Redefining Luxury – apprecating time!

You never forget that moment in time when you experience something profound, in all its astonishing glory, that stirs up deep emotions inside of you, it may be joy, confusion, fear, sorrow or passion. Collectively these moments becomes the vivid memories you take home from your adventure to talk about forever.

Learning to travel slowly and appreciating the simple pleasures in life is something that travelling on a budget awards you. Trusting the journey, not rushing through a checklist or planned itinerary is something I learnt along the way.  It did not come naturally or easy but surrendering to the journey and appreciating time became my new luxury.

Luxury as I knew was all about comfort qualities and material possessions, I never considered that time would be the biggest luxury of all.  Little did we know, in the beginning, that 12 months of travel would become less about ticking off multiple countries but much more about experiencing intimately the local environs, the people and culture, the language, the food and the weather.  Our motto became; see less experience more!

On a daily basis the simple needs of life became our priority, seeking out decent food and a safe place to sleep became the two things that we wouldn’t compromise on.  Our decision to start our journey in Indonesia and spend 6 months backpacking through South East Asia was more about living within our means rather than ticking off a bucket list destination.  We knew we could survive on our budget in Asia and hopefully even much less if we were careful.

As 50 year old trainee backpackers travelling through third world countries, the moments of culture shock occurred repeatedly.

As a budget traveller you find yourself deliberately migrating off the tourist trail to escape mass tourism and all the expensive trappings and it’s in these back streets, small villages, and hard to reach places that we found the friendly locals, the children playing in the streets, local markets and the daily rituals of life unfolding, all of which provided us with a true essence of the area.  Our 2 wheels gave us the freedom we were looking for and we often stumbled across these places quite by accident, many opportunities opened up to us with our relaxed attitude about time.

I’ll never forgot the generosity we frequently received from locals who often stared at us in amazement, I’ll never be sure if it was due to our age, blonde hair or both but on many occasions we were invited to join families at their table to share a meal and with no common language between us we would laugh, nod and smile a lot, play charades and draw pictures over a meal of some kind of unidentifiable food.  We felt so rich having had these encounters.

One piece of advice that we were given before our journey began was, say yes to everything. I’ll have to admit we didn’t quite get to this level of abandonment but we came close.  Going back to rule #2 of our gap year and not making plans, we had an amazing freedom that we hadn’t enjoyed since our early 20’s.  Waking up every single day and wondering what we would do and where the day would take us was so liberating.

People always ask us what was the best thing about our year away and without hesitation both Richard and I say the luxury of time and freedom to roam, we could have been anywhere in the world and found this happiness, this has been a profound lesson and discovering this in our 50’s is slightly embarrassing.