1) What did you love or didn’t love about the choices you made in 2013 while traveling?
The ups:
I hiked across a glacier, attempted to run up the steepest street in the world, saw wild penguins and sea lions on a beach, hiked through glowworm-filled caves, hiked over an active volcano and learned to paddle board in New Zealand. I ate kangaroo in Australia, lizard in Vietnam and brain tacos in Mexico. I finally got around to visiting some of the US’s most famous sites: Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, Monument Valley, White Sands.
The downs:
Exhaustion, mainly. My hectic road trip around New Zealand (6000 kilometers, 45 places, 60 days) was incredible but draining. It took roughly six months for me to recover from the fast-paced travel, making much of my 2013 all about bases. I rarely spent less than a month in a single place after March.
There was also the usual list of misadventures — breaking two cameras and a laptop, forgetting to get an Australian visa, spending a month in a room without windows, almost having a boat sink, having a dentist drill through the nerve of my tooth. Just the usual…
2) What to Expect from Never Ending Footsteps in 2014
I’m going to spending 2014 travelling to lots of brand new countries as I work my way south from Mexico to Antarctica. I’ve never been to Latin America before so I’m extremely excited to be exploring this new region of the world. I foresee plenty of misadventures over the next 12 months, as well as many opportunities to visit places I’ve been dreaming of for years — Machu Picchu, The Galapagos, the Bolivian Salt Flats, Iguazu Falls, the Atacama Desert, Antarctica… It should hopefully be an incredible year.
I’m also going to be releasing a book in early 2014! Titled “How Not To Travel The World”, it’s going to feature a collection of my biggest misadventures over the past two years I’ve spent on the road.
Click on this link to check out Lauren’s blog Never Ending Footsteps
