1000th

Arnastapi. Favourite place in Iceland so far

So after 6 years of blogging... I have finally reached my one thousandth blog post! Happy 1000th my dear! Thank you for being such an awesome friend to talk to every night. Thank you for helping me to write my daily happenings. Thank you for writing my memories. And sorry that I can be a bitch at times when my mood isn't great and stuff. But I'm glad to have you, and even more glad that we've been together for 6 years, and many more to come! :)

Well my goal is to reach the 1000th post before I turn twenty five. Because well last year I thought I won't be able to reach it, so I gave myself an extra time to hit this goal. But hey I did it! Not sure if I can reach the 2000th post in the next 6 years. Because I'll probably get busier as the year goes by. But I am going to try to keep up with the 100 posts at least every year. Which is my resolution this year too, and looks like I'm on the right track so far.

Today is the 17th of August and it is Indonesia's independence day! Wishing my beautiful country a wonderful 69th birthday! We may not be awesome throughout these 69 years, but I am very sure we are going to be awesome in more years to come. We may be far from other countries but we are beautiful in our own unique ways. Don't give up Indonesia, you can do it, we can do it. Though we have a long way to go, so will we walk forward the bright future days!

Right, since it's my 1000th post... I'm going to dedicate this post to my recent trip to Iceland. Since I've finished blogging about my days there, I'm now going to talk about my thoughts about the trip. My thoughts about traveling, to be exact traveling alone. And well about life.

Going to Iceland has been a dream of mine ever since I discovered how beautiful it is through the my favourite band, Sigur Ros. Listening to their songs, make me imagine the beautiful landscape the country has. And watching their documentary film, Heima, makes me really determined to go there. I've kept on telling myself to go there "before I die" or in "one day". But of course I realised this one day will never arrive if we never decided when is this one day.

So I told myself last year that I have to go there in 2014. Before I forget the existence of this one day, as life and time slowly consumes me. This "one day" will just turn into a day where I will forget about this dream of mine. A day, where this dream will turn into dust inside the depths of my memories. I wouldn't want that to happen. So I decided to go to Iceland this year, I started searching for possible dates etc. All these happened a year before.

As the days go by, many things come to my mind. Doubts, fears and many more. All of the things that were trying to make me choose another "one day" to go to Iceland instead of the one I planned to go to. I tried to calm myself down, and I toughened myself to jump past these hurdles. I just went ahead to book my tickets and accommodation, I went to the Danish consular service to get my visa done. And then when I received my passport, with the Schengen visa pasted on one of its pages, I just asked myself "am I really going to Iceland now?"

I have to say it wasn't an easy journey. But I am so glad I did it all.

It felt so surreal to finally be on the flight I've been dreaming of getting on. It felt so surreal to land in Keflavik airport, to walk around Reykjavik, and to see the rugged and different landscapes of Iceland. The past four years Iceland was just in my dreams and in my mind. The only way I can see it is through photos and videos in the internet, or through Instagram (recently). Do you know that I've been searching for #reykjavik on Instagram every night before I sleep the past one year or so? That's how badly I want to go there. Sounds silly, but it's real.

So yes, it feels weird that 2 weeks ago I was in Reykjavik taking photos on my Instagram and putting #reykjavik in my photos. And to see the sights I've been seeing through the photos of other people, with my own eyes this time round.

Iceland is the first country that I traveled alone to, without knowing anyone. Well I traveled to Bali alone last year. But Bali is part of my country. The people there speak the same language as mine. Iceland is definitely my biggest wanderlust journey. To be in a totally new place I've never been to, and where I know nobody. It was an adventure, a pretty fun one.

Perhaps I'm thankful of my experience, being a foreign student in Singapore. That 2 years or so of living alone in Singapore have given me so much independence, that traveling alone doesn't appear to be a problem for me. In fact, I enjoy traveling alone. There are a lot of perks you can get from traveling alone. Sure it may seem daunting and sad and emo at the same time to think of traveling alone. But well, only if you tried it once, you'll understand why.

Traveling alone allows you to be yourself. You go to a new place where no one knows you and you know no one. You are truly being yourself in this case. You know how sometimes we behave differently to people we know well and to strangers. To me traveling alone is one of the times in this life where you feel the world doesn't own you anything (well it doesn't actually, anytime).

And by being yourself, traveling alone allows you to know yourself better. You have no one accompanying you, only yourself. This is the perfect time to get to know yourself better. You'll have conversations with no one but yourself. You will eat with no one but yourself etc. We spend so much time with other people, we neglect who we truly are.

Traveling alone allows you to forget about life. It feels like you have entered a new place, out of your comfort zone. Whatever you left behind will be forgotten for a while. Sometimes you get so busy trying to keep yourself safe, or to enjoy the moments of your travel, you truly forget what life is!

I love traveling in particular. It is my biggest bucket list item to travel around the world. Not necessarily in one shot. I feel that well we're the citizen of this planet. Wouldn't it be such a waste to not explore it? To see its beauty and the different cultures and places it has in offer? Surely I feel that the wilderness outside my home is more comforting than the warmth of my house. Like what Gandalf said to Bilbo, the world is not in the maps or books, the world is out there.

Traveling allows you to forget about life. It allows you to see that there is still beauty in this world, despite of the problems and worries we dwell inside every day. As you see the sights of this world and how beautiful it is, there's more to life than all these problems we have. It is important to take a break from our daily lives. Get out there and see the world. It will change you. Like the words of Prophet Muhammad, don't tell me how educated you are, tell me how much you've traveled. 

I've always believed that I will gain something from traveling. And I will lose some too. I will gain the great experiences, and learn some of the things that the locals of the country I traveled to do in their daily lives. The good lessons, I will try to implement it in my life, and hopefully in the lives of others, to make our lives better. The bad ones, I will avoid doing it to myself and others.

There are so many things that we can learn from other countries. So many things we can try to implement in our country that might make a positive change!

But like I said, I lose some too in my travels.

This trip to Iceland has taught me that traveling around the world is a difficult thing to do. You have to be willing to sacrifice some things. And you have to give your heart and soul to it. I realised during my travel that people who were currently backpacking to many places are either: someone who quit their job to travel, someone who has retired, or a student who is having a holiday. I never meet anyone who's having a job, backpacking to many places. Because traveling is kind of a job already. And you have to choose one! Can't have best of both worlds heh.

You know Avicii's song "Wake Me Up" hit me really hard when the lyrics go "Hope I get the chance to travel the world, but I don't have any plans". That line was a true representation of me last year. How I kept on telling myself I want to go to Iceland, how I hope that one day I will go to Iceland, but I didn't even make a single plan to achieving this dream of mine. Well thanks to this song, I was even more determined to make this dream of mine a reality.

I am not ditching my dream of traveling around the world. However now I know that it is rather a difficult task to do. But not impossible. I am going to rephrase "the world" to "places I want to go". Well I think we all have out own definitions of "the world". Sure we can be ambitious to travel to every country in this world. Maybe some of us focus more on regions or continents. Or maybe capital cities. Well I'll leave it up to you to define your own world!

This trip to Iceland however has taught me how wonderful it feels like to realise you've accomplished the dream you've been dreaming of, and holding on to, for years. And it definitely drives me more to accomplish and satisfy more of my wanderlust hunger! I was feeling sad and empty the moment I left Iceland. But then again my hearts was also empty of one thing, and that is the fear that I will never go to Iceland, because I did! And it's a wonderful trip!

A lot of people asked me why I spent such a short time in Iceland, when I should have spent like two weeks there. Well to be blatantly honest with you it is because 6 days is all I have, now, to travel to Iceland. And I suppose that's the art of traveling? To make full use of the duration you're given for your travel. Yes I do wish I can spend months in Iceland. But I know I enjoyed myself in that 6 days and I'm happy with that. Besides I'm coming back to Iceland. That's for sure!

It's been really a wonderful 4 days reminiscing about the trip. And to be honest I feel like I'm not myself every since I left Iceland. Perhaps I left part of my soul there or something. I feel sad to leave but more happy to have spent 6 days there. Feels weird to be the Adhi that has now been to Iceland, unlike the Adhi who wished he could be there.

I'm definitely a changed person after this trip.