The Healthier Traveller
I2Q April 2018 Editorial

I´ve travelled s much these past few years and love it. I´ve travelled for jobs, on vacation as a tourist and to see friends and family. All of these are fine ways to experience new places and grow as a person but does travelling as a tourist really broaden your mind? I wonder. As a tourist, everything is laid out for you. Your destinations, restaurants and places to visist and people to meet up with. It really is too planned, safe and cozy (most of the times) to be any kind of serious adventure. So are we really travelling for life experience when we travel in bubbles of safety?

I read many blogs, travel blogs included, and they really can be categorised into groups. You have those making money off travelling and in which case those travellers show everything through rose colored glasses and punctual taxis. Those get boring quick and they often lack substance. You also have the diametric opposite blogger who is in a country and paints a picture of the country through a critical lens. Those can be interesting but often cross the line of being malicious and slanted. I still recommend checking out those types of bloggers because some of their observations are truly fascinating.

I can think of one French blogger (who is not negative) but shows the foreign country he is living in from the perspective of someone living there and not a tourist. He gives very good critiques that are both honest and sometimes disturbing. In my opinion someone like him is gaining valuable life experience living in a foreign country and growing wiser because of it.

So to wrap up this little article I think that living in a foreign country and dealing with the challenges of that society is how you grow as a person and get any kind of wisdom. Seeing how peoples on all social strata live and the problems facing that society is one of the two things you need to cultivate your intellectual garden. The other thing is to care. Yes to care about the people in that foreign country is another important element to understanding that riddle that is the human race and your place in it.

So if fun is what your looking for and that´s fine, then be the  tourist. I do it often. But real, deep life experience and wisdom will come by living in the foreign country and caring about the place you live in. It´s that best way to have skin in the game, as the expression goes. Travelling somewhere and spending money and just watching what goes on around you is not the most valuable kind of life experience. The most valuable way to travel is to be a part of the human fabric of the place you´re in or contributing in some way. That is what makes for a healthier traveller.

Take care people.

Written by John

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