Want to Travel the World? Here are 6 Rules to Follow

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If you’ve always wanted to travel the world, but you’re not sure how or if you should or if you can, this post is for you. I want you to know that you can travel, learn, grow, and explore, and I want to help you. 

In this post, I list six rules for you to follow if you want to travel the world. I often find that information about travel can be overly focused on one part of trip planning, say finding a cheap flight or the best thing to do in X place. Instead, my goal is to inspire you take the leap, and to travel in a way that helps you grow and explore and take on entirely new perspectives. Some of the information in this post is very practical, but in other cases I focus on having the mindset of a World Traveler, which I think is just as important.

1. When in doubt, book your flight.

Sometimes, people talk about planning trips in a way that’s very linear. You start by having a travel idea, then you request time off from work, then you research and buy your ticket, then you plan your itinerary, then you go on your trip. That’s great, and I’ve done that, but I’d like to offer my formal support for the chaotic good version: pick your flight first. Book your Airbnb first. Take the first jump and then figure out the rest later. 

The moment of commitment to taking a trip is scary, so just do it. If you’re waiting for the “right time” but you have no idea when that might be, you may just be feeling fear. If you know the right time to take your trip, start planning it now! Book the ticket, so long as Google says you’re getting a good price (hint: check the “price graph” and “date grid” to be sure that the prices you’re seeing are at least average for your trip). If Google tells you to hold off, make a calendar reminder to book the ticket a little closer to your travel dates, but start looking at hostels and Airbnbs and restaurants now. 

Do whatever you can to make the trip feel as real as possible. If time allows, I love to do the fun parts first. For me, the fun parts are exploring restaurants, picking places to stay, looking up museums, watching documentaries, and reading novels. If you need more trip planning advice, you can read some of my top travel tips to help you get started. Don’t worry if your trip isn’t fully planned before you go, or if you’re not 100% sure what you’ll do when you get there, or if you have some other lingering doubts. 

You don’t need to know everything, just be willing to learn and get better and make mistakes and keep trying if you fail. You don’t owe anyone perfection, not even yourself. In fact, perfection is the key ingredient in failure, because it is so unyielding and inflexible. The more your goals can be defined by growth, betterment, resilience, and adaptation, the more likely you are to succeed. Plan your goals so that you can be on a winning team with yourself, instead of judging your accomplishments and failures from the pedestal of perfection. 

Related Post: A Guide for Ethical (and Safe) Horseback Riding on Your Next Trip

2. You can travel alone.

If you’ve always wanted to travel the world but none of your friends are interested, I give you permission to go alone. Some of my fondest travel memories are times when I’ve walked through city streets alone, taking in the magic that urban sprawls always seem to hold. For me, the beauty of cities is twofold, there’s the architecture, which is a tribute to collaboration and the culture of the place. Buildings and streets and parks are the way that cities organize themselves, giving us clues about the values, struggles, histories, and people contained therein. Then, there’s the tiny moments of magic, places where people tinkered and made art and put their own stamp on the place. 

Wandering through Paris, you can’t help but notice the staggering beauty of the city’s architecture. But, if you look close, you can see little signs of life and love and joy and pride. When you enter a patisserie, it’s hard to ignore how precise the pastries are; each swirl is perfectly round, each corner perfectly square.

The streets of Paris can sometimes seem chaotic with the honking horns and swarms of people and dirty sidewalks, but when you look closely at people, you see the opposite. Paris is a city of contrasts, of almost unfathomable wealth and grandeur in its museums, but also countless instances of visible poverty and suffering. And, yet, life goes on. 

Traveling alone is a bit of a contrast, too. When you’re alone on a trip, you feel an exhilarating type of freedom. You’re free to set your own priorities, travel on your own schedule, experience a sort of freedom and limitlessness that would be difficult to replicate at home. And, yet, you are alone. With that freedom comes limitations, the need to either stay alone or make friends. There are moments that will feel awkward or intimidating or lonely. 

I got used to seeing sights on my own when I traveled to California for two months by myself for work when I was 23. I took a boat tour of the Golden Gate Bridge, hiked 5 miles to bungee jump off a bridge in the desert, and ate countless meals in the company of strangers. Those experiences forced me to sit with the awkwardness of traveling as a lone woman, and then I went ahead and did it anyway. I learned to trust myself. I found my own rhythm for moving through the world, and in the process started to love my own company. 

Being alone opens you to experiences you never would have had otherwise. I once stayed in an Airbnb with a single woman in her 50s who worked as an assistant for a Disney executive. She had a tiny white dog and rented out a bedroom in her small Los Angeles townhouse to help cover the mortgage. In anticipation of my arrival, she bought me a gourmet caramel apple and we stayed up late into the night eating slices of it while laughing and talking about life and drinking red wine. It was one of the best experiences I’ve ever had while staying in an Airbnb.

3. You don’t need to know everything. 

Normalize learning on the fly. If you’ve seen Instagram posts by people who have traveled around the world and feel intimidated and like you don’t know how to start, that’s ok–but please know that you’re not responsible for knowing everything. You’re not even responsible for knowing most stuff. Practice makes better. If your goal is to learn and grow and explore and become a better person, you’ll learn what you need to know on the fly. Never read a bus schedule? You’ll definitely get the hang of it if you need to. 

The easiest way to rob yourself of experiences is by telling yourself that you don’t have the experience necessary to have the experience. It’s a form of self-sabotage. You can certainly be realistic about your first trip: maybe don’t plan to road trip through Mexico alone if you’ve never traveled anywhere before, but don’t let it stop you. 

A great first trip abroad is to do a language study or a home stay. My first trip abroad was a four week long stay at a language school in Guatemala, at the Quetzalteco Linguistic Project. They offered home stays with local families, pre-arranged day trips to local areas, and Spanish language classes tailored to your level of understanding. It’s ok to want some structure for your first trip, but if you can’t afford group travel like that offered by REI, it’s OK to get more creative.

Some hostels also do a great job of offering day trips and helping you make the most of your time, like the activities offered by Tribu Hostel in Isla Holbox, Mexico. Many hostels will also help you arrange pickup from the airport and local transport at your destination. Hostels are also great because they’re full of other travelers, so they’re easy places to make friends and travel companions (just carefully monitor/secure your luggage and valuables, because they can be full of thieves). 

4. Always look for the beauty in everything.

A yoga teacher recently referenced a quote from the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, “Art is how we decorate space; music is how we decorate time.” The beauty of travel is that it’s often filled with art and music, both of which provide enrichment and color and life that carries on well after you arrive home. The more you travel, the more you start to see patterns in music and art, tracing them back to moments on bygone trips. 

Every trip you take can have moments of wonder and beauty and color. Your attention will dictate your experience, so consciously direct your attention to the beauty around you. Know that your attention changes the thing it purports to observe, even if it only changes the way you experience a place. If you spend your trip searching for signs of whimsy and beauty and creativity and kindness and love, you’ll probably find it. If you draw your attention to all of the unique and special parts of a place, they’ll usually make themselves known to you. 

“Art is how we decorate space; music is how we decorate time.”

Jean-Michel Basquiat

Decorate the time and space of your life with all of the richness the world has to offer. Travel the world so that you have artifacts that demonstrate that the people and animals and spaces that make up this globe are reasons for hope. Those artifacts may be small pieces of art that you buy from street vendors and hang in IKEA frames, or sweet memories of moments passed with strangers you’ll likely never see again. Know in your heart and soul that every place has a history and a reason to love it, then make it your mission to fall in love.

Fall in love with places large and small, find joy in the disparate and expected and unexplored places that make up the world. A positively non-exhaustive list of places I have fallen in love with: San Francisco, California; Tarija, Bolivia; Rendezvous Bay, Anguilla; Paris, France; Taos, New Mexico; Wadi Rum, Jordan; Istanbul, Turkey; the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico; Florence, Italy; Salento, Colombia; Telluride, Colorado. 

When I think of Tarija, I remember sitting in a crowded cafe in the late afternoon eating the best dulce de leche cake I’ve ever tasted while sipping espresso. The sun was hot and I was starving, but the cakes looked too good to pass up. So, instead of lunch, we ate slices of cake and stared out at the plaza as it lightly bustled with the late afternoon activity of a small city. It was at once serene and timeless, a reminder that life and time can simply slow down to accommodate a perfect, albeit fleeting, moment. 

5. Travel ≠ Vacationing.

Try your very best to live your life according to your values. For me, travel is a value, but I think it’s important to differentiate this from “vacationing is my value.” While I’ve certainly been on vacations, they’re different from traveling. They have different goals. They include different activities. They form you into different types of people. 

The most obvious difference is in the goal of relaxing. When you’re traveling, it’s usually not relaxing. Adventure is not relaxing. Exploration is not relaxing. Learning is not relaxing. It may relieve stress, it may rejuvenate you, it may make you feel present and whole and alive, but it’s not necessarily relaxing. You may even choose small moments of respite on your travels, like scheduling a massage or going to a hot spring or laying on the beach, but differentiate those moments for yourself from the act of travel.

Travel makes me feel alive. It makes me feel like the world is so enormous and the sampling I’ve had of it is so small that the only option is to continue exploring until my body gives out. You can turn vacations into travel by shifting your mindset. You can learn more about how to travel better by reading this post. Be an explorer-adventurer who is curious about the world and wants to make it a better place.  

6. A passport is your ticket to travel the world.

If you want to travel the world and don’t currently have a passport, your next task is to get one. This page has everything you need to know about getting a passport, including what documents you’ll need, how much it costs, and how long it will take. Once you have a passport, here are some general rules and best practices to follow:

• Always know where your passport is. It’s an important document, and you’ll want to keep it somewhere safe. 
• Unless you take cruises or often travel to Mexico/Canada by land/sea, you probably don’t need a passport card. You can’t use a passport card to travel by air, so you can probably just save the money and stick with the passport book. 
• You want to be sure that your passport expires at least 6 months after you plan to return from your trip. 
• Once you have a passport, it’s much easier to renew it than it was to get it the first time. 
• Save your old passports, you never know if you might need them! I needed scans of every page of my expired passport when I applied for Irish residency. 
• I like to keep my passport in a passport holder. It keeps all of the little documents you need while traveling in one place, and they’re usually RFID-blocking, so there’s an added layer of protection. By the way: these make great gifts for a friend’s first trip abroad 🙂 
• When you’re traveling, be extremely wary of handing over your passport to anyone. If you can, try to always keep it in eyesight. 
• Hostels often ask for your passport and will scan it to check you in. This is fine, just be alert and make sure they hand it back to you. 
• When I traveled to places where passport theft was a known issue, I wore one of these very cool fanny packs and tucked it into the waistband of my pants/leggings. I’m kidding, they felt *aggressively uncool* to wear around, but no one stole my passport so it’s OK. 
• If your passport is stolen, there are steps you need to take immediately. Read this page for more information. Should your passport be stolen while you’re traveling, you will probably need to travel to the US Embassy in the country you’re visiting for assistance getting home. 

Final Thoughts

I hope, no matter where you go, that you choose to travel. I hope that you choose to make your world as big as possible, when it can be so very easy to keep it small. I hope that, when you travel, it changes you; that you step off the airplane as someone whose perspective is global.

There are so many reasons not to travel, but I hope you do it anyway. I hope your travels help you to learn to look fear and perfectionism and doubt and self-consciousness in the eye, and then live your life anyway. Take calculated risks. See places far from home, meet people you don’t understand, and then cultivate a deep and profound respect for all of the things you don’t know. I hope that your travels help you to see each and every person in the world as someone with an inherent and indelible right to live in dignity and safety.

I hope that, when you travel the world, you do it for the growth. For the love of it. That you keep traveling, despite of all of the challenges and headaches and missteps that you’re sure to meet along the way. I hope you do it anyway because you’ll never forget how much you learn to rely on yourself–and the rest of humanity–when you miss a train and need to make a backup plan but your phone is dead and the only people who can help you are strangers.

I hope you live a life well traveled.

Do you have other rules that you follow when traveling the world? Any other tips for people who want to travel, but aren’t sure where to start? Let me know in the comments!