How to Travel Without Leaving Your Neighbourhood
Experiencing Your Hometown Through the Eyes of the Traveler
Photo by Chris Lawton on Unsplash
Yes, there is tremendous enjoyment and value to be found in visiting a faraway destination and checking out the main tourist attractions, relaxing on a beautiful beach with an exotic cocktail in hand, or doing a long road trip trying to cover as much ground as possible.
But often the best kind of travel happens at a more relaxed pace — and it doesn’t even have to be far.
It’s not an escape from the daily grind and work, but something that weaves directly into our everyday life and lets us truly explore a place — as well as our inner selves, which are revealed and amplified when stripped from their usual patterns and routines.
That’s what travel really is: a shift in mindset, an embrace of curiosity and wonder.
If you are unable to take an extended time off or can’t afford a trip far away — or if travel is not an option due to, say, a pandemic — you can travel to parts unknown near you.
A little while ago, on a sunny Saturday afternoon, my friend John Fitch decided to leave his phone at home and walk to a piece of his hometown Austin, Texas, that he didn’t know. It was a section of the east side of town that has a dense concentration of Latin culture.
After an hour’s walk into this part of the city, John felt like he was in Mexico.
The smell of fresh-baked pan dulces, the swirling, colorful murals painted on the sides of the buildings, and the tin milagros glittering in shop windows had him convinced he was in Guadalajara. He spoke small talk Spanish to a few neighborhood locals, and he even enjoyed a few mezcals at a neighborhood cantina.
The entire afternoon felt like a trip to Mexico.
All he had to do was explore a part of the city that was entirely new to him.
In one way, this felt even better than some of his far-away travels. Rather than trying to coordinate what hotel to stay that night or prepare for the flight back home, John was an hour’s walk away from his bed.
There is undoubtedly excitement and joy in taking a long flight to a far-away destination.
But when our schedules (or pandemic travel restrictions) don’t allow us to take that multi-week exotic getaway, there are plenty of parts unknown right in our own backyards.
Aside from the new culture exposure, you get to see new tones of your city. You can find the beautiful diversity in the place where you reside.
Go shopping at a farmers’ market across town, or see what you can discover on foot. Walk into alleys you usually don’t take. Even your commute can be a form of travel if you switch up the route now and again and allow yourself to get lost.
It is what we do when we travel abroad, just applied to where we already live.
Unfortunately, many people approach travel just as an antidote to their busy work life, a short sprint that ends up being just as hectic and over-scheduled as their normal life.
Just like we rush from one appointment to the next during our busy work life, many tourists similarly rush from one landmark to another without really experiencing a place. It could be said that these tourist aren’t traveling at all, they are just taking their usual routines and habits on the road.
And when we think of long-term travel, we often just imagine more of that. Or, on the other extreme, doing nothing at all.
We might find ourselves dreaming of getting rich and then escaping to a tropical paradise. But we rarely ask what we’d actually do once there.
As Rolf Potts writes in Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel, even with just a small amount of money, “in all likelihood, your enthusiasm for sitting around smeared in cocoa butter will run out before your money does.”
The tropical paradise of our imagination is nothing more than a contrast to the stresses at home. Once those stresses are removed, this image of paradise will seem pretty boring and lose its strength.
Real travel is different from this.
It does not have to be expensive and hectic, nor does it have to be mere relaxation that will soon turn into boredom (not that there’s anything wrong with pure relaxation from time to time).
While Potts specifically talks about long-term travel when he writes “if there’s one key concept to remember amid the excitement of your first days on the road, it’s this: ‘Slow down!’”, I believe that this equally applies to shorter forms of travel, or traveling in your own neighborhood.
Travelers, as opposed to the tourists described above, in some ways have a very similar experience to children at play. And a big part of the joy we associate with travel comes from this playfulness that we have a hard time accessing in our everyday lives (although it doesn’t have to be that way — playfulness can and should be cultivated at any age).
But it is accessible to anyone, anywhere.
Like a traveler in awe of an unfamiliar sight or like a child at play, open your eyes, activate your lantern mindset, and be amazed and inspired by the world around you.
While traveling, near or far, even the most mundane things like getting groceries or riding a bus can become exciting and filled with unfamiliar sights, sounds, and smells.
They allow us to really live a place. And if we never slow down, we miss these joys. It may sound cliché, but it’s true that the journey is the reward.
At its core, Potts argues, travel is “about being a student of daily life.”
Every traveler who decided to skip a restaurant visit and go to the local grocery store or farmers’ market instead to find ingredients for their own creation will know this.
The unique smell of spices, the unfamiliar fruits and vegetables, the exotic fish and meat selection — entirely trivial and boring to the locals — all trigger intense curiosity and creative possibility through the eyes of the traveler.
And to stress it once again, this mindset and experience is not limited to travelers in a faraway destination. We can become more aware of the details of everyday life even if we never leave our home.
If we manage to cultivate the spirit of travel within us, we can experience our hometown as if it was a foreign and exotic place, just like John did on his walk through Austin.
If we slow down and look at our surroundings through the curious eyes of the traveler, which are not too different from those of a child engrossed in play, even our daily commute or a stroll through the backyard can become a form of exciting travel.
In the words of Lao Tzu, “a good traveler has no fixed plan, and is not intent on arriving.” All we need to do is allow ourselves to get lost again from time to time, and re-develop our sense of wonder and curiosity.
Not only will this allow us to feel like travelers wherever we are, we might also spot new creative breakthroughs and brilliant ideas that were right in front of us the entire time, but we were too busy and distracted to notice.
Part of this article was adapted from a chapter in the book Time Off: A Practical Guide to Building Your Rest Ethic and Finding Success Without the Stress by John Fitch and Max Frenzel, with illustrations by Mariya Suzuki.