2017 has been declared the international year of sustainable tourism.
This is a great occasion to highlight the importance of respecting the planet and local communities while travelling, and to show the potential of sustainable tourism to transform our world into a place of prosperity for all.
It all began when I first put real life on pause to just live, elsewhere. I took a break from the intensity of life back home -stuffed with people you must see and places where you must go- and it felt great. Without strings, obligations, responbilities or duties, I found an elsewhere where I could just be.
As you already know if you have been following my blog for a while, exactly one year ago I downshifted at my desk job to have more time for writing and focusing on this blog. It has been a very intense year and has brought me to the 1000 follower milestone on facebook, to publishing my travel stories in several magazines and even in a couple of books, to developing partnerships with different companies and –above all- to spending my time doing what I like most: travelling and writing.
“Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life”
Jack Kerouac, On the Road
While on the road, you are supposed to make it with just what you’ve managed to stuff into your suitcase. I find it very liberating: I always end up realizing that I can survive with a very small part of that big amount of stuff I’m usually surrounded with.
Impersonal as only airports and stations can be, the anonymity of places of transit is democratic: they are extremely similar, even if they are located thousands of kilometres away from each other.
Similar are the snacks you will find –despite the variety of local cuisines- the long hallways of automatic machines and wracks displaying magazines in different languages, the overabundance of signs that channel the travellers, the simple font on no-frills screens indicating arrivals and departures.
