Don't jump to conclusions, give it a read and let me know if you should travel now or not!
Let me tell you about a story that happened in 2018. I had quit yet another job and back at home doing almost nothing. I then realised that the motorbike I was using, going to turn 10 years in the coming days. So I had to celebrate it!
Anyway, I was also getting bored at staying home and doing nothing exciting.
So I decided! " I am going on a motorbike trip and destination is unknown."
In the first week of August 2018, I packed my bags, found some old Bungee cords and I was ready for my solo motorbike trip with no fixed destination and no fixed end date.
There was one place I wanted to visit on this trip and that was Hampi. So I was headed to Hampi from Kerala via Hassan. My first stop was at Hassan where I had some friends to meet. After a few days with them, I continued to Hampi.
I had found a Couchsurfing host for my stay in Hampi for a few days. So my only plan was to meet my host and figure out a plan for the coming days.
My host had a restaurant in Hampi. I reached there in the late afternoon and the restaurant was still quite busy. Kali, my host warmly welcomed me to his restaurant. It was a popular restaurant among the travellers, I felt from the initial glimpse itself.
This restaurant was going to be my home for the next few days.
Yes, I was sleeping in a restaurant at night and during the day time I would go out and explore the ruins of Hampi. But in the noon time I would come back to the restaurant and help them during their peak business hours. My previous experience of co-managing a backpacker hostel and its cafe proved to be useful.
The initial plan of 2 days got extended to a week, then 2 weeks and finally I stayed, explored and worked with them for almost a month!!
They were interesting days. Early morning I would go out on my motorbike to some different part of Hampi and wander around and come back to my 'home' to help them and go out again later. During this process, I met a lot of interesting people of Hampi. Tour guides, drivers, friends of my host and so on.
The restaurant which served as my home and workplace didn't really have a system in place and it really showed during the peak hours. The boys who worked there messed up the orders under pressure when all the tables were filled up. Fussy and difficult customers made things even worse.
Since I had a little bit more experience than them in running a cafe, I could suggest a few improvements here and there. I couldn't say things improved drastically but I soon received an offer to manage a new hipster cafe and another offer to manage a guest house! The best part is that all the monetary investments were taken care and all I had to do was to manage it.
Since I quit something similar to seek more freedom, I didn't want to commit myself to something that needed a long term commitment. So I politely declined those offers and got back on the road.
When I left Hampi, I thought I should go till Goa at least and then think about returning home. But on the way I decided to stop at Hubli. There also I had a couchsurfer ready to host me. That is the only reason why I went to Hubli.
While I was in Hubli, I met this guy who was crazy about motorcycle riding. He had covered some unimaginable distances within a short period of time on his Royal Enfield Bullet 500cc. My humble 150cc wasn't an equal match to his machine but riders on the road do want to meet each others and share stories, I guess. So we decided to meet.
When I met him, he had a stable job with the government which didn't really allow him to have any exciting adventures. So we were sitting in his office and he was ranting about not having enough adrenaline rush because of his desk job.
After a few hours into the conversation, we were almost finalising the itinerary of an international motorbike trip. A motorbike trip to Bhutan, a trip my new friend had already done in the past! That is how I ended up organising the 2018 Bhutan motorcycle trip.
I used this blog to advertise about the trip and we found enough clients to run this trip without incurring any loss for us. There were many ups and downs, and a lot of lessons to learn from this trip. But in the end, it was a successful trip.
Thus I visited a country which was not even in my wildest dreams to visit in the near future. And the best part, I didn't have to spend a lot of money to do that international motorbike trip!
After making the plans for this trip and deciding on a date which was a couple of months away, I got back on the road again. This time I was going to Pune instead of Goa, all the way from Hubli!
Till that point, I only wanted to do a maximum of 200kms a day because I was more worried about my buddy, the 10 year old 150cc Hunk! But when you get inspiration from crazy riders, you would start to think, why not?!
So I decided to do Hubli to Pune, more than 400km in a day. And boy, it was a great feeling when you break your own limiting beliefs! When I got there in Pune, I had a new personal record for myself!
I had couchsurfers and friends in Pune who had offered a place to stay. So I went to stay with them, made new friends and renewed some old friendships too.
One of my very old couchsurfing friends whom I met in 2014 while travelling to Auroville was in Pune. So we decided to catch up. I happened to be there exactly when he was looking for someone to design a few of his websites.
I am not a professional website designer. But I had some experience with it while working on my blog and a few other sites. So I was able to offer a helping hand to him. In the following weeks I was staying at his place and doing and redoing websites for him. And yes, it was a paid gig!
Good things come to you when you least expect, while you are on the road, because you are doing something new, experiencing something different at each and every minute.
These opportunities wouldn't have come to me if I were to sit and relax in my own home doing the same things that I always used to do. Since I took the first step in faith and went along with it, so many interesting things came my way.
That is the very reason why I am telling you to travel.
"But when the whole world can't travel at the moment, then how can I travel?", you might be already going to ask that on my face. Well, then take a different journey.
I believe travelling is an act of movement and it is definitely not being stagnant. You are well aware that as long as you are going to stay in one place, do the same things, not many interesting things will come your way.
Same thing happens with your mind too!
As long as you are having the same thoughts and same actions, nothing new is going to happen. I know that from experience. To know this, we will have to travel back to 2013. It was the year when I quit my last known corporate job and was staying at home.
For many months I didn't know what to do and hence I wasn't doing anything interesting. I was bored, dejected and maybe almost depressed. Probably because of the influence of some self-help book, on the 1st day of September 2014, I decided to do something new, to start a blog. A travel blog!
Unlike many other bloggers out there, I din't quit my job to start a blog or I didn't start a blog to travel the world documenting my journey. I started a blog out of boredom and the only category of blog I could think of at that time was of a travel blog.
In 2014, WordPress had a community event where they taught the newbies how to blog. One of the lessons was to combine two keywords to create a unique domain name. Thus born trablogger.wordpress.com
Even though I started it out of boredom, the change in route brought some changes in me. I got hooked and it brought some positivity back to me and I wanted to do more exciting things.
I started writing more, I started to travel more, I started to meet more people and a chain of interesting things started to happen. All of this happened because I decided to move forward and do something different than usual.
This journey led me to writing a book, getting a travel job and many other things that basically changed my whole life from that point onwards. So this made me believe that good things come to us when we take the unknown path and do things which make us happy that are not on our usual path.
Things are different now. Many people are starting to get frustrated about the situation that they can't move around as before and their life has been restricted.
It is quite normal to feel this way, I guess. But if you decide to dwell at this thought pattern, it will not help you in any way. That is why you should start to take a different path right now to travel; not physically but mentally.
Instead of dwelling in the thought that you are restricted to one place, start doing something different, something interesting, something that you haven't done before.
Maybe learn a new language, learn to play a musical instrument, think of taking up a new career, write that book you always wanted to write or simply start a blog like I did in 2014!
If you don't "travel" right now, you will still be staying at wherever you are. But if you happen to think the place you are at now is good enough, let me tell you, there are better places out there and you will know only when you experience it.
In order to experience it, you have to travel through some different roads right now, take a new path in life! Do something interesting that makes you happy. Take that new path and change your life forever!
Now do you think that you should "Travel" right now?!
Let me know your thoughts.
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