Anybody who actually follows through on their desire to travel the world has my full and undivided attention, on whatever level their commitments to travelling are. However, a special place in travel folklore should be reserved for the truly free spirits whose wanderlust trumps all logic, reasoning and fear, which has them overcoming every obstacle you can possibly think of to just make it happen and just go!

This is how the true essence of the traveller’s spirit bears its raw and uncut soul and it’s a thing of beauty when you come into contact with it without expressly having gone looking for it.

Picture having finally booked that trip to Thailand after hearing about just how cheap it is to holiday in that part of the world, and when you get there you are intrigued by the many stories of how some of your fellow countrymen made the same trip under the auspices of it being nothing more than a holiday, except a few years to even a couple of decades later, they’re still there! There are many such stories of how travellers would say that they “came here on holiday, fell in love with the place and just never left.”

It’s not just Thailand which is brimming with such stories and in fact Thailand is not the typical case of a destination turned traveller’s paradise, to the extent that those travellers decided to make it their permanent home. Bangkok in particular is known for some of its entertainment which is aimed more at adults who are looking to get up to no good, so one wouldn’t expect it to be the poster child of the rawest travel diaries.

There are some travellers who just have a natural knack for manipulating things in their favour and simply making any trip they have a desire to take happen, no matter what regulations indicate to be a hindrance to their plans. You’ll find an officially unemployed South African traveller with a passport full of stamps from places where they’d indicatively otherwise struggle to get a tourist’s visa to, for example, but this only serves to highlight the sheer power of the true traveller’s spirit.

When you want to just go, nothing can and will stop you.

I marvel at stories like that of a young lad (early 30’s) who is all the way from Sri Lanka, but roll with him in any of Indian Ocean islands and it’ll be like you’re travelling with a local. I mean the Creole spoken on each of these Indian Ocean islands is different, but this lad picks it up instantly having only spoken with the locals a couple of times. By his own admission he first learned the Creole spoken in Mauritius and apparently there’s something about where the islands are positioned on the globe which pretty much determines how the Creole dialect spoken on each of those islands differs.

Raw travellers seem to be detached from material things and so they have a lot less possessions tying them to one place…For the life of me, I wish I was all the way like that as well!