Do more on your next travel …
“One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.”
-Henry Miller
Hey, guys!
We hope you’ve enjoyed yourselves as much as possible since our last post. Moreover, hopefully, you haven’t forgotten all about our Good Earthling challenges and have continued practicing all of the past ones.
We would like to use this post to introduce you to the idea of joining good deeds with your next travel to less developed areas of our beautiful planet.
Before we dig into that, let’s take a look at some pros and cons of traveling.
Pros and cons of traveling
On one hand, traveling broadens one’s horizon in so many ways. It enables one to learn a lot about other cultures by actually experiencing foreign customs in first hand. By traveling, one creates unforgettable memories that stay with him for life. Moreover, those who travel a lot are typically very open-minded, which makes them accepting of people of different nationalities, different religious and cultural beliefs. As such traveling promotes world peace. Also, when traveling one deals with many different situations that help him develop a set of skills which improve his ability to cope with many different everyday situations.
“Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.”
-Gustave Flaubert
On the other hand, traveling is not exactly eco-friendly. With each mile, we take with any kind of motorized mean of transportation our carbon footprint grows. Walking and cycling aside (those can hardly be used to cover long distances), machines that we use to get around are emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, whether directly or indirectly (electric car, electric trains, etc.). Those greenhouse gases (mostly CO2 when we are talking about transportation) are responsible for causing so-called enhanced greenhouse effect which leads to global warming.
However, there are others industries, like meat industry, that produce way more greenhouse gases than all means of transportation combined, giving us the chance to make up for our travels.
To travel or not to travel?
What can we conclude based on all of that? Well, since we love traveling, we suggest everyone try it and see how you feel about it. If you are thrilled about it, by all means, do it, just try to compensate by reducing your carbon footprint in other areas of your life. For instance, you can eat less meat, plant a tree for every n-th flight or miles traveled, take even shorter showers, walk or bike to work… For more suggestions, click here.
As for those of you whom traveling doesn’t really suit, keep in mind that you’re doing nature a favor by staying in your cozy nest. To sum up, do not travel unless you really like it.
“If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion, and avoid the people, you might better stay home.”
-James A. Michener
Travel and more …
To those who like or even love to travel, this act of departing the known to visit and discover the unknown or just to enjoy a change of scenery, a life without traveling would be way less fulfilling, exciting, and meaningful. We sure are one of those people. We fell in love with traveling.
So far we’ve been to many countries and due to our love towards nature and its beauty, we’ve often found ourselves arriving in less developed countries. Once there, one doesn’t need long to realize what a luxurious privilege it is to be able to travel. It is a luxury that most on this planet cannot afford.
Mixing those experiences with our Be a Good Earthling project, we soon thought of adding some extra value to our future trips. We’ve decided to do the best we possibly can to perform at least one good deed at each destination of our future travels.
When we’ve decided to visit Africa, the opportunity to put our idea into practice presented itself. We put some thought into it and soon decided to bring some extra clothes we’d donate to the locals and some school supplies which are hard to obtain for many local children, especially in rural areas.
When we arrived in Arusha, Tanzania, we kindly asked our hotel’s manager to contact local orphanage and arrange for us to visit them. He was very prompt and before we knew it we were in front of the SOS children facilities. They let us in and we were able to give the things we had packed at home directly to the underprivileged children.
Moreover, we asked their guardians to write a list of basic things they need. It was mostly basic grocery like flour, rice, water, washing detergent… With the help of the hotel manager, we were able to purchase as much of the things from the list as our finances enabled us and organized a transportation of those ingredients to the property of SOS children, Arusha.
“Certainly, travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.”
-Miriam Beard
We’d like to call on every traveler to try and do something similar every time you travel to less developed countries. It doesn’t have to be much, just do the best you can.
Our goal is to get as many travelers as possible to make a habit out of this sort of donations. There is a lot of us and we can make a difference. Moreover, we should consider making up for CO2 emitted due to our journeys.
Please share this information with every traveler you know and you’re more than welcome to tell us your opinion via the comment form below.
Love,
Good Earthlings
