When returning from holiday, one starts to think of holidays

[fivemack]

By 'south of the Rio Grande', I mean 'into Mexico' rather than 'anywhere south of 31N' - I thought this was standard usage, but various of my friends in Cambridge interpreted it the other way.

[Poll #1545665]

Comments

[emperor]

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

[beckyc.livejournal.com]

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...

[naath.livejournal.com]

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...

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

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.

[beckyc.livejournal.com]

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.

[beckyc.livejournal.com]

*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.

[emperor]

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