The Most Amazing Place You’ve Never Been

There’s a place between stations and if you ask the driver, he will stop or slow the train so that you can jump off.  There, rising from the soft salty grass, is an old stone path that zig zags up the mountain to a medieval village overlooking the ocean rim and you are there. I want to tell you about the most amazing place you’ve never been.  I got there once when our bus happened to stop in this little town and it was the annual harvest festival. 

Young men tested their mettle running from a goring death of the “corridas del torros.” While my Spanish was poor, a new friend invited us back to his patio for a family feast of meat spiced and grilled by old women and the cold snap of beer bottle caps in the cloud forest.  There was also a gate to this place when a man told me where to pull over on a nondescript stretch of blacktop and hike through the thick Banyan to a low area. 

In the roots and ferns there opened up a 15 foot wide lava tube burrowing a quarter mile into the island.  It was surreal with spires and straws looking like brownie batter was dripping from the ceiling and coating the whole thing. 

Later that night we found a lodge and we were the only ones there. She let us choose whichever room we wanted and for pennies we stayed in the treehouse honeymoon suite overlooking the waterfall with fish swimming in a pool. 

Where Is This Place You’ve Never Been?

Where is this place you may be asking?  The answer is that these are places that I have been while traveling but could never re-create even if I returned.  Maybe you’ve been there too or maybe though you’ve vacationed many times you’ve never actually travelled?  I am not trying to get on some high horse about pure travel like some jaded guy in nylon cargo pants who thinks everything is “disneyland” unless you are in the Congo or something.  I love to vacation as well but I would like to draw a distinction because I see people conflating vacation with travel all the time and in my experience it is important to have clear intent in order to maximize appreciation and be successful.  I also love travel and would like to make a case for including it in a life outside the maze to those who may not be considering its virtues separate from vacation. 

Vacation

When I go on vacation, I may want everything planned in advance and designed for comfort and relaxation as an escape from the stress of work or school.  

I recharge, I may do a tour to get some controlled accessible adventure, and sometimes I seek out fancy amenities.  There is an industry to serve me.  

However, I have recently heard comments like the following from friends and financially independents: 

“I thought I would travel the world but vacationing is not as fun when there is not a job that I want to get away from.”

“While travel sounds like fun, you can get a bit burnt out…too long, too many beds, not relaxing and too disruptive to my routine”   

I wonder if part of the problem here is conflating travel with vacation?  To me, vacation is better when there is a job to get away from but travel is actually another job all together that you work for yourself to learn, grow, and discover.  If it was relaxing, there would be little growth or discovery. The disruption of your routine is essential to shake yourself out of your personal world in order to see that it is just one narrow homogenous slice of something greater, something worth this inconvenience to peak at.  Here are a couple more that I’ve heard:

Before I hit my number, “I thought that I would travel more but after traveling around for awhile you get sick of seeing churches and museums.  Every hotel bedroom looks the same no matter what city you are in.”

“We tried to travel for 3 months and we realize it was way too long so now I think we’re more one month travel, max.”

If you are lamenting that every hotel looks the same you are right and if you were on vacation this convenient familiarity may be exactly what you are looking for. Your lament may actually be that you are bored with vacations and tours and want to travel outside of your comfort zone of Marriott mini shampoos and an endless string of churches and museums.  It also gives me pause when I hear people say that they prefer shorter travel stints because 2 weeks is enough or “we’re more one month travel, max.”  Going to Mexico for one month may be an eternity if you are sitting on a beach on the Mayan Riviera drinking Coronas and listening to Kenny Chesney every day but it may not even scratch the surface if you are trying to travel all of Morelos and Puebla for example.

Travel may be harder now than ever before.  Cell phones and constant connectivity make it so much harder to pull away from your system and live in the one around you.  In addition, if you have reached your financial independence you have likely honed some skills of careful planning ahead, a proven minimal risk approach, and steady disciplined execution.  Traveling on the other hand requires one to be flexible on the fly, take risks, and not over plan.  While traveling, I once went to Santorini for 10 euros simply because I was able to leave the next day.  

Travel

My first experience traveling was when I was 19 and my girlfriend and I travelled around Europe for a summer.  We did not plan how long that we would spend in each place or exactly where all we would go but we set out and we talked to a lot of people along the way.  It was adventurous, somewhat stressful, and it was eye opening.  At one point, we found ourselves in 10 different countries over 30 days.  

Travel is very disruptive to your routine by design and there is growth in suspending your discomfort and your judgement.  You are often trying to respectfully explore outside of or at the edges of the tourism industry.  Much of your discovery of cultures, people, history, art, and marvels is only accessible through research, bravery, and an explorers mindset.  Some of it will prove to never be accessible despite your best efforts.  You plan minimally and leave huge gaps that you fill through accepting random chance encounters, meeting new people, pursuing the opportunities that arise, and embracing luck (good and bad).  You do things that you never could have envisioned in advance had you made an itinerary.  You experience some culture shock and learn about yourself, what you believe, and what is simply assumed values from your own community back home.  This is why travel takes a long time, because you can’t do this if you need to be somewhere within 2 hours based on your itinerary.  When I travel, I slow down and greatly reduce my expectations for what can be achieved in a day.  I develop tricks on the road like booking an overnight train to both save a day and save money on a hotel room, or stringing a line through all my zippers and gear tied to my finger to alert me of some other passenger’s sticky fingers if I fall asleep on a long bus ride.  I am thinking on my feet and planning what I am going to do tomorrow while living today.  I am also taking in some of the little things because I don’t have to hurry:

Travel is hard and sometimes I even take a vacation while I am traveling:  

Extended traveling has led me to re-define what home really means to me, and it has revealed the darkest truths about human nature as well as the global kinship of this amazing planet.  Much like an episode of Anthony Bourdain’s “Parts Unknown,” part of traveling is discussing the things you read or heard about with the people who are actually living them and then seeing the real truth of those things in their faces as they tell you.  The point I’d like to make with all of this is that setting realistic expectations between travel and vacation may help you with your life outside the maze.  And with that, the recommendation that I would like to make is that if you read this post and you may have never actually travelled, consider it if you are in a spot to do so.  Set aside a month to start, make a very rough plan that only includes your main flight departure and return dates and first night’s accommodation.  Let go of the fear and just seize every day with humility and patience.  You may find the adventure of a lifetime and the most amazing place you’ve never been.