Get Up and Travel

When you've seen enough of the habitual cities, towns, and parks in a country - it's time to refresh a little and get into the wilderness. That's what three students decided to do at the end of their exchange semester in London. We set off on a journey to Land's End – a place with a vague and romantic name in Cornwall. Today, seven years later, I am still convinced that sometimes getting to a little-known place you have no idea about brings more treasured memories and surprises than visiting a famous sight.
The road took us through Exeter, Plymouth, and, finally, Penzance, the most westerly town in the UK, where we stayed for a night. In the morning, we got on a bus with the official destination - Land's End! Well, in the direct sense this phrase means this is how far you can go westward before ending up in the sea. But there's more to it. When you get off at the final station and set your foot on a narrow path leading to the top of a steep cliff; when you start walking along its edge, shivering under ruthless gusts of November wind and afraid to look down at the chilling sea beneath; when you finally find the courage to do that and instantly notice an old half-sunken shipwreck - then it gets clear that this is the end of the land, civilization in general. The Nature rules here - powerful, strong, wild. There is no other way in such a moment but to feel like a small part of a universe, fragile on its own but immensely strong together. It really takes going thus far to grasp this insight - and how easy it is to forget it, returning to the comfort of the cities!
Frozen but very much alive, we moved north-east to stay for the night in Tintagel - a small coastal village with the remains of the ancient Tintagel Castle, surrounded by King Arthur legends. After a healthy dinner in a pub, where all the locals seemed to be playing darts, my friends went to sleep. I couldn't - as though felt that there is some final treasure left for the day. And rightly so. Walking outside the village, I looked up in the dark sky – and, perhaps, for the first time in my life discovered that there are millions of them: an endless cupola shining with myriads of lights and converging with the equally infinite sea. The earlier sense of being part of a universe came back even stronger - and still stays on.
It is true that finding a hidden gem sometimes means just looking up and ahead - and seeing things from a new perspective.