Purposeful Disorientation

I grew up in the middle of Barcelona, one of the most densely populated cities in Europe. Like most people we lived in a small flat but I was one of the privileged few with a big terrace on top of the building we lived in. No trees or other buildings nearby were taller so I could see very far away. The whole flat felt like it was floating in the sky and I could see further than the domains where my whole life would happen. Any shops we needed, friends, family, school was within a 20 minutes walk from my home. But from that terrace I could see so much I hadn’t yet discovered, the view reminded me there was more to explore than what I knew. When I think of the home where I grew up in, I remember the blue of that sky that always loomed over the city. Maybe that was the reason, paired with the many seagulls and the abundance of objects my parents had from their trips that I liked to pretend the hammock was the boat that would take me around the globe. 

All I needed was the hammock and a broom and my imagination did the rest. I would imagine myself saying goodbye to all my friends and family at the beach of Barcelona. I would feel the excitement in my stomach and the impatience to leave and stop the ceremonious farewell. I would imagine this sense of freedom of not being tied to expectations, the rush I still get everytime I move somewhere new. Detaching myself from the constraints that represented routine, obligations, expectations, being someone’s daughter, being someone’s friends, being who you believe you’re expected to be and venture to confront more, find yourself through living what you haven’t yet experienced, discovering more layers of yourself and letting it change you.

I would imagine myself as a little girl, afraid of loss and rejection, leaving my home where I had everything I was defined by. I would imagine myself arriving at some unfamiliar shore like a grown more confident version of myself, the adventurer I aspired to be. I then would disembark my boat and arrive somewhere new, not knowing what to expect or knowing where I was, I would let my imagination create a different light, a different temperature, a different type of humidity in the air, the noise of different streets, the musicality of a different language I would not understand and I would imagine being surrounded by a lot of new details capturing them for the first time, making sense of it all, being in a different reality. 

When I entered the flat I would take one of the albums of photographs my parents had from somewhere I would then not be able to place on the map. I would look at those sandy streets, the faces staring at the camera without the ‘Say cheeeeeeese’ smiles, the run down shops, the clothes, the sepia of the photographs, the instant of seconds that became immortalised. I was fascinated by it, someone who had only seen Barcelona, la Costa Brava and the Montseny. Everything so close to my city where my whole family, friends and my parent’s jobs were a 20 minute walk away from our house. Through those pictures I would travel, I would absorb all of those details and recreate them around my house and be in that fantasy that I would be travelling when I would be old enough. My parent’s photographs (like most before the 2000s) resembled more National Geographic than a narcissistic Instagram account. Those pictures to me  were less about me or them, less about the traveler and more a portal to a different world.

My parents’ house was decorated with many objects from their travels. They had been in the background of my upbringing but as familiar as they felt, I had no context to understand them and appreciate them except for those albums. In my imaginary world, when I played that game, I would then pick some objects that seemed from the destination of the album I had selected and go back to the hammock, raise the anchor and set sail to new shores. 

I played that game with myself a lot, it was probably my favourite game. The day I turned 18 I flew to Brussels on my own, took a train to Brugge, walked all day and came back to Barcelona that night. This is very much not sustainable, I am aware. However, it answered one of my deepest, truest desires. Exploring on my own, meeting people, leaving my ego and expectations behind and instead become an observer, be out of place, become almost invisible with my backpack, seeing the lives of unfamiliar people interact with their environment and with each other. Since then I have travelled a lot, mostly by myself. I have lived in four different countries and many cities, towns and the National Park of Dartmoor. I have traveled through countries by train, bus, on foot, hitchhiking and by car. I have stayed in host families, I have hosted and surfed on couchsurfing, I have stayed in other people’s flats through AirBnb and rented whole flats on the same platform certainly contributing to the rise of rent, I have stayed in hubs, tents, monasteries, hotels, convents, old schools, hostels, I have spent nights in airports, bus stations and ATMs. I have lived what I wanted to live or rather how I knew I wanted to live without having a clear image of what that should look like. I lived changing my life and myself with it, seeing many different versions of myself, meeting lots of people, rearranging my priorities, my hobbies, my routines, my ideas of life, friendship, family, food, work, status, leisure, sustainability and responsibility. I want to continue travelling and exploring. I want to continue feeling challenged and out of place to remind myself to be humble, to be curious and to constantly learn. I wish that at least 5% of what travelling has given me could be experienced by everyone. That 5% is not the many beautiful pictures I have taken but that strong overwhelming beautiful and life changing feeling of ‘I would have never been able to imagine me living THIS’.

This THIS is that disorientation, that feeling of being completely out of place. That feeling of becoming familiar with something that had always been alien. THIS is the moment something in you changes because you cannot be who you were before you experienced something you ignored existed. 

This blog aims to explore the future of tourism, pursue the meaning of travel, seek to reimagine what traveling can be, explore sustainable alternatives to do so, enquire about strategies implemented around the world, approaches to travel sustainably, the outcomes of overtourism, the damaging sides of the industry and the many potential benefits but also study through the postcolonial lens to analyse critically the impact of foreign investment in the less affluent destinations taking away sovereignty of their precious land from locals. This blog aims to gain some sense on how to travel with purpose, to set aside expectations and nurture an attitude of allowing the destination to surprise the traveler who is to fit in and not the other way around.