The joy of travel

I’ve always loved travel and the idea of travelling. When I was in my 20’s I bought a large scale map of the world to cover my whole wall. It measured about 2 and a half meters wide by a metre and a half tall. I used to stare at it for hours looking at the countries and cities and dreaming about where my next travels would take me.

In fact I would say it was my passion on travel that led me to even take up my first job as an internal auditor. This allowed me to travel some of the globe and let my company pay for the privilege. I became a country ticker and would compare with my brother how many countries we had visited. The rules were you had to be in that country for at least a day or overnight and just transiting through an airport couldn’t count. If however you say flew into Dubai and then went out for 8 hours to explore the city or spent a few hours exploring the Vatican you could count that too.

The definition of countries also needed to be clarified. If one uses the official United Nations statistics of countries there are currently 196 (?) countries in the world. You can use the larger autonomous regions of the world (~289) but doesn’t seem a fair reflection. Of course country ticking is a nice way for brothers to compete but doesn’t really give a measure of the quality of those visits. Also, is it fair to say compare a week exploring Malta with a week in the USA just visiting one state? The one you probably get a fair idea of the culture and sights of the country, whilst the other you are barely scratching the surface.

So my brother sadly is a banker and as he is younger than me and I have been constrained by children, he has more recently whipped my ass and is way more than the 67 countries I have visited. But boy have we had fun during those visits both work and leisure and there is nothing like travel to give you a sense of your place in this world and a perspective on other people and how they live. Also you get to tick off all those places you can only dream of.

I do also like my wife’s approach to travel; in that she prefers to go off the beaten track, not so much in a hardship way lets trek across the gobi desert type of way but rather just wants to visit the more unknown or plain places. When you say let’s go see California she would look at the map and say but there is a place called Johannesburg here – lets go see that. She will want to pick obscure landmarks or villages to visit and you know when you actually go there they can provide far higher levels of entertainment than the other more common sights.

"It is better to travel well than to arrive" (attributed to Buddha).