Why do we travel?

Posted by Sarah Duff on 14 October 2013

If you’re reading this blog, you probably like travelling. Or love it. Or are totally addicted to it, like me.

Do you ever stop to think why you travel? It’s surely not just to get a tan in a warm place while back home everyone is trundling through winter. Nor is it to accumulate jealousy-inducing Facebook profile photos of yourself, cocktail in hand, in some fabulous exotic location. For most people it isn’t just about ticking places off a list, or racking up experiences like jobs on your CV. (On a side note, why we travel is a very different question to why we should travel, which is covered extensively in magazine articles and blogs).

And so why do we travel? I haven’t yet worked out the answer to that one, despite having read as much as I can about it by travellers far more philosophical than myself (The Art of Travel, by Alain de Botton, is the most comprehensive and thoughtful work I’ve read so far). Instead, I decided to dedicate an entire website to the question.

Last month I launched Peregrine, an online travel magazine that is all about the “why” of travel, explored through long-form narratives. With so much online telling us where to go, how to get there and what to do, eat, drink and see when we’re there, there isn’t much telling us how to travel, or why we’re going somewhere foreign in the first place. Over the months (years, decades etc), I hope that travel writers will contribute their wise learnings about travel to Peregrine, and ultimately answer this question from all their multifarious perspectives.

In the meantime, I thought I’d share some of my favourite quotes about why we travel by some of the world’s greatest travellers:

“The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land: it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.” – G.K. Chesterton

“For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go.  I travel for travel’s sake.  The great affair is to move.” – Robert Louis Stevenson

“Man’s real home is not a house, but the Road, and that life itself is a journey to be walked on foot.” ― Bruce Chatwin

“The wish to travel seems to me characteristically human: the desire to move, to satisfy your curiosity or ease your fears, to change the circumstances of your life, to be a stranger, to make a friend, to experience an exotic landscape, to risk the unknown..” ― Paul Theroux

“We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again — to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.” – Pico Iyer

“Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than a moving plane, ship or train. There is an almost quaint correlation between what is in front of our eyes and the thoughts we are able to have in our heads: large thoughts at times requiring large views, new thoughts new places. Introspective reflections which are liable to stall are helped along by the flow of the landscape. The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do. At the end of hours of train-dreaming, we may feel we have been returned to ourselves – that is, brought back into contact with emotions and ideas of importance to us. It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not; the domestic setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, but who may not be who we essentially are.”  – Alain de Botton

 

For more on the “why” of travel, read Peregrine, follow @PeregrineMag on Twitter or join our Facebook page.  

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