When people ask me what I enjoyed most about travelling, they usually expect me to mention a country, a city or perhaps one of the bigger adventures. The truth is, I don’t think I was ever really travelling towards a place. Looking back, I was travelling towards the unknown. Countries simply gave me an excuse to keep discovering it.
One of the stranger things I learnt about myself was that the more comfortable I became somewhere, the more I found myself wanting to move on. It wasn’t because I’d stopped enjoying the place. Quite the opposite. It was because I’d started to understand it. The streets became familiar, I knew where to buy breakfast, I recognised the faces around town and tomorrow no longer felt like a mystery. What I missed wasn’t the place itself; it was the feeling of discovery. Once I understood how everything worked, the quiet excitement of wondering what might happen next gradually faded, and I found myself looking for another place where life felt unfamiliar again.
That doesn’t mean I was searching for danger or constant excitement. Most days were wonderfully ordinary. Yet it was often those ordinary days that quietly became extraordinary simply because I hadn’t seen them coming. An unexpected conversation, a wrong turn, an invitation from someone I’d only just met or a place that never appeared in any guidebook often stayed with me far longer than the famous attractions I had planned to visit.
Over time, I realised that if I wanted to understand somewhere, I learnt far more by talking to the people who lived there than by standing in front of the places everyone else had come to photograph. Ask a local what makes their town special and they rarely begin with the biggest landmark. Instead, they tell you about the bakery that’s been there for generations, the beach tourists never quite find, the café where everyone knows each other’s name or the little street that somehow feels like home. It reminded me that places are rarely remembered because of what they look like. They’re remembered because of how they feel, and it’s usually the people who quietly give them that feeling.
As the internet grew, I noticed something else beginning to change. It made travelling easier in almost every imaginable way, and I’m genuinely grateful for that. But it also felt like the internet was telling me what was in the present before I had the chance to unwrap it myself. Part of the joy of travelling had always been the surprise of discovery, yet gradually more and more of those discoveries seemed to arrive before I did.
Before I even reached a destination, I often knew where the best coffee was, which viewpoint produced the perfect photograph and which hidden gem everyone insisted was still hidden despite millions of people already knowing about it. It made me wonder whether certainty quietly changes the way we experience the world. When we already know what to expect, do we notice less? Do we ask fewer questions? Do we leave believing we’ve discovered somewhere new, or have we simply confirmed what someone else had already told us? I don’t know the answer, but I find myself wondering about it more often than I used to.
Some of my favourite memories came from moments I could never have planned. They happened because life briefly stepped away from the itinerary. A delayed bus led to an unexpected conversation. A wrong turn revealed a part of a city I would never otherwise have seen. A simple hello changed the direction of an afternoon. Those moments reminded me that discovery rarely announces itself in advance. It usually arrives disguised as inconvenience, uncertainty or something that wasn’t supposed to happen at all.
Perhaps that’s one of the quiet gifts of the unknown. It encourages us to pay attention instead of assuming we already know the answers. It rewards curiosity, asks us to remain open to being surprised and reminds us that certainty isn’t always something to chase. Sometimes certainty quietly closes the door on discovery before we’ve even realised it was there.
The older I get, the less I think this was ever just about travelling. Travel simply gave me more opportunities to encounter the unknown, but the same idea exists much closer to home. How many conversations never begin because we assume we already know someone? How many places become ordinary simply because we’ve stopped looking at them with curious eyes? And how many opportunities quietly pass us by because certainty feels safer than discovery?
Looking back now, I don’t think I was ever travelling towards certainty at all. I was travelling towards discovery, and perhaps discovery has always lived on the other side of not knowing. That’s probably why the unknown was never something to fear. It quietly became my favourite destination.
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#Travel #TravelReflections #Backpacking #Curiosity #Discovery #TravelMemoir #TravelWriting #Observation #Adventure #AuthenticTravel #HumanConnection #AustralianAuthor #NoIWontBuyYouADrink