Travel Bucket List Take Two!

I am not a great cook, I am not a great artist, but I love art, and I love food, so I am the perfect traveller.

Michael Palin

Well, to say I’ve been busy this week would be a bit of an understatement so, sorry I’m late with the blog plus, sorry there’s no fashion element! However, to continue on

the theme from last week, here’s seven more places I want to see before I die!

Camp at Everest Base Camp

This may sound a little odd and a little unlikely however, it’s been a dream of mine for several years! Years ago, Claire, my most outdoorsy friend decided to trek to base camp, just before she left her camera broke and she ended up borrowing mine for the trip. When she got back, she gave me the camera back with the pictures still on the memory card. She walked me through all the pictures, from leaving Heathrow to arriving at Kathmandu and onwards up the mountain. I was totally hooked and decided that it was going to be the trip for me – and it will be!

Everest Base Camp is perched on the Khumbu Glacier at the foot of Everest and is at an altitude of 5600 metres, it takes about seven to nine days to get there which includes two full days of rest on the way up!

Hike the Milford Track in New Zealand

We all know New Zealand is a beautiful country however, did you know it has nine official Great Walks (with a new one recently opened), the Milford Track is the greatest of the lot.

Around 100 years ago, in an article that appeared in the London Spectator, the poet Blanche Baughan declared the Milford Track to be “the finest walk in the world”.

Arguably New Zealand’s most famous walk, the 53-kilometre journey begins at the head of Lake Te Anau, and leads you across suspension bridges, board walks and a mountain pass. The Milford Track is a smorgasbord of pristine lakes, sky-scraping mountain peaks and enormous valley views. It will take you to feel the misty breath of Sutherland Falls, the tallest waterfall in New Zealand.

On a sunny day it is postcard perfect but some walkers say that only when it rains, and torrents of water cascade down the steep mountainsides, have you truly experienced the magic of the Milford Track.I’ll have picture perfect please!

Visit an endangered tribe in Amazonian Ecuador

To glimpse a unique culture, but to do it sensitively and responsibly is something that, in the age of the internet will not be possible for that much longer. Understandably, many struggling minority tribes don’t want to be gawped at by tourists passing through – the arrow-firing Sentinelese of the Andaman Islands being a case in point so, avoid them!

The Cofan people, a tribe that has embraced ecotourism for many years are an indigenous people native to Sucumbíos Province northeast Ecuador.Their total population is now only about 1,500 to 2,100 people, down from approximately 15,000 in the mid-16th century, when the Spanish crushed their ancient civilization of which there are still some archeological remains.They speak the Cofán language or A'ingae. The ancestral land, community health and social cohesion of Cofan communities in Ecuador has been severely damaged by several decades of oil drilling. However, reorganization, campaigning for land rights, and direct action against encroaching oil installations have provided a little bit of stability and encouraged tourism.

Spot a snow leopard in Ladakh, Northern India

Now this one is a bit of a cheat as I’ve been to India a few times and I simply love it!I’ve never been that far North before and the chance to see a snow leopard in the wild would be too much of a gift to be turned down!Few people have actually seen this endangered cat. There are thought to be just 4,000 to 6,500 snow leopards left in the wild. Coupled with the fact that these charismatic big cats tend to live in cold, inhospitable, rocky clifftops at altitudes above 3,000m, they’re not that easy to spot. But just imagine if you caught just one fleeting glimpse – wow what a real privilege!

Visit Antarctica

Of all my bucket list items, this is actually the one I might be able to complete first.A colleague of mine gave up her job a few years ago and became the cruise director for a company called Hurtigruten.We’re still very much in touch and her tales of thousands of seals, penguins, birds, and whales are simply stunning.One of the cruises she directs takes in the Falkland islands and South Georgia, so this is actually a double bucket list as I’ve wanted to visit South Georgia and see the colonies of King Penguins for many years!Maybe not this year but 2022, who knows!!

Climb Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania

Another one with friends connections!Another friend and colleague has been pestering me for ages to do it with her for cancer research, after the year we’ve just had, the time feels right, again maybe not one for 2021 but sometime over the next few years I’m going to do it!No other mountain manages to combine such a wealth of wow-factors to tick all those boxes: it’s an aesthetically awesome monolith poking out of the African plains; it’s a tough but achievable challenge; at 5,895m, it’s the roof of a continent; it’s a climatological oddity, proving snow can sit virtually on the equator. Tick, tick, tick, and tick again!!

Tour Havana in a classic convertible

It’s all change in Cuba. A gentle thaw in relations with their big neighbours to the north means that some travel to the island has become (slightly) easier for Western citizens, even some of the trade restrictions have been lifted. With 2019 marking the 500th anniversary of the founding of Havana, there’s never been a better time to visit.

For now, Cuba remains quite unique, with an intoxicating je ne sais quoi that’s strong in culture and looseness of hips! Perhaps the most iconic Cuba image, though, is of a classic 1950s car bumping down a Havana backstreet.