Travel: a time to wonder

Unrestrained by thoughts about work, deadlines, and the chores of everyday life, and stimulated by all the new things I see every day, my mind has been able to wander and wonder much more freely during our travels. There’s so much freedom in simply having the curiosity and energy to ask very simple questions, inspired by the unfamiliar surroundings. Add the fact that we did not have mobile internet (at least in the beginning), and we had some pretty deep discussions very quickly. We did want to look up things eventually, so we had an imaginary google list of things to look up later. But we‘d have to speculate about it and discuss it before looking it up. So we came to research a variety of quite random things, such as

– What are the ancestors of domesticated cattle and sheep? You can tell we were in New Zealand at the time.

– What do crabs eat, and how do they breathe when they are sometimes in the air and sometimes in the water? Yes, we just sat on the beach for quite a while.

– Seeing a number of unfamiliar animals, we not only looked up what they are, how they live etc. but also the English term applied to a group of them (such as a flock of sheep). Did you know it‘s a raft of penguins, a mob of kangaroos, a murder of crows, a pandemonium of parrots?

– We also looked up some other things such as how these different countries generate their power, or how much they recycle. Hopefully I will look at some of these figures in a later post.

Take-home message: it‘s fantastic to allow your mind to wander, wonder and then follow up those random questions that arise. And if that happens, please don‘t take out your smartphone immediately, but make yourself think first! It’s more rewarding that way 🙂

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