What Makes Traveling Worth It

Traveling has an idyllic shroud that surrounds it, filled with fantastic vagaries of empty beaches of endless white sand, setting suns that pierce the sky with a spectrum of reds and purples and nights that end when most people are beginning their work day. And in truth, it is all these things. But not only these things.

Traveling has an ugly underbelly that can soften even the strongest wills. Hellish days in the blistering sun carrying 30 pound packs on your sweat-drenched back, prostrating yourself to the mercy of foreigners who can't speak your language and could care less about how badly you need to find a bathroom and hygenic standards that are so low I won't even discuss them here.

Worst of all, there are days of utter displacement. On the heading of this blog there is a description about traveling in the land of foreign minds and foreign tongues. Sounds romantic. It can also be no less than rattling. Life on the road means life without home, and life without home means life without constancy. Being creatures of habit, this just cannot do.

So what makes traveling worth it? Why do we travel? If you type it into google, you'll find a slew of answers that range from a primordial and inordinate desire to explore to "we're bored." I venture that whatever the reason we travel can only be satisfied by the people we meet. Traveling forces you outside the box that you've constructed for yourself back home and into the world of the unknown - the world of potential rejection where every face could mask a hidden contempt for you. But once outside that box, you discover that, outside a few outliers, people exceed any expectation of generosity and hospitality that you ever had.

We've met so many different types of people on this trip (and I wish I had my camera to provide pictures). They range from Turkish communists that scoff at Islam to hermit imams that scoff at everything that is not Islam with a myriad of people in between. Tonight we have dinner with a Palestinian Christian family who live on the Vatican estate in Jerusalem, as the father is the private driver for the archbishop and the Pope when he is in town. Tomorrow morning, we have breakfast with a Catholic priest who studies here and then a third day of tours led by another Palestinian Christian, whose passion for his race is only outmatched by his passion for his faith, and a group of 80 Christian Ugandans who I've known for only 2 days but have been invited into over 15 houses.

Occasionally you do meet that one person who has nothing but contempt for you, but that one is overwhelmingly surpassed by the amount of men that welcome you without question, no matter their race, religion or disposition. Without these people, traveling is nothing more than a continuous stream of historical and aesthetic sights that begin to meld into one. But the people give traveling life.