by Vanessa Di Grazia
Travelling can fucking suck.
Making your way through a foreign country can be scary and stressful and make you so tired you just want to crawl up in the corner of the convenience store and cry yourself to sleep.
You can’t find anyone that speaks your language, all of your flights get delayed, you have no data and are grasping for wifi at every McDonalds just to talk to your loved ones back home. Your accommodation is laden with rodents, your suitcase gets sent to Turkey and is lost forever and the streets don’t match Google Maps in any way shape or form.
I’ve been chased by corrupt bandit police in Mexico, had a paralysing anxiety attack in the dangerous muddy streets of a Filipino mega city, and witnessed the realities of wealthy dictatorship in the slums of Brunei. I’ve narrowly escaped being looted by floating women in France, burned with bed bug bites in an upscale hotel in Malaysia, and seen the fearful price of globalisation in the ferocious Vietnamese traffic.
Walking through the streets of Bali burdens any Aussie with the effects of unsustainable tourism.
The hoards of homeless drug addicts in central Los Angeles instills a sense of hopelessness.
Visiting the Killing Fields in Cambodia genuinely blackened my spirit with pain.
Across the world, from Italy to Singapore, Colombia to Zimbabwe, inconvenience and suffering exists in familiar and unfamiliar forms that can shock us and break us and sometimes completely tear us apart.
This is the reason why travel is important.
Anybody that is likely to read this, myself included, is brought up with such a sense of privilege and promise that it’s easy to think that our lives of luxury are normal, or even worse, deserved. It’s easy to look down upon other people that don’t have what we have or live how we live as an indicator of their ‘lack of hard work’. It takes seeing the world in all of its rawness to understand that isn’t so.
Travel makes us grateful for everything we have and is a step towards a happier and more appreciative existence.
To recognise whether problems are really problems. To understand that these problems can likely be fixed and to have a sense of responsibility over the maintenance of our own happiness.
Of course, travel can be ecstatic. The eruption of connection when you see your grandparents hometown will make you cry. The nights you spend dancing on the beach with English backpackers and Saudi businessmen will let you access a feeling so emotionally human you didn't even know it existed.
The fun parts will always be our focus. We don't realise we are growing subconsciously and fruitfully with every new experience. Travel does not ask; it demands a sense of self betterment that will impact you and the way you live your life far past your flight home.
This is the reason why travel is important.
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