Zealous Traveller

Drum roll please!! Guess what? We’ve made it to the end of the April 2017 A-Z Blogging Challenge! Phew!! And wasn’t that a whole lot of hard work. But ultimately it’s been a great way to get back into writing and I’ve come across some wonderful new blogs and thoroughly enjoyed catching up with everything I missed from my original blogging friends. So, to Z. I didn’t want to do a specific destination for this post. I was looking back over the posts I’ve written, not just for challenges but in general, and I have to say it’s heavy on the travel. You could say it is a testament to my zeal for discovery. I figured, what better way to end the challenge then than by looking at why I travel.

I’m not sure when, if ever, I decided I could call myself a traveller. I don’t think it was a deliberate choice, there was no set moment. It just suddenly was. And not just for me, it became a word that friends would also associate with me. I didn’t do my first international trip until I was about 12 years old. It was that well-worn path many Australians take – I went to Bali, Indonesia. Quickly followed by my first trip to the USA & Mexico. But in fairness, I already loved to travel. My parents had ensured that I did a lot of domestic travel in my childhood. It started when I was about 7 months old. By the time I was 9 years old we were ready for an epic Australian road trip. That trip, I think, is what shaped not only my love of the country I was born to but also my love of travelling.

So why do I have such zeal for travel? If you look at the definition of zeal, it says “great energy or enthusiasm in pursuit of a cause or an objective”. I think that is a good starting point to explain it too. There’s no denying my greatest passion is to see new countries, new places, new cultures. I am quite single minded when it comes to being driven to keep booking trips, keep exploring. There’s very few places I wouldn’t want to see, at some point. To me, travel is the greatest adventure. For some, it’s embarking on a challenging and engaging career path, for some it’s venturing into the realm of parenthood. For me, seeing the world is my life’s adventure. I do it also because of the sense of freedom. I step onto that plane and the shackles and monotony of ordinary, every day life vanishes. No worrying about work, family, friends, money, health … nothing. It’s just me and the great unknown adventure that awaits at my destination. And when I return? It’s the wealth of experiences, sights and sounds, and memories that I’ve accumulated that continue to stimulate that desire to go again! To see some place I’ve never seen before, and may ever see again. I want to learn new things, soak up the knowledge and history of foreign places. I want to be awed by the magnificence of this world’s varied wildlife. Or humbled by the beauty of all her changing faces etched in the landscape. I want to experience first hand other cultures so I may form educated opinions of other ways of life. I am indeed a zealous traveller. I am an adventure traveller. I pursue relentlessly the love of travel and adventure. It is as much a part of who I am as the blood in my veins and the ink under my skin 😉

This post is part of my contribution to the April 2017 A-Z Challenge

For a list and link to my other challenge posts, click here

For those interested in revisiting my 2016 challenge post for Z, here’s the link: Snapshot – Zambezi River