My World Map

I just thought I would share with you this really cool thing that I found on the web. Below is my travel map and highlighted are all the countries I've visited. It's really great for people like you and me who love to travel and show all the places they've been to. It's especially good for people like me whose ambition it is to travel to every country in the world. This map shows me how well, or not so well I'm doing.

 I thought I had visited a lot of places and to be honest it does look like I've conquered a lot of the globe, but according the the travel map I have only visited 17 per cent of the world. This does not sound like much at all, although it does not count Scotland and Wales as separate countries and I do. It also obviously hasn't got the new country of South Sudan on the map yet, which just became a new nation on Friday. So it looks like I have one more country to add to my list.

Don't get me wrong though, for me it's not just a list and something to tick off. I want to experience, feel, taste and meet people in every country.

So for those of you who want to see your own map of the world. Visit www.world66.com and click on my world, then map of the world.



create your own visited country map

Travel makes us smarter and sexier

According to a new Lonely Planet article travel makes us smarter and sexier. I always knew that there were more reasons to travel than just to see new places and have fun and now it has been proven by scientific research.

I have always learnt so much on my travels, from the terrible history of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia to the life of Picasso in Barcelona and all about whales in Argentina. I truly believe that travel is one of the best educations you can get.

The article claims that travel also makes you younger, well this may not be entirely true, but life does slow down the more you travel. Everyone always says how fast life goes and it does when you are doing the same things day in and day out, but have you noticed that a two week holiday seems to last a lot longer because you are experiencing new things everyday.  Two years ago I travelled around South America for five months, when I look back on all the places I went to and all the things I did during those five months, it seems like I was there more than a year. In comparison these last two years back in London have flown by.

The third thing that this article claims, is that travel makes you more productive. Now this I do agree with. When I come back from travelling I always have new ideas for articles, new art ideas I want to try out and new dishes to cook. Travel definitely inspires me to do more things that I would never have even thought of before.

Lastly, the article claims that travel makes us more sexy, I'm not entirely convinced by this one. It might make us more intelligent and therefore the opposite sex might find us more interesting - making us appear sexier, however other than getting a tan, I not sure it makes us physically sexier. Sorry guys. But, let me know if you have found this one to be true too. Suffice to say, we definitely make conversations more interesting and if that makes us attractive then great!

Any way you look at though travel is good for us. Click here to read the article and the scientific research for yourself.