Understanding Why We Travel So Much

Why do so many people travel thought out the world? There are many reasons why they do it: for work reasons, enjoyment, or to see their family. One thing that many retired people do is travel. They buy a RV and go around the United States because they want to do it, and they have the time to do it. Pico Iyer says, “Yet for me the first great joy of traveling is simply the luxury of leaving all my beliefs and certainties at home, and seeing everything I thought I knew in a different light, and from as crooked angle.”(189)

We see that people that travel for a living have a different out look on where they are staying at. They might commonly think “Everything here is the same as it is in Cairo-or Cuzco or Kathmandu.” (189) They have been to so many different hotels and city it all looks the same to them. But a person that is tourist might think “Nothing here is the way it is at home.”(189) To a tourist this is something special that they only do once or twice a year, and they want the place where they are staying at to be like it is at home, but in the reality it not.

He talks about the differences between China and Paris. In China he says, “People will pay a whole weeks wages to eat with Colonel Sanders,” (189) which I find that very odd that they would waste their earning on that. In Paris, “Mickey Rourke is regarded as the greatest actor since Jerry Lewis.” (189) When I read that, I was like you got to be kidding. Rourke is an OK actor and nowhere is the class of Jerry Lewis.

Then he goes on talking about the way it is in North Korea and how we can be concern as an extraterrestrial to them. But in reality we can be taking the same orders for the Central Committee: on how to dress, eat, what route to take to work, and have propaganda every morning at dawn blaring in our bedrooms. They would not know the difference. He makes a contrast between drinking in Thailand and being in a Buddhist temple in Tibet. I can understand someone going and drinking until dawn and then going to sleep. But going and pretend that he is a Buddhist just to hear chants of sutras for days on end.

I went to Disney World on the first real vacation in my life. That was very stressful for me. I worried more about being on vacation then enjoying it. It was different routine for me. There was a time we have just drove to Washington D.C and just stead there for one hour and drove home. On time I was on plane to Portland and one part of the flight seem like it just took hours and hours to land. In reality it was just 3 hours. I understand why people act the way they do about traveling.

Copyright (c) 2005, Jeffrey Shane Saunders. All Right Reversed.