“Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colours… coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.” - Terry Pratchett

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Founding The Explorer Society fundamentally changed the way we approached our own lives. We had travelled the world a lot prior to it being formed, and had undertaken adventurous expeditions of our own. But now, as part of The Explorer Society, we finally found ourselves with clear guidelines with which to approach more than just our own travels. And it made us rethink what makes an explorer, compared to a tourist and a traveller.

A ‘tourist’ is something we all understand. It is someone who travels and gains perhaps a surface-level understanding of a destination. And, although this may come as a surprise, that’s fine. Each to their own. Sometimes people don’t want to go somewhere to learn something new but instead simply go somewhere to leave something behind. It might be a week of sun for those from miserable climates or a week without responsibilities for harried parents stuck as a child delivery service. ‘Travellers’ meanwhile are those that enjoy the act of travelling. This can be equally those who travel in set bursts and holidays or those who live out of a caravan for months on end. The travel and the highlights that travel brings are the point, with an additional focus on soaking in all that destinations have to offer.

We have been both of those groups. In fact, you can be multiple ones at the same time. But, for us, being an ‘explorer’ is best.

Despite the common belief, an explorer isn’t just someone who holds the record of the ‘first’, or the ‘fastest’, or the ‘furthest’. It isn’t just limited to those travelling a century ago, or those now with unlimited budgets trying to leave Earth’s orbit. These are perhaps examples of famous or accomplished explorers, but that doesn’t define the term.

An explorer, by its truest definition, is someone who “travels through an unfamiliar area in order to learn about it.” This can equally mean scaling the highest peaks of the earth or just taking a new and different way home from the supermarket. Travelling overseas is an easy way to encourage that as it forces new things upon you, but it isn’t the only way. For the best way to approach being an explorer, look at young kids. Everything is new to them, and so they are curious and interested in everything. Seeing the world from a child’s eyes may be a cliché but it is one that holds true. Meanwhile, as a teenager or a young adult, we are taking on so many new experiences and emotions, searching for connection and full of passion, that our memory pathways supercharge. It’s not a coincidence that for many of us our younger years of 16 to 26 years of age seem to be the brightest memories. It affects the music we hold fondly and the friendships we keep. But then, as we age, the world loses its lustre. We settle into routines, into careers, into relationships. We settle into patterns. It’s been clinically studied that time seems to move by faster the older we get. This is for a few reasons, one of which is that we no longer have any memory milestones to attach time to. Without definitive moments of adventure and exploration to attach a memory to, then life slowly starts to blend into one long haze.

So, how do we fix that? We just need to make memory milestones. We take new pathways home, experience new events and try new ways of doing things. You can brush your teeth with your opposite hand for example. We explore new ways of doing or seeing things, and in return, our lives become richer and fuller. Exploring can be a bit scary, as suddenly the familiar comforting road is gone. It isn’t always great, like when you discover that you really don’t like the new dish you just spent $30 on. And, it isn’t always easy.

But it is fun. Even the failures make for good stories. And the good things open up new doors to new cultures, to new people, or new windows to new worlds.

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“To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted” - Bill Bryson

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This Society we founded forced us to rethink our own well-trodden paths. Were there things as a travel professional that we were doing because it was the way it was always ‘just done’? The answer was yes, and it encouraged us to change how we ran our company. It even changed the places and experiences we offer our own explorers, which is one of the reasons they are so well received.

As a traveller ourselves, were there things we did that had become old habits? Yes, and it meant that we looked for new experiences in countries, even if we had visited them frequently.

And, as a human, did it change our approach to life? Absolutely. We now try to approach everything with an open mind, instead of thinking we know best. It’s not easy, but we sometimes zig when we used to zag, or even explore new ways of getting our kids to school. No longer is the week just a race to get to the weekend, but each day is now a chance to see something new.

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“We live in a wonderful world that is full of beauty, charm and adventure. There is no end to the adventures we can have if only we seek them with our eyes open.” - Jawaharlal Nehru

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And why did we decide to approach everything like an explorer? Well, let’s be frank: We are all going to die one day.

Technology may advance and medicine may work marvels, but one day there will come a time when our journey ends. This may seem confronting, especially in an article coming from a travel company, but this sort of thinking is actually crucial to the belief of any explorer. As life goes on we all become more risk-averse, from our approach to life to our superannuation balance, but reward often doesn’t come without risk. Accepting risk is not the same as being reckless. Being reckless is going ahead without any care for the negative results. Risk is looking at the options and making a calculated decision. It’s for this reason we travel to areas that some find scary. But, in the end, when ‘the end’ is in sight, the risk of doing nothing is far greater.

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“And then there is the most dangerous risk of all – the risk of spending your life not doing what you want on the bet you can buy yourself the freedom to do it later.” - Randy Komisar

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It sounds quite brutal, but once you realise that time is finite, then you might be encouraged to see the world differently. You can even use this approach to encourage you to explore more. For example, imagine you are 60 years old and you love to swim in the ocean but, you only really do it once a year. With an average life expectancy of 80 years, this means you only have 20 swims left. Each one of those 20 swims is now far more valuable, and it might even encourage you to jump in the ocean on a day when it is a bit chilly, or you feel bloated. That attitude is the explorer mindset. When now you are faced with the choice to simply let the day slip past, you also have the choice to use that time to see more of this world.

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“I can’t control the wind but I can adjust the sail.” - Ricky Skaggs

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This world of ours, despite its faults, is undoubtedly an amazing place. Nature has provided stunning environments for countless fascinating creatures to live. On top of it, we have humans, each with their own rich and unique culture, capable of such incredible acts of kindness, creativity and ingenuity. Despite the bad things that happen within our cultures, the vast majority of the eight billion people who call this planet home are good, with fundamental lives not too different from ours. Being curious about our differences and celebrating our commonality, without a sense of placing one above the other, is the mark of an explorer.

That’s why we created The Explorer Society. We wanted to spend our days working with other like-minded people planning out adventures. The name isn’t just a catchy title, it also underpins our belief that life, and this world, is meant to be explored. That can be the world we help you see, from the depth of the Congo to the Antarctic. But, it can also be the world you already live in.

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Happy exploring.

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