Por que?

So what is it about travelling that draws me to it like an addict to a drug? I think that it’s a mixture of two things, the first being the obvious: when you travel you get to experience and see so many amazing things. From Machu Pichu, to the Pyramids of Giza, The Taj Mahal and the Acropolis, I have seen a lot of the world’s most famous sights and they were mind blowing, there’s a reason that people travel all around the globe to see them.

But it’s the second side of travelling that captures me. When I travel, I’m still me, but a better version. I stop stressing about most things, I relax about what I’m wearing or how my hair looks, I open myself up to making friends, I throw myself in the deep end and let my hair down without the worry of who’s watching and what they’re going to think.

It normally takes me about a week to get into the swing of things but once I morph into my travelling self, it is like I shed an outer skin. I have made some great friends over the years through travelling by just sitting down at a table in a bar or hostel and saying “hi, I’m Eve, do you mind if I sit here?” One of the most nerve racking and exhilarating things that I think anyone does when travelling is attacking the local transport, easy enough in English speaking countries, a little harder when there’s a massive language block but you just do it because that's how it works.

Why I can’t manage to adopt this persona in my everyday life, I’m not sure but I think it has something to do with how small Brisbane is and having lived here all my life, it’s inevitable that I know a lot of people. I’m hoping that one day, when this urge to travel numbs to a dull pain, I will be able to merge my two selves into one and be who I truly am all the time. For now though, I’ll just settle with working my butt off during the year to take off and abandon responsibility for life out of a backpack