Yesterday I woke up and set myself a mission. I was gonna find out as much as I can about Queenstown, New Zealand, from all the different kinds of information that are available to us travellers. First of all there are the normal print media like guidebooks and their newly born siblings, downloadable pdf chapters of guidebooks, but then there is the whole internet. Forums, travel networks, travel wikis and personal travel blogs. I was wondering if I could get the information I wanted from all those sources and how they compared to each other…
Archives For April, 2008
What’s going on?
Apparently T-J.com has been down for the last four days. Visitor numbers dropped down from 250 to 5 a day. What people would see are 403 and 500 errors and it was all down to there not being a index.php file. Something fishy is going on here, I think. When I went to work in the bush 12 days ago everything was fine. Then suddenly… nothing! How can that be?
Lost & Found
Once in a while you meet someone who is out and about busy “finding him or herself”. I have never fully grasped the concept of this idea. What is it exactly that people try to find? Is it their real self, how they would be without the influences of todays society, or is it how they really want to be?
While this undertaking seems somewhat realistic back in their own country, I find the idea ridiculous when travelling. What makes people think they can find themselves in the alien surroundings of a foreign country when they couldn’t even manage it back in the familiarity of their homes?
The expression in itself implies that somehow somewhere along the road they got lost, otherwise there would be no point in going looking for yourself. And they obviously seem to have a problem with being lost. They might not be happy with themselves and want to change things. But it’s funny how naive some people are. Travelling is not an express ticket to a new personality. It is true that travel changes people. Without my trips I wouldn’t be the person I am today. But even when travelling, with all its amazing experiences and impressions, this is a gradual process and does not happen overnight or during a two week trip.
Moreover I think all this takes away parts of the travel experience. How much can you actually take in looking for yourself in every corner, when you should be looking for new cultures, new experiences, new friends…
The same is true for the problems you carry around with you. How many couples do (or should I say ‘did’?) you know that decide to take a break from their routine and go travelling or on a holiday, just to break up after a couple weeks on the road? Travelling does not solve your problems for you, at best it just puts them safely away somewhere for easy retrieval on your return. And more than likely your problems will try to surface at times. If you drink too much alcohol, then you won’t suddenly become a AA advocate, just because your favorite pub is halfway around the world.
What travelling does, though, is giving you a chance to start making those changes you always thought about on New Years Eve and forgot about after the third drink. Your usual temptations are gone, you are out of your normal routine and you are basically free to do whatever you want. All you need is patience and time. And who knows, you might even stumble upon your lost self somewhere on the way.
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