When I was a kid, I used to look up at the sky and try to spot the planes. I stared as long as I could, my eyes track­ing the huge bird break­ing though the clouds, won­der­ing where it was going, what was the story of the peo­ple fly­ing up there on a jour­ney to another world. Sure, the plane might have been fly­ing Paris-Marseilles, but I liked to fan­ta­size about mys­te­ri­ous des­ti­na­tions, warm weather, dream beaches and white mountains.

Although I’ve always try to fit in wher­ever I was, I wanted more. I once though the world could be divided in two : the peo­ple happy with their cur­rent life who tried to improve it mate­ri­al­is­ti­cally; and the peo­ple who always wanted more, who needed a chal­lenge in order to sur­vive. Happy inno­cents on one side; per­pet­u­ally unsat­is­fied hairs-splitter on the other. I soon real­ized I prob­a­bly fit­ted best in this sec­ond category.

After I grad­u­ated from high-school, I had sleep­less nights think­ing about my future. I wanted to main­tain a facade of nor­mal­ity by going to uni­ver­sity, get­ting a job, hav­ing co-workers and bosses. But I also wanted to leave, leave as far as I could, to check whether the grass was truly greener on the other side of the world. It was almost a fatal­ity. I was bound to hitch hack the world, to soak up cul­tures and lan­guages, to under­stand what was going on around me.

Volando vengo, volando voy
Deprisa deprisa a rumbo perdido

Cuando me bus­can nunca estoy
Cuando me encuen­tran yo no soy
El que está enfrente porque ya
Me fui cor­riendo más allá

My first trip to China was an eye-opening expe­ri­ence. I felt free yet chal­lenged, lost yet found, a stranger but part of a new global trend: a chameleon who truly doesn’t belong any­where but can try and suc­ceed anyway.

Trav­el­ing scares me and will always do so. What’s not to be scared ? I stack all my stuffs in a back­pack, ride crazy buses all nights long and arrive in places I can’t even point out on a map ! Tell that to any­body and you’re sure they will never travel. Because if you describe it this way, you don’t know about the rush of adren­a­line you get when you arrive some­where fresh and dif­fer­ent, you pass on the magic of walk­ing in the mid­dle of nowhere to finally get to a beach or the top of a moun­tain, you don’t men­tion the feel­ing of mas­ter­ing your sur­round­ings and liv­ing a free life, a life of geo­graph­i­cal choices and col­ored languages.

Trav­el­ing scares me cause it’s always a new jour­ney. Like get­ting a new job, mov­ing to another city, mak­ing the choice of liv­ing with some­one or decid­ing of any­thing in life. But bet­ter jump aboard than pass­ing on a new expe­ri­ence. Bet­ter try than regretting.

Related arti­cles:

1. The Nos­tal­gic Chameleon
2. Jig­saw Falling Into Place
3. The Ying And the Yang
4. The Run­away
5. Wel­come Winter