I Hate Traveling. I am Traveling Anyway.

My ideal mode of transportation is teleportation.

I would like to close my eyes in Lagos and open them in Seoul, my suitcase standing gallantly beside me. No airport, no security line, no sixteen hours spent sitting upright while different parts of my body slowly begin to hurt. Just Lagos, darkness, South Korea.

I would also accept super speed.

When I first watched The Flash, I spent an embarrassing amount of time imagining myself with Barry Allen’s powers. I could cross cities and continents without traffic, planes, or strangers lowering their seats into my lap.

This tells you everything important about my relationship with travel: I don’t hate new places. I hate the trouble of getting to them.

I hate traffic. I hate driving because it makes me anxious. I hate long flights, whether I’m in economy or business class. More legroom can make suffering luxurious, but it remains suffering.

I’ve developed ridiculous systems for surviving flights. Sometimes I exhaust myself beforehand, calculating that if I sleep for seven hours on a fourteen-hour flight, I’ll have only seven hours left to endure consciously. I also watch an unreasonable number of films on long flights. Hollywood becomes anesthesia. If I’m absorbed enough in somebody else’s crisis, perhaps I won’t notice that my butt has gone numb.

This would be easier to understand if I disliked arriving at destinations.

But I love arriving.

Before the pandemic, I wasn’t exactly Anthony Bourdain, but my world had a larger radius. Sometimes I left Nigeria, sometimes I explored more of Nigeria itself. At one point, I decided I wanted to see more of the North, and so I did. I wanted to visit Ghana, and I went. When I lived in Bradford, I traveled around the United Kingdom and Europe because it seemed a terrible waste to move countries only to see Bradford.

Then the pandemic happened.

Like everyone else, I stayed inside. I worked behind a computer. I watched things, read things, and learned how to conduct almost the whole of my life indoors.

The strange thing was that when the world opened again, some part of me remained closed. I didn’t just stop traveling. I stopped going out too.

Home was easier. Everything I liked was there: my television, my K-dramas, my films, my bed, my routines, my peace.

Nothing catastrophic happens when you become comfortable. The walls simply move inward until, one day, you realize that your world has become very small.

That began to bother me.

I don’t like not knowing things. My friends know that if they tell me a story, I’ll probably ask, “But what’s the context?”

What happened before? Why did the person do that? What am I missing?

I don’t always need to agree. I just need to understand.

I’ve been trying to read more because of this. I’ve been listening to podcasts and learning about industries, products, companies, countries, cultures, and people. I’ve failed spectacularly at some of these goals. I’ve bought books I haven’t finished and saved articles I may never open.

But one thing I’ve managed to do this year is travel. I began traveling again because I realized that there are things you can’t learn secondhand.

I can read about Doha, watch documentaries about it, and listen to podcasts explaining how it became what it is. None of this is the same as standing there.

There’s a difference between knowing that another reality exists and encountering it. I’d begun to worry about what might happen if I encountered the world only through the reality I already knew.

I don’t want to become one of those people who believes the world is exactly as large as their own experience. If they haven’t seen something, it can’t exist. If another way of living doesn’t make sense according to the logic of their own life, then it must be foolish.

This kind of certainty drives me mad, partly because I’ve caught myself practicing it. The world is too large for such confidence. Billions of people have inherited different histories and built different systems. They have different ideas about family, money, beauty, government, work, faith, and ambition.

My Nigerian reality is one reality, but it isn’t the blueprint for humanity.

Quite frankly, Nigeria isn’t the blueprint for anything.

I wanted more reference points.

This matters personally, but it also matters to my work. I’m a storyteller. My job requires me to understand people, motivation, behavior, culture, products, businesses, and ambition. It requires me to notice things and make connections between them.

My storytelling will be shitty if my inputs are shitty. If everything I know comes from the same people, internet feeds, conversations, and cultural references, I’ll eventually run out of interesting things to say.

Travel isn’t a cure for this. Some people have visited fifty countries and learned nothing except how to take the same photograph in fifty locations. But for me, travel is one way to interrupt familiarity.

At the beginning of this year, I decided I would explore more. I would read more, listen more, ask more questions, and deliberately move beyond the small circle of what was already comfortable.

Travel became the most visible part of that experiment.

There was also a less philosophical reason: I looked at my very green, very Nigerian passport. It was almost empty, and this annoyed me immensely.

For years, I had said I wanted to see new countries and build a travel history. Yet my passport looked like it belonged to someone who had no intention of going anywhere.

So I decided that this would be my year of reckless spending on travel. (Please don’t use this essay as the foundation of your personal finance strategy. I’m clearly irresponsible)

For years, I thought: If I travel, I’ll be broke. Then I discovered something profound.

Without traveling, I was still broke. So, why not be broke and travel?

There’s certainly a flaw in this logic, but I’ve decided not to examine it until next year.

This decision is complicated by the fact that I’m Nigerian. There’s nothing like a green passport to turn the romantic idea of seeing the world into a bureaucratic performance.

Travel often begins with proving yourself. You submit your bank statements, employment records, hotel reservations, and evidence that you have reasons to return home. You place your life before an unseen person who will decide whether you deserve to enter another country for eight days.

I’ve had visa applications rejected. They hurt. A rejection can make you feel foolish for wanting something. You gather your documents and your hope, pay a fee that won’t be returned, and wait for a stranger to tell you what your wanting is worth.

So some of my reasons for traveling are practical. I want a stronger travel history. I want future visa applications to be easier. I want immigration officers to open my passport and decide to stress somebody else.

Not every motivation needs to be noble.

So far this year, I’ve visited three countries. I’m tempted to say “only three,” but that would be unfair to the version of me who barely traveled at all. I’m incredibly proud of myself.

I mostly travel with tour groups because I don’t have the time or patience to plan complicated itineraries. But I’ve discovered that group tours suit me because they organize the things I naturally want to do: city tours, museums, historical sites, and cultural landmarks.

Give me an expert who can answer questions, and I’ll follow them around all day: Who built this? What happened here? Why does the city look this way? What stood here before?

I like speaking to people who live in the places I visit too. What’s it actually like to live here? What do you complain about? What do you love? What does a person visiting for five days misunderstand?

I’m less interested in collecting destinations than I am in collecting context.

Singapore fascinated me. Here was a country without Nigeria’s abundance of natural resources, yet it had built something extraordinary through trade, tourism, manufacturing, and even oil refining.

Standing there, I thought about possibility. When you live inside a system for long enough, its limitations can begin to feel like natural law. Then you go somewhere else and remember: Oh, things can be different. Not perfect. Different.

I’ve also done things while traveling that the version of me sitting comfortably at home would never volunteer to do. I’ve gone ziplining, ridden cable cars, and climbed onto rides that genuinely terrified me. I’ve tried things because I was already somewhere unfamiliar and had temporarily lost the right to act as though comfort were my highest purpose.

This is what I’ve enjoyed most. Not traveling itself, but the expansion.

I wish I could say this year has transformed me into someone who loves traveling, but it hasn’t.

I still hate long flights, and I still want Barry Allen’s powers. I remain convinced that teleportation would do more for civilization than many of the technological innovations currently receiving venture capital.

But I’m traveling anyway.

I’m traveling because I enjoy what happens to my mind when I arrive. I like learning something I didn’t know, seeing something I hadn’t imagined, and discovering that an assumption I carried confidently across a border was wrong.

At the end of this year, success won’t be the number of countries I can list or the number of stamps in my passport. It will be what followed me home: did something I saw give me a new story? Did I understand someone differently? Did my sense of what is possible grow larger?

I don’t know yet.

But my world feels bigger than it did at the beginning of the year. For now, that is enough.