The dark sides of Travelling: travellers untold secrets

If you ever read a travel blog (like this), a travel book or tale or a travel review dressed up with personal experiences, you’ll feel a huge (and sometimes untolerable) energy and optimism. (At least, I hope so, for me and for you).

Travellers who love telling their stories are often curious, happy, brave, motivating. Sure we are, we want people to try the travel thrill, somethig that is worth living for.

But there are 2 things that must be stated here: first of all, not all travellers are travel story tellers. What I mean is that out of this room there’s plenty of travellers even more traveller that me, that don’t want/feel like/need to write it all down in a blog or where ever.

Secondly, doesn’t matter if you are a travelteller or not… it’s not all roses.

There are secret aspects of travellers’ personalities that other people can hardly see, and when they see it, they don’t like it at all.

I’m going to declare some of them

MAD. Missin Anywhere Disease

sabrina7

I’ve aready dedicated an entire post to this strange and incurable disease.

DEFINITION: MAD (Missing Anywhere Disease), is an incurable disease that affects one crazy traveller out of three.
It occurs through several symptoms at different residential stages of compulsive vagabonds. In its less severe forms, it occurs  with an irritating feeling of nostalgia for the visited places.
In the more acute forms, the nostalgia occurs even for the places not seen yet.

In short, what happens is a shade of nostalgia that suddently covers the face of your serial traveller companion. It’s not your fault, you didn’t know that, but you may have mentioned a broken red shelf in your room, unconsciously reminding him/her of a red shelf in a coffee bar of Melbourne where there was a book she wanted to read but didn’t have the courage to ask for it. In a bar he/she used to go when homesick or whatever.

And she’ll be travelling back to that moment, feeling all she was feeling then and missing it, no matter if that feeling was sorrow and regrets.

Travellers can miss sorrow and regret too, did you know that? Bear with them, it’s nothing easy.

They have the feeling nothing belongs to them

sea winter

It’s more than rational, it’s normal, it makes sense. Nothing really belongs to anybody (right?).
But the absolute awareness of this hurts, even more so when you miss so much places where you’ve lived for a little while.

I’ll try to tell you another thing: most of times a traveller lives a beautiful experience knowing perfectly how strongly nostalgia will arise the day after. It’s like living every single moment just to wait for tomorrow and feel nostalgia (the sentence in Italian sounds better).  

What other people call fickleness

noleggio auto consigli

It’s not a scientific rule, but most travellers don’t have long term period friends in the sourroundings.
They have friends scattered all around the world. They don’t have a everyday relationship with them. Sometimes they hardly know when (and if ever) they’ll be able to see their friends again.

Moreover, they hardly ever have friends beloging to the past, friends they have since childhood.
This is often called fickleness, but it’s a mistake.
Travellers just let people go, when a friend’s ways is not the same as theirs. All people are but travel mates that we have the honour to have with us for a limited time. We must get the best out of it, and then give them back to freedom.

The bright side of this helpless solitude is that they almost always have lovely words for all of their past friends. They understand when the time to be parted has come, no need for therapeutic obstinacy for friendship that was supposed to last forever in the same crystallized way.

And they’ll always keep a good memory of all the past travel mates.

you might enjoy: 5 tips to find the perfect travel mate

What other people call indifference

FullSizeRender (4)

A compulsive traveller is used to see diversity. Different ideas of beauty, justice, morality, behaviour. They have tattooed in their veins that “other where, important things are different, so who am I to judge?”.

They generally can’t have an exactc judjemental idea of something. This keeps them outside of angry games of conversations about the last world events, they cannot express strong opinions when all the others do. They start shaping their idea in time… when all the others have forgotten it and have other things to complain about and write on facebook.

This doesn’t mean they are indifferent, they have simply learned that an opinion is not like a pizza… something you can just prepare and bake in 10 mintes and eat in 15.

Their opinion is slow, too slow for current days.

What other people call Incoherence

budaest

And, you know what? Their opinion can change! I know this is defined ‘uncoherence’… I don’t know how else to define it and justify this feature, but I (and you) must accept it.
Travellers can change their mind, sometimes. And they are so unproud to admit that… “You are right. You made me change my mind”.
Terrible, terrible people.

Low sense of self preservation

Self destruction looks so sexy to travellers! Even if they try to be as wise and carefull as possible, they’ll always enjoy risks, bad food, that sense of “What’s that shit!? I’ll try it!”
And they’ll always unconsciously look for that, no matter what they do.

You tell stories that can’t truly be told

This is a storyteller’s frustration. You live something and you try to tell it so that the others can understand. But this tale is always going to be partial and uncomplete.

Travellers must accept that other people have different eyes and different minds and telling too much of a travel expeirence is both useless and even unfair.

Sometimes, inventing a travel novel can be even more useful than telling a travel experience.
love and travel short novels

15 Comments

  • Trisha Velarmino - P.S. I'm On My Way

    Thank you for sharing all of this, Sabrina! I have felt similar emotions whilst traveling. There’s almost a perpetual restlessness. I predominantly travel long-term and a lot of experiences are less than ideal but I’ve learned to manage. Something will touch me in an incomprehensibly profound way and then I continue living the life I never imagined I would ever be blessed with.
    Good luck on more of your travels, Sabrina!

  • Christopher

    This is an excellent piece. Totally true. I am a MAD traveler. The more I travel the more I learn about myself, the more open minded and educated I become. I have no fave city and find it difficult to answer when asked. I do miss places I’ve been and get excited when a song or smell triggers a memory. Nice post.

  • Vicky and Buddy

    “So who am I to judge?” I loved that line. It’s true, most times I find it hard to give an opinion because I see multiple sides to a story or issue. Travelers see so much, and experience so many different things, that it isn’t always easy to make a quick and definite opinion.

  • Hugo

    All very true! Great idea putting these together. Travellers do have a lot of untold secrets and I definitely relate with some!

  • Meg Jerrard

    Thanks for writing this, I definitely relate to a few of them. Especially being able to let friends go. Although the travelers has many “5 minute friends” who they don’t see or speak to on a daily basis, I like to think that these are actually the strongest form of friendship. Your conversations in the time you do have with them are very real, and even though you don’t speak every day, when you do, it’s as if no time has passed at all. So I think there are pros and cons to each of these, though definitely important to realize that there are both.

  • tammyonthemove

    I can certainly relate to the storyteller’s frustration bit. It is never the same telling a story about certain experiences about travel to someone who wasn’t in that country or destination. If you don’t understand the background to a place, it can sometimes be impossible to explain what happened.

  • Sarah Ebner

    This is all very wise – I think a story usually has many sides, depending on who’s telling it, and even when they tell it. And very often we try to show the good side and just don’t mention the rest…

  • Curious Claire

    It’s great to encourage and motivate others to travel but when all you see is positive stories you can feel bad for having down moments. Great post

  • Sara | Belly Rumbles

    I agree with quite a lot of that, especially the indifference. The more we travel and learn, the more it shapes our views. I definitely can’t form an opinion on countries, peoples ways of life etc in 10 minutes. Plus it also means we respect, no a better word is accept (within reason) how things are abroad instead of home.

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