To try to go everywhere and to see everything eventually is an impossible task.
No matter how far and wide I travel, there will be plenty that I never see and never experience. I know that. Trust me!
But a decade ago the penny dropped. I couldn’t sit back. I couldn’t complain that I felt like the only person I knew never to have been to Australia, or Prague if I hadn’t even tried to go there. I could not continue to never travel but complain about life passing me by because it was too hard. I had to get off my arse and just start going somewhere.
Then you see something amazing and then you pick up a great anecdote and then you plan for the next trip. And again, and again, and again.
And part of it was being 23 and suddenly starting to have some spare income for the first time. And some of it was just Carpe-ing the Diem come what may.
As I started to notch up the trips and colour in the countries on my map, the penny also dropped about five years ago that there are some places that you really do need to plan to visit. What do I mean by that?
Some of the countries I have visited have come as almost as an accident or a surprise. Realising that Mexico was a 20 minute drive away from San Diego and somewhere you could go for lunch... Bonus! The 2am petrol station stopover in Luxembourg, en route to skiing in Austria because there is no VAT in Luxembourg and the petrol is cheap... Bonus! Finding out Bratislava was a half hour journey down the Danube just at the point when I was finding Vienna boring... Bonus!
But as I sat in that Luxembourg petrol station in the early hours, it occurred to me that there were some places that I was never going to be ‘just driving past’. There were some places that needed real planning and some real determination to get to.
So 2007 saw three things.
The launch of my itty bitty teeny tiny countries of Europe tour; my booking to go to North Korea and my plan for a number of Levantine Autumns.
Having already been to Beirut 18 months earlier, it occurred to me to take on the rest of the Levant. Annual trips to a different country in the region would check off that part of the World in three visits. And October was such a great time of the year to go... Not as hot as the region can get but certain guaranteed late autumn warmth and unusual destinations. Sounded perfect.
And with the exception of one October spent visiting a friend in Bermuda I saw the plan through. And in 2010 I visited my last Levantine destination... Syria.
And surprise surprise! Syria is the fifth place I've been to which claims to have the World's tallest flagpole and the World's biggest flag!
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