Why I travel?

I was roughly 22 when I properly started travelling. Now, at 29-and-something, I’ve somehow made it to 25 countries and more cities than I can confidently count without opening Google Maps.

And somewhere along the way, I realised something very simple: I absolutely, ridiculously love going somewhere new.

Does it break my bank account? Regularly. Does it also break my legs because I apparently refuse to behave like a normal person on holiday and end up walking 20,000-30,000 steps every single day? Also yes. But hey…worth it for the plot, no?

For a long time, I thought the appeal was just the obvious part: Oh, look at me, I’ve been to this many countries. And honestly, 23-year-old me probably would have happily said exactly that. There was definitely a little thrill in collecting countries, ticking off cities, adding another pin to the imaginary map and feeling very worldly about it.

But somewhere between then and now, my definition of travelling and what I love about it, quietly changed. What started mattering were the things that travelling did to me. Travelling humbles me. Constantly. It reminds me that the way I know how to live is just one tiny version of how life can be lived. Somewhere else, people eat differently, speak differently, celebrate differently, structure their days differently, look at time differently, and somehow the world keeps spinning perfectly well.

It also has a wonderful habit of exposing both the best and worst of my decision-making abilities. I have made some genuinely excellent choices while travelling. I have also made decisions that, in hindsight, could probably be filed under character development.

Questionable shortcuts. Booking things at ridiculous hours because they were €20 cheaper. Walking several kilometres because “it doesn’t look that far on the map.” Eating something without having the slightest idea what I ordered. Ending up somewhere completely unplanned and discovering that it was somehow better than whatever I had originally intended to do.

And I think that is part of why I love it.

Travelling pushes me outside the little bubble where I know how everything works. Suddenly I have to navigate, adapt, ask for help, figure things out, trust people, trust myself and occasionally accept that I have absolutely no idea what is going on.

It pushes me physically too. Apparently my idea of relaxation is waking up early, walking 27,000 steps, climbing something unnecessarily steep, forgetting to eat lunch because I got distracted by a building, and then saying, “I should probably walk around a bit more after dinner.”

But it also lets me experience just how many different kinds of beauty exist in the world.

And I don’t only mean the dramatic kind mountains, glaciers, beaches, old cities, sunsets and landscapes that make you stop talking for a minute. Sometimes it is a tiny café on a random street. A grandmother watering plants from a balcony. A train ride through somewhere I had never heard of before. Beautiful tiles on an ordinary building. Someone patiently trying to explain something to me despite us sharing approximately four words of a common language. A meal I still think about years later. Or simply sitting somewhere unfamiliar and watching an entirely ordinary Tuesday happen around me.

As I progress, the way I travel has also steeply changed. As someone who prefers comfort and privacy and who was in student budget mode, now happily books a dorm, go on those walking tours and has small conversations, shamelessly go and asks for recs from locals, and genuinely makes an effort to eat local cusine instead of sticking to McD or some other fast food chain.

Maybe that is what travelling has slowly become for me. Not collecting places, but collecting perspectives. Every trip seems to stretch my idea of what the world looks like and, strangely enough, my idea of myself along with it. Some places make me feel tiny. Some make me feel ridiculously alive. Some challenge things I thought I knew. Some make me uncomfortable. Some make me want to stay forever. And some simply become stories that I will probably keep telling until everyone around me is tired of hearing them.

So yes, 25 countries is cool. But I think 23-year-old me would have been much more impressed by that number than 29-something-year-old me is. Now, I’m much more interested in everything that happened between those pins on the map.

The terrible decisions. The wonderful ones. The sore feet. The unexpected kindness. The ridiculous stories. The things I learned. The things I had to unlearn. And all the different versions of beauty I would never have known existed if I had stayed in one place.

My bank account may strongly disagree, but I think that is worth travelling for. And more than anything, all of this makes me realise how privileged I am. Privileged to have work that allows me to travel. Privileged to be able to stand in these places and see them with my own eyes. To taste the food where it actually comes from. To now know what an authentic gyro tastes like, what really good pasta and pizza can be, what šaltibarščiai, a cold Lithuanian beetroot soup tastes like, or what a genuinely good croissant is supposed to be like. And there are so many more things I have tasted, seen, heard, and experienced that I would never have encountered otherwise.

There is something quite special about being able to bring little pieces of all of that home with you not necessarily as souvenirs, but as memories, habits, stories, flavours, perspectives, and tiny changes in the way you see the world.

And perhaps, to me, that is what a life well travelled feels like. Not how many places I have managed to pin on a map…that still matters but very very little now, as compared to how much bigger the world feels to me because I went…and how much bigger my own life feels because of everything I brought back.