Why Do You Travel?

Everyone has a different reason for why they love to travel. Some people look for the tallest mountain to climb and the toughest treks to conquer, while others look for a peaceful place escape. Some people want to experience new cultures, while others want simply to enjoy lazing on beach. The reasons for travel are endless.

I’ve been thinking about why I travel and I’m finding it hard to define. I think because, like many, there are so many reasons. Sometimes I just want to move – satisfaction lies simply in being somewhere different and doing something new. While other times I want to hike a particular mountain and bask in nature. Sometimes I want to visit a particular museum or an artist I’ve only read previously about in books.

Let’s explore some of these reasons in more detail…

Travel for adventure

Lee at Everest Basecamp

The photo Lee sent me when he reached Machu Picchu

My older brother Lee, who at twenty-six has climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, Mount Kinabalu (in flip flops), Mount Fuji and the base of Everest, tackled the Inca Trail, as well as running numerous gruelling marathons is definitely one of the most adventurous persons I know. He fits into the “thrill-seeker” category.

Travel for culture

“If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay at home.” – James Michener

Museums. Music. Graffiti. Churches. Theater. Whatever it looks like – culture is what gives a place a sense of identity. I haven’t called my travel blog The Culture Map for no reason.

Going up mixed race, I was introduced to different cultures from a young age. This shaped me. To be humbled by a language I didn’t speak and a menu I couldn’t read. To realise that the universe is not arranged around our preferences. That realisation? That’s the point.

Maybe you don’t “get it” right away. That’s fine. You’re not supposed to. You stand in a room of Czech surrealist paintings or watch a masked dance in Bali, and you’re reminded: not everything is about you. Culture doesn’t need your approval — it asks for your attention.

The first time you experience a culture so vastly different from what you know and experience in daily life really does make the world feel so much bigger. It makes you realise there are many ways to do the same thing. The notion of right and wrong suddenly blurs.

We travel for that. To be surprised. To realise there’s more than one way to live, one way to sing, one way to tell a story.

Travel for food

Food isn’t just something we eat on the road. It is the road. It’s the language when words fail, the handshake when cultures collide.

In India, it’s rice and curry eaten with your hands. In Mexico City, its tacos al pastor served at 3 a.m. with a side of cigarette smoke and reggaeton. Then you have Vietnam, where it’s duck blood soup offered with a smile and a challenge: will you say yes to this?

Every bite tells a story – about survival, tradition, celebration, migration. About who’s in the kitchen and who’s at the table. The best meals are never in guidebooks. They’re found by accident, down alleyways that smell like garlic and diesel, where the grill is rusted, and the cook has been doing one thing—perfectly—for forty years.

Final thoughts

It doesn’t mean I might not someday climb Mount Everest, run a marathon, or do a week-long trek in a desert. (But there’s probably more chance of Pamela Anderson being recruited by a nunnery).

I know we all have our own reasons, but really it doesn’t matter why we travel. The most important thing is that we do it, Robert Louis Stevenson explains it perfectly:

For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.

 

Do you agree with Stevenson? Why do you travel?