lesliegliani: Team Hejorama talks about the essence of travel

Team Hejorama

Alexis Kovalenko (30) and Benjamin Collignon (30) are two of the founders of Hejorama, a social media platform for travel. The Paris based creatives have launched the website in 2010 to share their travel philosophy and create a place for the stories of contributors and friends. At the Victoriapark in Berlin the Hejorama guys explain why holidays are not travelling, what the internet has changed and why you don?t have to fly to exotic countries to be a traveller.

You call Hejorama a ?social media platform?. What is the difference between your website and a regular travel blog?

Alex: ?We wanted higher quality. We wanted to have real journalists writing the articles, real photographers doing the photos, while travel bloggers are writers, photographers and city guides at the same time. And we call it a platform because our original idea was that people contribute to it and write about their travels.?

Ben: ?We didn?t just want to give addresses of destinations. We are more focused on travel stories. We want to know how travel changed you, how you escaped your world yesterday; this is what we want people to share.?

Your motto is ?Travel as you are?. What does that mean?

Ben: ?Hejorama is about the difference between activity and mentality. A lot of people see travelling as leisure. We want to show ? because we live it this way ? travelling as a way of thinking, a way of living, a day-to-day philosophy. There is a difference between holidays and travelling. You can go travelling during your holidays and go on holidays without travelling. For us, it is not the same. When we say ?travel as you are?, it means to travel your own way, to find your own quests??

Alex: ?? you don?t have to be a backpacker.?

Ben: ?If you want to be a tourist, be a tourist. But at least, do that every day of your life and not only two weeks or two month. This view allows us to show lots of aspects of travel and of life in general. It?s not only going to foreign countries, it?s also welcoming foreign people. Go to Turkish restaurants; see a movie in another language. This is Travel as you are. You don?t realize it, you just live it. For us, it is to be curious about everything, to be hedonist, to enjoy people. But not only people, you can be a lonely man and have the same philosophy. Travelling as a philosophy, that?s what it is.?

What you just said touches on the criticism of people who fly to a beach for two weeks and do not do anything else there than lying in the sun.

Alex: ?If you go to a resort on Cuba and only see one specific corner or beach ? you?re enjoying the sun of Cuba then, but you are not travelling to Cuba.?

Ben: ?We don?t want to criticize that, we just want to make a difference. Because we consider travel as a way of living: discovering things about oneself and other people.?

Do you want to connect to the world?

Ben: ?Exactly. Ask yourself: Who are you? Who are the people around you? What is your place in the universe??

Should a lazy person who is confident with his small world travel as he is ? which possibly means not to travel at all? Or should he break out of his shell and take the next best flight?

Ben: ?He can use the internet, movies, books or songs to travel. Alex travels a lot for example, and I travel less than him. He is the moving part of Hejorama. I am very lazy in a good way. I love music, I know my world, the planet we live on, a lot of religions and cultures. That is all fine.?

Travelling is not about moving to certain places?

Ben: ?Not in specific. It can be like that. But even in your imagination you can travel while you are actually staying home. There is this financial aspect people think about: Travel costs a lot. We think, travel is not an activity only for people who can afford it. You can do it by books, by songs or by plane, by train or by feet. You don?t need to be very far away to see different things and experience different cultures.?

But don?t you think that the more you confront yourself with people and countries that you have no image of and that seem to be strange and exotic for you, the more it affects you as a person and changes something inside you?

Ben: ?I totally agree with you, it?s better to confront yourself with different countries and exotic cultures, but travel is not just that. At the end, it is all about one question: Why do you travel? Each person should ask that to himself. Do you travel because you are fed up with your country, your culture, to hear German? Do you want to find a new home? We want to show people how to find their personal quests, their own reasons to travel. It is the leitmotiv of Travel as you are.?

And each reason is valuable?

Ben: ?Yes. One day of travel can be richer than two weeks under the sun, if you really think about the question why you are going there.?

The ultimate super question: How did the internet change travel?

Alex: ?The internet made travel easier. People have been travelling forever since. My parents travelled a lot when they were young. But now everybody has the chance to travel. It became cheap. Most people who believe travel is expensive are wrong, because they can find a low-cost flight on the Internet and a cheap hostel. And there is this social aspect to it. You can meet people easily; you can make friends, stay in contact and visit them.?

For our parent?s generation travels had a clear start and a clear end.

Alex: ?There are no clear ends anymore.?

The value of travelling, one could argue, arises from the contrast between going somewhere and coming back. If this is changing, what does that mean for travel?

Alex: ?Many travel bloggers I have met, who are travelling a lot and constantly, definitely lose the value of travelling. They?re not curious any more, not all of them, but I have noticed that. You have to come back home sometimes.?

Ben: ?Nomads and Touaregs are always moving. Are they travelling or do they just move??

The German news site Spiegel Online has an interactive world map now where readers can share their best travel tips. That is just one exmaple. Does travelling lose its necessary secrets if there are 1000 recommendations on Trip Advisor?

Ben: ?Totally. That is why Hejorama is not a good place to find destinations. You see, we don?t focus on addresses. Quite the contrary, we have addresses we don?t want to share. We want to show people how to find their own secret places and not to go to the secret place of this or that person. This is the way of travelling we stand for.?