Extended World Travel

Archive for December, 2009

At Christmas and New Year, food often plays a major roll. Well basically for all kinds of celebrations, a birthday or a wedding, food is always a big ingredient. So with food on my mind I just remembered yet another idea for having a theme when traveling the world. If you’ve been following our blog you know that we’ve suggested several times the idea of having a travel theme. You can read more about a traveling the world theme here.

Anyway, one of the joys of traveling is to taste and experience the food in different countries and cultures. Someone who has taken this a step further is Chris & Carolyn Caldicott. Since the early 1990’s Carolyn has been running World Food Café, a vegetarian restaurant in central London, where they serve dishes inspired from their world travels.

We first came across World Food Café through their book with the same name that we picked up in a library here in Sweden. It is a fantastic recipe book especially if you are vegetarian. But more than that, it is also a tremendously inspiring book for anyone interested in traveling. The pictures, taken by Chris who also works as a professional photographer, are just stunning. When seeing some of them you just want to go there!

Since their first book they have written a couple more on food from around the world. Isn’t that a clever idea? I mean whenever they feel up for another journey the just have to come up with a new book idea. They just combine their interest and talents and make something more out of their journeys than just visiting and seeing places.

Since most of our family is vegetarians we of course had to visit the Café to try some of these exotic dishes out on one of our visits to London. The Café itself is on the first floor which made it a bit difficult to find since there were just a small door that was visible at street level. It was a rather simple but nice restaurant with everything in just one big room with the food being prepared in front of your eyes. We enjoyed our meal and took the opportunity to buy a copy of their second book that Carolyn also signed for us.

If you do decide to get your own copy of “World Food Café”, our recommendation is to get the first one they made. And if you’re ever in London and are interested in vegetarian or exotic food, a visit is highly recommended! We will have to go back there again next time we’re in London. Maybe we can pull some travel stories out of them to share with you in the future… and writing this I must admit that my taste buds suddenly want something else than traditional Swedish Christmas food.

So do you have any interest or talents that you can build your journey around?

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We’re here to encourage you to travel more. But not necessarily on that weekend to Disneyland or on that short vacation to Paris… but to travel long term. Not that there’s anything wrong with shorter trips or going to those places, it’s just not the kind of journeys we’re mostly interested in here. What we want you to do is to go away for at least 3 months, preferable much longer. And we’re not saying you have to travel around the whole world and visit every thinkable country either… Actually, you don’t even have to go such a great distance, just far enough to be able to feel that you’re away, that you are on a real journey.

We’re not involved in any airline businesses, and we don’t have an interest in any travel agencies or hotel chains. What we’re interested in is what improves and transforms people lives. Your life. And to us, long term travel is one of the absolute easiest and quickest ways to do this.

If you have been following us for a while, you probably already know this since we’ve been hassling you about it all the time: “How you get the time to travel”, “How you can travel with your kids”, “Why you should go on that long journey with your spouse”….

We’d like to quote a fellow thinker here: Jeffrey Kottler, psychotherapist, author of more than 20 books, and traveler. In his book “Travel that can change your life” he writes:

“It is sheer arrogance to believe that people in my profession have cornered the market on promoting lasting personal change. Bartenders, hairdressers, taxi drivers, even friends, have been known to help people grow as a result of their interactions. I’ve wondered if real travel agents don’t do the best job of all.

Traveling can bring out in you parts of yourself that can’t be accessed any other way. Always looking for more efficient and effective ways to promote personal changes, I realized that most of the constructive growth I’ve undergone in my own life has not come from books, or the classroom, or even therapy, but from traveling – especially the kind of trip that involves not just the search for new experiences in the world, but also the time and inclination to look within”.

So you see, even the “experts” agree with us!

Now that this year is soon coming to an end, why not take that as an excuse to start fantasizing about where you’d want to travel long term? What would you like this next year to be like for you, travel wise? When do you want to leave on that journey of a life time? What do you want to do when you’re away? How will you arrange for the things at home that need to be taken care of: job, school, home, pets…..? What changes in your life and /or lifestyle do you want this transforming trip to lead to?

It may seem like a lot to deal with and your long journey may feel very far away, but believe us, if you make the decision to go for it, give it some attention and take small steps in the right direction continuously, we’re sure that 2010 will be the year when you’ll experience that dream trip of your life for real!

And continue to follow us, We’ll be here to encourage you on your way. To be able to do this even better, we’re planning some changes of this site. We’re working on simplifying a bit, adding some things and taking out other to make it easier to give you support in different ways so you can become a world traveler too.. So hang on and keep your eyes open for what we can do to help you on your journey to your journey!

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This morning when I looked out the window I saw – snow! I really didn’t know if I should laugh or cry at this white, actually rather Christmassy view. I used to love snow and always just had to take a long walk every time it was snowing with those huge flakes. It’s a very special feeling, being outside in a totally white world. Wherever you look, you only see white. And when it’s snowing in that special way, with those big, dry, fluffy flakes that slowly falls to the earth, it has some kind of insulating effect so everything gets totally quiet. Except for the sound of the flakes, you can actually hear when they crash into each other and when they land on the ground.

This can be a really magical moment, as long as you can be with it and not start to think about the result of this nature phenomenon. Like how difficult it will be to drive to the shop. And, “will they be ready with the snow plows? And if this continues, will it make the tree branches so heavy that they’ll break and fall on the telephone wires again and cut out the phones? Well, nowadays we always have the mobile phones and Skype…

Wouldn’t it be much nicer to be in Southern Spain or someplace else instead? As the world traveler I am at times, do I really have to put up with this”?

Anyway, I started to think about all the Christmases that we had spent traveling abroad. I realized we’d had been celebrating Christmas both in warmer climates as well as in places with similar weather to what we’re used to from home.Here’s what I came up with, places where we have had the privilege to experience a different way of celebrating this holiday seasons (well, not always very different)

Mallorca – this was like a Swedish summer although you didn’t want to go swimming in the Mediterranean at this time of the year.

Sri Lanka – actually one of my most memorable Christmases ever, without any traces of Christmas, absolutely fabulous, love this country!

Grand Canaria, the Canary Islands – Magnus actually moved here with his parents when he was a child. GC is very European but climate wise more like Africa so there’s no problem spending the holiday on the beach

Bethlehem, Israel – On Christmas Eve it is something really special!

Austria – huge amounts of snow and the skiing was absolutely fantastic, best skiing ever! Also extremely romantic with horse sledge rides and snow covered “chalets”.

Canada – very similar to Sweden, both the weather and the Christmas celebration, except for the fact that you open your presents on the 25 (in Sweden we do it on the 24th)!

France – We spend some time in Provence one year and this time we had a Christmas tree decorated with Provencal patterned ribbons, lavender bags and whatever typically French we found. We had the market just outside our apartment balcony and man, the food you could buy there. French food in fantastic in general but at Christmas (we don’t eat the typical oysters and foie gras though).

Spain – This is like our second home so we have spent several Christmas holidays here (whole winter seasons, actually). We always go to the most Southern part which is the warmest and, as we see it, where people are more relaxed then in northern Europe. The climate is great in the winter (unless you want to do lots of swimming in the sea), the culture is interesting and you get to practice one of the worlds biggest languages. And it’s close to Africa!

England – When we spent the winter in England (why you may ask, but we did have some good reasons) we actually celebrated 3 totally different Christmases in 2 days. First the Swedish way on the 24th. The next day some friends invited us to come along to a “Christmas dinner” at a big Hare Krishna place (bought by George Harrison, the Beatle and given to them) where our friends were invited for special reasons. The same evening, we celebrated again with our friends, but this time in “the proper” English way.

Wow, thinking about this really puts me in my world traveler mood and makes me want to go away. It’s a bit short notice now though so I think I’ll start planning for next year. Or I start by thinking about what I would like my life to look like in a year.

What are you doing this holiday season? Any traveling plans? If not maybe it’s time to start planning for next year. Start imagining where you would like to go? What would you like your perfect holiday season to look like?

In a whole year, you’ll have lots of time to plan your dream trip and have all things fall into places. Why not let a Christmas trip next year be the start for your long term journey, and maybe, for your new life?

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To travel with kids, or to travel as a family, can for some seem like the ultimate challenge. To others, like ourselves, it’s just the greatest of opportunity for learning and growing together.Traveling together for a long time gives you the opportunity to get to know your family members and to see who they really are. In many families today, you don’t know your family members very well. You spend so much time away from each other, at work, school, at different activities and when you get home, you sit in front of the computer or the TV. And then, what’s left? How much time do you have every day to connect to and communicate with your spouse and your kids?

Sometimes, when things doesn’t go the way I expect, or want and hope for them to go and I start blaming myself for not having done this or that in the right way (I know in theory, this is not the best of things to do, but I’m not perfect, yet) I often end up thinking. “at least I won’t regret not having spent enough time with my kids”. My family has had a big priority in my life and a big part of our time together we have spent on the road.

When we talk to people about this, we’ve realized that many are concerned that spending a lot of time with their family would make them crazy. Maybe they’d even come back ready for a divorce?

What we’ve found in reality though, it’s usually the opposite. When you go on an extended journey, you leave most of the different sources of everyday stress at home. You get rid of the things that stand between yourself and the other members of your family: all the stuff, the activities, the obligations. What you have left is just yourselves and your adventure. Now you have the time to see who this person you sometimes meet in the hallway on your way out really is.

When you travel, you will be away together in new unknown places and situations. You’ll create new circumstances that can help you to break old negative patterns and habits that are connected to your life at home. You will experience loads of interesting things together. You will get plenty of opportunities to practice cooperating with each other since problem solving is a natural gift of every long term trip.

And sometimes, the road isn’t just easy to walk on and the sun isn’t shining and things aren’t very fun, but this will be part of your journey together and oftentimes, the “worst” situations are the one’s that’ll create your warmest memories.

Doing some long term travel with kids and spouse is just so different to being at home and if you haven’t done it, it can be really difficult to imagine what a “boost” for your family life it really can be.

So, what’s your family life like? How would you like it to be? Imagine yourself 20 years from now. What kind of memories would you want to share with your wife/husband and your children?

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
Mark Twain

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