Travelling state of mind.

Tripoto
Photo of Travelling state of mind. 1/10 by Abhinaya.R
Safari rides into the National Park
Photo of Travelling state of mind. 2/10 by Abhinaya.R
Cycling along the trails of Hampi
Photo of Travelling state of mind. 3/10 by Abhinaya.R
Photo of Travelling state of mind. 4/10 by Abhinaya.R
Jellyfish by the beach.
Photo of Travelling state of mind. 5/10 by Abhinaya.R
Mangrove tunnels at Pichavaram.
Photo of Travelling state of mind. 6/10 by Abhinaya.R

Travelling is weird. As a child, the very premise of leaving my house to go all the way to an entirely different place and look around was quite over the top and a sensory exercise I clearly remember not being interested in. My memory doesn’t help me recall much in terms of where I went or what I saw, but I remember very clearly two states of mind taking precedence over the others - Confusion and nervousness. Confusion because I never understood what was happening around me almost all the time and nervousness unfortunately because my parents were quite unorganized and their absolute cluelessness often times in scenarios seeped out and invariably got to me.

Photo of Travelling state of mind. 7/10 by Abhinaya.R

Photo of Travelling state of mind. 8/10 by Abhinaya.R

Fast forward to the present, I find myself sifting through so many states of mind and emotional patterns before, during and for a brief period after a trip that I’ve come to understand this as a non-cerebral aspect to travelling which is also part of the whole experience. In all of the travels I've done after I became consciously aware of this, I've been able to equate the characteristics of how a place looked, smelled or felt to the way these sensory inputs made me very distinctively resonate to them, emotionally. For how perennially lazy I am in life generally, when it comes to exploring a new place, I find myself making plans that the folks who’re with me find to be elaborate and cumbersome. Whether it be cycling around the magnificent stone structures at Hampi, making the time to slowly take a boat through all of the five major lakes at Udaipur or taking a snowmobile around the levelled planes of Kathmandu, I could’ve probably found a lot more things to do with the extra time that was used up, but with such illogicality comes to me a strange feeling of satisfaction!

The induced state of “I'm excited to see what the next hour has in store” kind of feeling is what I consider to be the most rewarding sensation that the whole exercise provides, which is probably the reason why I’ve never been a big fan of heading over to a far away resort and laze around type of plan and try to keep away from them as much as I can. Travelling is definitely weird, for how devoid of preference, direction and clarity I am in real life, I become this overly self aware being who actively tries to make the most of every passing minute while travelling in ways that I can’t verbally explain to another person, it ends up being an odd incoherent rambling of inner voices and strange preferences. If this is yet another unsuccessful attempt at that, I'm just going to end this by saying, I now to a certain degree can make sense of nomads and their spiritual take on travelling.

Photo of Travelling state of mind. 9/10 by Abhinaya.R

 Photo of Travelling state of mind. 10/10 by Abhinaya.R