Travel not to go anywhere, but to go.

This post is dedicated to my dear friend Keren who turns 22 today, and who like me suffers from the incurable illness of wanderlust.

Back home, there's a poster on my bedroom wall. It's called the Holstee Manifesto, and it's a collection of encouragments and reminders of what the writers wanted out of their lives. My favourite line is 'Travel often; getting lost will help you find yourself.'

I turned 21 just over one week ago, on September 23. In following the wise words of the Holstee Manifesto, my trip to Galloway was taken alone with the intention of being wowed by seeing a starry sky.

There is something indescribable about travel - I'll try my best to put it into words - the adrenaline when you step on new land, the thrill of meeting new people, even if they are only single-serving friends, the amazement of seeing new cultures and different ways of life.

There are so many places on this earth, and according to TripAdvisor's Cities I've Visited map, I've only visited 6% of the world. Six percent! That's a tiny amount of the world I've been to. That's a good 94% of the world I've yet to visit. That 94% of the world with new lands new people and new cultures to visit. New sceneries, new air.

I suppose, though, the sceneries and culture and air - it's not all that new is it? It's not the new that takes our breath away when we travel, it's the old. It's the feeling that we're in the middle of something older, bigger, greater than ourselves. It's the feeling that we're little again, and we're looking at the world through eyes that are once more inquisitive and curious.

Today I read an article on Thought Catalog, titled Chasing "Authenticity". The second paragraph reads:

In travel, the desire for authenticity is a straightforward, universal and reasonable concept. It’s eating food off the street as opposed to the nice restaurant, not necessarily because it’s cheaper or better, but because its “authentic” (although the comfort of authenticity has a way of making something taste better — much like MSG). It’s riding bikes in China, taking Boda Bodas (motorcycle taxis) in Kampala, drinking Soju in Korea, and chain-smoking in Europe. Despite the fact that we are still only tourists and gawkers, replicating local customs and behaviors adds texture to our visits and allows us to live the pictures we take.

Is this true? Is this what we look for when we travel? I suppose some of it is. When we travel to experience the local culture, that is; not when we travel to look for new shopping malls and spend all day in air-conditioned comfort.

But when I travel, I travel because I want to learn about myself through other cultures.

I want to throw myself into new experiences and see how I react to them; I want to see parts of the world that other eyes have seen for centuries and imagine myself having lived in such long-ago times.

I travel not because I've read about a place in a travel magazine and want to lounge by a white sandy beach with a mocktail in my hand (lovely as that sounds) but because I want to live among others. My types of destinations are the ones with a fascinating story, the types you find in National Geographic, places with people who are real and who have dreams, just like me, hopes, just like me, and challenges, just like me.

In these people, I find little bits of myself. I find people who in some way or another seem to remind me of me, and I find that while with each breath and step we take we are forever in the process of creating our own unique stories, we are at the same time also the cumulation of everyone we meet.

They say that some people search the world to find themselves.

In many ways, that's true for me too - I guess you could say that with every journey I'm peeling off the layers, like the skin of an onion, to reach the heart of the person who is completely raw and completely fresh. To peel off the layers of socialisation that we have grown up with. I love that the people we meet when we travel are likely people we will never meet again, and that encourages us to be completely spontaneous and not need to care about whether we will be judged by the other person; I love that it allows us to be the person we are on the inside without needing to worry about being self-conscious.

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Travel is such a great teacher, because every time we go to a new place, we learn such amazing new things - about lands, about people, about cultures, about history, and about ourselves. You could live your whole life obsessing over travel magazines the way I once did and still do, planning dreamed up journeys to faraway exotic lands.

But after all that, there comes a time when the moment has arrived for you to click 'purchase' on your air ticket. No amount of obsessing can be the same as experiencing the real thing. Being on a journey gives you an unbridled freedom and exhilaration to which nothing compares.

The world is huge. It's forever changing.

I'm still not sure, but that could be a pretty good reason why I love travel the way I do.

I'm seeking out the story.