The Travel Urge

[Kuoda Travel]

By Emily Guilmette

In recent weeks I have been updating ourKuoda  web site, blog and social pages (please look for us on facebook, twitter, LinkedIn, digg and delicious), to provide better and more interesting information to all of you. As I combed through various sites and articles, I came across a Pico Iyer essay on Salon´s site entitled "Why We Travel." While I highly recommend the full article to all of you, I think the beginning is particularly resonant. “We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again - to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more. The beauty of this whole process was best described, perhaps, before people even took to frequent flying, by George Santayana in his lapidary essay,´The Philosophy of Travel.´ We´need sometimes,´ the Harvard philosopher wrote,´to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard, in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.´” Lovely, isn´t it? I felt just this way over the last weekend as I took a small Peruvian taxi from Cusco to Ollantaytambo. As we climbed through the sometimes harrowing hills and coasted across impossibly open countryside, I rolled down the windows and breathed deeply and differently. The size of the sky, the strangeness of the landscape made me feel incredibly peaceful and I found my own understanding of why this place is called the Sacred Valley of the Incas. There are so many ways to travel from the comfort of our desk chairs or couches now: travel websites and magazines and beautiful programs on the Discovery Channel or PBS, and, of course, the Kuoda website. And yet, it is not quite the same as plunging into the wide world. So, I encourage you all to remember your last great trip, take a different way home, go away somewhere for the weekend and feel that freshness that only new sights and experiences can bring.