What's It All About from Jim

What it’s all about?  Folks travel for many different reasons.  I thought it might be helpful to attempt explaining ours lest our itinerary seem totally incoherent.

Beyond the need to avoid moss, Leslie and I travel to expand our vision by seeing more of the world and trying to better comprehend our environment.  We want to get a feel, however superficial, for how people live in the belief that will modestly enhance our comprehension.  While this approach has its limits, it works for us.  We tend to keep organized touring to a minimum so as to maximize flexibility and wandering time.  From our perspective, a visit to the national palace, cathedral or some historic site are as usual as chatting with hotel clerks and market vendors.  We don’t aspire to expertise, merely to return with a bit more perspective than we began with.

Embracing this approach required me to compromise my Peace Corps acquired belief in the importance of language knowledge.  For years, I avoided visiting places where I didn’t know the language, which basically restricted me to the English and Spanish speaking world.  I changed my mind during our visit to China a few years ago where we visited several major cities within a few weeks and found English signage was common, that a fair number of people spoke English – and were happy to practice it – and that there was much more to be gained by visiting a country sooner without the language than waiting until later (which is to say probably never) when we had acquired linguistic proficiency.

We travel without a checklist and don’t aspire to see the top three or ten sites – historic, political or cultural, depending on your perspective – during our visits.   And while we don’t avoid such attractions, we could happily visit a country and not see any of them.  It is a flexible, idiosyncratic way of travelling.  So far it has worked quite well for us.  Hope it will this time as well.

    While there are some who say you’ll never get there if you don’t know where you’re going, we prefer to believe that any route is promising if you’re not dogmatic about precisely where you end up.