Let me make one thing clear: I’m no expert on the destinations I cover.

Sure, I love travel, do a lot of it, and have learned some useful things along the way. I also have some weird superpowers that sometimes come in handy when traveling — like knowing how to spot good gelato without even seeing it, and having a bottomless memory for generally useless, but amusing trivia.

None of this makes me a travel expert, however — and that’s why I prefer to think of myself instead as a drifting dilettante. Not a dilettante in the modern, poser-ish sense of the word. But in the original, old-fashioned sense of being a lover of travel who still has much to learn.

Here’s the thing with travel: at least in my experience, the more you know about a place, the more you realize you don’t know. And the more of the world you see, the more you realize you haven’t seen.

This is obviously true of the places I’ve visited on quick weekend trips, which always leave much to discover. But it’s actually been my longer trips — where I’ve had plenty of time to explore — that have gotten this point across the strongest.

I first realized this as a newly minted 21-year-old traipsing around Asia with my friend Andrea. After several weeks of planting flags around Southeast Asia’s backpacker hotspots, we set off to study yoga for three months in the small, South Indian city of Mysore. Rising at the crack of dawn each morning to practice, we had the afternoons to ourselves, and spent the first few days getting to know our fellow yogis around a popular hotel pool. But we knew that wasn’t the “real world” we’d come all that way to see, so we decided to get out in the community and volunteer a few days a week at a nearby orphanage.

Between our volunteer work and the exhaustion that accompanies intensive, daily yoga practice — especially combined with the South Indian heat and occasional bout of “Delhi belly” — we didn’t have much time or energy to venture beyond Mysore and the surrounding villages. But within those limits, entire worlds opened up, revealing much more to us than we’d seen in our earlier travels over a much wider terrain. Locals opened their doors to us. Rickshaw drivers and chai wallahs came to know us by name. And best of all, the children at the orphanage eventually saw it fit to welcome these two strange, tall Western women into their songs and games.

We were particularly fond of a 4-year-old girl named Amulya, who was whip-smart and clearly a ring-leader among the other children. One day, we were watching her draw pictures as she hummed a complex raga melody that I couldn’t hum if I tried. Without looking up from her drawing, she asked for our “good names” and ages, and then inquired about our marital status. Upon learning we were 21 and unmarried, she dropped her crayon and looked up in disbelief.

“Can you not cook?” she asked.

Naturally, we got a good laugh out of this. But it was also a reminder of the many onion layers of culture that remained between us, no matter how close we’d become. The more we came to know the children of the orphanage and “aunties” caring for them, the more we realized we had to learn. As small as Mysore appeared on the surface, it seemed bigger than ever by the time we left.

Since that time 15 years ago, I’ve lived in four different countries, visited many more, and relearned the humbling lessons of Mysore many times over. For this reason, I’ve always been reluctant to start a travel blog — tempted as I was by the idea of combining my love of writing and travel. After all, who was I to give advice about the places I’d visited? Did the internet really need another travel blog? Aren’t people looking for authorities on the places they want to visit — and not the musings of a drifting dilettante?

I still don’t know the answers to these questions. But finding assurance in the Socratic adage that “the only true wisdom is knowing you know nothing,” I decided to start The Jaunt to log my adventures with a focus on where I’ve been, what I’ve learned and, most important, why I’d go back — because every place leaves so much more to be discovered. By sharing my insights, and also my blindspots, I hope to inspire others to travel with confidence, observe with humility and celebrate how big the world really is.