#WordDOPE 2015 – A new list of TRAVEL WORDS

Every word has a story. For some its a short one, for some a transcending one, and for some its the story of their life. Compiling a brand new list of Travel Words that you ought to know in 2015, StreetTrotter also brings along ten Travel Bloggers with their ten soulful personal stories – each inspired from a word that changed their life. To support this exhilarating WordDope we also have on-board Vlad Suslov, a 17-year-old Russian artist who collaborated with us to create some equally mesmerizing artworks.  

So brush up your vocab, take your pick, and tell us which of these travel words is closest to your travel story? 

I continuously find myself crying in the back of taxi cabs, pouting in the corner of hostels, wandering streets aimlessly wondering what I’ve gotten myself into. While there is always excitement and thrill of the unknown, I’ll reach a point shortly after arriving that I question my decision: What am I doing here? Why did I come by alone? What am I getting myself into again?

At the beginning of any new journey, mixed emotions of fear one moment and exhilaration the next will race through my brain and get my heart pumping. Adrenaline is a good word to describe it, but the kind of adrenaline where you don’t know if you’re super stoked or about to have a mental breakdown. There’s a thin line. While I tend to look back at these vulnerable moments and laugh, I appreciate them nonetheless. Would a journey be as grand and influential if it never messed with your head?

By Kelsey Ohleger of www.routewords.com

The travel word ‘coddiwomple’ perfectly relates to me as a traveler. Ever since I quit my corporate job in the Philippines in order to travel the world, I have been ‘coddiwompling’ around the globe! I say this because I didn’t have any particular destination in mind — in fact, up until now, I don’t plan so much at all for my next destinations. I simply just have this sole purpose and desire to constantly keep moving and to see everything for as much as I could. “I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.”

By Aileen Adalid of www.iamaileen.com

There’s a certain magic in every new place you end up while traveling and there’s a certain something in every person you meet on the road and you connect with. There are places and people you connect with like you have been there before or like you were meant to be there in that precise moment. There are moments while traveling which fade away in the blink of an eye but have an impact on you like something divine and inexplicable has been poured through your veins and became part of you like they have been there all along but you just can’t explain how.

Maybe we are not the ones that choose the places we see or end up in…maybe the places choose us and sometimes we end up right where we were supposed to be from the beginning. Prayer time in Krishna Temple in Jaipur, the cold floor and children laughter in Besakih Temple in Bali, feet in white sand under palm trees on a beach in the Philippines, a boat floating on the Mekong Delta on a rainy day, the tensed hands of the Apsara dancers, a hand holding your hand on a crowded street in Prague…numinous.

By Irina of www.areyouhappytravel.com

I do my utmost to be a Livsnjutare. As my foundation I have five elements, like a spider web they are all connected. If all are present nothing can make me happier. If I was a bottle of liquid, the ingredient label would say:

1 incredible husband
a lot of journeys
a lot of artwork
a lot of written words
a lot of knowledge from books

Use all 5 ingredients regular. I don’t function without my husband; he’s my No.1 above all. Traveling overwhelms me with. Unfamiliar scents, different architecture, grand cultures; leads me to make my art. I create new adventures. My writing is an extension and is well connected with the two previously. Instead of drawing I write and relive my adventures through stories. Reading has since I was a little girl been a huge part of who I am. I strive for knowledge and written fairy tales.

By Kirsten K. Kester of www.globetrotterinawheelchair.com

Since my first travels abroad I’ve been longing to replicate the same feeling of “this must never end”. That first trip to Venice woke a wanderlust in me that I’ve been trying to sedate now for the past four years. I long to feel that level of excitement again, and though I’ve been travelling full-time for the past three years, I wonder if I’ll ever eclipse that feeling. I’m constantly striving to travel and experience the world in the same way, in a way that will provoke my interest again; but for all the bright lights of modern travel and tourism, I feel that the feeling I once had is lost for me for evermore. I hope my travels tomorrow prove me wrong.

By Dale Davies of Angloitalian – slow vegan travel blog

My eighteenth birthday was the most invaluable gift I ever gave myself. It signified my freedom and platinum pass to leave my parents home in South East England and never come back. At first, it started with an insatiable itch to move from one place to the other in the UK every year. I told myself I was doing it to get the best jobs in Psychology at the time but that’s a lie. I craved stark contrasts, unfamiliar smells, overwhelming sights, random people and the challenge of establishing myself over and over again. The overwhelming desire to run away from a place regularly is like a drug to me. I cherish everything about each year. I count my blessings everyday for all the experiences a country gives me. Relentlessly though, the heat in my heels soon enough reaches boiling point and I’m off again before you can say ‘drapetomani!’

By Alice Nettleingham of www.teacaketravels.com

My travel style is solivagant, wandering alone in a foreign place discovering hidden gems along the streets of wherever I am. My traveling spirit resists being guided along the tourist route with an experience easily portrayed in travel brochures. I enjoy the freedom wandering solo provides, an intermittent flâneur. Whether I am in India or some other bustling location full of exotic smells and noise, I choose to wander by myself to focus on what is around me rather than distracted conversations or the expectations of who is alongside me. I get to mingle with the chai wallas and street food vendors. Solivagant has provided me the freedom to find myself, lose myself, and continue to have insane adventures, like being thrown onto a moving train.

By Jacqueline Berman

For me, Sturmfrei means that I make my own decisions and also make my own consequences – be they good or bad. This has always been my way and this means living my life by my own rules. I do believe that I am very respectful of other people and other cultures, but maybe not so much with authority. I really have never liked being told what to do, ask Gordon. In fact, I tend to go the opposite way, just because I can. It means that I am my own best friend and at times my own worst enemy.

By Paula of www.contentedtraveller.com

Freedom is one of those tricky words, depending on who you are talking to, the meaning can change. It’s impossible to define as it has a different meaning to everyone. However, you will never know its true meaning until you have experienced it for yourself. Once you’ve tasted its true powers there is no going back to the way it used to be. You crave it, you obsess about it, you have this zeal to always have it and specifically for us we travel the world for it.

Traveling has made us experience what freedom really is. I can tell you it’s not that bullshit illusion that they feed us in our daily life. Freedom is to not be bound, constrained, chained and enslaved by possessions, jobs, status, legacy, but most of all money. But what has truly opened our eyes was our recent re-entry to the rat race after traveling long term. We finally realized what the true meaning of freedom really is.

Freedom is that soaring eagle you see high in the sky, the ability to truly BE, without a care in the world, to be free to learn, to choose, to live and to ultimately be self controlling. We are at the point where we want to eat, sleep and shit freedom. We need it and traveling is the only drug that can give us our daily dose. Our ultimate goal is TO BE FREE! That is why we are Eleutheromaniacs.

By Ben & Jazzy of www.roadaffair.com

I often wonder what made me really move to Travel. It was never about ‘seeing the whole world before I die’ kind of feeling for me, I am sure of that. Neither was it about the global architecture, meeting new people, visiting new places or drifting into new experiences. In that deep place inside my soul I knew this was all secondary.

Back in 2013 I traveled solo for the first time in my life. Sometime in that moment I closed my eyes, looked at the never-ending mountains that surrounded me and felt the air that I was breathing. It was so clean that I actually for the first time in my life realized what pure really means. In a mode of deep meditation I tried to block all the sounds that distracted me until I was left with only one. It was the sound of a gong beating in a distant temple. For a while I heard nothing, felt nothing and thought of nothing that was actually around me in a tangible state. What was real was everything intangible – as if I was transported to a world that was far away from human race. It was a certain awareness of the universe that surprised me forever. I never thought that ‘space’ had a deeper meaning to it. And we were only a tiny dot in this whole universal space of life. I wondered if existing as that dot was only enough for the rest of my life. Or was I supposed to move and find a purpose within this world…?

As the moment passed I opened my eyes, only to realize that this state of ‘yūgen’ was my true reason to travel and will always be.

By Shraddha Gupta of www.StreetTrotter.com

P.S. For more travel words – check out our previous list of 2014: http://streettrotter.com/2014/06/06/10-essential-travel-words-for-2014/