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.

Travel and Career - can we really have both?

I recently read an article on the Lonely Planet newsletter entitled Travel vs. career: does it have to be all or nothing? This is a topic, which I have been thinking about a lot over the past few years and one that resonates strongly in my life.  I naively hadn’t thought that other people might be facing the same dilemma as me until I read this article. It just seemed that everyone else had it figured out, which now I find out is not true. Up until this point, I have always put travel first in my life. Sure, I have gone abroad to work, the typical English teaching and temping in countries where I could, but this never really leads to long-term job prospects.

Now I find though that I am being left behind, all my peers and friends have jobs, and careers at least 2 or 3 steps up the ladder. Some are now managers, have their own businesses, are earning lots of money and are able to buy their own houses. I, on the other hand having decided that I should probably become more qualified to get a job, have just finished my Masters and am now unemployed.

Of course people will say, “Just get a job that involves travel.” These I found out a very few and far between and in order to get these jobs in the first place you need lots of years experience. But, what about those of us that are still relatively young, can we ever really begin our careers in the first place if we keep on travelling? Job agencies won’t even look at you if you have gaps in your career history, “… and what were you doing these few months here or this half a year here?” You can’t very well tell them that all those times were holidays.  Or those jobs that do look at you wonder why you have changed jobs so often and haven’t been in one job more than 3 months.

Don’t get me wrong, I have loved every single second of my travels and wouldn’t change those years for sitting behind the desk of any company in the world, but I do feel that this has been in detriment to my career, or lack of it I should say.  What I have done though and what has stayed constant with me throughout is my writing. Everywhere I have been I have written travel articles, after hard work and persistence I have now had quite a few of them published in magazines, online and in newspapers. I even wrote a few chapters for a Time Out guidebook while I was travelling around Argentina. I guess I would have to conclude that travel and writing about it is my career, even though I am not sitting behind a desk and I do not know where my next pay cheque is coming from.

So, can we really have a career and travel? Does it have to be all or nothing? I think in a way, that at some point we all have to choose.

Armchair Travelling

Since I have not been able to travel much this past year, due to travelling for half of the previous year, I have had to fuel my thirst for travel with a bit of armchair travelling. Armchair travelling for me, is in the form of some great travel literature. This past year I have managed to travel around Central America, Spain, Italy, Indonesia and India, vicariously through my books.

I am currently reading Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert, which not only takes us on a journey through Italy, India and Indonesia, but also through body, mind and soul. It is a great read for us travel enthusiasts, but also an inspirational tale for those of us going through difficult times in their lives. Elizabeth Gilbert shares with us her inner most desires, fears and conflicts and shows us that we are not alone in breaking down when our world’s collapse around us. She shows us that inner strength one can get through travelling and that it is always possible to over come adversity and to be happy in our lives.

This past year I have also read Travels on the Dance Floor by Grevel Lindop, one man’s journey to the heart of salsa. Lindop undertakes a journey through Central America learning a new type of salsa dancing in each one. His descriptions of Central America’s capital cities are vivid; as are the descriptions of the wonderful people he meets along the way.

Another great book, or trilogy of books are the Driving Over Lemons series by Chris Stewart, and although very popular a few years ago I hadn’t read them until recently. When I started reading I couldn’t imagine how I would want to read more than one book about a man starting up a farm in southern Spain, but Stewart writes in such an engaging and sometimes comical way that I found myself wanting to read on and on about his life on the farm.  I even found myself becoming interested in the things he was growing and methods he was using. I highly recommend.

Tip: When travelling, look at Lonely Planet’s guidebooks for great travel literature. When I travelled around South East Asia I did this for almost every country I visited and I began to appreciate each place even more, having read about the peoples who live there, the country’s history, troubles and triumphs. 

New Year Travel Predictions

A couple of years ago, while travelling through South America, the word on every travellers' lips was Colombia. I believe that 2011 will be Colombia's year to become recognised as a proper tourist destination. No longer do people fear the word Colombia, no longer does it conjure up images of drug lords and guns, but of friendly people and beautiful cities' waiting to be discovered.

I have heard that what makes Colombia so special are its people. A race of people so welcoming and so ready to show off their country to the world. Home to Cartagena, a beautifully captivating place and one of the best preserved Spanish colonial cities' on the continent, as well as glorious beaches, virgin jungles and rhythm-pumping, eye-popping festivals.

I myself have not yet been to Colombia, but as soon as I get enough money together, I am gone, so watch this space! In the meantime why not read up more about Colombia on the Lonely Planet website at http://www.lonelyplanet.com/colombia so that when the craze arrives you'll know all about it.