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How to make your travel experience as rich, and
beneficial as it can be for yourself and the people and
places you visit.
 1. Shop
where the locals shop. Eat where the locals eat. Dance where
the locals dance.
2. Simple things are often most memorable. Try
walking the streets and pathways with local folks, just
being where you are with them.
3. Let your travel bring you joy. If you are going
far away, stay a while. You have paid the price - now enjoy
it.
4. If you will be visiting places where the local
population is poor, it is in good taste to leave gold
jewelry and diamond engagement rings at home.
5. When you go somewhere, go to experience and become
part of a new community, a new lifestyle. Unpack and stay
long enough to renew yourself in a different flavor of life.
6. Wherever you are, look for what works. Little ways
that other cultures do things can stimulate your own
thinking and open new doors of possibilities when you get
back home.
7. Guide books. Read them before you leave home. Cut
them apart for travel, taking with you only the pertinent
parts.
8. Don't necessarily commit your schedule to being on
the move all the time. Let yourself “go with the flow,” and
be a little bit spontaneous. Enjoy a place fully before you
leave.
10. When you meet a stranger walking a dog, stroll a
piece together. Hang out in front of the town fountain,
meeting the same cast of local characters day after day.
11. Mark your suitcase. BIG. Ugly or beautiful does
not matter, but make it so you can recognize it at fifty
paces on a moving baggage carrousel. It is safer against
loss and theft if nobody of reasonable mind could say they
mistook your luggage for their own.
12. Experiencing life anew. Try it the local way, not
the tourist way.
13. Experiencing people anew. Try experiencing a full
day, from morning to bedtime, anew. Not cramming it with "shoulds"
but allowing the place and time to unfold with you in its
middle.
14. Simple travel. Try minimizing the amount of time
you spend packing and unpacking, ironing and blow drying,
lugging, storing and retrieving baggage. Let one suitcase
suffice, one small hotel, one favorite restaurant.
15. Perch on the stone wall and become part of the
scene for while. Ask questions of strangers. Pay attention
to their answers.
16. When you go to new places, go to live, don't keep
traveling. Spend your time being part of one place, maybe
two.
17. Live and experience life in the simplicity of a
new perspective. This is the real refreshment reward of
vacation time. Spend as little time as possible on airport
and hotel and sightseeing logistics.
18. Plan your trip, not to fly over places and people
you love on the way to somewhere else, but to stop and be
with them, to acclimate to new time zones, and to arrive
some days later at your destination, refreshed.
19. Traveling alone. When you walk or travel alone,
your attention can be on where you are, not on conversation
with a companion where, without intention, you "suck up"
each other's energies and focus. Try exploring alone, then
meeting up later with your companion, when you both have
plenty to show and tell each other.
20. Even when you travel, your mind will go any place
except where you are — if you let it.
21. May your travels be lit by millions of
kindnesses, tiny and large. Yours.
22. The whole point of travel is to express your
love.
23. The whole point of travel is to experience the
love.
 Click
here to continue:
The
Conscious Traveler
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