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Even Father Christmas knows the thrill of travel. Santa packs up his sleigh each year and traverses the globe: surely he would appreciate how exciting that is, how rewarding is the act of seeing the world.
That’s because travel gives back, sometimes in ways you would never expect. This, as they say, is the only pursuit that costs money but makes you richer. Travel is a teacher, a guru, a provider of memories, a window into your own soul.
And so this Christmas, we celebrate not the gifts that we can give to other people, but those we have already received. We consider what the act of travelling has given us all over the years, from the nebulous and the philosophical, to the tacky snow globe sitting on your bookcase.
Travel bestows gifts upon those who indulge in it. Think about the person you are today and how different you would be if you hadn’t seen the world. The lessons you’ve learned, the values you’ve gained, the memories you have collected – these happen when you take the plunge, when you leave home to discover somewhere unfamiliar.
Travel teaches you how to handle a budget; it shows you how to cope in moments of crisis; it helps you assess risk and know when you should just jump in the deep end; it gives you perspective on yourself and your place in the world.
Travel gives you friendships. It provides you with deep, rich experiences that you just can’t get any other way. And so we should celebrate that at this giving time of year by remembering the gifts of travel.
Commonsense
This, as they say, is not always common. And when you begin your travelling life you tend to make a lot of mistakes. You’ll look back on these in later years and laugh at your own naivety. But this is the gift of travel: the more you do it, the more practice you get, the more you start to get the simple things right. Call this commonsense, or even just basic sense. And the great thing is that you bring this skill with you back to your normal life, and feel far more capable as a result.
Calmness
Your flight is cancelled, and you’re stuck in Buenos Aires with no idea how you’re going to get home: what do you do? A Mumbai ATM just ate your only credit card. The Cape Town hotel has lost your booking and you have nowhere to sleep tonight. Crises like these take place all the time when you’re travelling, far more than they do in your predictable, static life back home. So as a traveller you learn how to deal with them, how to stay calm and make good decisions and get yourself back on track. That’s something you never forget.
Joy
This shouldn’t be forgotten, among these serious and worthy gifts. One of the greatest things travel can give us, if not the greatest thing, is moments of pure, unadulterated joy. These can be rare in your “real” life but when you’re travelling they happen constantly, sometimes multiple times a day. Whether you’re staring at an incredible view, or visiting a wonder of the world, or sharing a beautiful meal, or just strolling a street you have long dreamed of seeing, these blissful moments, these feelings of absolute, soaring happiness are what it’s all about.
Nous
You have to be able to manage a budget to travel. You may not start off being good at this, but you’ll get there, if for no other reason than if you don’t, you won’t be able to travel any more. Travel teaches you to handle money, to prioritise your spending and to understand value. It teaches you to haggle when it’s necessary and it teaches you to realise when you’re being ripped off.
Judgment
There are so many decisions to make in a day when travelling. Should I get on that bus? Should I believe this person? Should I buy this thing? And then you have all these other calls to make as well, decisions on how far to push your boundaries. Does this look safe? Am I putting myself in too much danger? Is the risk worth the reward? The ability to make good decisions is a skill that stays with you.
Daring
Here’s a gift that runs somewhat adjacent to the idea of risk assessment: the development of your own sense of daring; your willingness to take risks that you may not countenance back home. Travel, by its nature, forces you out of your comfort zone, it puts you in new situations with new people, and it dares you to close your eyes and just go for it. More often than not, it works out well.
Perspective
Travel doesn’t make any worries you might have magically disappear. It doesn’t trivialise them either. It just gives you perspective. Not only that, it also allows you to see how the rest of the world lives. Sometimes better, though often worse. It allows you to fit your problems into an appropriate box, to understand what really matters to you and the people you love, and what really isn’t much of an issue at all. It also makes you realise just how lucky you are to be able to travel for leisure in the first place.
Memories
The highlights of my life so far are as follows: the birth of my children; meeting my wife; playing guitar onstage with Green Day, and pretty much everything else is travel related. Every other moment I look back on as a major highlight of my life, from my gap year as a 17-year-old, to travelling in India in my 20s, to working on tour buses for Topdeck to driving around Africa to hiking in Peru to discovering an enduring love for Japan and its culture – it’s all travel. The best people, the best places, the biggest feelings. Travel will give you the most amazing memories of your life.
Wonder
You’re sitting in a chair in the sky. You’re travelling at almost 1000km/h over oceans and continents. You can go to sleep in Asia and wake up in London. Flying is incredible. It pays to stop sometimes and just appreciate what a gift it is.
Patience
There’s a term in Swahili, “pole pole”, that sums up much of the travel experience. It means “slowly slowly”, and is as much a philosophy as an order or a response. Take things slow. Take it easy. It will happen when it happens. If you’ve ever stood in a security line at an airport, or waited for your bags at a carousel, or tried to make something happen in a country where everything just takes a little longer than it does at home, you will know about “pole pole”, and you will understand that travel gives you patience (or madness).
Acceptance
I almost said “tolerance” here, but that’s not right. Travel gives you more than that, more than the ability to merely tolerate humanity in all its forms. Travel gives you acceptance. It helps you to understand the huge diversity of lifestyles and traditions, of cultures and beliefs, of identities and desires, and it gives you the gift of acceptance. To travel is to meet people and to understand that while many of us are very different in fascinating ways, we’re also essentially the same. And that is a very good thing.
Hilarity
Travel is just funny sometimes: gloriously, joyously funny. You meet funny people. You find yourself in hilarious situations. You laugh at yourself and everyone around you. It doesn’t matter where you are or what you’re doing, you can guarantee that travel will make you chuckle, over and over and over again.
Taste
This could be meant in a wider sense, to describe how travel gives you a broader taste for all sorts of things, from art to architecture, fashion to design. But what I’m really talking about is food. You might depart home shores with a narrow palate, with a simple set of dishes and flavour profiles that you’re used to, but travel will change all that. To eat in this world is to explore and to expand your horizons. What a beautiful thing.
Knowledge
How could you not want more? Everywhere you go, you learn something new. You learn about history, via everything from personal stories to ancient myths. You learn about geography, about culture, about humanity. This is part of what gets people hooked on travel, the thirst for more knowledge, the never-ending well of information and experience that is out there waiting to be discovered. There’s always room for more.
Conscience
It helps, as a human, to see things with your own eyes. This is our basic nature. If you’ve been to Antarctica you begin to understand the urgency of the climate crisis, and you act in ways that consider that. If you have visited developing countries it’s easier to accept the need for foreign aid, or to understand that everyone isn’t equally fortunate. The more you see of the world with your own eyes, the more you learn about it, the more you care about it and the more steps you take to set it right. Simple, yet vital.
Relaxation
Travel doesn’t have to be hectic, it doesn’t have to be adventurous, it doesn’t have to push you out of your comfort zone or deliver a life-changing epiphany. Sometimes the greatest gift a holiday can give is pure relaxation. A sense of well-being. A chance to recharge the batteries. It’s perfectly fine to just lie by a pool for a week and only worry about how to source your next cocktail, or stay somewhere with childcare so you don’t have to be a hardworking parent while you’re supposed to be having a holiday. That is worth celebrating, too.
Friendship
There’s an incredible solidity to the bond that forms between people sharing travel experiences. You meet once, you stay friends forever. So many of us can now count ourselves lucky enough to maintain friendships across the globe, with people in countries and from backgrounds sometimes so different to our own. Travel gives you those opportunities. How many new people do you meet in a week or a month or even a year in your normal, everyday life at home? Not many. Yet, when you’re travelling, this is a regular occurrence – of course you will find some people you click with. For many, too, it’s more than just friendship. It’s the discovery of a soulmate, the beginning of a family, the spark of something lifelong and beautiful.
Awareness
What are you like in a crisis? How would you deal with adversity? Are you someone who panics, or someone who stays calm? Are you the sort of person everyone can rely on, or do you need someone around you to be a calming presence? If you’ve travelled, you already know the answers to these questions and many more. Travel gives the gift of self-knowledge. All these unusual situations, all these hassles, all these moments where you can choose to either thrive or melt down – they teach you about yourself. Things you might want to work on or change, and things you’re proud of, and that give you confidence even back at home. To travel is to know yourself.
Souvenirs
You could argue that this, in fact, is a gift you give yourself, but it wouldn’t be possible without travel. And who doesn’t love a souvenir? Whether it’s cheap and tacky or tasteful and pricey, a magnet stuck to your fridge or an artwork hanging on your wall, these mementoes from travel are so precious and meaningful. A house filled with trinkets from around the world is a sign of a life well lived, and a home you’re always happy to come back to.
Passion
This is it. The final entry and perhaps the most important one, and surely the most universal. Travel gives you The Bug. The obsession. The desire to travel again and again and never stop. You are doomed to be forever saving for the next holiday. You are cursed with downtime that will be forever spent dreaming of the next destination. You will always have that itch, that desire. Of course, this isn’t really a bad thing. It’s an amazing gift, one that will change your life for the better, that will bring you joy and happiness and friendships and self-belief and so much more already mentioned here. Just be aware that once bitten, you’ll probably never be rid of it.
Travel giveth, and it taketh away…
Money
Ahem. There’s no way to sugar-coat this. Travel costs money. Sometimes it’s a little bit and sometimes it’s a lot, but there’s always a financial cost to be borne. And once you have the travel bug you are doomed to always be saving for the next trip, always sacrificing the chance to keep up with the Joneses with their nice car and new renos by going on an overseas jaunt instead. The rewards, however, are obvious.
Satisfaction with the ordinary
This one is a little more difficult to shrug off. Office life just seems that bit more dull after you’ve been on an exciting adventure. That cafe down the road isn’t as good as the one in Italy. Your weekends aren’t filled with daring and excitement. Your satisfaction with the day-to-day, with the ordinary, takes a big hit when you have travelled. Normal will never feel the same again.
Stability
If your idea of a good life is a stable life, one in which you live the same place for long periods of time, where you invest wisely and plan prudently and always know what’s around the corner, then travel may not be good for you. Because it upends all those notions, it forces a certain amount of instability and unpredictability – which could be seen as a good or bad thing.
Disinterest
Never again will you watch the news on TV or read a story on your phone and have it just wash over you. Not my problem. I don’t care. Because when you travel, you do care. You become familiar with the world. You take an interest in everything and everywhere. The ability to separate yourself from the wider world and its problems will disappear.
Prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness
This is a famous quote from writer Mark Twain: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.” To which we say: hear, hear.
