Given the option do you have any kind of dream travel destination?
Where would you go, what would you want to do? What would you want to see, eat, experience, urinate on or whatever other fanciful ideas you might have.
Reason for me asking is; last year I traveled across Japan and although this was pretty much a highlight of my life it wasn’t the perfect vacation, nothing will ever be perfect. I’m considering trying to get out on another trip somewhere. The first idea of course is to get back to Japan and do it differently this time, but I’m not sure what to do and how to make it markedly different. So I’m curious to learn about where you would want to go if able and see if I can draw any inspiration from your dreams and aspirations.
I asked this question years ago to an older and quite experienced traveler. She said the worst thing is cruise ships, and her favorite experience was traveling in England. A lot depends on your personality and what types of things capture your imagination. Based on that conversation, my wife and I went to England in 1994 and started with a visit to my half-sister in North-East England. We had a rental car and over 14 days we drove about 1800 miles in the Northern half of England and up to Edinburgh in Scotland. We really liked the antiquity of the buildings and the culture and history, but also the Lake District (North West) with high bluffs/hills surrounding multiple lakes. ps - We never went to London.
I would love to be able to travel along the entire Middle East one day.
I have always been fascinated by the different cultures in those countries and offcourse by the cuisines.
I am a big foodie and would love to try all different local flavors of hummus and falafel.
for what I want to experience, I would like to meet local people and not only get the tourist experience, but also what people are going through and how it must be to live there.
Unfortunately now is not the time.
I don’t have a dream destination, but I’d love to take long research trips for my various stories:
Central Finland and Finnish Lakeland, starting in June and going until autumn or maybe even winter proper. I want to wander the parks and woods, and rent a boat to wander the lakes as well, maybe visit some rock painting sites. I’ve been to Finland before, but I’d like to see more of it, and in more seasons. Last time I went, the weather was disgustingly perfect ;D This part of the world is rather nostalgic for me.
St Petersburg, Lake Ladoga, Lake Onega, Kizhi. Similar to the above, but with more architecture. Time permitting, fly to Novosibirsk and visit some of the museums and parks of western Siberia. This one’s a no-go because Russia.
Norway, late summer and autumn, see some fjords, enjoy the rain. I think my dream trip would be from Oslo to Bergen by train, then rent a car and drive north along the coast, stopping wherever I feel like, maybe visit Lofoten, then take Hurtigruten back south when I get to Kirkenes. Alternatively, maybe I could skip Kirkenes and go to Sweden after Lofoten instead, and work my way through some national parks back south. Would be neat to do this on foot (Kungsleden), but I don’t think I actually could.
Great Britain. I’d love to see Avebury, and Neolithic Orkney (particularly Skara Brae before it disappears). There are several churches and museums I want to see in London; had I the money, I’d rent a Georgian townhouse for my stay there. I want to see York, and the Lake District, and hike out to Round Loaf and any other similar sites nearby. Edinburgh and Leith would be nice for a few days - there’s little specific I want to see there, I just want to wander the streets. All the tourist crap’ll make it less pleasant than I’d like. I’m planning a trip to England, but this will deliver perhaps on a quarter of my London wants, and I’ll get to “enjoy” a chunk of Northern England by bus (York, Manchester, Leeds, and numerous villages) - should be a lot of fun, but so much will have to be left unseen because I just can’t go for various reasons.
Japan. I want to see some small towns in Toyama (disappointingly, mostly only reachable by car), plus the more typical stuff in Kyoto and Tokyo, if only briefly. Then I think what I’d really like to do is take the train towards Hokkaido, but get off at every town that looks interesting to wander around a bit, and catch a later train onward. In Aomori and Hokkaido, I’d like to see the various Jomon sites and museums, like Fugoppe Cave. I’d also like to visit some national parks.
Antarctica, not on a cruise, but staying at a station for a season and working. Not being a scientist and not being the right kind of artist for a residency, it’s not going to happen.
And of course, I want to go to every used books shop I see 8]
This list of destinations will probably change completely when I finish my current projects and work on something else that’s inspired by different places xP I think Fennoscandia/northwest Russia will remain a constant though.
Aside from money, the main thing stopping all of these from being possible is the difficulty of finding a place to stay, especially when I’m not sure when exactly I’d be at any given location. Another problem is how many places require a car to get to, I don’t like cars.
I certainly feel you in regard to the car thing. One of my main idea for another trip to Japan is to get out of the cities more which would only really be possible in a car, but I’d have to get a drivers license first which is something I’ve never before even considered trying to get.
Seems a little silly and maybe unsafe to get a drivers license only in order to drive for a couple of weeks in a foreign country every other year.
On the other hand I found rentals like these potentially very tempting.
Drive myself up some remote mountain and stop somewhere random for the night, would save hotel costs. Unfortunately Japanese highways are almost entirely toll roads and getting anywhere by car tends to cost more than taking the shinkanzen in tolls alone, and take about 50% more time.
I don’t know how it is in Japan, but in the US, you often can’t “stop somewhere random for the night”, even on public property, as there are often laws against it (campers specifically, or overnight parking generally). There are entire websites and apps for finding places to park campers. It’s just another version of the problem of finding a place to stay. It’s something to research, and that sort of research can get difficult if you don’t speak the local language, but hopefully the rental company can provide guidance since it’s in their best interest that their customers don’t get fined xP
I can drive, but it’s the last thing I want to do in a country that actually has decent public transport, even if it means not being able to go to a bunch of cool places.
In Japan, you can get quite far from the cities via trains and buses, you just can’t go everywhere (but neither can you in a car alone). Finding a place to stay may actually be the bigger problem if you want to go to the less popular areas. (Actually, though I said some of the towns I want to see are car-only, there probably is bus service I forgot to look into xP I just see a lack of railway and get sad.)
Most national route “service stations” around Japan allows people to camp overnight in their parking lots as long as you’re not being a nuisance. Small, unmanned camping grounds are also not entirely uncommon where you can set up for a night, of course you’ll be lucky if they have so much as a public restroom to use as far as conveniences go.
While it’s true that you can get to any corner of the nation easily by train and further still by buss. If you’re looking to go hiking, exploring the countryside or mountain villages you are going to be well served with your own transportation. Most places will have a buss connection at SOME point in the day, but you’ll be pretty badly stranded if you miss it.
Figuring out buss services in Japan was one of the tougher challenges I encountered. Once you get outside the bigger cities, even medium towns you wont find a whole lot of information online. IF you do manage to figure out which company operates busses in the area and they do actually have a webpage, it’s not going to be in English. Worse yet most time tables I managed to dig up were hosted as static images which means you can’t copy paste the text to machine translate it. At best you might be able to use google translate’s OCR capabilities from a phone, if the image wasn’t ‘optimized’ for 14.4k modem speeds.
There were three locations I really wanted to try to get a buss service out to a more remote area and I was entirely unsuccessful with them all. Two of them however I still visited, by renting a bike instead and cycled out there.
There’s also many places that have only charter buss service, no regular “public transport” so you need to book a tour type deal.
I could have a go at trying to figure it out if you want, though by what I just said I can’t make any promises of success.
Of course I’ll tell you since you’re my best friend.
First I would go to the Vatican or Jerusalem. To give you an idea for yourself, maybe there is a location with a long history that you want to witness. A certain building. A certain road. etc.
Then I would go to the North Pole or South Pole. Maybe there is an unpopular place you secretly want to go to? This is my personal novelty location I would like to go to. North Pole to find Santa. South Pole to find AntiSanta.
Then I would go to Mount Everest. I don’t mean climb it either. I mean take a helicopter to see what the big deal is and go home. I hope it will not be as disappointing as when I saw the Mona Lisa. I can finally determine if the people that liked it were just adrenaline junkies that like pain or if there is anything nice up there. But the weather is so unpredictable and dangerous, last I heard, it needs a lot of planning and leeway.
So for you, maybe there is a thing that you want to observe that is temporary and needs a lot of preplanning. Maybe seeing Aurora Borealis in the few months it happens? Or a certain yearly festival that happens for a few days in the year. I think Japan has a Cherry Blossom festival. Those types of things where you can’t go during tourist season or have to take a vacation at a weird time.
There’s some other places I just remembered: Norway, New Zealand, maybe Greenland or Iceland. They should seem so huge and green (and icy). Fjords, green grass for the cows and the countries with the most ironic names in the world.
