Travelling The World

I love this quote. I came across it in a series I was watching recently and something about it clicked immediately. I am not going to claim I am the wandering type. But the more I travel, the more I suspect I might be.

Feel free to go through the stories above and see where I have been. Or keep reading and I will explain why I document any of this.

I did not grow up travelling.

My first trip was to Turkey, with my friends. It was a holiday. After that, work started taking me places, because that is where the clients were, and for a while every flight had a reason attached to it.

When I went to Sri Lanka last year I started noticing something. Then Georgia and England most recently confirmed it.

I realised I was not doing this for work anymore. I was doing it because I feel the most alive when I am in a new city or a country I do not know, on my own, working things out as I go.

Part of that is just my personality. I get bored very easily. I always have.

But the bigger part is this. I cannot get my head around spending my entire life in one city when I have the means, the ability and the technology to go and see the rest of it. That option exists now. It did not exist for almost anyone who has ever lived. Turning it down feels strange to me. If Elon gets to Mars and it ever becomes affordable, I will probably be in that queue too.

Once you have tasted something, you do not go back. So travel as a hobby, or one vacation a year, is not enough for me anymore. I want it built into my life. I do not know if I will ever feel satisfied with how much I have seen. I doubt it. For the foreseeable future I just want to explore as much as I can.

Every country I have been to has taught me something new.

It is not frictionless for me. I hold a Pakistani passport, so most countries mean an application, a fee, a wait, and occasionally a rejection the day before the flight. I mention it only so nobody reads this page and assumes travel is easy for me. It is not but it is still worth it.

And here is the thing I keep coming back to.

I live near the airport. Every time a plane goes over the house, I stop what I am doing and look up at it. I am a grown adult but it still gets me every time.

Think about what is actually happening up there. A few hundred people, sitting at about thirty thousand feet, eating a meal, crossing from one side of the world to the other, treating it like a bus ride. If I had been born a few decades earlier, none of it would have been available to me.

Ibn Battuta , Marco Polo , Christopher Columbus . These people fascinate me. They left without knowing whether they were coming back. They could be robbed, fall sick, or die on the way, and they went anyway.

If they could do it then, what excuse do I have now?

I also started watching people who do this properly. Drew Binsky , Yes Theory , Passenger Paramvir , Giuseppe Bertuccio d'Angelo  and many others. Now whenever I have free time, I end up on YouTube watching one of them walk through a country nobody else is filming.

It gets me every time. How big this world is. How beautiful it is. How many completely different lives are being lived right now, at this exact moment, in places I will probably never reach.

The goal now is simple. See as many cities and countries on this earth as I can.

Travel is more accessible now than it has ever been. It is fun, it is educating, it is thrilling, and it is an adventure.

I will be travelling either way, and I will document as much of it as I can, in different formats. Some of it here, some on my social media, my YouTube channel, or the blog. I might also end up doing none of it. Right now, sitting at home building this page, I am inspired and motivated. When I am actually in that city, there is a real chance I forget this page exists. So I will not promise anything. I will just try my best to document as much as I can and share it with you.

I am always open to a new adventure. Feel free to get in touch .