For the first few years of my life, the closest I have ever come to travelling were my epic journeys to Middle Earth or down the Rabbit Hole to reach Wonderland. Not to mention the magical world of Narnia or the mystical island of Never land.

Although these experiences enthralled me, I could hardly begin to imagine how diverse and fabulously fascinating yet unfamiliar the rest of the world was. There is a certain air of vibrancy unique to each and every country.  Clearly, travelling overseas broadens your mind. I personally realized that it helped me experience a way of life that I hardly could in London.

I love to travel. It gives me the opportunity to taste different cultures. I love the excitement of arriving somewhere new; of hearing a new language and trying to make sense of it; of trying different foods; of muddling my way through an alien transport system; of seeing the sights that have enthralled me since I saw them in atlases and children’s encyclopaedias.

As well as adults, travelling opens the eyes and minds of our younger generation. Children become much more tolerant, less fearful and more understanding of people and situations that are different.  

Many of us who grow up in urban and cosmopolitan areas are cloistered away from primitive, rural and simple lives. Also, given the high degree of globalization that tends to consume cities, we often have less opportunities to truly understand cultures and heritages - even our own! When visiting our home countries, or even our home towns where we’ve spent half our lives, we may often feel as though we ourselves are tourists. Why? Because  

Travelling to different parts of the world allows us to fill up gaps in our knowledge of the world. For instance, we can learn about cloistered Catholic convents or monasteries in Spain, experience the fullness of love and religion in the Taj Mahal and feel how people truly make the most out of nature in African tribes. It's pretty difficult to gain first - hand knowledge of all these life's treasures if we remain in modern cities our whole lives!

During my trip to Greece, I experienced the rich aura of power and heritage at the Parthenos. It opened my eyes to the range of beliefs that had previously existed, and maybe still do exist in the precious few, today. The stunning architecture and magnificence accompanied by the years of history brings the setting to life.  

In addition, travelling to new places puts you in new situations; even unpleasant experiences serve to broaden the mind: the lack of hygiene, the lack of safety, the abundance of poverty.

In Kerala, India, students have to walk up and down numerous hills for hours just to get to school and then embark on yet another tedious journey back home later during the day. Perhaps living there for a month or two - where our modern-day creature comforts would be taken away from us - would enable us to truly appreciate all that we have.

However, in order to broaden the mind, one must be willing to accept and digest all that they have seen so that they may incorporate all that they have learnt in their daily lives. It may mean that they make those first few steps and change a little by little, or that they accommodate a whole new way of life.

To travel is to drift down the river of knowledge and arouse each and every one of our senses so that we can build on the most fundamental of human nature: to learn from other and surroundings but simply on a larger scale.