At the center of every travel is created a personal experience, a lived experience. In ourselves, travel develop different things. It brings an opening to other relations between us and the space, us and the others, us and the time. We learn to adapt and to integrate ourselves in an other environment and in an other culture. We change ourselves and become someone else when we are in contact with elsewhere.
Travel become a school of life and teach us ethical relations with the others, which create more sharing and more opening.
Symbolically, the travel would be a research of the truth : its aim would be to learn at the knowledge source, to free the mind of every illusions. According to Buddhism and Hinduism, travel would be a search of ourselves by the experience of other environments. Here, experience would become knowledge, and travel would answer to two quests : a deep desire of personal change, and a meeting with another world.
Travel appear as a test, which is related many times in the Odyssey of Homer as the charcacter of Ulysse. It highlight the fact that travel is migration and acceptance of loosing your marks, firstly because you move in the space, and secondly because you're far from your daily environment.
When he was living, the greek traveler seperated himself with political and social life of his own city. Go away here meant to put a distance between you and you're own culture, and meant to be different from the others.
Go away is also to go out of a cultural context to be able to see it with a new point of view. So you can be more conscious of you're own culture then, travel make you be aware of cultural differences. The intercultural communication is an art, it's the ability to go from one cultural environment to an other, it's the possibilty to be more open to the world. It's in this way that travelers from all times made other people want to live a real experience abroad, through writings, drawings, and now pictures. Indeed, the theorical knowledge has its limits, because theory whithout experiment could be misleading.
http://swellvoyage.com/
http://www.hankboughtabus.com/
http://www.theguardian.com/travel/2010/mar/14/why-travel-makes-you-smarter
www.magnumphotos.com/martinparr
Mathilde Rouch