The Epitome of Travel

September 14, 2007

I can’t say exactly what it is that draws the traveler to their travels. Perhaps it’s the draw of the unknown or the quests for the known. The truly monumental experiences one has while traveling can’t really be articulated, though. They can only be felt.

It’s strange to see the Taj Mahal for the first time and have your first thought be, at least in my case, ‘I though it would be bigger.’ On the flip-side, it’s astounding to sit in front of the pyramids at Giza during sunrise and be absolutely mesmerized– dumbstruck, quite literally– thinking, and the ability to do so, only a distant memory.

I remember the moment quite vividly. My personal history, world history, everything I ever knew or thought I knew seemed to flutter away like wisps of dry leaves in an autumn breeze. Sitting there, looking at the great monuments, something ethereal came over me. I was no longer in the here and now, but I was lost in some far off realm. It was a moment that reminded me how nothing can reach down to the very depths of your soul like being a foreigner in a foreign land can.

As the sun slowly climbed up the sky, hanging heavy as it always does in the desert, light shot off from the horizon, backlighting the pyramids like actors on a stage. It’s a testament to the indomitable will of the human spirit, and the cruel oppression of tyrannical forces that they were ever erected in the first place. It’s engineering ingenuity that they still stand today.

A friend once looked back upon the morning spent wandering the pyramids as something ‘so awe inspiring that it makes you feel almost cliché being there, experiencing what you are experiencing.’ Of all of the sights I’ve ever seen, hell, in everything I’ve ever seen, very few things, if any, can top the wonder of the pyramids.

Perhaps that’s just my singular response. Perhaps millions of others have gazed upon those same pyramids, from that same spot, and scoffed, thinking that they’d be bigger, or shuttering at the expense of the lives it took to build such things. But I don’t care. It’s a moment that is mine and that I will always carry with me, and that is the epitome of why we travel.