Over at RamblingTraveler.com, Stacy asks What Are Your Top 5 Travel Dreams?. Here are a few of mine, in no particular order:
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- Visit Antarctica. Before I started really digging into the costs involved in a RTW trip, I thought traveling to Antarctica was only for the rich. I had this preconceived notion that a trip there came with a five-digit price tag. Once I realized this isn’t at all the case, I added a special “Antarctica fund” to my travel savings. I love the idea of Antarctica as sort of the lost continent – it’s so removed, so isolated from everything. And it’s host to some of the most extreme weather conditions and spectacular scenery on the planet. Cool!
- Swim with whale sharks. The largest fish on the planet – they grow up to 40 feet long! And, since they only feed on plankton, they’re completely innocuous to humans. TravelHappy‘s had a few posts about this lately and their videos have reminded me why I’ve always wanted to do this.
- Visit Tokyo. Is there a culture more quintessentially alien to Western civilization than Japan’s? Having grown up on William Gibson’s cyber-novels that depict Tokyo as nothing short of a hyper-modern playground of technology, and hearing Tony Bourdain describe the city as something out of Blade Runner, the geek in me is giddy at the prospect of visiting Japan’s uber-city.
- Dive the Great Barrier Reef. K and I were scuba certified last summer and I plan on diving every corner of the globe on my RTW trip. But of all the underwater hotspots I can think of, none gets me as excited as the Great Barrier Reef. My dive instructor told us that, of the ten deadliest underwater species on the planet, all ten are indigenous to the Reef. I’m not sure if that’s true or not, but it sounds cool to me either way.
- Ireland. I’m not 100% convinced that I want to live in R.I. (or in the U.S. for that matter) for the rest of my life. The first alternative that comes to mind? Ireland. When I came back from the Emerald Isle a year and a half ago, I was still mesmerized by it. It was all I could think about for at least a month or two. The beauty of the landscape is breathtakingly surreal – it’s as though god invented new shades of green just for the Irish. And the people are the friendliest bunch you’ll ever meet. It’s everything I imagined it to be.
What are your top 5 travel “must-do’s”?