Why It Is Important To Travel?

In Toulouse-France, June 1994

Enjoy the journey as the destination is always overrated. In life, we always have multiple maxims that we live by as part of our philosophy or principles. The first sentence from this paragraph is one that I started adopting some 10 years ago. In the modern lifestyle that we live in, we tend to get stuck doing the same things with the hope that it would lead us to something different and that destination will give us some mysterious happiness.

Coming from an island city state of Singapore, travelling is one of the best ways to enjoy the journey of life. Be it far, near or even within the area that we live in. In this part of my Life Journal, I will focus on the overseas travel that I have done over the years. The Travel Journal will be recounted based on the places that I had visited. Then within the pages of those places, I will indicate the years that I was there. This is because there are several places that I visited more than once. Undoubtedly, I will visit some of these places again in the future as my travelling days are not done yet.

However, I will begin my travel blog with the experience I had travelling with my sons over the past few years, just before Covid-19. (At this point, we haven't travel for more than 2 years due to the borders closing and then followed by travel restrictions.

Some parts of this Journal will be written as I recounted my days there. Whilst there will be parts where it will be in narrative as those parts were written whilst I was at the place. The latter style was adopted from 2012 when I started penning down my thoughts as part of my Travel Journal. Prior to 2012, I would only collect souvenirs and then create a scrap book out of them. Post 2012, I started penning down my thoughts as it happened.

Travelling has always had a great appeal to me. I remember as young as 13-14, my friends and I actually travel all the way to Kota Tinggi in Johor-Malaysia to camp overnight there. Nowadays, I only allow my sons to travel overseas when they are 18 years old. I guess back then it was safer then now. At the same time, we were “tougher” and more street-smart than kids nowadays. Nonetheless, the past few trips, I had included my sons in the planning process in the hope that they become travel-smart.