Travelling Without Moving

The title of this article, Travelling Without Moving, was taken from the Jamiroquai’s album released in 1996. Why I choose this phrase as the title of my new article? Here’s the story.

One fine day, like usual, I was trapped in the middle of long line of cars somewhere in Jakarta, and I’ve got nothing to do about it, so I listened to the radio and there was a phone conversation between the announcer and a lady. The topic is about memorable places that you’ve experienced.

I didn’t notice nor follow all the conversation, but then the announcer asked the lady, “So, what is your hobby?”. The lady on the other side answered, “Travelling”. “Really? You mean to the exotic places, like those backpackers?”, said the announcer.

“Hmmm, not really. I like to go to the shopping mall or just hanging out with my colleagues afterwork on Friday night”.

What the…? Travelling and window shopping are two different things!! Travelling in this context means that you have to make a journey, a quite long one, to find new experience. I’m not talking about making an 80 kilometres journey a day to catch your workplace. That’s what I do everyday, and still I didn’t call myself a “traveller”! How come she can call herself “traveller” if all she can do is just walking three hundred metres around the corner of her office to buy a cold cup of mocca frappucino in Starbucks and spend her salary on Mango sack dress?

It’s not that I don’t like that kind of lifestyle. I watch movies at cinema once a week, buy Rockport shoes because they just fit my feet, and wear Oakley glasses to protect my eyes from that harmful uv light. But I will not consider myself as a “traveller” if I never been to Poso Lake, watch people from Nias Island jump over a 2,5 m rock lively, take pictures next to the skulls of the dead in Torajanese graveyard –or gravecave, and feed the orang-utans in Bukit Barisan mountain directly from my own hands.

That’s the problem of today’s people. The hectic citylife, the consumerism that all the TV stations offer, and misleading in basic education teaching system lead us to become a “one place” person, a person who doesn’t have the curiosity of Indonesia’s cultural differences, a person who always thinks that pizza is much tastier than blakutak (I bet not many people know what “blakutak” is), and a person who doesn’t even know on what island Gorontalo is.