Why I travel

For the past week I have wandered through a small corner of Central Europe. Armed with little more than my Interrail pass, a Nikon D40, my green Gregory pack, and the requisite Lonely Planet, I swung through Budapest, Krakow, and Prague. A few days into my trip, I asked myself: why do I travel?

Travel junkies often suffer from guilt, because ultimately traveling is a self-indulgent pursuit. You visit a place purely for your own pleasure, to satisfy that natural human inclination to explore, and to saturate your senses with a new and exotic locale. So of course, a large part of why I travel is simply for the joy and excitement of experiencing something new.

But I'm also naturally curious about the world, its people, geography, cultures, conflicts and ideas. I read reams of facts, figures, and statistics on everything from Hungarian inflation to Brazilian bossa-nova. It's an odd, almost insatiable hunger to better understand the world around me.

Traveling is a natural corollary to my paper-based pursuit. Seeing a country or a place or meeting people in the flesh, provides some subjective grit to layer on top of this more objective base. It helps me form an opinion and lends my views credibility and weight; you listen more carefully to a witness than an observing pundit.

Am I just saying that seeing is truth? Well, not exactly. Seeing fuels the imagination and brings understanding. For example, it's hard to comprehend the phenomenal speed of change in China without seeing the sky scrapers sprouting up around Beijing's second ring road. And yet this is not universally true: at Birkenau I saw evidence of the Nazi death camps, yet it was still devilishly difficult to comprehend and truly appreciate the scale of such barbarity.

It is often said that the world is shrinking. Indeed, earthquakes and invasions, celebrity weddings and 100m sprints, are simultaneously available on your TV, Macbook, or Blackberry. But this is really just a trick, because it's reality which is here one moment and suddenly gone the next at the touch of a button. If you find the image to offensive or banal, you can instantly exchange it for another more agreeable picture.

Travel is the antidote to this world of filtered information. It helps me remember that the world is a big place. As I roll across the grain basins of the southern Czech republic on Euronight 402, I see a farmer sitting on his tractor tilling the land and a woman on her bicycle off to the shops, or church perhaps. In each of these villages are hundreds of lives with their own aspirations, fears, successes and tragedies. Although I am virtually closer to these people than ever before, they know little about me, and I little about them. Travel reminds me that I should not confuse virtual closeness for a shared world view or a common opinion.

So ultimately, I travel because I want to push back my boundaries of understanding, bridge physical divides and enjoy drinking beer with locals in far off lands.