Three Things an International Traveler Tends to Forget after Being on the Road for Too Long

The travel guide books tend to make it clear how difficult it is to travel, even in convenient and relatively safe continent that it Europe. “Even for 3 weeks, travel seems to become...work,” the books say simply. And after personal experiences doing exactly the many things the travel books recommend travelers to do, the travelers would unequivocally agree with the books’ sentiment. But amid the tiresomeness and desperations of continued travel, what becomes more important, upon retrospect, are things that the travelers seem to forget when they are on the road.

(1) When the travelers are still energetic at the beginning of the trip, they tend to carefully track their spending and remember to budget for how much to spend every day and each destination. Three weeks later, that financial meticulousness goes out the window as fatigue sets in. The travelers would eat whatever whenever they want; they would stay in much nicer lodging because they cannot be bothered to seek out those cheap places in dark corners of the city and then share facilities with strangers who would inadvertently disturb their much needed rest...

And scarily enough, the travelers would stop realizing just how expensive the accumulation of nice food, nice lodging, and an occasional taxi ride or two are becoming until they are reminded of the numbers. Especially here in the Balkans, the Western travelers like to rationalize their little luxuries because saying how they are so much cheaper than “back home,” only to be informed by the locals in response that the average monthly wage is 500-800 Euros. Only then, the travelers remember that they are spending more than a month’s salary for the locals every few days....

(2) Traveling around Europe, entering another country, getting another stamp in the passport, and coming across another language or currency becomes a thing of routine for the travelers. Then the travelers, with the matter-of-fact voice, start talking about transporting themselves from one country to the other, they get the “complaints” in response, from friends back home and from locals alike, of how they never been to even the countries neighboring their home countries.

And interestingly enough, money and time never seem to be the reason why they have never done so. And for the many citizens of EU, getting the paperwork is not the source of obstacle either. Often it is much simpler than that, in the realm of “lacking motivation to go” or “lacking some sort of justifiable rationale to travel.” To the frequent traveler, such excuse is just outright puzzling, but on second thought, the traveler has to, in a way, be grateful of his own privilege for having the adventurous mind for travels.

(3) Indeed, the locals’ lack of willingness to visit their neighboring countries often contains an element of massive gap in mutual understanding incongruous with the tiny physical distance. Travelers from massive entities like Canada, the US, Russia, or China are surprised to find just how much prejudices and stereotypes, not to mention real cultural differences, exist among proximate clusters of tiny countries, each smaller than even half a state or province back home.

But these gaps among tiny countries of Europe can be much more deeply rooted and divisive than any form of regionalism in those massive countries. The Slovene and the Bosnian, for instance, is readily bashing the Serb for being mentally backward or averse to multicultural community building. Yet, such sentiment confuse the foreign travelers, who see three peoples who speak essentially the same language and, not withstanding recent history of conflicts, did live within the same political entities and socio-economic circles for centuries...

Sometimes it feels like the foreigners on Euro-trips are going through “the Amazing Race” with themselves as the only competitors. They, perhaps, are just too preoccupied by getting to all the amazing sights, not forgetting to checking out all the dazzling varieties of different peoples, or, more realistically, simply too tired and too crunched for time, to think through the underlying meaning of those sights and differences. Maybe what is forgotten on the road can be regurgitated and recalled when the trips come to their inevitable end...