Extended World Travel

Archive for March, 2010

I’ve had some really interesting reading lately – my old journal from the first time we did some extended travel with our campervan in 1996. Wow, how times flies and how quickly you forget! The struggles we had! And so much fun! Although we had traveled a lot before that, this was the first time we were campers, in our own campervan and totally inexperienced at this. But we learned a lot .

Like how inappropriate it can be to go over some of the highest parts of the Swiss Alps in the middle of the winter. We started off in a big snowfall (and in the Alps “big” can really be an understatement) and had to put on snow chains (I mean, wouldn’t that have been a sign enough not to go?). Snow chains make the driving very slow though and after a while the roads got better and we took them off. As we wanted to save time (for what? I can wonder) we put the campervan on a train that took us trough the mountain instead of driving around it for 4 hours. Sitting safely on the train was actually a very nice part of this trip, but soon, after having arrived at the end station on the other side it really wasn’t very pleasant anymore. We were now very high up in a place where there was only one choice to go to if you wanted to go further. The road down was very steep and winding and suddenly it also became totally icy. We didn’t have the snow chains on now and the road was so icy, it just wasn’t possible to stop and put them on either. This was one of my life’s most scary moments I assure you! High up on an icy steep winding Alpine road with the whole family in a campervan which couldn’t stop. “I got all shaky” I have written in the journal, and I think that went for the rest of the family as well. Even though the kids were very young at that time, they got the seriousness of it all. Finally, a patch without ice appeared and Magnus could stop the car. We stopped to gather our breaths for a while and thanked the higher forces that we all were alive. Then, with the snow chains safely on and with the speed of a snail, we continued out of this steep icy nightmare.

After having passed through the amazing St Gotthard tunnel, 16 km long, we later arrived in Lugano, in the Italian part of Switzerland. We visited some old friends there and they were kind enough to let us borrow an apartment they had in the middle of this beautiful city. From snowstorms and icy roads, we were now surrounded by palm trees! All in the same country and just hours away!

Our trip continued after a few days and we went to France, where we rented an apartment in the old town in Nice for a few weeks over Christmas and New Year. Then, after France, finally our big goal: Spain! We were so happy to have gotten this far, and first of all we really wanted to visit Barcelona, in the northern parts of the country. To start out, we planned to visit Barcelona’s famous street “La Rambla”. Still inexperienced as we were at travelling with a campervan, we had the somewhat naive idea of just driving into the city and park somewhere along the famous street.

I quote from the journal here: “What chaos! Narrow roads and lots of traffic. We got lost before Barcelona. We got lost inside Barcelona. We got lost after Barcelona. Boy have we seen many industrial areas today! Finally reaching La Rambla there was nothing else to do than trying to turn around and get out of the city. Not a parking lot in sight big enough for half the size of our car even, well not a parking lot in sight at all. We gave up and continued without having set one foot in Barcelona. Had “lunch” in the car while driving – at 5 o’clock- bananas and candy! Horrible!”

The rest of that day continued in the same spirit with narrow steep winding roads (we now realized what a mountainous country Spain really is, had never thought of that during our visits there by plane), quarrelling exhausted kids (and parents) and finding ourselves lost a couple of more times. Finally, after having been driving for a whole day, we arrived at the campsite which was our goal for the day. We had then done 70 km!

I quote myself again: “Today I really question if we should go on further south?”

We did go on though. After having taken a couple of days to recuperate ourselves after this first driving experience in Spain, we decided to follow through with our plan, to go to the very southern part, Marbella.

And it’s just so interesting to read this today. And to know, in retrospect, that the rest of this trip actually turned out to be one of the best times in my life, and the rest of the family says the same! After this first challenging part of our trip (I assure you, this wasn’t the only things that happened ) the remaining months of this journey was just like heaven. And I mean that!

So think about this: we were out doing some extended travel and had gotten so far, and we were relatively close to our goal, the South of Spain, and we were also on the verge of giving up. But we didn’t. We did stop for a while to just relax and let go of all the stress and frustration. We took a deeper look at what we really wanted and then recommitted to our goal and continued. Today, I can see this as such a great metaphor.

How often don’t we strive for our goals and on the way towards them are faced with one challenge after the other. At some point we are close to giving up – it’s just too much. We ask ourselves if it’s really worth it. And then, when we can’t take it anymore and are ready to surrender to the challenges , if we just let go for a while and detach, relax, get some new energy and recommit, we lay the grounds for amazing things to happen. If you think back on your own life, I’m sure you have your own memories of this phenomenon. And when you are in the situation of giving up on your dream, try to remember these situations, the times when you didn’t give up, and what that meant to the rest of your life!

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When you ask the question – Why travel? – you can get as many answers as there are people. We have some very close friends, the Dalmin family – Anna and Sven and the kids Efraim, Johannes and Tilja, and they have their special story. They are Swedish as well, but spend their life in two different places – Sweden and Romania. When we had them visiting a while ago, we took the opportunity to ask them about how they ended up in Romania of all places and how their life took the direction it took.

Anna tells us: “In the nineties, an older lady showed us a film from a village in Romania where the people suffered greatly from lack of most of the essentials. She had been in her seventies when she went there herself to contribute with whatever she could. As we, at that time, shared everyday problems as well as joy together with eight Swedish teenagers with whom we also studied the Bible, we saw this as a great opportunity to take our studies one step further and not only read but also to practice the love of God in reality”

So, she, Sven and the teenagers collected clothes, money, food, kitchenware, and lots of other things they assumed families and orphanages would need. They then rented some space with a charity organization which was going to Romania and flew there themselves, all ten of them.

Finally there, they handed out the things to orphanages as well as to children living in the streets. “When we gave out food to the street children, it was terribly difficult to experience how hungry they really where” Anna says, and continues: “but maybe more important than handing out food, or at least as important I think it was to spend time together with the abandoned children. We spent lots of time with these unwanted children who took neither love nor care for granted. But in all their poverty, they were so talented and they taught us so much about love and had so much to share. They really gave us well fed and loved people so much to learn from”.

This first time, they stayed for 10 days and one of the Swedish teenagers said to Anna: “I felt like I did more good in these 10 days than I’ve done in my whole life”!

They continued to go to Romania, “instead of going on vacation” to help out and to spend more time together with the children at the orphanages. During their visits there, they discovered that Romania has such a fantastic countryside and they fell in love with it so much they wanted to move there. They especially appreciated the simple lifestyle that people had. People still did, and still do, use horses and oxen in their farming for example. And that’s what they also wanted. So they got themselves this piece of land where they built their own house, and since they didn’t even have a road, they had to take everything there by real horse power. So, now they spend 6 months every year there, living mainly on self sufficiency and without either telephone or internet. They have shared a lot about their life there with us, and I must say it really sounds fantastic.

It is possible to go and stay with them and enjoy living a more natural and peaceful life for a while. You then can participate in the everyday activities and also have the opportunity to experience Romania and the people in a very genuine way. At the moment, they mainly offer these stays to young adventurous boys/men between 13 and 25, so if you are one, or know of one, we can really recommend you to contact them. They just made their webpage: www.ivildmarken.se. It’s only in Swedish at this stage but will soon be in English as well, and even if you don’t speak the language, you can get a lot from just the pictures so check it out.

So, as you can see, whatever answer you have to -Why travel? – whatever reason you have for wanting to go out into the world, you never know where the road will actually take you in the end!

For a bit more about Volunteering you can click here

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Thousands, maybe even millions, of people dream about being a world traveler. Often though, it just stays as a dream. Could it be so that it requires something to overcome fears and take us out of our comfort zone and take the leap and really do it?

Have we been totally comfortable every time when we’ve been on our way to leave for a trip? Definitely not! There’s this first stage of excitement and anticipation, when we’re happily planning our next adventure and use all our time to get things into places. Then, the closer the departure, the more excited we get, but also the more “the buts” turn up. What we’ve also noticed, every time, is that just before we leave we start to appreciate our home a lot: “Aren’t things good as they are? Why don’t we just forget about this and stay home this time?”, “should we really leave everything for such a long time and now when we also have kittens” or ”when the apple trees are blooming?” or “shouldn’t we really stay here and renovate the kitchen instead?” (and these may seem like small buts, but I can assure you, they have been accompanied by loads of much bigger ones).

There’s this Swedish couple who write and publish travel guide books called “Willma” (like a Swedish version of Lonely Planet). They travel the world regularly for their business and pleasure and they say that every single time they’re on their way to leave on some new adventure, they ask themselves –why- and try to persuade themselves to stay at home this time. And every single time, as soon as they have turned the key in their front door, there’s no more hesitation. Now they’re on their way, they’re travelers, and they almost forget they even have a home in Sweden.

To me, this is a great picture of taking yourself out of the comfort zone. When you’re on the verge of doing it, you try as hard as you can to talk yourself out of it. How great your old way of doing things or of being really is! When you then resist the urge to stay in the old and take the leap, everything changes. You usually don’t even remember why you stuck to your old way and realize that it wasn’t so difficult to take a new step at all, you just did it!

And have we regretted overcoming fears and taking our leaps and leaving things to go out into the world? Not one single time! Rather the opposite. We ask ourselves, again and again, why was this so difficult? How could we even think it would be better staying at home? And very often, almost every single time, we’re so happy traveling and being somewhere else, we don’t even want to go back.

“People who stay in ‘comfort zone’ do so sometimes more because of fear than comfort.”
- Thomas Leonard

So, we may call this whatever we want, fear of the unknown, fear of change or “you know what you have but not what you’ll get”, but it can be good to remember, when you find yourself wondering if you are losing your sanity taking your whole family around the world or whatever leap you’re planning, that there’s a part of you that will do whatever it can to keep you “safe” and in the familiar and well known. And you can be sure that that part, that little voice, will let you know it’s there. And then, it can be good to bear this in mind and to follow the advice I got myself the other day regarding doing something outside of my own comfort zone: “you may do it trembling – but do it!”

I want to finish here with some wise words from Wade, an experienced world traveler who we interviewed a while ago – you can read the whole interview here. When we asked him if he had any advice to people who dream about going out into the world but experience resistace and hesitation, he said:

“Everything always works out. The great thing about leaving is that you can usually return to the same place where you are standing right now. Have faith that you will figure everything out when you need to, and rest your mind about planning. Nothing ever works out according to plan anyway, so why waste the mental energy bothering with it. The adverse consequences of traveling that you may foresee are merely illusions. You are not nearly wise enough to foresee the future, so stop trying — go forth and see what happens.

It is my impression that the human capacity for planning for the future is a very rudimentary development that usually only serves to provoke fear and to hamstring any desire that we may have for change. If anyone thinks about their future they get scared — “what if this happens, what if that happens.” You know what? “what ifs” rarely ever really happen. Humans tend to be intelligent enough to make the most of their situations when they are in the moment, and often have the ability to sidestep any “what if’s” when they need to be sidestepped. You will be alright.

Fear is an emotion that is reserved for the potential occurrence of future adversity. When in a moment of adversity, fear is rarely ever felt. I know that I have often felt fear about future possibilities — about being robbed, about getting lost, being cold etc . . — but every time I have been in such a circumstance, fear is the last thing that I felt, as I was much too busy focusing on how to get out of the bad situation to be scared. Fear is a survival instinct only in the fact that it keeps you sitting where you are, it keeps you way out of danger. When in a bad circumstance you automatically figure it out, and usually leave the moment saying, “Wow, that was not that bad after all.”

When given free range, fear will keep you sitting right where you are forever and ever and ever. It is amazing that many people would rather be comfortable, hemmed in by fears of future occurrences, than to really find out what the future may hold. There are no “what if’s” in a moment of adversity, so why leave yourself hampered with “what if’s” when the horizon is clear and the sun is shining?”

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