travel, living locations

[wispfox]

I often wonder what it is that other people look for when traveling, beyond visiting specific people. Same as far as where people choose to live. So! I ask y'all what you think.

When you are traveling, especially if it involves returning to a place you've visited before, what makes your decision on where to go? I'd rather avoid answers which are specific to people instead of location, because people is already why I travel most of the time. I want other answers. I want to know where to go, why to go, and what to do when there. Outdoors and indoors, places to eat and places to visit, places to feed my mind, my ears, or my eyes. Sell your favorite places to visit to me!

Similarly, if you like where you live, or somewhere that you have lived in the past, why? If the answer is specific people, that's fine, but I want to know more than that. Is it access to specific social groups? Activities like museums or parks or forests? Safe neighborhoods? What?

Comments

[opalmirror.livejournal.com]

Travel. I want to go someplace where I can experience a different view on the world than I do in America. I want to experience the details of how people live day to day. I want to understand local values and cuisine. I want to explore how people interact with their environment. I want to see how they take care of their home.

There are wild places I've visited by hiking that I return to again and again, because they remind me of how I am a small creature that individually has a modest effect on it, but with my culture and society I threaten its very existence. The clean, natural beauty of the wild places puts me in my place, forces me to acknowledge my personal choices. I am always grateful for being here in this time and this place to witness and get to know my environment.

Living. I want to have an intimate relationship with the physical environment and an appreciation of where it came from and the best ways to honor it. I value broad support of social systems that encourage basic fitness and wellness. I value people who view themselves as world citizens with an interest in all humanity, more strongly than they view themselves as a nation. I look for people who live comfortably but pay attention to what their impact on the world is. I look for the encouraging of free thinking and the support of the voice of radical artists.

So, I look for living situations where wild places are easily accessible via hiking and trails. I look for a reverence and a desire to maintain the wild places in their natural state. I look for community of people with some socialist values in health and the basic dignity of individuals, particularly the sick, lame, or destitute. I look for music, art, and dance that reflects world interests. I look for a lot of elbow room, quiet, safety, lack of crowds.

I want to visit New Zealand, to see constellations I've never known in the sky, to see a land wild and untrammeled in some respects but also under the grip of a conservation debate. I want to understand how many of the failures of earlier western civilizations have attempted to be avoided by the relatively recent European settlement of NZ. I want to understand the truce and institutions set up between the recent immigrants (Pakeha) and the less recent immigrants (Maori). I want to see if I want to live there, maybe grow old and die there.

I want to visit Waterton-Glacier National park (and many outdoor places), to walk upon the cores of a volcanic chain that rivaled the Andes and see more of the tremendous gouges they left behind; to see tiny true fir battling for water and survival at high elevations in their struggle with ice, sun, wind, and water. To feel my breath laboring within me as I trundle my body along the narrow paths with sweeping views of rock, ice, gravel, trees, and wild things. To see the tiny lakelets perched on the edge of a dropoff, and the wind raising small waves upon them. Three Sisters and Jefferson Wilderness in Central Oregon evoke some of this too, as do the Wallowas of NE Oregon.

I enjoyed the two weeks I spent in Troncones and Zihuatanejo, Mexico - on the Pacific coast a few hours West of Alcapulco. A sleepy town, Troncones, just a strip of houses and B&B's along a long sandy beach. Each morning up before sunrise, walk the sand and see the brilliant colors of the Sun. Enjoy flowers and tide pools during the days, or trips in to the colorful town of Zihua, or rent a VW beetle and careen down the narrow highway to ruins or other towns. Warm days, warm nights sitting in family restaurants eating ceviche, local lobster, or a whole fish broiled and the covered in diabla sauce. Burros. Coconuts. A local wedding party. Rays of light. The sound of wild creatures in the bush at night. The stars overhead. The gentle hermit crabs scurrying across the palapa kitchen tile floor at night. A quiet bite of dinner in subdued light after sunset and dark. Lying in a hammock watching the geckos triumphant smacking noise after eating a tasty bug.

Social group and cultural access living near and in the city taught me a lot about who I am, what I want, and what motivates me. It performed a sort of personal validation. What is really important to me though, is how I live and communicate with my immediate natural surroundings.