We here at Roadjunky have often wondered why long-term travelers do it. While some can only manage brief stints abroad, others undertake epic treks lasting year(s) passing through places that can be downright miserable. This type of travel is a life itself lived on the road, a style that attempts to make a break from the everyday wake-commute-work-commute-sleep existence. Isn’t it paradise that these trekkers are looking for?
Is it possible to find a little slice of paradise in the world? A small island in the Pacific? A hidden village in the Himalaya? What requirements would paradise have? Good weather? None of the problems of modern life? No bills? Maybe traveling has nothing to do with finding paradise at all, and you can find it at home. Is it something that can be found during your 6 AM commute to the office? A realization?
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My vote is that travel can sometimes enable a certain frame of mind, an openness, a willingness, that let's one see the joy in the game of life we're playing hidden behind all the misery.
"..a willingness, that let's one see the joy in the game of life we're playing hidden behind all the misery."
I'm guessing you're stuck behind a computer somewhere dreaming of the Andes...
Every first time traveler thinks that travel is all they live for, that they're only really alive when they're abroad. Then they come back home and find fault with everything, making everything in the memories perfect, everything that's from their travels a dream.
If there's any kind of paradise out there, it starts from within.
Travel is a totally new way of living for a person just leaving the student or workaday life. Especially if going alone, you are tossed to the wolves, so to speak. You either go home quickly or learn to be self reliant. Then things change. You become adrift and seperated from everything, especially when you cut the ropes tying you to home. It's wandering in a vast wilderness of filthy, dangerous third world cities, surreal jungles, mindblowing mountains and everything else. After months of this a traveller is partly broken down, maybe more able to appreciate the beauty and simplicity of "paradise" whatever or where-ever it is. He can rest and rebuild his sanity and contemplate life for days, weeks or even months and years. It all takes time and seperation from ourselves. Paradise is found this way rather than by hopping on a plane for a weekend in the yucatan or Majorca.
And the thing about all these changes is that you're never the same again. If you dare to really swim out to sea, so to speak, then there is no coming home for you, 'home' just becomes another place as you search for your own personal paradise.
Most people quit and go home, like Ohio1987 says, because they're too afraid to discover who they really are, and if you don't know that, you'll be locked outside the gates of paradise forever.
To paraphrase John Lennon, Life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans.
I think paradise would be letting go of that finally, and living in the moment. I can say I found that a few lucky times on the road, in places I never expected I would, and that the rest of my life will benefit from the experience.
Travel comes into the picture, I think, because the responsibilities of a job, a family, school or whatever keeps our heads in a rut with plans and worries. Traveling, for once, you can get away from that if you give yourself enough time.
Solo treks in nature can do the same thing. Hence the power of Walden or John Muir.
While a majority of my travel is business related, I always try to make time to see the area I am in.
I have been plesently surprised to find paradise in a variety of places. Everytime it has involved my forgetting why I am in the place I am. When I am seeing the locale as if I had always lived there.
So I agree with Jim that paradise can be found everywhere, even on a solo hike in your own backyard.
For most travelers i met, paradise was living somewhere beautiful with a favourable rate of exchange so that 2 months of working at home was enough for 10 months on the beach or up the mountain.
The Himalayas were like that, even Goa or the Thai islands.
Thing was, along with that came the DDT poison the Indians used on the trees in the mountains, the visa difficulties in Thailand and all the cop shakedowns, thieves and insanity that went with Goa.
It was like we found pockets of Paradise, but it was flawed. Some would say corrupt but I'm getting a reputarion already on this forum for being too cynical..
Yeah, if you define paradise by sitting around getting stoned while the natives do all the work. Talk about nouveau colonialists.
You're not going to find paradise anywhere because this world is in this shit wherever you go. You can close the doors, smoke another joint and pay people enough moeny to smile at you, but millions die every year around the world from avoidable diseases, starvation and wars started by corrupt politicians and armed by the west.
Against that background you're looking for your precious little island or mountain valley? Give me a break.
The troubles of the world belong to the world. If we want to chill out somewhere nice we're not hurting anyone and certainly not adding to the problem. Sure,l it's a feature of the modern world that now we can fly to cheaper countries to hang out and make our own corner of paradise but that's how it is and it's ok.
I found that your best chance of finding somewhere special are to learn a language other than english, otherwise you'll always be stuck with the other travelers. If you learn Thai really well then you can live among Thais, or if you learn Portuguese then you can live in small beaches in Brasil and blend in.
And that takes us back to the previous discussion about the differences between a traveler and a tourist.
Throughout history those who have pay those who do not to provide for them in a manner better than they have at home. It will always be that way. What I despise is when a people come into an area and convert it to the way things are at home.
What's the point of traveling if it is going to be the same as at home. That's not paradise.