Real Travel

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This is the terrain that draws personal explorers away from cubicle, career, home, rut, and mutt to the distant shores of self-discovery. The call of the road is really about indulging our urge to know the world and, through it, our place in it. Ever since it grew out of privileged society’s Grand Tours of Europe in the 19th Century, tourism American-style has revolved around the idea of going somewhere to have other people do stuff for you. Real travel is about doing it yourself, as close as possible to the ground of where you are standing. Only then can we experience the journey, not just the destination, and uncover the surprises that lie behind the everyday surface of perception. Like my Milky Way encounter, the altered state of travel lets us see what is always there—but obscured by the filters of civilization. This opens up a whole new interior frontier, where we can venture beyond lingering fears, deeply held assumptions, and regimented behavior, where our identities are challenged and transformed. Strangers in strange lands become more familiar than the people back home. And our world suddenly expands—we’re connected to the global tribe, to the land around us, and to the wanderer within.

We were born to travel. From our brains to our big toes, natural selection designed us to move, discover, and seek out nourishment for both the body and our insatiably curious spirit. We may have forgotten our nomadic days, but our physiology hasn’t, which is why we get stir crazy when we’re cooped up too long.

Call it genetic manifest destiny. Studies show that the gene identified with exploratory and thrill-seeking behavior happens to carry instructions for building brain receptors that attract dopamine, a pleasure-inducing chemical in our bodies. Those with a high need for novelty, risk-taking, and stimulation have a long form of this gene, while the more risk-averse have a short form. But everyone, to varying de-grees, has a built-in biological urge to explore. Travel author Bruce Chatwin postulated from his studies of the traditional ways of Australian Aborigines and other nomadic tribes that we were built 'for a career of seasonal journeys,' not unlike that of fellow earthly species. Movement is at the core of existence, from the lulling motion in the womb, to the unfolding passages of our lives.

The world’s first long-distance travelers not trading or warring across antiquity were pilgrims, on the road to sacred mountains, temples, and shrines. Hindu and Buddhist pilgrims in search of salvation trekked for months across India to the Him-alayas and Mt. Kailas, an abode of the gods and center of the universe. Some still do, finishing with a 32-mile circumambulation, or kora, around the mountain’s base, a practice that the pilgrim believes erases a lifetime of sin. Those who complete the Kailas trek are believed to have made a symbolic journey through the complete cycle of life and death—and to have been transformed by the power of this passage.

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