bucket list Archives - Page 2 of 3

Travel Maps and Travel Lists: Why this urge to visit more countries?

5 December, 2014 By Anna S E Lundberg 2 Comments

This week on Facebook has seen a proliferation of travel maps, tool from Matador Network that lets you see how many countries you’ve been to. A lot of my friends have shared theirs, with little comment except: “Must do more.”

I myself have “Visit 100 countries” on my bucket list, in addition to visiting specific countries and places like Mongolia, Tibet, the Great Wall of China. When my friend and I had two weeks in Central America, we raced across four countries; last year in South America, I covered eight countries in three months.

So what is it that makes us feel that we should visit more countries? Chris Guillebeau, who started his blog around his experiences of travelling to every single country in the world – 193 countries over 11 years – called his journey a Quest. We’re looking for adventure, for physical challenges; to see natural and manmade wonders like the Grand Canyon and the Taj Mahal; to learn a language, discover new cultures, taste different food; sometimes we’re looking for escape, from a painful break-up or a redundancy; and we’re simply looking for a change.

There are some, of course, who prefer to spend more time in one country, getting to know a place and its people. I have a friend who goes to Thailand at every opportunity, my mum loves nothing more than going back to the same resort once a year, and all those with sailboats and holiday homes spend a lot of time there rather than going somewhere new. It means you know what you’re getting, you can hit the ground running and be sure to have a great holiday. I even sat next to a guy on the plane this summer who said he much preferred staying at home.

At the other extreme, the manic urge to see more countries can come at the expense of truly experiencing each one. Counting a business trip on which you never left the conference centre, or spending a day or two in a country just to tick it off your list, is hardly doing it justice. My worst crime was in Liechtenstein: intending to have lunch there (ideally in the restaurant frequented by the richest prince in the world), I had driven through this tiny country in minutes. In the end, I had to stretch my leg out of the car at the crossing into Austria so that my foot could touch Liechtenstein soil. Yes, it counts! But, yes, it’s a little bit cheating…

I don’t feel rushed, though. I think I’ve developed the perfect pace, for me, when I’m travelling. I go to bed when I’m tired, I wake up naturally without an alarm clock; I plan a few excursions each day, some days more action packed than others; I have time to sit in a park with a notebook or stroll along the river with my camera; and I don’t give myself a hard time when all I want is a latte and some Wi-Fi. I feel like I’m making the most of my trip without rushing through a list of must-see attractions.

Looking at my friends’ maps, it’s interesting to consider the choices that have led to their particular configuration of countries. Often, we’ve travelled to the other side of the world but ignored our own backyard. I was shocked the other day to hear that my Australian friend had never been to New Zealand – but, then, I’ve never been to Ireland, despite spending 20 years of my life in the UK (an anomaly that I will correct next year!). Another friend in Brazil has similarly not explored the rest of South America.

It also depends on what you’re after: beaches and surfing? Mountains and hiking? Museums and temples? Adventure or relaxation? What languages do you speak? Are you comfortable travelling alone or do you need to go somewhere your friend or partner also wants to go? Where do you have friends that you can visit? My choice of destination is the result of an algorithm taking into account the time of year, the cost of flights and, of course, my bucket list.

So, here we are, my own travel map. I’ve been to 51 countries so I’m just past halfway to my goal of 100 countries. I plan to visit at least two new countries every year – this year it was Malta and Malaysia. In fact, it’s getting harder to cross countries off, with few nearby countries left to explore. In addition to Ireland, I’m quite tempted by Iceland next year (I seem to be going by the alphabet); and maybe Canada, a little further afield. Small countries help you tick off more on your list, but the countries with large surface areas look more impressive on a map! So I’m thinking Canada as well as Greenland and Russia…

Anna Lundberg has been to: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Ecuador, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Guatemala, Honduras, Hungary, Italy, Jamaica, Kenya, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Maldives, Malta, Mauritius, Monaco, Morocco, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Paraguay, Peru, Portugal, San Marino, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Tanzania, Thailand, Tunisia, United Kingdom, United States, Uruguay, Vatican. Get your own travel map from Matador Network.

What does your travel map look like? Where have you focused your attention so far? Where are you going next? Share your bucket list in the comments below!

Another birthday, another show

7 October, 2014 By Anna S E Lundberg 5 Comments

And so another year has passed, the fastest yet. Is this how it’s going to be now, each year passing more quickly, as we race towards middle, and ultimately old, age?

The fact is that a year is no longer a large and significant portion of my life. A year is one of many that I have already lived, and, I hope, one of many that I have still ahead of me. It’s 20 years since the Macarena, 19 years since Oasis released Wonderwall, 17 years since I watched Titanic five times at the cinema, 14 years since I graduated from high school, 10 years since Friends and Sex and the City ended…

So a lot has happened in 32 years, and a lot has changed, from MS-DOS to iPhones and iPads, from school discos to late night clubbing, from handwritten essays to PowerPoint presentations, from break-ups to weddings, from funerals to births. And it’s no wonder. Go back 32 years from my birth and you end up in 1950, the year that President Truman ordered the development of the hydrogen bomb, Disney released Cinderella, and the Korean War began. Yikes.

Time is relative, though. A year can pass quickly, while an hour can be agonisingly slow. Usually, of course, time slows down when you’re doing something unpleasant. My favourite Shakespeare quote from Macbeth is one that I clung on to as I endured hours and hours of school and university exams:

Come what come may,
Time and the hour run through the roughest day.

Of course the problem was that you couldn’t just sit and wait for time to pass, you had to actually concentrate and actively participate in the exam that lay ahead.

When you’re at school, you want time to pass quickly. You say that you’re 12 and three-quarters because it’s so important that you’re almost 13, which is so much older than 12. You plan your birthday party months in advance. You read magazines that are aimed at older teenagers. And you can’t wait to be a grown-up, when you can do what you want, when you have your driving licence and no homework or teachers telling you what to do.

Even as adults we want time to go quickly. We complain about Mondays and count the minutes until the weekend comes around. Then we count the weeks until our next holiday. And so time and the hour run through all days, until we shrivel up and to dust we will return.

Maybe that’s why I’m so seemingly obsessed with bucket lists, with travelling to new countries, learning languages, spending time with friends and family. I want to make sure that I’m using the time I have wisely, that I won’t have regrets. And, so far at least, each year has been better than the one before. I don’t long for my twenties or my teens, or even for the sweet innocence of childhood. Thank goodness for that, as I’m pretty sure that no one has invented time travel as yet.

So no looking back. Onwards and upwards! Here’s to another fabulous year, my 33rd. It’s going be a good one! The best to date, in fact.

“The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.”
– C. S. Lewis

100 Things to do before you Die: My bucket list one year on

1 July, 2014 By Anna S E Lundberg 3 Comments

One year ago, in July 2013, I was sitting in a hostel in La Paz, Bolivia, finalising a list of 100 things to do before I die. That blog post has since received 12,789 hits. It seems it’s a common desire among many of us to want to see the world, do interesting things, and make sure we’re not missing out.

On the other hand, some people are critical of lists like this. They don’t think you should just “tick the box”, or they argue that it’s more about who you’re with than what you do. I agree on both points. And The List is not my only resource in life – I’ve done all sorts of things in the past year that aren’t written down anywhere, including many wonderful moments with friends and family doing seemingly mundane things, watching new films and reading good books, starting my own company and making new connections…

For me, though, having a list is a way to ensure that I also look at the bigger picture, that I plan a few longer trips, that I invest time in the things that won’t be achieved just overnight; ultimately, that I don’t wake up dead one morning wondering, “What did I do all these years?”

So one year on, where am I with The Bucket List?

#5 Visit Iguazú Falls – DONE! Argentinian and Brazilian side. My first major waterfalls, and well worth the experience.

#11 Witness the Northern Lights – I need to do this soon, who’s with me? We’re experiencing a peak in sun spot activity this year and next, so now is a great time to see the auroras…

#15 Visit Pompeii – I’m planning to do this with my mum next year to celebrate our 33rd/66th birthdays. We already went to the exhibition at the British Museum, so we are well prepped!

#16 Go to Hobbiton and visit Weta in New Zealand – I just booked my trip to Auckland for November. Not all those who wander are lost…

#17 Do a Thelma-and-Louise style US road trip – Well it’s not the US but I do plan to drive from Auckland down to Wellington with my friend with whom I dressed up as Thelma and Louise for a fancy dress party at uni, so I think it counts…

#41 Sing Evita songs in Buenos Aires – Done! I went through my full repertoire outside the Casa Rosada and gave the city just a little touch of star quality…

#45 Visit Iceland – Could combine this with #11 next year?

#47 Travel to 100 countries – Almost halfway there! I think I’m at 45 today and I’ll be at 48 by the end of the year…

#53 Go paragliding – Done! I was going to do a little arty video clip from my GoPro footage but it was 16 minutes long and all a bit jumpy, so I think you might either get bored or experience motion sickness…

#55 Gallop across a field – Done! In Argentina. Amazing.

Horse riding in Salta — I’m on a horse. My first proper horse riding experience with Sayta Cabalgatas in Salta, Argentina

#71 Read the Bible – So I started last year. I had a bit of a break. Now I’ve started again and I just have 77 hours to go, so says my Kindle. Hmm…

#73 Watch all three Lord of the Rings films back to back – Well I obviously need to do this before #16.

#83 Reach 1,000 Twitter followers – I’m halfway there at almost 500 followers. I just need to make sure I reach my target before Twitter stops being a popular digital platform! 😉

#89 Do yoga daily – I was doing it just a few months ago and now I’ve completely lapsed.*Sigh*

#90 Speak fluent Spanish – I was well on the way last year but I must admit that I haven’t really been working on it since my South America trip…

#91 Learn Mandarin. Or possibly Japanese – I tried Mandarin. It is hard. So I’ve gone for Japanese instead, and I’ve completed a foundational course. Maybe if I plan a trip next year I can have that as a goal..

#100 Watch a tennis match at Wimbledon – DOH I completely missed the fact that there was a ballot. Oops. Apparently there are some tickets released every day online so will try that. Or does someone with friends in high places want to invite me as their plus one to the Centre Court Final? …

What’s on your list?

Goodbye 2013, Hello 2014: Resolutions and Retrospection

1 January, 2014 By Anna S E Lundberg 2 Comments

Another year ended, another begun. Welcome to 2014.

That moment when the clock strikes twelve and we all wish each other a Happy New Year is somehow magical. Our hearts fill with nostalgia for days gone by and great hopes for the future. Whether we want to lose weight and exercise more, spend more time with our family, or travel the world – it all seems possible!

Then the next morning we wake up, exhausted from our antics the night before, and faced with the cold, dark reality of a rainy New Year’s Day.

Now what?

I’ve written many a list of standard resolutions in the last twenty odd years. Some years, I’ve been more focused, deciding on a couple of things I want to concentrate on. Other years, I haven’t really given it any thought.

Of course, if you’re not fussed about where you’re going or what you’re doing, and you’re happy to take life completely as it comes, then writing goals and lists and action plans is probably not going to be productive.

But I do think a degree of reflection over what you’ve achieved and experienced over the past year is a worthwhile exercise. You press the pause button on an otherwise action-packed film and even get to rewind, to smile as you look back over the joyous moments, to recognise the hard work you’ve put in and difficult decisions you’ve made, to feel again the sadness over the more painful memories; in other words, to reflect on both the good and the bad.

As far as my own video of 2013 is concerned, unusually, I actually feel completely contented. No big regrets, no ‘what ifs’, and overall I’m left with a blockbuster hit that I’ll be watching again and again over the next few years…

1. I finally travelled to South America

South America was an untouched continent for me, a far-off land that promised adventure and great natural beauty – though people warned me of its darker side (mwahaha!). After having talked about it for a while without doing anything about it, I ultimately decided to make it happen, and then everything fell into place.

People now ask me what the highlight was, but, of course, it’s impossible to choose one single aspect. The whole three-month period – my longest break from school or work in twelve years, and my longest trip alone ever – was a highlight. Good or bad, every day meant a new experience, a new encounter, a new memory.

Machu Picchu was always the biggest draw of South America for me, and it exceeded my expectations – somehow I had been so focused on the big finale of arriving at the ruins, I hadn’t realised how much there was to see and hear about on the four-day trek that led me there. Then there were all kinds of wonders of the world and activities to tick off on my newly created bucket list: 5. Visit Iguazú Falls, 41. Sing Evita songs in Buenos Aires, 55. Gallop across a field (on a horse).

I also had my first – and hopefully last – encounter with a gun, and had my iPhone stolen, which led to four whole months of life without a smartphone (gasp!).

2. I started to blog

Not exactly an early adopter, in January 2013 I bit the bullet and created a personal blog. A little tentative at first, I soon got into the regular routine of publishing something every two days. It wasn’t too difficult to think of things to write when travelling alone across a new continent! The most popular posts? The Bucket List and my South America packing list, my ode to London, and my musings on daring to dream.

I love writing and the blog has given me an outlet, a ‘reason’ to write. And, as much as I write for my own sake, I’m also grateful to those of my old and new friends who have actually taken the time to read my ramblings.

(I actually just found a diary I wrote in the summer of 1995, with insights that would make Miley Cyrus blush. Well, no, they were probably quite normal adolescent reveries, but still quite embarrassing. Thank goodness they didn’t have blogs ‘in those days’.)

3. I changed jobs and countries

Sometimes, however happy you are somewhere, you need to shake things up. It’s so easy to snuggle down into blissful contentedness, as your comfort zone gradually shrinks around you. New encounters and new physical surroundings will by definition give you a different perspective, an injection of energy, a burst of new ideas.

It can be hard to leave your friends behind but in the end you have to create your own life. And, anyway, you haven’t really left your friends. They’re with you in your shared memories and, more prosaically, in your online network. With a mixture of Facebook, WhatsApp and email, and a sprinkling of Easyjet, it’s like you’ve never left…

I haven’t quite settled yet, so there are likely to be more changes still to come!

Looking ahead

That was 2013. What about 2014?

Obviously I need to lose weight, exercise more, travel the world… and I will. But is there a more inspiring way to kick off the new year than with the usual list of resolutions?

In the last few days, I’ve come across for the first time the idea of identifying a personal theme for the year, instead of writing resolutions that you will inevitably break. It’s an approach that I find appealing in its simplicity. It can be something like ‘mindfulness’, ‘family’, or ‘fitness’, and it’s intended as a general framework to guide your choices, instead of being yet another list of things you should do.

Looking back over the past year, I think I would retrospectively assign the theme of BOLD DECISIONS to 2013. And with that wonderful benefit that is hindsight, I can say that with each big decision I’ve made, I’ve grown more confident as I’ve seen the results unfold.

And I think the new theme of 2014 will be FOLLOW-THROUGH.

Follow-through is defined as the completion of a motion, finishing the stroke after you’ve hit the ball.

Making the decision turns out to be the easy part. The tricky part is the bit that follows, sticking with the decision you’ve made, completing the movement, avoiding distractions as you drive it to a conclusion: the follow-through. It’s going to all the exercise classes or language lessons once you’ve paid the fee. It’s buying that plane ticket before it gets too expensive. It’s reading that book that’s been sitting untouched on the shelf for so long.

I look forward to seeing what this one magical word will have led to when I do my review of 2014 a year from now!

Happy New Year everyone, and good luck with whatever plans and goals and lists you’ve created for yourself!

Revisiting The Bucket List: Why are we all so concerned about death?

15 August, 2013 By Anna S E Lundberg 3 Comments

Something strange has happened to my blog. Or, rather, to the traffic on my blog. For the past few weeks, I’ve been getting hundreds of visitors to one of my posts. Which one, you ask? The one with the gun? In fact, it’s the one with The Bucket List, a post whose essence is a list of 100 things that I want to do before I kick said bucket. Every day, people are arriving at my blog having searched things like “things to do before you die” and “things that should be on a bucket list”. I find that quite fascinating.

Personally, I love to-do lists, I love travelling, and I love learning and experiencing new things; and I suppose that on a planet of over seven billion people it’s unlikely that I’m the only one with such interests and goals. Today, more than ever, the pressure is on to achieve things, to outdo each other in the far-off places we visit or the extreme sports we undertake, to have great stories to tell of our unusual experiences. And it feels amazing! I get a thrill most of all from the experience itself, then from the feeling that I’ve done or seen something meaningful, from sharing that experience with other people, and finally from feeding off of the memories of the experience for days and years to come.

Coincidentally, I read a post from Lonely Planet today “In defence of the ‘tourist trail’” and visiting well-known sites around the world. So many cool traveller dudes would scoff at any kind of box ticking, working your way through common tourist places like the Taj Mahal, the Pyramids of Giza, the Grand Canyon… But there is a reason why these places have become such tourist attractions: THEY ARE AMAZING! I found this when I was at Machu Picchu: yes, it’s become increasingly commercialised as thousands of additional tourists flock there each year, and, yes, I’ve seen pictures of the ruins from the exact same angle many times both from the media and from my friends. But that didn’t make it any less spectacular when I arrived there after my four-day Inca Trail and took that same famous picture.

Since writing my list of 100 things to do before I die just over one month ago, I’ve achieved four of them:

5. Visit the Iguazú Falls

41. Sing Evita songs in Buenos Aires

53. Go paragliding (today!)

55. Gallop across a field (on a horse).

And I’ve also had countless moments and experiences that weren’t on my list – such as meeting my niece for the very first time, going for an inspiring coffee with a colleague, playing with my friend’s adorable one year old, eating ice cream by the lake, watching L’auberge espagnole at an outdoor cinema – and the list in no way detracts from those experiences. Life is much more than a list of tourist attractions, sports, and languages.

But in the end, it seems that many of us are searching for meaning, we’re looking for ways in which to experience life to the fullest before that life comes to an end – and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. We just need to remember to keep living in the present, and enjoy the little moments as well as the big WOW adventures. And if we don’t manage to tick off all those 100 things on the list then that’s okay! We will have had a pretty good run…

Travel Maps and Travel Lists: Why this urge to visit more countries?

Another birthday, another show

100 Things to do before you Die: My bucket list one year on

Goodbye 2013, Hello 2014: Resolutions and Retrospection

Revisiting The Bucket List: Why are we all so concerned about death?

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