Why Is It Worth Travelling When You’re Young? – Part 1

1. If not now, when?

Life’s too short to keep postponing things. We’re aware of this now more than ever what with the coronavirus situation. So, make the most of it while you can. Travel while the borders are still open. You never know when the nth wave of the new coronavirus epidemic is going to happen. Or maybe some other kind of disaster strikes. Perhaps a war in the country you’ve been wanting to visit (like it happened with Yemen in our case) or a natural disaster (like the earthquake in Nepal a few years ago). Young people often use the lack of money for travelling as an excuse. Maybe there’s not enough money now, but later in life there won’t be enough days off or there’ll be a thousand obligations.

2. We can learn a lot by travelling – even things we usually learn in school

I found history class to be extremely boring in secondary school. The professor was well-read, but he just didn’t know how to give lessons in an interesting way. So, I just didn’t care at all what happened five thousand, one thousand, five hundred, or one hundred years ago. Like it could change my life if I knew why a certain revolution started, I thought. And don’t get me started on geography! Who cares about types of climate? Of course, when you only listen to all this theory in classroom, it seems like fiction that doesn’t concern you. But if you see these things in person you can understand them more easily and can easily remember them.

And when you visit a new country, you learn about the its history or geography through travelling. When we were in Iceland, for example, we could see at first-hand how a glacial valley is formed, what all those igneous rocks mean, and how a geyser erupts. In South America, we learn a lot about the time before the arrival of the Spanish and the Portuguese, as well as about the colonialism and its consequences. The things I’d barely listen to in school were the same ones we read about with interest when we were there and I even educated myself about them.

3. You realise you’re really well off in your home country

Those of us living in Slovenia are really fine. We have enough food, drinking water, clean air, wonderful nature, great healthcare, an education system and a social welfare system. Even if the media are trying to convince us that our healthcare is falling apart and the government doesn’t do anything for its people. Sure, it could always be better, but it could also be much, much worse. In many other parts of the world people are facing scarcity, poverty and famine, and have to struggle for their survival. Only when you see all this with your very own eyes and not on a UNICEF flyer can you really grasp it.

We experienced Venezuela where the minimum monthly wage is two dollars, and a loaf of bread in a shop costs one dollar. How can a person even survive on that? There’s no social welfare, everyone has to fend for themselves. And when we went to a shop and bought 30 dollars’ worth of food (which wasn’t very expensive for us) for a Venezuelan family, they all started crying because we made it considerably easier for them for a few months. We take electricity and internet for granted, but in Venezuela there’s a power outage almost every afternoon. It also seems natural to us that we go out for a walk in the park or the forest. In Oman, an arid Arab country, people go out for a walk in a mall. There are obviously no forests there, and the temperatures are so high that staying outside is unbearable. Yes, we’re doing fine here in Slovenia and it was only through travelling that we’ve really started appreciating that.

4. You gain independence

When travelling, you find yourself in all kinds of situations, which you have to deal with on your own. Without your parents who would defend you or solve things for you. That’s when you have to find the bus on your own, ask around in a foreign language and know how to haggle. It is through these situations that you learn how to take care of yourself, how to figure it out on your own, and how to get organised.

5. You learn how to manage money

Income is usually low when you’re young, but wanderlust pulls you into the big wide world. That’s why you need learn how to handle money early on. If you want to travel you need save up money and give up some of the unnecessary expenses. By travelling, you also learn how to best allocate your savings and get more for less.

6. Travelling isn’t really that expensive

Many people think you need to be rich to be able to travel. But that’s not true at all! You can see the world with very little money. All it takes is for you to be resourceful and give up life’s luxuries. But that’s up to the individual. Some people won’t have trouble sleeping in a tent, while others will prefer to spend more money for a room and then give up a meal in a restaurant, preferring to make their own lunch. The point is that where there’s a will there’s a way.

We started travelling the moment we got our scholarships. We were saving up the entire year while working, so we could go on a trip in the summer. At first, we only went on short trips to short-haul destinations because we didn’t have enough money for, say, a plane ticket to Thailand. But travelling around Europe isn’t bad either. We’ve seen and experienced a lot. We’ve managed to save up more over the years, so we could fly across the globe. We had been saving up for four years for our first trip to Australia. Again, I could say that we spent as much money travelling Australia as one would spend on a holiday in Croatia. But it’s up to each individual how much luxury they can afford.

You can find out the next six reasons why you should travel while you’re still young in the next issue of Globetrotter.

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