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Ask me why a person should travel and I'll tell you a million reasons (better still, read my friend Kori's latest blog and you'll get a very eloquent, concise explanation). So why not travel? It's a question I threw back at a girl I met in Paris, after our flight back to France from Bangkok. She was from Birmingham and returning from a holiday in Istanbul, and she wanted to know why we'd been travelling for 10 whole weeks. I was left trying to answer my own question after we went our separate ways. And this is what I came up with:
- Too expensive /haven't got enough money
- Fear - of planes, snakes, other people...
- Can't take enough time off work
- Can't bear to rough it - need luxury!
- Don't like / can't stomach foreign food
- Not a hippy / vagabond / explorer
- Not bothered about seeing the rest of the world
- Would miss home, family and friends
- Have too many criminal convictions
- Can't go without a cigarette/other vice for the duration of the flights
As you might expect, I've got smartarse counter arguments for all of these, but at the end of the day, a person will travel if they want or need to, not because someone else has told them to do it. And even those of us who wish to continue travelling have to take a break from it every now and then, as I am now doing (even if I do get to live in France, which, for the moment at least, makes it feel like I'm still on the road).
My reasons for making this temporary stop are two-fold: I have an impending operation (the details of which will no doubt be divulged in a future blog post) and I have to earn some money - selling your house Eat-Pray-Love style and spending all your savings is fine, in my opinion, and I've met countless others on my travels who've done something similar, but I am not the Sultan of Brunei and my pockets aren't deep enough to not work at all. And so, the road back to employment lies before me... But I know that road will only take me to the next turning, the next leg of the journey, because it turns out I am one of those people who wants and needs to travel.
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