Has it only been 40 days since I last boarded a plane? It feels thrice as long, and if things don't work out this December, it'll be at least another 169 before I do.
In all honesty, I've already traveled quite a fair bit this year despite all the travel hiccups. There was the Lombok/Bali trip in place of Perth, Hong Kong (without Taipei), Hanoi for Sojourn, and Batam though it feels more like zipping over to your neighbor's messy backyard. But still there's this niggling sense of disatisfaction and incompletion in me.
Why do you travel?
For me, what started off as escapism became a pleasurable past-time, which then evolved into wanderlust and a self-discovery journey of sorts. I suppose the turning point for me was India. Leaving the comforts of home to spend four months in a developing nation with an entirely different set of culture and lifestyle values has changed me, and along with it my travel personality.
There's the yearning to see and experience, but above it all, a yearning to feel. I'm no longer content to touch and go, only to see the superficial and capture that in a snapshot. But neither can I describe this yearning as a need to get down and gritty with every foreign place, because I unabashedly value my creature comforts.
Perhaps what I'm looking for from each trip is perspective. It's an intangible concept that is wholly self-indulgent, but not any more than choosing a country for its cheap massages or its selection of boutiques/bars/restaurants. Could it be then that it is because my recent trips have slanted towards the materialistically-indulgent that I am this unfulfilled?
Then again, perhaps not. That is yet another thing to discover.
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