So many people plan all details of their trip. Looking online, reading blogs and countless travel magazines and ask others for the hidden gems. Every minute of the day has a purpose and the items of the to-do list get checked off.
I just can’t do that.
Do you remember the story of Christopher McCandless?  The young man who walked into the Alaskan wilderness without a map and was found dead a few months later? It is heartbreaking to realize an adventurous soul didn’t make it out alive and that one of the reasons was that he didn’t have a map on which he would have found a shelter and a bridge to cross that wild river.

Planning your trip might be extremely important up to a certain point. Of course you need to book a flight or put some money aside. Or make sure you have food and insurance. And it’s very useful to know the currency and some habits and taboo’s of the place you’re going to visit. But I can’t help but understand what drove Christopher McCandless into the wild without a simple thing as a map. Even in the nineties he realized how everything was owned, organized, planned and discovered before him. And we even take it a step further with constant online access and instagramstories 24/7. There is hardly a place on earth to visit without to hear somebody say: “Oh you should have seen it when,…” or: “Yes it’s nice, but have you seen…?” and even: “What you didn’t visit…, you really should have!”
How can walking in the footsteps of so many before you going to change anything or give you a new horizon? How would it be anything different than a monotonous life you can have at home?
The great sensation of travel is discovering something unknown. A surreal landscape, a charming corner in a city, and encounters with people you’ve never met before. It is diving under the surface of the first impression and look for the odds, the familiar, the weird and the beautiful as well as the ugly things. It is experiencing life itself in a different setting and surrendering to the fine-spun changes it makes to your being.

Every traveler is able to look for his own way of exploring and look at a place like it is never seen before. When walking through a city or even hiking up a mountain, I won’t for a second think that I am the first person there –that would be silly. But I want to feel my own steps and choosing my sights as I wander and follow my intuition, the changing light and my curiosity.

Coming home from a journey, uploading images or editing video, it feels so much more real and mine this way than when I would check off the boxes made by others. Now I can think back: “Oh look that’s the winding path we found behind the bakery!” or “Look that’s the view from the apartment from that cool Jazz musician that we met”! Reliving those moments of joy en excitement that only come with new discoveries.
One of my most inspiring journeys? My 62 days in solitude. You can read more about it here.
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