I’ve never really experienced travel as something separate from normal life.
I was born in Zimbabwe, I’m Palestinian, and I grew up moving between countries because of my family’s work. I’ve lived across Africa, the Middle East and Asia, spent a significant amount of time in Indonesia, and eventually found myself building a life in Australia.
I’ve written more about that journey, and how surfing, culture and work somehow became tangled together along the way in From Zimbabwe to Perth: My Journey Through Surf, Culture, and Building a Career I Love.
So when people talk about travelling as this big, transformative thing, I understand what they mean.
But I also think living in different countries teaches you something that travelling through them doesn’t.
You stop experiencing places as destinations.
You start experiencing them as normal life.
And that has completely changed the way I travel now.
1. I Would Rather Stay Longer and See Less – living in different countries
I don’t really care about seeing everything anymore.
Give me one small town for three weeks over six cities in ten days.
When you stay somewhere longer, there’s this point where the destination stops performing for you.
You stop searching for “the best café in…” because you’ve already found the one you like.
You recognise people.
You know which road goes where.
You figure out what time everyone actually goes to the beach.
You have days where you don’t do anything particularly interesting.
And weirdly, that’s when I usually start liking a place the most.
2. I Travel Around Things I Actually Love Doing
Surfing has completely changed the way I choose destinations.
Instead of asking:
What are the top things to see?
I’m much more likely to ask:
What’s the surf like?
And then suddenly you’re staying in small coastal towns you might never have visited otherwise.
That’s part of what I love about Batu Karas in Indonesia.
Yes, I went there because of surfing.
But eventually the surf becomes only one part of why you stay.
You know where you’re getting coffee after a session. You know who will probably be in the water. You know where everyone ends up around sunset.
If you’re thinking about going, I’ve put together a practical guide to the best time to surf in Batu Karas and the Batu Karas wave.
Your hobby becomes your way into the place.
And I think this works with almost anything.
Running.
Climbing.
Diving.
Photography.
Food.
Music.
Whatever you’re genuinely interested in gives you a much better way of experiencing somewhere than a generic list of attractions.
3. I Don’t Think Every Day Needs to Be Productive
Travel itineraries stress me out.
7:00 breakfast.
8:00 temple.
10:30 viewpoint.
12:00 famous restaurant.
13:15 apparently we’re having fun again.
I understand wanting to make the most of a trip, especially when you’ve flown halfway around the world to be there.
But some of my favourite travel memories happened because there was absolutely nothing planned.
Someone messages.
You go somewhere.
Someone else turns up.
The sunset is good.
Dinner turns into drinks.
And suddenly the completely empty day becomes the one you remember.
I’ve learned to leave space for that.
It’s also the side of travelling and surf-town life that I like documenting on TikTok not just the big moments, but the slightly chaotic normal life happening around them.
4. People Usually Matter More Than Places
There are objectively beautiful places I’ve visited that I don’t think about very often.
Then there are completely ordinary places that mean everything to me because of who I knew there.
That’s probably one of the biggest things growing up internationally taught me.
Places and people become tangled together.
Sometimes you don’t miss the country.
You miss who you were when you lived there.
You miss your friends.
You miss your routine.
You miss the stupid little things nobody would put in a travel guide.
And sometimes going back feels strange because the place is still there but that version of your life isn’t.
I’ve written about this feeling more deeply in A Soft Place to Land (When You’re From Everywhere).
Because when you’ve lived in enough places, the idea of home gets a little complicated.
5. I Try to Learn How People Actually Live
I still do tourist things.
I’m not going to pretend I’m above a beautiful viewpoint.
But I’m much more interested now in understanding what ordinary life looks like.
Where do people go after work?
What do they eat when they’re not taking someone to the famous restaurant?
What does Saturday morning look like?
Where does everyone disappear to around sunset?
Living in different cultures taught me that you understand very little about a country from its attractions.
The interesting stuff is usually in the routines.
6. I Don’t Expect Every Place to Change My Life
Travel content has become incredibly dramatic.
Every trip is life-changing.
Every beach is paradise.
Every solo trip is apparently a journey of profound self-discovery.
Sometimes you just went somewhere and had a nice time.
That’s allowed.
I’ve lived in places I’ve loved immediately.
I’ve lived in places that took me years to appreciate.
I’ve visited places everyone else seems obsessed with and thought, yeah, it’s alright.
Not every destination needs to become part of your personality.
7. Home Doesn’t Feel Like One Place Anymore
This is probably the strangest consequence of moving around.
Home becomes plural.
There are places I haven’t lived in for years that still feel familiar.
There are people scattered around the world who feel like home.
There are foods, expressions, habits and tiny pieces of different cultures that have somehow followed me everywhere.
For a long time, I thought eventually I would settle somewhere and that feeling would disappear.
It hasn’t.
I’ve just stopped thinking it needs to.
That relationship between place, identity and belonging has become a big part of what I write about on noraebaid.com.
8. The Best Part Is Usually What Happens Between Everything Else
Maybe that’s ultimately what travelling differently has taught me.
The main event isn’t always the thing you remember.
Sometimes it’s what happened afterwards.
The coffee after surfing.
The drive home.
The conversation at dinner.
The friend you weren’t supposed to meet.
The town you stayed in for another week because leaving on Tuesday suddenly seemed unnecessary.
The ordinary parts.
That’s actually why I made Between the Waves, a little film about what happens between the surf sessions rather than making surfing itself the entire story.
And surfing has taught me something similar.
You don’t have to be particularly good at something for it to become an enormous part of your life. Queen of Kooks is my slightly less serious take on that a surf film about being bad at something you absolutely love and continuing anyway.
Those are the things I’ve become increasingly interested in documenting.
Not just where I went.
What life felt like while I was there.
Because years later, that’s usually the part I actually want to remember.
And maybe travelling well isn’t really about how much of the world you manage to see.
Maybe it’s about how much of it you actually notice.