The results of a short survey I took on two different occasions on a well-known travel-related website revealed made me realize the complexity of an ideal traveling experience.

A few days ago I completed a short 5-question survey on Tripadvisor with the purpose of discovering what my travel destiny for 2018 was. I tried to answer the five multiple choice questions instantly, without thinking too  much about the options, and the  result of the survey indicated to me that my travel destiny for this year is the philosopher, which implies that I'm a curious traveller whose minds, eyes and ears are all eager to plunge into a spiritual adventure of discovering new people, cultures, and traditions. Based on these results the famous traveling website recommended a few destinations that would match my travel profile, and they were all cities of huge historical and cultural importance, such as Rome, Athens, and New York. 

Those conclusions sounded quite good to me, as I consider myself a curious person, eager to absorb and understand as much as possible about other cultures and ways of life, but I also felt that they didn't offer me the complete picture, as the destinations suggested by Tripadvisor are certainly among the visited ones in the world, and I'm not particularly excited about the idea of going to places which are extremely popular  and therefore certainly overcrowded most of the time, so I repeated to take the survey again and take my time to reflect a little upon the answers I was about to select.

After completing the survey one more time at a slower pace(it didn't take me too much time anyway since there were only five questions involved) I got a different result, as my travel destiny in this second attempt was the trailblazer, a traveller who's more likely to appreciate going off the beaten path and exploring the beauty of nature at its fullest. According to Tripadvisor, it is the year in which I am supposed to unplug in the wilderness and clear my mind, and those ideas sound really good to me; as for the destinations suggested by the travelling website, the simple thought of escaping to places like Reykjavik, Banff from Canada and especially  Victoria Falls was enough to fill me with excitement and a renewed determination to make my dreams come true and see them for real one day.

Anyway, when I thought about those different results I got when I completed the same survey on separate occasions, I understood that the two travel destinies, the philosopher and the trailblazer, though apparently quite distant in their essence, do not necessarily exclude each other. On the contrary, I like to see them as only two of the two multiple facets that a traveler might experience in his journeys, and I can only hope that I will get to experience at least a bit of both my travel destinies for 2018 and for the years to come.

 If reaching some of those destinations still sounds like a hard target to accomplish due mostly of financial restraints, I can still get in touch with the philosopher and the trailblazer within me by visiting the cultural and historical treasures and natural wonders which I can explore in my country, and fortunately there are plenty of great things worth seeing and even revisiting close to my home, so whether I manage to go thousands of miles away from my country or stay at home, I am quite sure, that one way or another, I will follow my multiplefaceted travel destiny, and I wish you all the same. Enjoy traveling as often as you can because this is the best way to improve your knowledge of the real world!

 

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