Guest Post: Curiosity – The Root of All Travel

Today’s guest post comes from Tim Raveling of Good and Lost. Tim is a writer and traveler who wishes to acquire no address more specific than “Earth: at large.” He enjoys good books, beautiful places, and interesting people. You can follow his upcoming round-the-world adventure at Good and Lost or on Twitter @nomadico.

Editor’s note: Tim is planning a long-term jaunt around the world traveling only by land, so I asked him to explain what the inspiration for such a trip was, and how he’s gone about planning it. Here is his response:

Curiosity — The Root of All Travel

In my experience, the root of all travel is curiosity. I felt the first stirrings of wanderlust before my tenth birthday, leafing through an old National Geographic world atlas. It had more statistics than pictures, but the place names alone were enough to set my mind on fire. Kathmandu. Vladivostok. Marrakesh.

When I started traveling in my third (and last; travel is bad for your “career,” kids) year of college, I finally began to put images and smells and stories to those names. Bosnia wasn’t just that one country where the war happened, but became the country where gypsies accidentally sabotaged our train. Syria wasn’t just a paragraph on the State Department’s warnings page, but became the dark castle tunnels under Krak des Chevaliers, the narrow covered souqs of Aleppo, the spice markets of Damascus, and an easy-going band of cigarette smugglers headed into Turkey.

Combined with a love for history, travel became a way of connecting the stories of the world into an overarching pattern that connected the places and people that are with the places and people that have been. For the most part, I traveled however I was able — trains, buses, boats, and good old-fashioned boot leather when motorized transport failed me.

The more I traveled without flying, the more I grew to dislike it whenever I did. That dislike extended beyond wondering what effect extreme boredom and new TSA security measures were having on the security checkers in long airport lines. It took me a while to figure out, and it didn’t really hit me until I was reading Harry Franck’s “Vagabond Journey Around the World,” published in 1910.

Flying is magic. You walk onto a plane, sit down, watch a movie, and walk out a few hours later in a completely different part of the world. That pattern of connection woven together by direct experience, by friendship, by history, is sliced clean. How possible is it to understand Leif Erikson or Christopher Columbus, when it takes us seven hours to fly from New York to London, and we do so without ever even smelling the ocean? How can America’s Great Plains ever be anything but a quaint term, when all we see of them is a green patchwork gliding beneath a silent layer of cloud?

Pursued by these thoughts late one night a year or so ago, I stood in my then-apartment in Virginia and stared at a map on the wall. Flying is so easy, so convenient, that to travel at any length across that map seems impossible without shelling out enormous amounts of money to go on one of those tailored round-the-world cruises (which are, in their way, no more facilitative to curious travel than are airliners).

To try would be nuts. It would undoubtedly include exorbitant amounts of money, crossing troubled borders, mangling several relatively innocent languages, and possibly going down at sea.

All right, then, I thought, and started looking for trans-Atlantic ship tickets.

Nearly a year later, here I am, significantly more knowledgeable, in the last stages of buying gear and consolidating my effects, and finding loving homes for the denizens of my bookshelves. I leave in May.

So. Is it possible? Cutting flying out of the picture returns the world to the size it was a century ago. Visiting Iceland means charting ferry routes through the islands north of the UK, crossing Russia means seven days on a train, and as for the south Pacific, suffice it to say I’m going to have to learn how to sail.

But it is possible. For money, I’ve set up my consulting business to be entirely location independent, with a Skype account and a Google Voice number and a bank that can process all of my checks for me remotely. That’s the first step; slow travel is just that — slow. And for a young person like myself with no savings to speak of, finding a sure way of funding the trip is a necessity.

I’ve researched transport carefully, and am becoming quickly aware of the difficulties of freighter travel. My original ticket, from New York to Bremerhaven, Germany, was first kicked back two weeks and then rescheduled entirely, so I’m still waiting to hear if I’ll be getting a ride through that company. If not, I’m considering attempting passage on one of the tramp steamers that ferry grain between the Great Lakes and Europe — after all, it’s not every day you can say you’ve taken a ship from Duluth, Minnesota, to Amsterdam.

As for politics, backup plans are in order, and the traveler’s grapevine is fully active. I’ve had a tip that the best place to get a Russian visa outside of the States is in Estonia, and that, barring entry into Russia, it’s possible to hitch across the Caspian Sea from Azerbaijan. As all travelers know, though, the sketchiest situations ensure the best stories (if you survive, whimpers the last sensible portion of my brain).

I’ve never traveled for longer than three months at once. This time, I don’t expect to get back to my starting point here in western Montana until 2014. I’m looking forward to the freedom to relax, to settle into a place if it strikes my fancy, or to detour for months at a time if interest pulls that way.

It’s complete capitulation to curiosity; it’s looking down that path that leads in a direction you’ve never been and knowing nothing’s stopping you from turning into it.

Isn’t that, after all, what travel’s all about?

——

Images provided by the author.

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