I have done quite a bit of trav­el­ling over the last few years. Out of the last 8 years, I have been away from Ger­many for roughly 6 years and out of all the coun­tries I have been to, I liked Indone­sia the best. That def­in­itely had some­thing to do with the people and the sur­round­ings and the under­wa­ter world, but a big chunk of it was the actual trav­el­ling. Get­ting from place A to place B. As a trav­el­ler you spend an unusual amount of your time on vari­ous modes of trans­port and in many coun­tries that can be an extremely dull exper­i­ence and you actu­ally start con­tem­plat­ing jump­ing off whatever vehicle you are on right now or even slit­ting your wrists, just to relieve the bore­dom a little.

Every self respect­ing trav­el­ler usu­ally has a couple stor­ies up his sleeve that have to do with trans­port. Most of them are actu­ally quite hor­rible, yet, when a few trav­el­lers come together it’s just a mat­ter of time until the first stor­ies get told. The worse/better the story the more approval the trav­el­ler gets. It seems to be some kind of unstated ritual and it actu­ally is really fun listen­ing to all the stor­ies and telling your own. A couple things I noticed were that the vast major­ity of those stor­ies come from coun­tries where trav­el­ling (from point A to point B) can be quite dif­fi­cult (which should be kind of obvi­ous) and that the stor­ies seem to get worse the more exper­i­ence the storyteller had with travel on little money. That and a bit of think­ing, which con­trary to pop­u­lar belief I actu­ally do some­times, led me to the devel­op­ment of my the­ory of pro­gress­ive travel.

The The­ory

The the­ory of pro­gress­ive travel states that the more budget travel exper­i­ence a per­son has the more he or she will want to travel to remote and inac­cess­ible places and the more he or she will dis­ap­prove of travel in approach­able and access­ible places.

Most people start trav­el­ling in ‘easy’ coun­tries, like Thai­l­and or Aus­tralia, and fol­low the well-trodden back­packer trail where almost everything is being done for you. Tour­ist busses and organ­ized tours are the norm and cer­tain things have to be seen so the coun­try counts as done, as in “Yeah, I did Thai­l­and, went to Khao San Road, trekking up north and then down to the islands.” This is not a bad thing (apart from the ‘done’ part). It’s a good way to famil­i­ar­ize your­self with the whole new exper­i­ence of being away from home for an exten­ded period of time and maybe even trav­el­ling alone. In my case I real­ized after a while, though, that I wanted to get out there where I don’t bump into another tour­ist every two steps, where people don’t neces­sar­ily under­stand Eng­lish, where people still live accord­ing to ancient tra­di­tions, where I might even be the only for­eigner around, and so on. Basic­ally I want unique experiences.

Over the years I have found a few places that fit into the above cat­egor­ies, although it was very rare to actu­ally be the only trav­el­ler around. I came pretty close though quite often and, mostly, the other trav­el­lers I met then had the same frame of mind than me and fun­nily enough quite a few had been to the same places, often around the same time, than me. There is noth­ing like a lonely planet any­more. Any­where you go, most likely there will be other trav­el­lers. And that isn’t a bad thing either. Lan­guage and cul­tural bar­ri­ers often pre­vent you from really get­ting to know the local people in those far-away places. All you might be allowed to see is a glimpse of their life. And that is under­stand­able and makes a lot of sense. How would you like some strange people bar­ging into your vil­lage and dis­turb­ing your life? One res­ult of that is that you do get to know your fel­low trav­el­lers so much bet­ter there than in one of the big name­less back­packer chains or even the Thai-style beach bun­ga­low accommodation.

For me it has been quite hard going back to trav­el­ling in ‘easy’ coun­tries, like Aus­tralia or New Zea­l­and. Some­thing seemed to be miss­ing. Everything seems anonym­ous, trav­el­lers just do their own thing, it is hard get­ting to know one another and get­ting from one place to another doesn’t seem part of the exper­i­ence. It is merely a means of get­ting from one exper­i­ence to the next. But I crave the sense of achieve­ment I get from a good days dif­fi­cult trav­el­ling. There’s some­thing a lot more sat­is­fy­ing about a cold beer at the end of a long dusty sweaty 150 km drive on the back of a pickup truck that took 9 hours than a fairly com­fort­able bus drive for the same amount of time dur­ing which you watched three movies and stopped reg­u­larly for short breaks so you can stretch your legs.

Obvi­ously, how you travel doesn’t have much to do with what you can see. Undoubtedly there are many amaz­ing des­tin­a­tions in Aus­tralia and other ‘easy’ coun­tries, but I really have to push myself some­times not to just pack my things up and leave in pur­suit of a more demand­ing exper­i­ence. But the thing is that I really do want to see those coun­tries, all of them actu­ally, so I guess I just have to put up with their ‘short­com­ings’. I have made the mis­take of leav­ing a coun­try pre­ma­turely once and I will not do it again.

All in all, I think I’m just weird in that respect,but I’d like to know if there are more weirdos out there. Have you exper­i­enced some­thing similar?