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| So I write a blog about the essence of friendship and choose a picture of me..... alone! |
Travelling is about the simple things in life. It is the
ultimate equaliser: Everyone is in the
same financial position, and this financial position is known as skint! Travelling
isn’t about the clothes you wear, the post code you were brought up in, the car
you’ve left behind… It’s about the raw friendship, the essence of a person, a
pure connection uninfluenced by external factors. My friend Angela put it
simply as “It’s just friendship and taking care of each other… an adopted
family… travelling is truly living.”
The concept of travelling has evolved and has become more
commonplace amongst thousands of young adults as time has progressed. So why do
so many people flood the borders of other countries? I think each of us has our
own personal motivations for setting off and seeing the world. My friends and family used to share their
tales of travelling and they riveted me, more because of the people they met
and the things they got up to rather than the things they saw. I loved it when
they returned from their travels with new friends and partners from different
cultures in tow.
Initially, when I embarked on my travels, I thought I was
going for the sightseeing. I had grand plans of soaking up the sights in New
York, getting off the beaten track in eastern Canada and getting the adrenaline
pumping through Australia, but I very quickly learned that I was gaining more
from the experiences and the people than the sights. Of course, no, not everyone you meet is nice.
I’ll be honest - you meet more than a few complete lunatics while you are
travelling! There was one night where someone in our hostel room turned all the
lights on at 1am and ran around completely naked, yelling about freeing a
cockroach from the prison of the room. Unfortunately not everyone you meet will
be well meaning and ‘normal’. However, I met some amazing people and made
lifelong friendships.
I have to admit I went into the whole thing with more than a
little naivety. The experiences of travelling are too much to capture in a
blog, but I remember going to a karaoke night in Ohio at aged 19. After several
rounds of ‘I Will Survive’, the bar closed and we had to make our way home.
Being in the middle of nowhere, my newfound group of friends and I decided to
walk back, an activity that apparently is worthy of investigation by the police
because they promptly pulled over in front of us and asked for ID. My friends
were both over 21, but I was a young baby faced 19 year old thinking how
strange it was that the police ask for ID for a walk home. It turns out that
after midnight in Ohio, if you are under 21, you’re not allowed to be walking
on the street so we were given a police escort back to our accommodation. No
dramas there, but certainly an indication of how my eyes started to be opened
to the fact that not everywhere is like little old Nailsea in the west of
England.
The experiences I have from travelling and the memories I
have retained are some of the best from my lifetime (so far!). I love looking back on my photos and reading
my journal from that time. I have been so lucky to see some of the world’s
iconic sights, but by far the best thing to come out of my time travelling was
the people I got to know and the experiences we shared. I wish our memories had
the capacity to store all the little moments and bring them back in HD format
to the mind’s eye: The photos I have just don’t do those justice.
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