4 benefits of travelling

Paul Theroux once said “Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.”

Paul, after a lifetime of travelling, is coming from a place of wisdom, and until you’ve hit those dusty roads, it’s difficult to understand what he means. But we’ve sat by many a road side waiting for promised buses, some of which never arrived. We’ve been lost…a lot. In the close, humid heat, wandering the streets aimlessly with weighty backpacks, it’s easy to question why you ever left the comforts of home.

Yet, travelling really does develop you, and in ways you may never expect. Here are 4 ways I feel I’ve improved as a result of travelling.

Confidence

The most obvious benefit of being on the road is that you have no choice but to push the boundaries of your confidence back. As a young Englishman in Australia 10 years ago I was only too happy to sit back and watch taxi drivers over-charge us, or run a mile when I was in an uncomfortable situation.

Now, I haggle over 7 pence and stand my ground. I’m quick to initiate conversation, and I have more confidence in other people. More than this, I have confidence in that we can navigate most cities, subway systems, and public buses. I know that I can fly along on foreign roads on an ancient little moped and still be alive to tell the tale.

This is a level of confidence that simply didn’t exist 10 years ago.

Pride in your country

A benefit that I never expected to see was how proud or fond I would become of my native land, England. I was never comfortable here. The grey weather and greyer people were a constant drain on me. I used to stare out of the window at work and look forward to adding a bit more colour to my life. After living in Asia for a couple of years I started to really appreciate our little island, the free healthcare, well-mannered people, and general cleanliness of the streets.

Absence really does make the heart grow fonder.

Making friends

The people in your life are often the biggest influences on your happiness. The friends we’ve made along the way has been for me the biggest pleasure. Almost all of my fondest memories involve people we consider life-long friends. Summer nights drinking maccoli outside 7elevens in Korea, evening beers on the beach (There’s an alcohol theme here), weekends on tiny islands, all of them were made better by exceptional people.

In the next couple of months we’ll be meeting up with a few Parisians who we met on Nusa Lembongan. It’s wonderful how connected people feel when they’re on the road.

Friends in Korea

Getting to know yourself

This sounds horrendously cheesy. I’m not talking about the ‘inner-you’ but simply knowing at a deeper level your tolerances, pleasures and skills.

It wasn’t until a taxi driver tried to con us at 5:00am on Bali that I learned the limit of my tolerance level in another land.

I had to leave the UK to learn I had a love of photography, and a desire to become good at it – it’s a road I’m still travelling down now. Through this love of photography I came to create HDR One, a potential career for me in the long run.

If we’d stayed in the UK I would not be the person I am now, be that a good thing or bad. I wouldn’t have needed to change. Life was easy then. I plodded along in my job and enjoyed a weekend drink. That was my existence and there was seemingly no reason to change that.

The road simply will not let you get comfortable. You have to change. You have to adapt. And in most cases, you come out as a person more content in your own skin.

Journey with us from place to place, language to language, photo to photo