Green Holidays

.

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!

.

If local women are not allowed to visit somewhere – why should female tourists get access?

I was just reading an article in last months National Geographic about a peninsula in northern Greece filled with around 2000 monks.   This self-governing state is seen as the focal point of Orthodoxy in this region, and is home to over 20 monastical buildings and various other shelters and buildings – and not one single woman!

The males here have decreed that there should be no women allowed to visit, work or live on the peninsula – and they have lived here a long time holding on to this wish.

Mainly as they do not want to be distracted from their busy lives of worship and also as the land they occupy is hemmed in by great mountains, and only accessible by boat, so they have a certain amount of control over who enters.

Everything that happens here is ruled by the self appointed ‘rulers’ and they are sticking to their word.

However, now Greece has become involved in the European Union and many of the monasteries are receiving financial support from it – there is talk of ‘changes’ to modernise the area and bring it into line with the rest of the country.

And this could mean allowing women to visit!

Is That Wrong?
Just because we (as travelers) can visit virtually anywhere in the world that we want to, including remote Amazonian tribes in Brazil and Aboriginal families in the vast wilderness of Australia, does that mean we can ignore their culture – and their history – and in this case; their beliefs?

So, should men be able to stop women visiting this region?  Well, I think so.  Or more correctly – women should see how important this is to the monks and refrain from going there.

It is directly comparable to our personal space.  For example: when we go to the gym – we don’t just wander into the men’s locker room?  When we visit someones home – we don’t just go looking around their bedroom – so why should we go and ‘look’ at their monasteries?

It’s a matter of respect really.

Preservation Of Culture:
We all know that as the world expands, so history and culture are lost – so why are we not helping to preserve them?  Things may well eventually have to change – but we shouldn’t be the one’s speeding it up.

There are plenty of people living in the world today that do not want to or do not need to become modernised and have everyone trampling all over their land to see what they are like.

They should be able to just continue doing what they have done for centuries before without being ‘studied’ or dissected to see how they ‘fit in’.

It is amazing to think that their are still places in the world that we don’t know about – and I must admit that I enjoy reading about such places and the people who live there.  People living their whole lives in religious seclusion or totally isolated from the rest of the world.

And sometimes, I just hope it will stay that way.

.

Learning to Tango in Argentina can be just as important as visiting a rainforest…….

There are a whole host of festival and events that may well rely on your visit to survive the next 30 years or so. 

I’m not talking about the modern Rio Carnival or Oktoberfest – I’m talking about traditions that have lived for centuries in small communities across the world.

UNESCO has set about preserving these traditions with their Intangible Cultural Heritage scheme – to which they have recently added the Tango – but which holds many many more already including many little known cultural delights from across the globe.

Take for example, the Indonesian Wayang Puppet Theatre. This art of story telling has been used in Indonesia for 10 thousand years, across the royal courts and in towns and villages, to bring the regions epic history to life.

There is still an interest in the puppets – either 3-dimensional or brought alive by shadows – accompanied by musicians and singers, but it is having to compete with television and the internet for viewers. 

By making sure you add a visit to a traditional theatre show on your trip to the area, you could be making sure that it is worth continuing the tradion and worth training for.  Would you invest your time learning a skill that people might not need in 5 years?

Or a trip to Mexico in late fall could coincide with the huge festival: el dia de los muertos – the Day of the Dead.  Thousands of local villagers spend the day in celebration of their lost loved ones who are said to come alive for the day and to bring properity and good luck to the families.

Cultural Heritage:

We all know how important it is to encourage traditions and festivals, but of course we need to make sure that we don’t make them into a side show, like the Kayan women from Thailand have become, but we want to make sure that they know the importance of their traditions.

Also, they do not want to freeze cultures in time.  There is no intention to force people to continue with customs that are no longer relevant, but to empower cultures with their past – rather than force them into an uncomfortable future.

Things like Morris Dancing in the UK are well known not to be a part of modern culture – yet we all love the tradition of the dancing and the people who dress up for this know the history and pass on the reasons behind the colors and the stick-bashing!

Society will always evolve – but why not hold on to the things that were once important.  Hopefully governments are working with these groups to make sure that these traditions are not lost forever like many languages around the world have been.