I’m halfway through my trip and I feel like I’ve done so much and not enough. I’m just settling in, picking up momentum, finding my rhythm, getting to grips and soon it’ll all be over. I have so much time and not enough. Memories of last week blur around the edges.

I am full of bittersweet.

That’s the problem with the travel bug, I think. It’s never satisfied. If you don’t spend long enough in a place you can’t experience it to the fullest and you leave unsatisfied, perhaps feeling the trip wasn’t worth it because you missed out on so much. But if you stay too long, you begin to settle in too much. Novelty begins to wear off and the day to day becomes normal routine. The experience loses its shine.

It seems to me that successful travel is about striking the perfect balance between novelty and comfort. It’s a skill you must learn and I’m still learning it.

Something else that has been playing on my mind this week is how to keep hold of all the memories. I’m doing so much on this trip that I feel like I’m already starting to forget the details of everything I’ve done. Taking photos helps, of course, but I’m always torn between taking loads of photos for future reference and enjoyment, and being completely present in the moment, focused and undistracted. Taking in as much as I can so I can preserve the feeling of being there. So I can remember the experience as it was in 5d and not in the 2d of a single frame photo.

Maybe there’s no answer to this quandary. Maybe everyone’s the same. When they come home and people ask if they had a good time, maybe everyone answers ‘yeah, I think so’. And maybe that doesn’t matter. Do we need the memories to be in 4k? Do we need to be able to recall every detail? We had the experience in the moment. The sights, the smells, the sounds. Isn’t that enough? Isn’t that why we do it? We know there’ll be more experiences because…well, that’s the bug, right? And there’s only finite space in our brains to store memories, so we can’t expect to keep them all. So why worry about it in the first place?

Sometimes I tell myself that travelling is a pointless waste of money if I can’t remember every part of it. But it’s not about the future, is it? It’s not about the stories we can share later, is it? It’s about ourselves, our environment and our experience in the moment, isn’t it?

So ask me now if I’m having a good time. The answer is ‘yeah, I’m having a blast’.

Ask me again in three weeks time, when I’m back at home and back at work. The answer will be ‘yeah, I think so’.