>I am now lucky enough to have the opportunity to travel to many different countries and I sadly realized that this planet is not nearly as big as I hoped when I was a kid.
Fly less. I find that my sense of how big the world is is related to how frequently I fly Vs traveling by train, bus, motorcycle or anything else really.
Hurtling from one airport to another at ~800km/hr gives you a false impression about the distances you are covering. I suspect the speeds are simply so fast that we don't have the ability to intuitively appreciate just how far we are traveling. When you take slower forms of transport you suddenly realize how freaking huge the world is.
Flying also isolates you from the area you are traveling across. When you don't fly you see that there is in fact a vast amount of stuff (cities, towns, farming areas, mountains, rivers etc) between the airports. When I fly a lot the world is reduced to a network of airports.
An example from my own life. My wife and I once flew to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia then traveled overland (trains and buses with the occasional ferry) through Malaysia, up through Thailand, around part of Laos, back into Thailand and then over into Cambodia.
Travel time => 8 months.
My impression of how big the world is => absolutely massive.
Then we flew back from Phnom Penh to Kuala Lumpur, where we started.
Travel time => less than 2 hours in the air.
After a few additional flights, my impression of how big the world is => tiny.
>I am now lucky enough to have the opportunity to travel to many different countries and I sadly realized that this planet is not nearly as big as I hoped when I was a kid.
Fly less. I find that my sense of how big the world is is related to how frequently I fly Vs traveling by train, bus, motorcycle or anything else really.
Hurtling from one airport to another at ~800km/hr gives you a false impression about the distances you are covering. I suspect the speeds are simply so fast that we don't have the ability to intuitively appreciate just how far we are traveling. When you take slower forms of transport you suddenly realize how freaking huge the world is.
Flying also isolates you from the area you are traveling across. When you don't fly you see that there is in fact a vast amount of stuff (cities, towns, farming areas, mountains, rivers etc) between the airports. When I fly a lot the world is reduced to a network of airports.
An example from my own life. My wife and I once flew to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia then traveled overland (trains and buses with the occasional ferry) through Malaysia, up through Thailand, around part of Laos, back into Thailand and then over into Cambodia.
Travel time => 8 months.
My impression of how big the world is => absolutely massive.
Then we flew back from Phnom Penh to Kuala Lumpur, where we started.
Travel time => less than 2 hours in the air.
After a few additional flights, my impression of how big the world is => tiny.