... isn't it true that we want more than just those 'things' when we go there?
We want a little magic - at least a sensation of something wonderful, a splash of awe, a tickle of the incredible. Do we not? Some would argue that the trick to a happy life is the ability to find this sort of wonder - a sort of traveller's delight - in the everyday. This would be an arguement that I would enjoy over a glass of Cabernet and a big fat pizza anywhere in Italy, Greece, Spain, Peru, Ecuador or Tahiti (where I would, of course, pass on the vino and have the pina colada).
They would say that it's Very Naughty to desire too much travel because it means you're running away from yourself, or 'reality', and you are clearly an escapist or a hedonist or at least a nasty person who participates in burning too much jet fuel. (The jet fuel debate is one to tread carefully on, I know, because even though I have just witnessed three people in my street tear down and junk three perfectly good homes and replace them with a whole lot more pvc, plastic, wood and marble etc, using not camels and donkeys, but yellow beasts farting smoke - we've all got very sensitive about our flying.) I say poo! Travel is the elixir of life for the jaded worldview, it's a shot of champagne for a collasping cosmology, it's a ticket to making friends with the planet, with your world, with your self and a pretty ragtag sack of clothes you will grow to love but then abandon happily ... an excellent exercise in Letting Go, and in Getting Over It.
Travel opens up the hamper of happy coincidences and spills a picnic of wonderful possibilities all over the place - from the airport in Buenos Airies where you may learn infinite forgiveness and patience, to the grassy knolls of the Portuguese coast where you may learn to surf a cool left hand break. It reveals a world just begging you to come, dive in - and one in which your usual self talk ... "oh, I wish I could, I wish I hadn't, god I'm tired, what if I..., check out that idiot driver, oh, how can I leave with my hair like this etc etc etc" eventually evaporates into onto one that is alert, alive, in love with you and all the things you could do tomorrow, here in Cairo or Fiji or Peru .. .where you are unfettered by the chains of your normal reality and can be free. Really free, Even if that means sleeping in .. in San Fran or in Ubud or even in the Amazon (which is actually impossible 'cause it's 40 degress before 8am and the only cool place is NOT under a sheet). In short, it's excellent practice for an attitude to life and a love affair with it to, that you can bring home with you - like a fridge magnet that you wear on you soul.
When we're traveling we learn what the sun looks like when it's rising, how the bugs sing when it's setting, what wild water from streams tastes like and how it feels when it's a bit too wild for our tap-tamed tummies. We have disasters of the ecoli, communication, cash flow and last train variety, but we Let Go, we deal with them, we add them into our travel stories as hilarious incidents or evidence of our great bravery and adventuryness. We can be our best (as long as we're not English soccer fans), we can have our eyes wide open and our hearts too. We can do things we would Never have imagined - bike ride down the world's deadliest road, swim with piranhas, ice climb a waterfall, go out hunting tarantulas, eat snake, let a monkey check us out for nits, bribe the cops, dangle over wild rivers in a fruit box suspended with coat hangers, body surf with penguins ... and that's just my own little list... we find out what that free and happy chick inside us is capable of. We change our definition of risk (ie - the terror of changing jobs, or contributing to meetings, or trying a new sport, or wearing 8inch stilettos can be suddenly eclipsed by a new-found passion for diving with great whites off Cape Town - and that seems perfectly reasonable!).
We change our expectation of life. We DO go on a two-week expedition into the Borneo rainforest with a guy we met at a chicken sacrifice ceremony. We DO trust the instinct that says, "I'm not getting on a bus like that!" so we hire a horse and ride it for 6 days instead. All sorts of things happen to us. good and bad. And the good seems AMAZING because it's wild, free-range, trust your guts, and trust the world good - and the bad doesn't seem so bad because it's the same - and even when it's really nasty bad, it's sometimes worth it anyway, because it's not the sort of bad usually, that you have to live with all day every day year in year out and try to believe it's all for a good cause, even when you're heart's crying out to yodel at the stars with the Bedouin - just once.