Surely you also dream of traveling around the world, or at least visiting some specific countries. Travel beckons. But some fall in love with them so much that they decide to make them their work. And this is true even during a pandemic! Our reader shares his story.
Travel is my life. And I say this not only because I really love to travel, but also because this is my job — I organize photo tours and spend more than 250 days a year traveling. In a way, I have to travel in order to survive. Like a shark that lives while it swims. And here’s how it happened.
… Back in 2015, my wife Veronica and I got off the train at the Vladikavkaz railway station. A car warmed up by the summer sun, a chicken in a bag, two huge backpacks, an old «penny». The highlander taxi driver cast a bewildered glance at our huge bags.
“Hey, why are the bags so big?!
Let’s go to the mountains…
And what didn’t you see there?
— Well … it’s beautiful there ..
“What’s wrong with that, isn’t it?” Here is my friend took a ticket to the sea. I told him: “What are you, a fool?” Pour a bath, pour salt into it, scatter sand — here is the sea for you. There will still be money!
A tired man with tired eyes, and his car seemed just as tired … Every day he saw the mountains on the horizon, but he never got there. The taxi driver needed his «penny» and a predictable quiet life. Traveling seemed to him something useless, if not harmful.
At that moment, I remembered myself in 2009. Then I, a completely domestic boy who devoted all my time to two higher educations and a badminton rank, suddenly made good money for the first time — and spent it on a trip.
Travel is about more than scenery, food, and dusty roads. This is an experience
Around this moment, I completely “blew off the tower”. I spent all weekends and vacations traveling. And if I started with a completely harmless St. Petersburg, then in a little over a year I reached the trip to the winter Altai (there I first encountered temperatures in the region of -50), to Baikal and to the Taganay mountains.
I posted a photo from the last point in LiveJournal. I well remember one comment to that report: “Wow, Taganay, cool. And I see him from the window every day, but I still can’t get there. ”
I can only see the wall of the neighboring house from the window of the house. This stimulates to go somewhere where the view is more interesting — that is, anywhere. That is why I am grateful to this wall.
I traveled to see something new, not just my small town where nothing ever happens. A city where, apart from the forest and the lake, there is nothing that could be called even remotely beautiful.
But travel is about more than scenery, unfamiliar food, and dusty roads. This is an experience. This is the knowledge that there are other people with a different way of life, faith, lifestyle, cuisine, appearance. Traveling is a clear proof that we are all different.
Sounds trite? I know people who have never left the house and call their way of living the only true one. I know people who are ready to scold, beat and even kill those who are different from them. But among travelers you will not find such.
Discovering a huge world with all its diversity is an experience akin to tasting dry red wine: at first it is bitter and you want to spit it out. But then the taste begins to unfold, and now you can no longer live without it …
The first stage scares many. You can lose such “valuable” things as narrowness of outlook, categoricalness and peace of ignorance, but we spent so many years and effort to acquire them! But like wine, travel can be addictive.
Want to turn travel into work? Think a thousand times. If you drink even the best wine in large quantities every day, only the severity of a hangover will remain from the refined smell and taste.
Travel should cause slight fatigue, which will pass in a day. And the same slight sadness from the end of the trip, which will leave you when you cross the threshold of the house. If you “groped” this balance, then you have found the perfect rhythm for yourself.
Although, perhaps, the Ossetian taxi driver is right, and will a bath with sand scattered around be enough? I definitely don’t. Many do not talk about it, but on a journey you completely remove everyday life, home routine from your life. And this thing is deadly — it destroys families and turns people into zombies.
Travel means new food, new bed, new conditions, new weather. You find new reasons for joy, you overcome new difficulties. For a person with shattered nerves, this is a very good way to calm yourself. But for insensitive people, with a soul made of stone, perhaps a salty bath with a handful of sand will really be enough.