Why a trip to Asia?

In reality, to say Asia does not mean much, it is a continent over four times the size of Europe and with almost five billion inhabitants. Asian environments are extraordinarily different: from the Saudi desert to the Siberian heaths, passing through the Indian valleys and the populous Chinese cities. To say Asia is to really say a huge amount of things, Shanghai and Samarkand, Bali and Ulaanbaatar, Mumbai and Vladivostok, Phnom Penh and Tehran, all this is Asia despite scholars discussing what the real borders of this continent are.

So why talk about Asia? Because there are few words so evocative, full of charm and atmosphere. The Silk Road with its oases, jungle temples and villages perched on the terraced mountains of Yunnan, the peaks of the Pamir and the Malaysian beaches, this is only a small part of what you will find in Asia, a continent that inhabits dreams and allows them to be realized. Precisely because of its immensity, a trip to Asia is not easy, first of all it must be carefully designed, choosing which of the many beautiful places to visit.

In Asia time flows differently than in the West, here progress has not (yet) done irreparable damage and the jungles are still home to elephants, tigers, brightly colored birds and schools of noisy monkeys. A trip to Asia is to immerse yourself in an incredible mix of different cultures, a true calidoscopio of clothes, faces and languages in which getting lost becomes a unique experience. In most of Asia there is the paradox of nationalism lowered in a context where borders do not make much sense, where shepherds take flocks grazing across borders for other impenetrable.

For all this, traveling in Asia can be complex, it would take years to learn to juggle such different realities sometimes in contrast with each other. The risk is to take a trip to Asia in a superficial way, where at best you see little and learn even less while at worst you can also take risks. In the world of travel there are also people who treat things without caring too much, whose only interest is to collect money from people who turn to them. They don’t not worry at all about the experience that these people live.