Seeing the World
There are only a few pieces of promotional mail that I bother with. One of those that I can’t seem to ignore is that National Geographic Expeditions magazine. The magazine is a pretty fancy piece of literature that must be expensive to produce and is therefore probably not just sent out randomly. I must be of the preferred customer list as both a long-time subscriber to their magazine and an occasional buyer of their travel products. a few years ago I bought a South African Safari from them that I could not actually go on, so I sent Kim’s sister Sharon in my stead to enjoy the trip with her and with her brother and sister-in-law. The thing that had attracted me to the trip was that it included a trip on the Rovos Rail from Cape Town to Pretoria. The thing that made me less concerned about having missed the trip where all the safari stories about large wild animals and close encounters therewith. I can live quite nicely without large wild animals in my life, thank you very much. And now this year we have committed to and bought a trip to Egypt and Jordan through NatGeo and their Kensington Tours operation. This is a customized private tour through Cairo, down the Nile to Aswan and Valley of the Kings and then over to Amman, Jordan, Petra, Wadi Rum and the Dead Sea. Its a trip we have wanted to take for a long time and one of the few that remains on our bucket list.
I have seen a good deal of the world and Kim has also done her share of traveling. In the seventeen years we have been together we have been all over Europe (including Eastern Europe), several places in Africa, touched on the Middle East, been a few times to Central and South America and done three trips to Asia (Japan, India and Australia/NZ). I would say that we are both well-travelled and have been to the usual spots plus lots of out-of-the-way and unusual places like Benin in West Africa, Tazmania, Croatia and the other Balkan countries. Chances are that any of the places we haven’t been to together, I have been to through my work. Naturally, there are places that neither of us has been to, but they tend to be a fairly narrow list of places like Antarctica, Easter Island, parts of SE Asia like Burma and Tibet and a wide swath of Central Asia that is generally called The Stans, that area traversed by the Silk Road and into Mongolia.
The reason I always keep and look through the National Geographic Expeditions magazine is to remind myself of where in the world I would like to go next, should the opportunity and desire for wanderlust arise. One of the things I like about Nat Geo’s approach to travel is to identify clearly the amount of activity level involved in the various trips. Those range from light to strenuous and are useful in avoiding getting in over one’s head physically speaking. They separate trips not just by region, but also by theme. There are animal and eco tours. There are sightseeing tours. There are adventure tours. There are cruises (ocean and river). There are what NatGeo calls expeditions, which are bespoke versions of their tours, tailored specifically to your interests. And there are even around-the-world private jet tours. I like NatGeo’s mass customization approach because I think there are times when we want a survey trip and don’t have much of an agenda and can use their off-the-shelf tour product. Other times its nice to be able to customize as much as we might want so that we see all the things that are on our list while avoiding things or places we have been or don’t care to go to.
I won’t be booking anything before we see how this next Kensington Tour works out for us in Egypt and Jordan, but its always interesting to get ideas together for discussion while we are floating down the Nile or on the Dead Sea. The enthusiasm of a good trip in progress is the best advocate for the next trip. They say you should never buy real estate while on vacation, but I can think of no better time to plan a next vacation than while on vacation. I start by eliminating the places that are not up for consideration starting with all the U.S. destinations and expeditions. I have minimal interest in sub-Saharan Africa any more and fortunately, Kim feels she has had her fill of the big wild animals. I have also done Latin America every which way possible over the years so I have minimal interest even in places like Patagonia. What goes with that is Antarctica, which is a very timely destination for people looking for adventure, but we have chosen to pass due to lack of sufficient interest to endure the necessary hardships required. I generally shy away from high altitude or deep tropics. I’ve been all over the Middle East and while Kim has not, she rightly hesitates to challenge the significant gender bias in the region.
The places that draw my interest that I haven’t seen much of are Polynesia, some parts of SE Asia (from Cambodia to Myanmar), Mongolia and the Stans along the Silk Road. None of them is easy to do, but NatGeo has a dozen options to get the thought process going. I know Kim has an interest in going to China, but as sketchy as many of the places of the world are to visit, I’m not sure China is a totally safe place for Americans to travel at this time. When we did our Baltics Cruise a few years ago, we enjoyed our stop in St. Petersburg. Today, those same cruises skip going into Russia thanks to all the Russian sanctions and the growing tensions therewith. Our motorcycle group went to Cuba a few years ago when things were looser during the Obama years. Since Trump was in office that has gotten harder…not impossible, but just a bit more difficult. Iran is very much off the travel grid and by extension, places like Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq are not really tourism-worthy. The modern-day Axis powers of evil include Russia, Iran, North Korea, and, increasingly, China. China is the troubling one, because it is high on Kim’s bucket list (I did two weeks there in 2014), and because we are used to thinking its OK to travel there, and yet the growing irritation between our country and China is at a point where China is very much a target for our economic aggressions in ways that the other Axis powers cannot compete. It strikes me as the sort of place where a trip could get imperiled very rapidly by some geo-political event that could create collateral damage to anyone unwittingly traveling there.
I have just checked in with Kim and the bad news is that she still wants to see China. The good news is that she also places Polynesia, the Stans and SE Asia high on the hit parade. That is a good starting point for discussions. There are other ideas out there that could interest us like the idea of a cruise around the British Isles (that has been suggested by Gary and Oswaldo) and there are a motorcycle trip or two that could also attract us. In fact, we are supposedly teeing up for a trip from southern Spain across and into the desert and Atlas Mountains of Morocco.
As much as we tell ourselves that we have each seen enough of the world, we are both suckers for almost any opportunity for seeing the world.