I’m starting to feel that I’ve travelled too much. When I say travel, I mean travel for it’s own sake: to hop on a train or a plane to some dream destination, to stay in a nice hotel and visit the top 10 TripAdvisor things to see in one morning, and to add another country to my list of those I’ve visited. I’ve been to 24 now. A part of me takes pride in this, that same part of me that is still ideologically aligned with the seeming billions of Australians who litter the Côte d’Azur and Amalfi Coast during the European summer, who pay half my current yearly salary to pack themselves into busses with other Anglo-Saxons to be trafficked around by underpaid migrant workers who haul their suitcases from destination to destination for their clients, who they address politely as monsieur or mademoiselle through gritted teeth, all so photos can be taken for instagram, destinations can be crossed off of the list and the days become stories that are barked across the table of their local pub for weeks to come.

Travel of this kind is just another thinly-veiled status symbol. The only thing impressive about it is the price tag, the feeling of luxury. Yet the person who gets on that bus on their first day of their all-expenses paid tour will be the same person who returns home. Outside of a boost to the ego, no change occurs.

I can say all of this, for I have been this person. 

How different those times were to now, or specifically, the morning on which I wrote the first draft of this piece, on my sixth day in Transylvania, where I woke at 5am to go quail hunting with my girlfriend’s brother and father. She barely stirred as I left and re-entered the bedroom multiple times, having forgotten my socks, then my boots, then my hat. I was (and still am) despicably tired; I had not had a day off in nearly 6 months before this trip. And I regret to admit that a part of me did not want to go, wanted to stay wrapped up in bed to be awoken by the sun and the call of the chickens, to lie in bed and drink coffee and scroll the internet. I wasn’t so tired that I couldn’t resist the pull of fatigue, and it’s not so easy to tell a group of large, moustached hunters that you won’t be joining them because you want to sleep in. 

We were seven in total. We stood in the corn fields, the sun rising as the men around me spoke Hungarian, their breath steaming. The five of them who carried shotguns began loading them with birdshot.

It’s remarkable how quickly you can learn to understand phrases such as “stop”, “stand there”, and “don’t move” when firearms are involved. My girlfriend’s father got everyone into position, standing 3 or 4 metres apart in a line, all facing the farmed field which we were about to cross. On his orders, we began walking. Every once in a while, a little quail would burst forth from the bed of cut stems of corn, chirping and flapping its wings as it made its break. When there was a clear shot, the men closest would fire. I had to go and collect the fallen bird a few times, and more than once, it was still alive in my hand.

I remembered being younger, about 10 or 11, at a park with some local kids back in Australia. Our group heard noises coming from the bushes, and when we looked we saw a pigeon that had broken its neck and fallen to the ground, where it now lay writhing. I started to cry, and one of the girls laughed at me.

This is not travel done for the sake of travel. I’m here to meet people, to live among them, to learn their language and their ways. To understand the deep connection my girlfriend has to her roots. Most of the time this involves work and an awful amount of time with my brain spent in system 2, leaving my brain exhausted by the end of the day.

And in a little under a week, I’ll be on a train to Prague to see my parents. But truthfully, the place itself is secondary, it’s mainly about the time to be spent with them. This new distance between us has taken a lot, but it has given us many new experiences, many new memories.

Reframing travel like this is new to me, as just two years ago I had just moved to France and dreamt of going to every country on the European continent. In reality, I’ve only been to a few and mostly for work. 

Travel for its own sake is empty. There’s merit to the platitudes that it’s about the journey, not the destination. Most of us who travel seek change of some form, but the real change isn’t found by being shuttled around to see a bunch of things that someone else has told you that you absolutely must see before you die. Real change demands either connection or sacrifice. It’s hard to have a truly authentic experience with a culture, or with loved ones, without one or both of these.

As such I have been doing the calculations in my head of the cost that a hypothetical Australian with a particular fixation on quail hunting in Transylvania would need to pay to have an experience, any experience like those I’ve had over the past week. My estimates tell me it’s probably about as much as one of those four-to-six week Contiki tours I’ve been bullying a little too much in this post. Yet I’ve been able to do it for nearly free, all the while ending each day with my brain feeling like it were in the process of some kind of change.

There are of course a bunch of caveats to this anti-travel position. A certain amount of travel is good - it’s important to see how the world works in other cultures, to see poverty more extreme than one sees back home, or to experience kindness and politeness far stronger than usual. It’s important to rest and to spend time with loved ones. 

But travel for its own sake can often just be a way of breaking up a mediocre year into mediocre months with something in the middle to avoid having to deal with real issues. Is it travel, or is it running away?