Why Travel?

I am currently sitting on beach chair by myself under a well-worn rock formation watching the waves of the Mediterranean Sea crash in front of me as I look back down the shoreline towards Beirut in Lebanon. How the hell did I wind up here? Life is a very strange mistress.

Eight years ago I was just finishing high school and I’d never been east of Edmonton except for one trip to Yellowstone National Park and a trip to Disney World in Florida. I had also been to Mexico. It’s true that I’d always dreamed of traveling the world, but what starry eyed overly ambitious teenager hasn’t?

Perhaps I did have one slightly different feature of my travel dreams than most, I actually didn’t want to go to Europe. Or at least not in the traditional drunken euro-trash eight-clubs-in-five days sense. I did want to see all of Europe, in fact I still do, but I figured that Europe wasn’t going to change anytime soon and I could go visit it when I was old in my 40s (hey I was 18 at the time) and get just as much if not more out of it then.

For me, travel – not holidays or vacations - is about opening your mind, body, and stomach to new ideas, people and culture. You need to get lost, be misunderstood, order something you thought you’d never eat and love every minute of it.

There is an inherent fear of the unknown in our society just as there is a natural fear of the dark. This isn’t a bad thing, it is one of the major reasons we have survived as a species for as long as we have, but it is also why many of us don’t even know our neighbours anymore.

If traveling and this trip in particular, has taught me anything, it is that humans individually are universally kind. It has also shown me that North Americans have a lot of catching up to do on this kindness.

I have been asked by a couple people recently why I chose to go to Lebanon and Syria in the Middle East instead of say Greece or even staying in Turkey to finish off my trip. They are also quick to point out that Lebanon is on a watch list that recommends no non-essential travel to the country.

My best answer is that like Croatia and Serbia, which I have already been through on this trip, the only thing I really knew about Lebanon and Syria were the 30-second clips that were shown sensationalized on the evening news. In my mind that is a sorry state of affairs to be in for someone who likes to regard himself as a global citizen and wants to change the world. I wanted to give these countries and people a chance to speak for themselves, and hopefully to help them find a small voice through me out into the larger world.

This may be a bold, brazen, or even arrogant approach, but I simply refused to believe what I’d seen on TV. It just didn’t make sense, especially after having been through Serbia, which is regarded as the black sheep of Europe, and was my favorite country on the bike trip.

Everything I’ve seen in Lebanon so far, and every person I’ve met have completely dismantled any sort of preconceived notions I may have had. Everyone has been beyond kind and caring and as helpful as possible. It’s true that the political situation still exists on a razor's edge; walking down the street it is not uncommon to see a full armored tank quietly sitting on the street corner. If you pull out a map to get your bearings however, the soldiers will be the first people to try and help you along your way.

Beirut is a wonderful melting pot of a city that has mosques sitting right next to churches, across the street from ancient ruins, and kiddy corner to a building full of bullet holes and tank shells. Because Lebanon is so small every culture that has come here has been forced to live beside another and it has created an amazing blend of food and ideas.

Today I took a bus 40km up the coast to a town called Byblos, a town I’d never heard of before. It turns out that Byblos is one of the oldest continually used towns on earth dating back to around 6000 BCE. It also is considered the birthplace of the modern alphabet. They actually have an unbelievable problem with their archeological excavations: they have too many ruins. Because it has been a town for so many years every civilization built on top of the last, so in order to get down to the truly ancient ruins they’ve had to remove the “more recent” ones, excavate, and then replace them for people to see. How have I never heard of this town before?!

You’ll notice that when I travel I refer to it as travel and not as tourism or vacation. For me there is an important difference. Sometimes you need vacations from the everyday, you need to relax, and you need to unwind. That’s totally fine. The result of this is often tourism, you go somewhere new and you see some sights and take pictures. Being a traveler, to me, means something more; it’s trying to engage with people and cultures to gain a better understanding of the unknowns of the world. It’s a belief that knowledge leads to understanding, leads to friendship, leads to peace and a better tomorrow. I hope that I’ve been able to impart some of that to the people who have read my blog, and will continue to try to do so as I travel around an area of the world that we all need to know more about.