Summary

The author reflects on the unique, unparalleled thrill of first-time travel experiences, contrasting them with subsequent trips that lack the same intensity of emotion and novelty.

Abstract

The author recounts their transformative first trip to Vietnam, emphasizing the sensory overload and raw emotions that came with the experience. They describe the challenge of crossing a bustling road, the vibrant street life, and the sensory feast of new sights, sounds, and smells. This initial journey sparked an enduring passion for travel, akin to an addiction, where the pursuit of that original high becomes increasingly elusive with each new destination. The author acknowledges the potential role of aging and neurochemical changes in the diminishing returns of travel excitement. Despite the maturity and practical benefits gained from years of travel, such as better language skills and fewer scams, the author yearns for the pure, unadulterated joy of those first encounters with foreign lands. They encourage readers to cherish and document their early travel experiences, as the magic of discovering the world for the first time is incomparable and irreplaceable.

Opinions

The author believes that the initial travel experiences are uniquely impactful and set a benchmark that subsequent travels struggle to match.
There is a sense of nostalgia for the early days of travel, with the author suggesting that memory selectively enhances the positive aspects of those experiences.
The author implies that the excitement of travel diminishes over time, possibly due to a combination of increased travel tolerance and age-related changes in brain chemistry.
Despite the advantages of accumulated travel wisdom, such as improved language skills and savvier navigation of new places, the author feels that these do not compensate for the loss of the initial travel euphoria.
The author recommends that new travelers should actively preserve their experiences through journaling and photography to capture the essence of their first travels.
The author expresses a wish to relive the first-time travel experiences, akin to rewatching a favorite movie or relistening to a beloved album for the first time.

Travel Will Never Feel As Good As The First Time

So enjoy it while you can

Vietnam, that’s where it all started. The first time I landed in another country and found my face pressed up against the window of a taxi. My eyes wide, my heart open, my brain scrambled from a sixteen-hour flight as a whole new world streaked past me. The crumbling buildings and swarms of motorbikes were terrifying and exhilarating and everything that travel should be.

It took me thirty minutes to cross the road that night.

That same taxi had dropped me on the wrong side of it, putting a river of motorbikes between me and the guest house where I would spend the next month. I stood there with my backpack over my shoulder as I was assaulted by the living, breathing sounds of the street and the smell of the old lady cooking phở gà next to me.

My eyes didn’t quite know where to look. The oncoming traffic would have been the logical place to start and yet there was so much else on the street pulling them in other directions. The tangled jumble of power lines hissing with wayward electricity, a motorbike taxi driver who had fallen asleep with his feet on the handlebars, and the locals sitting on tiny plastic stools slurping up bowls of the aforementioned pho that looked, smelled, and no doubt tasted delicious.

For an eighteen-year-old kid, it was overwhelming.

It thrust me into that beautifully nebulous place between fear and excitement, between hope and despair, where the simple act of smelling things I’d never smelt before released endorphins that would otherwise require chemicals to elicit. From that moment on, I was hooked on the proverbial drug that is travel and have been chasing that high ever since.

But the more I see, the more I do, the more I’m finding that travel no longer makes me feel the way it used to. No matter how far I travel it always feels like that bewildered excitement is just out of reach. Call me a filthy addict, but it’s almost like I’ve built up a travel tolerance. There are no veins left in this arm. I have to find new places to inject travel into my bloodstream to conjure the same kind of feelings I did when I was younger.

This could be an age thing. Science tells us that as we get older, our brains produce less serotonin which could explain the gulf in the emotions between how I felt then to what I feel now.

Even the photos of me were better back then

The logical solution to this is to travel to new places. Better yet, crazy places, places that don’t just push you outside your comfort zone but kick you out of the door.

While I think this has some merit, these out-of-comfort experiences will never quite measure up to the formative ones we have when we first leave our familiar shores. Nothing has made me feel the same way as I did when I arrived on my first Thai beach.

I stepped onto the sand and giggled while Porcelain by Moby played in the back of my head [say what you will about The Beach but the soundtrack was killer].

After falling into the ocean and washing the overnight bus from Bangkok to Krabi out of my bones, I spent the next hour trouncing up and down the beach in search of the most affordable guest house before inevitably settling on the first one that I found anyway.

It was terrible. The room didn’t even have a door and yet when I think about it I get this kind of painful nostalgia that is conjured through a rose-coloured lens.

Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe all my new travel experiences have to work so much harder because they’re competing against the memory of my old ones and memory is, at best, selective. I don’t remember the mosquitoes that kept me up all night or the fact that I had to take my passport out with me out of fear of being robbed. I remember how beautiful the beach was and how delicious that thirty baht pad thai tasted and how magical it was watching the sun go down with a beer in hand as I floated in bath-warm water.

There have been some advantages to getting older, wiser, and a little more experienced when I travel. I get ripped off way less, for one. I’ve also developed a better mastery of some of the local languages which has opened up a whole new side of travel to me, helping me connect with places on a much deeper level than ever before.

My first trip to Japan, for example, was spent mostly getting lost in Shinjuku Station, eating dishes I didn’t order, and getting hit with service charges that left me scratching my head and wondering if the whole country was playing some sort of financial joke on me.

Now, being able to speak a passable amount of Japanese, I’ve met people and seen parts of the country I never would have been able to back then. I’ve discovered hidden beaches, experienced the joys of hanamis, and eaten in restaurants that would have otherwise turned me away with an awkward smile and a gomenasai. I’ve been privileged enough to see a side of Japan that few tourists will ever get to experience.

And yet…

I’d trade it all for the pure, heady joy I felt when I stepped into my first Japanese convenience store and spent an hour browsing through the shelves.

People often talk about watching movies or listening to albums for the first time again, just so they can experience the same magic one more time. I wish I could do this for travel, too. I wish I could go back and step onto my first Thai beach, open the door to my first Japanese convenience store, and experience my first aperitivo hour all over again.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that if you’re reading this and you’re just starting your travels, you should treasure these experiences. Keep a journal, curate your photos, and listen to certain albums so that whenever you hear that album again, you’ll be transported back to that time and place. Do everything you can to appreciate those first trips because even if we could magically experience these things for the first time again, something tells me they still wouldn’t burn as brightly as they did back then.