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Travel for your dreams are many but life is one.
Travel for you want to live long time but time has wings.
Travel for its now or never. But, honey, who are we kidding, now is better than ever.
We started this page one and a half years ago when we were traveling through Vietnam. It was all great. We were taking pictures, sharing them on our page, writing blog posts and connecting with people. I had a great time. But suddenly , I found that I could not write anymore. Everything was fine, so then what went wrong that I dropped the ball.
On our way to South East Asia, like every avid traveler I had carried a big travel guide of everything in South East Asia. The book sort of spoke about every nook and corner of South East Asia in an exclamatory tone, like an overexcited personal guide. Now, an overexcited guide who magnifies the reality before your eyes and captures your imagination is tolerable for a weekend. But we lived this for six months going by the guide book suggestions, following people’s blog and spending long times in different places. It all sounded great but I realized a lot of times the places just didn’t stand up to the tall claims beyond a day or two. If we stayed some place longer its touristic facade came off. In some cases it didn’t like we spent months in McloedGanj and we would still go back there in a wink. BUt there is no way I would step anywhere in some places which were described as must see destination.
I would come back and write my honest review of places on my blog, which I thought was my space, but I often got people disagreeing with me. When I thought a place sucked, others thought it was the best trip of their life which is fine. But then I got travel fatigue and I wanted to write about that as well. The long time travel bloggers who claimed they were on the road nomads for years now, very people who inspired us to take off on our dream adventure, did not find the sort of disillusionment I experienced in any of their travel entries. I wondered if I was I alone? Was I sceptic? Does my opinion really count? or am I just a really weird person for not thinking that every place I went to is great or is the best trip of my life. One night I was so disappointed with what the travel guide said, I tore it apart, not aggressively in anger but just calmly, page by page I ripped it as a mark of protest.
The article is written by Ishwinder Kaur, an aspiring novelist, free spirited avid traveler based out of Australia. She is cofounder of Empty Rucksack.
The featured photo is taken by Neal Sanche and is used under the creative common license.
My friend experiences are personal, i backpack and travel too. To me a place could be average while for you it could be out of the world and vice-verse, we weren’t derived from the same cocoon.
As for the book it’s like tip of the iceberg (reminds me of a series of books maybe a decade back ….. for dummies).. So these are for people who are kicking off, You wanna have the real taste, get local, get to the grass-root level; The more you dig the more you explore, it’s a gold mine.
Hope that helps, If it doesn’t, simply ignore. It’s my personal view 🙂
tc