Hardest Part About Travelling

I got another opportunity of a lifetime based on my studies to travel mother-flipping Europe, which I will elaborate on in my third post next week and it was literally so exciting!!

Right now, I am expressing my travel-bug bite. Guys, I just can't stop thinking of travelling, I literally have this indescribable yet insatiable thirst for travelling and it needs to be quenched quite soon.

There is no way to describe an addiction to travelling, but there is two sides to it. This post will express the hardest part about travelling - the parts that no one talks about. This post has been adapted to feature some of my own experiences from travelling but the original piece by Kellie Donnelley sums up the whole experience quite well.

You got out to the world: arrive at a foreign country to find that the natives may not understand English or refuse to acknowledge English as a language, difficulty in navigating the area (especially if you travelling solo), experience some price discrimination and day-time robbery, homesickness based on food and in some cases experience discrimination based on race or nationality.

You see the world: try new things, meet new people, fall in love, make lifelong friends, visit amazing places, learn about other cultures and languages – then it’s all over. People always talk about leaving, but what about coming home?

We always speak about the "hard" parts while we’re away –  making real friends, finding great accommodation, staying safe, learning social norms – but these are all parts you get through. All of these lows are erased by the complete highs you experience (and believe me the highs always outweigh the lows). The goodbyes are difficult but you know they are coming, especially when you take the final step of purchasing your plane ticket home. All of these sad goodbyes are interrupted by the reunion with your family and friends you have pictured in your head since leaving home.

Then you return home, have your reunions, spend your first two weeks meeting with family and friends, catch up, tell stories, reminisce, unpack, etc. You’re Hollywood star for the first few weeks back and it’s all new and exciting. And then it all just…fades away. Everyone gets used to you being home, you’re not the new shiny object anymore and the questions start coming: So do you have a job yet? What’s your plan? Are you dating anyone? Or in my case: are you going to continue studying or you going to travel again? But the sad thing is once you’ve done your obligatory visits for being away for a while; you’re sitting in your childhood bedroom and realise nothing has changed.

You’re glad everyone is happy and healthy and yes, people have progressed in their lives, but part of you is screaming don’t you understand how much I have changed? And I don’t mean hair, weight, dress or anything else that has to do with appearance. I mean what’s going on inside of your head. The way your dreams have changed, they way you perceive people differently, the habits you’re happy you lost, the new things that are important to you. You want everyone to recognise this and you want to share and discuss it, but there’s no way to describe the way your spirit evolves when you leave everything you know behind and force yourself to use your brain in a real capacity, not on a written test in school. You know you’re thinking differently because you experience it every second of every day inside your head, but how do you communicate that to others?

You feel angry. You feel lost. You have moments where you feel like it wasn’t worth it because nothing has changed but then you feel like it’s the only thing you’ve done that is important because it changed everything. Like learning a foreign language (French for me) that no one around you speaks so there is no way to communicate to them how you really feel. This is why once you’ve travelled for the first time all you want to do is leave again. They call it the travel bug, but really it’s the effort to return to a place where you are surrounded by people who speak the same language as you. Not English or Dutch or Tamil or Finnish or Xhosa, but that language where others know what it’s like to leave home, change, grow, experience, learn, LIVE, then go home again and feel more lost in your hometown then you did in the most foreign place you visited.

This is the hardest part about travelling, and it’s the very reason why we all run away again.

No one realises the beauty and intrigue of travelling, until you get home and rest in that boring apartment and that is, sadly, the hardest part about travelling.