My name is Jin. I'm honored to have you reading my blog. I hope you enjoy it. I'd like to share a little about what inspired me in the first place to start Travel in the Raw.
In 2013, I left everything behind and began traveling around the world. I knew there was more to life than sitting in front of a desk and wanted to see what that was.
Two years into my travels, I was starting to realize that as fun as it was to visit waterfall after waterfall or some shiny temple, just going from one destination to the next was starting to lose its luster.
When I looked back at all the moments I experienced until that point, the memories that stood out the most had nothing to do with sightseeing. Those moments had everything to do with feeling alive; feeling human.
It was in new experiences like spearfishing for the first time with locals in Fiji. It was in feeling the sheer power and beauty of raw, untouched nature in Western Australia. It was in human connections like being invited for a drink in a hill tribe man's humble shack in Vietnam or sitting around with locals in Indonesia, singing and playing guitar late into the night.
Since having had this tiny travel revelation, I've been on a quest to tap into this new found feeling of aliveness. Our modern world has become so convenient, comfortable and automated. It's not a bad life, and its filled with familiarity and a sense of security. So we choose to live in it, regardless of how unnatural it may be, especially when you consider our more primal roots.
Travel is such a great way to immerse into worlds that have a more traditional, natural way of life. Unfortunately, even travel is starting to become a pre-planned packaged tour. But it doesn't have to be.
That's why I created this blog. To inspire other travelers to think outside typical sightseeing routes and conventional ways of traveling. To tap into that natural, raw life that is still somewhere out there. And maybe even feel something that we may not have the luxury to experience forever: to feel alive.
