TICK…..the seventh and last new world wonder visited, admired and snapped…. Being a completist, I should be filled with elation and a sense of achievement but the problem is, I’m not.
Yes impressive as it might sound, I can’t help but feel my personal achievement feels like a drop in the ocean. The world is small but sometimes I feel there are so many places to see in our brief moment on this earth. So how shall I spend my brief moment?! Before I even arrived at the last world wonder, I constantly found myself wanting to expand the “list” so I had the comfort of something to transition into….but what? Maybe the 911 UNESCO world heritage sites….! With such an expansive list, I would certainly be trying to complete that list until the day I die….is that really worth dying for?
It begs the question as to why I need a list in the first place. Sometimes I struggle with myself to live my life by lists. As I tick places off one by one, it feels like I’m formalising my passion of travelling and inadvertently strangling the romance of just being there and engrossing yourself in that moment.
Travelling should be anything but formulaic; it should be about the moments like riding the back of a pickup under a starry night in the middle of a Arabian desert, holding on tightly to scooter as it a swerves in the back roads somewhere in rural Vietnam or waiting to jump out of a stuttering biplane as it circles above Rio…… but most importantly smiling as you look over to your friend/companion/partner at the situation you got yourselves into! These are my true travel wonders. A moment I strive for every time I mechanically squeeze myself on that packed commuter train at 8:38am.
I want to travel for the sake of travelling not for the sake of my own self imposed bureaucracy… And to that end I will start hoarding these travel wonders in my memory, in my world….That surely is worth dying for.