fivemack | When returning from holiday, one starts to think of holidays

I got stamps from six in my last passport, but only have stamps from two in my current passport, though I have already got *thinks* three US stamps, one Canada and two NZ ones, though NZ is a borderline case because other schools of thought break up the continents differently. Must get round to getting a Europe one in it next time I go someplace in Europe - that was the last one for me to get last time :-).

I would very much like to go to Hawaii, Easter Island and the Galapagos, but I'm not quite sure which I'd count them as :-).

I answered yes to well-travelled, even though what I think is truer is "I spend a lot of time and money on nice holidays abroad and, indeed, am famed amongst some of my friends for this habit :-)". I don't go as often as you do, and I'm fairly conservative in where I do go.

Can I cite the Inca trail as a counter-example of being conservative in where you go? :)

Do you think so? I'm not sure if I am the best judge - it's a very popular tourist destination so it sort of seems a bit pred; oh, and we *did* have portaloos at the camps if that makes a difference to how conservative or not it was.

I'd probably put the part of the trip when I went to a lodge in the Amazon jungle as being a bit more radical, if only from the "aiiiiiii, the critters, the critters!" POV ;-). NOT a good place to go if you don't like biting or stinging things...

from starting in the UK it's a great deal less conservative than "a rainy weekend in Bognor". I mean, like, whole orders of magnitude. For most of my childhood family holidays were "a week in a cottage in $scenic area of the UK" which often seemed adventurous at the time. "A week in a tent in a foreign country" was the height of exotic travel destinations until I was 16 (then we went on a Nile Cruise, which was rather more adventurous).

I think any scale of conservativeness that rates flying halfway around the world to hike for weeks through jungle and mountains as "conservative" is a scale so thoroughly skewed that I'm not sure it's any use. What *would* rate as "un-conservative" on it? Trecking to the South Pole with only a dog sled? Climbing Evenest? These are things that people do do of course, and a scale of adventurousness of holiday should include them but...

There's a scale of how much practiced support you're using; I could imagine a view that travelling on one's own to Ukraine or China having personally organised all the accommodation and travel you'll be using is less conservative than going with a tour-group to Peru.

What is all this organised of which you speak? :-). In '99, I went to Poland by bus and we just winged everything. Our accomodation in one city was a room in someone's house - we just found someone at the train station who didn't look like an axe killer who had a room available for a reasonable price and went home with them.

For the record, they were lovely and it was fine.

*Nods* - my holidays as a child generally involved tents or staying with a relative (they were still holidays, so it's not like I was deprived!) - I didn't go abroad at all until I was 13 and that was on a French exchange, so not exactly glamorous.

I think of myself as being conservative bordering on prissy about where I travel because I generally only go to places where I can generally 1)get digestible vegetarian food, 2)have access to Western-style plumbing and 3)be reasonably assured of my personal safety - e.g. no war zones or areas with extensive terrorism.

At least slightly apropos, thanks for the postcard, which arrived yesterday :)

I don't think I go as far as you do - I don't often do two long-hauls in a year (err, um, actually I've got three planned this year, but Chicago is for work), whilst New Zealand is actually quite distant - and the Inca Trail is rather more strenuous than anything I've done.

Aren't nice holidays abroad pretty much what time and money are for ?

Edited 2010-03-31 14:31 (UTC)

I don't USUALLY go to NZ twice in a year ;-). I actually have a limit that I impose on myself of two trips abroad by plane per year. Last year, I actually only went on one *gasp* (because I had the second NZ trip planned for Feb of this year!).

Aren't nice holidays abroad pretty much what time and money are for ?

I won't argue with that one :-).

This trip to NZ, I crossed the IDL in both directions and I can report that both ways are really confusing, even though it's easy enough to keep track in theory. In reality, if ONE timepiece ends up wrong and you wake up at 4am with an alarm, it is really hard to work out what went wrong where and what time it really is!

NZ is a really good way of picking up airports for a transited airports list - I think this trip was the only time I've not picked up a new airport! And the first time I've done the whole trip in only 4 flights (FTAOD, I'm defining it as a take off, followed by a flight followed by a landing, to maximise number of landings because those are the worst bit IMO). For comparison, last NZ trip had 6 flights (er, more if I count paragliding and parasailing ;-)), the first NZ trip had 11(!), Peru had 8.

Time and money are for KNITTING THINGS silly ;-)

Oh, and I'm not sure how many EU countries I've *technically* been to because some of them weren't in the EU at the time and/or some of them were places I went through by coach.

I have accidentally found myself in a number of different countries and surprised that I had crossed the border without noticing. But those tend to be edge cases - e.g. that time I technically went to Italy *over* the very snowy Alps or that time when I thought the prices of everything were extortionate in a little village I visited on a boat trip on Lake Lémanuntil until I discovered that it was in France not Switzerland, so the prices were therefore *French* Francs not Swiss ones. Not that Switzerland is in the EU, of course.

And my African exploits so far have been limited to Egypt - I've not been Sub-Saharan Africa, which is completely different.

Please try not to accidentally cross the border into Iran, or similar!

Yes, indeed!

I did wonder about making a comment along the lines of "But that doesn't really count, at least not for countries that wouldn't lock me up as a spy or worse!".

Flying to Dubai took us over Iran/Iraq in such a way that I couldn't work out which side of the border we were flying over. At the time, I thought "Hmmm, if this plane were to need to make an emergency landing, which of these countries would actually be worse to end up in?" and I really couldn't decide!

I'm not sure how to go about getting a Europe stamp ... ask nicely at the Swiss border? I've got Hungary and Romania in the current passport, but they're of course EU now.

(actually I also have Ukraine and Serbia, which won't be EU for a while, but they're not places you tend to transit)

I might well fill this passport before it expires in Feb2012: not that many blank pages left and I'll be wanting at least a Chinese full-page visa.

Edited 2010-03-31 15:46 (UTC)

I got Vienna airport in my last passport by smiling sweetly and saying "Please may I have a stamp?" when I went through passport control.

This resulted in a BIG sigh and rummaging around in his bag for the stamps (it was an EU queue so I guess I was the first that day and that it was generally uncommon but common enough for them to have stamps). But no actual "Why do you want that stamp?" type of questions.

I didn't get a stamp for Poland, nor Norway, nor Switzerland. Given that I crossed the Swiss-French border twice a day for a few months, that would have very quickly filled up my passport if I had :-).

When returning from holiday, one starts to think of holidays

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