Travel is an experience like no other. It can elevate your spirit and expand your perspective. It provides you with a view of the world that you can’t get by staying at home. It’s truly immersive and allows you to push past your edges so that you’re no longer complacent but willing to try new things.
Touching, Tasting, Seeing, Hearing, and Smelling the World Around You
A big part of your travel experience is through your senses. Your sense of sight helps you pay close attention to details you may have not noticed before. Your sense of touch helps you connect to different objects, particularly ones that excite or comfort you. When you taste something incredible, you can note each ingredient by memory.
Without a sense of touch, taste, sight, hearing, and smell, you’d miss out on so many things while traveling. It’s important to keep an open mind about the world around you. That way, you don’t miss out.
How to Have a More Immersive Travel Experience
Here are some suggestions for engaging your senses while traveling:
- Look for interesting textures to feel. Hold the item in your hand and note how it feels to touch it. Is it smooth, rough, prickly or soft? What is it made out of? Is it naturally textured or does a human add texture to it? Can you photograph the texture so others can see what it looks like and envision how it feels?
- Try foods that you’ve never eaten.Look for ingredients that are unique to the area. What makes them special? Are they spicy, silky, sweet, bitter or even repulsive? Is it something you’d eat once but never consume again? Why do you say that?
- Pay close attention to minor details.Try to take a big picture approach to everything you look at. Pay attention to colors, patterns, and materials. Try seeing things from different vantage points and note how they change in appearance. Are they smaller or bigger? Shorter or wider? More or less attractive?
- Listen to the sounds going on around you. If you were to close your eyes, would you recognize where you’re at? How would you differentiate one place from another? If you were to assign a location a single sound, what would it be? Is there a soundtrack you could create for each city or country that you visit?
- What smells do you recognize? Are there scents that you love? What about ones that you hate? If you could sum up how a city smelled, how would you describe it? Do you have a favorite place to visit that smells incredible? Writing about it in your travel journal helps you remember it in vivid detail.
Make travel a full-body experience by engaging your senses wherever you go. Don’t let your eyes and ears be the only things getting a workout. You can touch, taste, and smell things, too. Taking note of how certain things make you feel heightens your travels and helps you fall in love with a place. You’re aware of things that other people may have never noticed before about an area you’ve traveled to.
