There is nothing more beautiful than traveling! The joy of saying goodbye to your motherland, the smell of the airport, new impressions and rich life experience – all of this makes the gray matter under the cranium work in a different mode and generally makes your life better. But the process itself is associated with endless myths, which discourage people from any desire to discover new things. It feels like there is some organization, whose goal is to destroy the very concept of travel. We decided to destroy the ugliest travel myths!
1. Expensive pleasure
Everything costs some money, and you also have to pay for travel. Thanks to advertising, cinema and the lifestyle imposed by culture, we think that a good and interesting vacation can only be spent in a luxurious hotel room. However, an interesting holiday is not necessarily an expensive holiday. Walking along the streets of Rome or living in a hostel is no worse than walking along the same streets while spending the night in a luxurious and unnecessarily expensive room. Why should you pay more for the night? You do not travel to sleep there.
When we plan our first trip to Greece, tours to Australia seem unaffordable. But if you go deeper into it, you will find several options for an economical and exciting trip to the Green Continent. All sorts of season proposals, which all tour operators offer in their advertising brochures, significantly expand the boundaries, and you just need to adjust to the time of the hot offer. In the era of websites and special offers, nothing is easier than to find and plan an exciting budget adventure in a desirable country. You just need to devote some time to find a suitable hotel, tickets and other amenities of budget travel.
3. CouchSurfing is unsafe
Of course, staying in the house of unfamiliar Chinese people, whom you know only through to a couple of chats on Skype, is not a pleasant idea. However, experience has shown and proved that one can rely on the kindness of strangers: people who offer their homes are often very sympathetic and kind. It is clear that it is very wrong to trust people from the other hemisphere unconditionally. For some reason, people do not like to talk about their mental disorders and manic habits. What should be done? Read the reviews. Websites such as Tumblr, meetup or bewelcome allow you to see host reviews and choose where to stop. It is best not to violate the good old traditions of settlement: a lonely girl stops by another woman, a family visits another family. To be on the safe side.
3. Hitchhiking is not safe
The idea that hitchhiking is always insecure was born in the 1950s when the FBI started a campaign of intimidation to somehow bring down the wave of mass travel with strangers. Partly this was done because the poor from all states would massively gather at rallies this way. That’s why the cunning Federals intended to intimidate the population with stories about maniacs and pervert drivers who do not really care about gender and appearance. Disturbing thoughts were scattered around the world combined with the idea that the world is unsafe and sound as crazy as trying heroin. However, hitchhiking does not always end in a ditch. Of course, hitchhiking alone is not recommended.
4. Travel is dangerous for women
Both men and women face risks when traveling, but we must admit that girls are doomed to have additional difficulties. There are situations when one needs to be especially cautious, and being a female leads to additional problems. However, everything is exaggerated by the sick and frightened imagination of the society. The latter believes, just as Giordano Bruno believed in the ideas of Neoplatonism, that maniacs are waiting for a traveling girl around every corner and in every doorway.
In fact, it is the people who have never left their grandmother’s village that advise against traveling. In the end, the chance of getting into the sweaty hands of criminals or of being hit by a bus is equivalent to the chance to experience it on the streets of your hometown. Should you live your whole life fearing to go out? What if… Everything mentioned above may well happen not only in Tunisia but even in prosperous Switzerland.
5. Travel is an option for the young
There is an opinion that you need to travel at a young age, and the older you become the more demanding becomes your decrepit and tired body. There can be no hiking, and you just need an all-inclusive tour with lying on a hard couch 24 hours a day. But in fact, age does not matter. Many pensioners from all over the world prefer hiking to comfortable lying at the side of a pool. It’s such a great thing to see: they move much more than the younger generation. They do not hesitate to spend a night in a hostel, they drive cars and do not refuse anything. You are limited by your thoughts rather than the age.
6. It is impossible to find a job abroad
There are not so many things abroad that would attract as strongly as working abroad. It seems like you earn money and get acquainted with someone else’s culture at the same time. Few people can make this decisive step, and it has nothing to do with patriotism. According to the old good habit, we tend to find new obstacles. It is clear that finding a good job after you get off the plane is difficult, but where there is a will, there is a go.
Virtually all countries are open to new employees. You can work on a cruise liner, teach a language abroad or work via a variety of student programs. Getting a work visa is not so difficult, even distant and mysterious New Zealand has a surprisingly easy and simple procedure for obtaining a visa.
