by Tracy Bee

Created on: July 02, 2008   Last Updated: October 31, 2008

There is one question that will always upset me. Yet, I always seem to hear it. Friends and family seem to love it. The question - "why travel?"

This question pulls at my heart-strings. I equate it with asking "why live?" Unless someone is waxing philosophical, you'll rarely hear anyone questioning the point of life though. The need to live is simply accepted as matter of fact. "Because" seems to suffice as an answer to this question. Yet, tell anyone you think it is also important to travel "just because" and people will inevitably stare back at you, mystified. But there is little mystery to it at all. Traveling, simply put, is living.

I shouldn't judge though. I started traveling 8 years ago and back then, as I strode through those first airport security gates, I didn't truly understand the answer to this all-important question either. In fact, had you asked me why I wanted to travel, I would have said, "to see the world, silly." Let's just say I began my travels with a very naive understanding of travel but quickly learned that merely seeing was not what it is all about. Anyone who remains open to the new experiences soon realizes that travel forever changes a person. Writer Miriam Beard gets is right when she explains that travel "is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living."

When I first began traveling, I learned that while one can healthily avoid some aspects of a place, like the possible germs lurking in the tap water or on surfaces, it is nearly impossible to remain unaffected by the sheer experience of a place. Yet, these more obvious bugs are what plague people's minds until they travel. My mother assured me that there were far too many bugs out there to not be very cautious while traveling. She had my suitcases bulging with hand sanitizer packets. Every last one of their outer pockets were filled far beyond capacity, my mother still stuffing more in them until I rolled my bags away towards that first security gate, that portal to a new dimension. "Anything could happen," she also warned me. That she had gotten very right. Little surface bugs, on the other hand, never affected me.

On the other side of those first airport security gates, or more specifically on the other side of the world where the plane landed, I was gripped by something much stronger than any devious little water microbe. I fell into the grips of the travel bug, an empowering and overwhelming little bug for which there

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>