Plan In Advance And Really Improve Your Green Holidays
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Instead of waiting until you have booked your green holidays – get planning now!
Think of all the time you have available now to learn something new or start saving for! Even if you don’t know when you will book your next trip – it’s never to late to start thinking about the things that will come in handy when you do.
For example, if you love South America or South-East Asia – then you know you will get there eventually even if you have a few local short breaks in between. And you know that you will want to spend longer there than normal vacations as you love the place. And you know that anything to do with the language, culture or wildlife of those places will interest you.
So, what are you waiting for?
You will never get time back, so why waste it watching that repeat on TV again when you could be reading about a nations history? Why wash the dishes staring out of the window when you could be working through an audio language course while your hands are wet?
And it’s not just the little things you could be achieving. Say for example you enrolled yourself on a distance learning TEFL course and spent a few hours a month completing that rather than searching for an elephant on Farmville!
Or took flying lessons, diving lessons, a photography course or rock climbing adventures. If you practice all these things in advance you can get so much more out of your green adventures – and you will regret it as I have seen people who are in the beautiful Maldives filled with endless coral and passing dolphins and turtles – but they are in the pool taking starter diving lessons rather than out there experiencing the real magic beneath the waves!
Just a few horse back lessons before you leave can build up your confidence for that sunset canter along the sandy beaches on the Caribbean, or a long trek up into the rainforests and mountains of the Andes.
Write Your Plan:
Get yourself a sheet of paper, and create a sort of spider diagram to highlight the places, people, wildlife, or experiences that you love or want to see or experience. Keep adding to the flow as you think of things.
For example, writing ‘Canada’ could lead to ‘Rockies’ which could lead to ‘skiing’ or ‘horseback riding’; or it could lead to ‘Wilderness’ which could make you think ‘camping skills’ and ‘kayaking’. Either way, if you read up on these things or gained the new skills needed before you arrived – your trip would become 100 times better.
I wouldn’t want to try setting up a tent for the first time in the middle of nowhere – and I certainly wouldn’t want to try to eat plants or mushrooms in the ‘wild’ having only just brought the book!
Once this diagram is complete, turn it into a 1 or 2 year plan – effectively finding out how long these things take to learn and planning backwards.
So, learning to dive might take around a week if you do it intense, whereas learning Chinese from scratch could take at least 6 months for general conversation – or more. Fit these in around your existing plans and your work load to find out the best plan for you.
The First Steps:
The easiest first step is a trip to the library. You don’t need to spend any money or risk any investment – just go grab some books about the things on your list and start reading.
It’s possible that you thought you could learn hieroglyphics yourself – but after reading the first book, you know you need help – or a lot longer!
Same goes for certain countries – what if you thought you liked a certain region and then found a better one – or you found out something about a region that you didn’t know about before and want to learn more!
Everyone has a spare 15 minutes a day to start reading stuff – so take the first step as soon as possible, and get learning!
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