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In a first of many to follow within these travel related articles, let us start with the very basic question – Why do we travel? But before that let us set up the context in specific.What do we mean when we say ‘travel’? Is it the mere locomotion from one point to another? No! Here we will strictly stick to travelling to a place for a purpose other than our routine chores involving school, office, basic amenities and necessities. So we will be discussing today about travelling to a new place may be for a vacation, new experience, sight-seeing and the likes.
Tourist or Traveller?
One of the most common dilemma or discussion you would come across – Are you a Tourist or a Traveller? To answer this question you would have to understand what distinguishes them. It is commonly told that tourist is on a leisurely trip where the focus is to not have any focus but to freewheel and enjoy the time off from routine activities. On the other hand, a traveller is said to be someone who wishes to immerse oneself within the place and culture in order to understand the native livelihood. Certainly a stark difference between the two as one approach is just looking for a change from a usual day while the other is seeking to learn and understand the peers from a different culture.
What to expect when you travel?
Irrespective of what approach you take, most of the time you would have a nearly perfect plan from travel to accommodation to activities all planned well ahead before you kickstart your journey. But needless to say, you would have for sure experienced some unexpected twists in the tale during your travel. As the saying goes, ‘Prepare for the worst and hope for the best’. This might sound a touch pessimistic but the idea is to optimise for the best possible experience that you can gather from the trip. It is in the best interest to account for some unforeseen event so that you are prepared for it. Also, too many constraints in the name of comfort can dampen your experience even at the earlier stage. One can’t be too picky and choosy about stay, travel, food, language, etc. when one wants to explore or even just experience something different. Some calculated decisions have to be taken to let go of the comforts and luxury. This trade-off differs from person to person and it depends on the value derived from this compromise, if I may say that. That is why most of the time you see those with similar tastes happen to travel together.
Where should you travel?
“Are you a beach person on mountain person?” is often a common question amongst travel enthusiasts. Normally, the decision to narrow down on a destination is the toughest one. Unfortunately, it happens to be the starting point for your travel planning. Every member have their own agenda and destination. That is how destinations change from Thailand to Maldives to France to India. One of the most commonly cancelled travel plan among youngsters in India is Goa! Yes, you read it right – Cancelled plan – they plan it and some how some one pulls out. Travel, like any other activity has its own inertia. Hence it is important to execute a travel plan successfully without much of compromise in order to set the ball rolling. Once this is done well, then the subsequent plans will happen without much of the initial hiccups. Therefore, if you are very new to travel and planning to assemble a team, the best bet to start off is to a nearby place where you don’t have to compromise a lot on cuisine, language and culture. Having an ambitious goal for a travel destination can be exciting but at the same time challenging and exhausting if you do not execute it perfectly. Travel plan has its own learning curve, hence it is better to be on a known turf when your learnings are steep while you are still figuring out a roughly better travel itinerary rather than find yourself clueless in an unknown territory.
Why should you travel?
Coming to our core thought, why should you travel? To answer it in a short form, travel is a mini life journey in itself. Whether you are a tourist or a traveller; whether you travel solo or as a group, there is lots to learn from any travel. You get to know how to plan and execute and more importantly you get to know how it would fail due to things beyond your control. Travel gives a humbling experience. It helps us to manage our finance. It ensures we find a way through challenging environments (like cuisine, language and weather). We are then left with first hand experience of interactions with people from diverse backgrounds and cultures. Even when you are just a tourist visiting a place for leisure and sight seeing, there will certainly be a learning that you will assimilate even without you realising. Next time you travel, try to sprinkle some consciousness around all the activities that you planned to do and you ended up doing. This introspection will give you an enriching experience and motivate you to raise the bar next time.
Upcoming..
It is indeed exciting to travel. To be honest, I find it exciting to even plan or just check about places even if I don’t end up travelling. There have been some good experiences from all my travels. I hope you also would have a fair share of experiences from your travel. I am planning to write some of my unforgettable memories from travel. Let me know what are your unforgettable memories! Until then, thanks for stopping by. Hope to meet you soon in a random travel destination.
theponderingpanda 
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