The Map on the Wall: Chasing the Roads Less Travelled
Where I have been
There's a map on my office wall with twelve countries coloured in, and lately it's been doing something I didn't expect.
It's not making me want to collect more countries. It's making me want to go further off whatever road most people take when they get there.
Twelve places in, and I can already see the pattern I want to break.
It's easy to visit somewhere and only ever see the version of it built for visitors, the main square, the famous view, the queue everyone else is standing in. That's not nothing, but it's not the whole place either, and the map has started to feel less like a record of where I've been and more like a prompt to go back and do it properly.
Sri Lanka and Australia are near the top of the list for exactly that reason.
Not the postcard version of either, the tea plantations away from the tourist trail, the outback towns that don't make it onto anyone's itinerary. Scandinavia again for the same instinct, somewhere genuinely wild and quiet rather than curated for a camera. And then the American West, Utah, Wyoming, the west coast has been sitting in my head as something closer to an expedition than a holiday. Big sky, empty roads, a landscape that doesn't care whether you turned up prepared.
I need a return trip to Japan too, a genuinely different one this time. Last time nearly broke me before it began wth being poorly out there really limiting what I could see and do. I came home having barely scratched the surface I went there for. I suspect the version of Japan I actually want is the one that's harder to reach, further from Tokyo, slower, less translated for someone like me.
There's something about a genuinely difficult trip that a comfortable one can't teach you.
Getting lost forces you to actually pay attention. Being underprepared to a degree forces you to adapt rather than follow a script someone else wrote for the place. I think that's what the map is speaking to me about. Not another country to colour in, but a harder version of the ones already on there, and the courage to seek out the places that don't make it into anyone's guidebook or instagram feed.
None of this fits neatly into a plan, which is probably the point. It’s a shortlist that keeps rewriting itself. What I do know is that the easy version of travel, the one built entirely around convenience, comfort, and someone else's idea of what's worth seeing isn't the one that I want.
The map still has plenty of white space left on it but I'd rather fill the next stretch of it with somewhere genuinely difficult to get to than somewhere easy to check off.
Whilst I have ideas, I’d love to hear your wild ideas of a totally different trip you would love to take in the comments!