So how’s your big holiday going? It must be great to have such a long holiday! You are so lucky that you can go on this long seemingly never-ending holiday? It must be great to be able to afford such an extravagant endeavour! How many times have we heard these phrases in our time travelling? Probably too many to count. And while it may seem that we are having a go at people for thinking that what we are doing is a prolonged holiday, sort of like a Christmas night in which Santa never shows up, we are not. The fact is, long-term travelling is no holiday!
However we understand that people might not get it, we probably wouldn’t have got a couple of years ago either. At the end of the day how many people do things like these? It’s easy to forget in the travel and travel blog community that we are a minority and people only usually just dream of these escapades, and sometimes for good reasons; because they don’t want to leave their jobs, families etc. But are we brave or reckless and are they sensible or just scared/not interested because they are happy with what they already have? But we digress…
Having said that, we think it’s important once and for all to make a distinction between the concepts of holidaying and long-time travelling. The two things are really as different as having the occasional beer to being a full-blown alcoholic, and we are full-blown alcoholics…so to speak! We take the good that comes with it, the fun and the euphoria but also the unbearable hangovers, the sickness and the craving that comes with the…erm…alcoholism (please bear with the alcoholism analogy!)
So, in what ways do holidaying and travelling differ?
Holidaying by definition is a time of relaxation and fun, and yeah it can be tiring and even challenging at times but it’s finite, it’s all in the short-term. Also think of the state of mind you are in when you are on holiday. You want to make the most of every single second you have because those two weeks won’t last forever. Having a good time all the time is paramount, be it lazing by a beach or checking out museums. We have done plenty of holidaying in our lives and have spent good chunks of our salaries on it and we liked it…to a point. We kept on going on holidays for years and tried to make the most of it until something changed unbeknownst to us. Our attitude changed.
It probably first happened in our Cuban holiday in 2013 and again in our life-changing Peruvian escapade a year later. During those two trips we realized that having fun all the time and making sure that every moment was as good as it could get wasn’t…well…good enough. I think the Eureka moment for us was in Cuba’s Varadero in 2013 where we just kept on wondering what we were doing there. We had just travelled through Cuba for about ten days and all of a sudden we were HOLIDAYING like everyone else in a soulless resort, it was an eye opener and a game changer. We realized that relaxing by beach, drinking bucket loads of mojitos and eating mutant gigantic lobsters at dinner wasn’t all that fun and wasn’t satisfactory on a cultural level. That’s when we promised ourselves not to do something like that again. And sure enough the following year in Peru we tried to pack in as much authentic travel in our two weeks as possible. That is we made an effort to go where tourists do not necessarily go, and see how people really live, and put ourselves in their shoes as far as we could. We were determined to understand their culture, their way of life and their daily struggles as much as possible.
After returning from this holiday to Peru we realised that we had started something that couldn’t be stopped. Also having met some long time travellers along the way inspired us to make the big step, the one that takes guts and courage. Leave everything and go, go where your heart and intuition is taking you and embrace it. Also the way you view your everyday life changes, jobs, careers, mortgages, possessions, cars etc just don’t mean as much to you anymore. You realise you still have ambitions but of a different kind, the non-mainstream kind.
So there you go, we switched from holiday makers to full-time travellers. Is the difference between the two clear yet? The traveller dedicates all of himself to travelling and discovering no matter what, accepting the good the bad and the ugly, and trust me…the bad and the ugly do show up from time to time just to remind you that this is not a fun fair, not a holiday! The holidayers on the other hand have limited time and therefore less chance to fully immerse in a city or an area just because they like it, they can be less spontaneous and have to stick to a rigid schedule…but of course they didn’t have to give everything up back home. We had to, otherwise this travelling thing could not happen.
We hope it’s clear by now; we are not trying to say that it takes a special person to travel long-term or that holiday makers are lazy, we’re just trying to highlight the differences between the two approaches.
We can now say with confidence that travelling is one of the most fulfilling experiences a person can have in his life, no wonder some people never stop!
But let us say it again, there’s nothing wrong with holidaying. Holidays are great to recharge your batteries and go back to your life full of energy and positivity. You cannot however go back to your life after long time travelling and expect it to be the same. Your experiences will inevitably have changed you and those changes will stay with you and have to be applied to your everyday life, because you are not the same person that left all those months ago. And if you put yourself in the position to be changed, chances are that you needed a change! So if you don’t fancy change and like things the way they are, we would advise against long-term travelling…
Travelling has changed us in ways we do not understand yet, but certainly for the better. Anyone who has travelled long-term will tell you that they don’t regret the choices and we can whole-heartedly confirm that. Your life won’t be easier but it will be fuller and richer. All we can say is what a good friend of us told us before we went “if you’ve got the slightest inclination to do it, then do it”. There is nothing worse than thinking ‘what if’. It’s not for everyone to make the switch between holidaying and travelling, but if you feel that call within you telling you to ‘take the red pill’ then take it. What’s the worst that can happen?
If you are thinking about it, it’s likely that you have already made the decision.
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