Your body can’t travel but your soul can! If you feel frustrated and you miss discovering new places and meeting new people, check out how to feel like on holidays during the time of quarantine. Put on a Hawaiian T-shirt and mix yourself a piña colada. This is going to be a wild ride!
‘Travel just in case of urgency’ they say.’But your flight might be cancelled even if it is an urgent travel’ I say! Travelling is literally ‘banned’ and staying at home is what the current emergency situation requires. Basically, if your job allows you, you have to become a couch hero and safe the world from your living room (they say)!
Alright, I guess we all get it and fully respect it but how can we heal our souls which long for ocean breeze, never-ending landscapes and peaceful views? We can get the travel feeling with virtual holidaying and using a bit of our imagination!
Thanks to the miracle called internet almost everything has become possible. We can dream about adventures with our favourite film, e-book or game heroes; watch real look like videos of beautiful sceneries or listen to holiday ambience.
Travels in the times of coronavirus are tough, but nobody can stop you from creating a holiday vibe during your quarantine. Discover some useful tips how to bring a travel mood directly to your living room and enjoy your well deserved vacations!
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
1. Organize Your Old Travel Pictures
Bring back your travel memories with browsing old holiday albums. We tend to take hundreds of photos when on travels but just a few of them get the famous moment of being posted on social media, published in blogposts or shown to friends and family. Now it’s the time to check out your old travel photos and organize them. As a pretty nostalgic person, I love browsing through the old stuff. Seeing the pictures or holiday souvenirs helps me to catch back the past happy moments, to feel again the breeze of Italian Lago di Garda or to see the sunset in Cadiz.
2. Pretend You’re on Vacation
Photo by Daria Shevtsova from Pexels
Take out your colourful holiday dress, put on some fancy sunglasses, spread the sunblock through your pale body and…. go to the balcony or stick out your wide-open window! Spring is here, the birds are jabbering, the flowers blooming, and both the grass and trees are turning green again. What a great time of the year for a little dreamy get-away, right? I hope you managed to get some pasta and white wine to travel to your personal Tuscany! Do you prefer Caribbean? Take the last bottle of rum from the store shelf and mix yourself a dirty Mojito! Experiment with different types of cuisine and learn how to mix cocktails or ‘mocktails’. Turn on some holiday ‘schlager’ or dance a limbo in the kitchen! There is no reason why you couldn’t pretend at least for a day that the sunlight tickling your nose is as hot as from Seychelles!
3. Watch a Travel Documentary or Movie
Raise your hand if you spend most of your evenings by watching Netflix, Amazon, YouTube or TV. I knew it! It’s definitely one of the top activities during the COVID-19 quarantine. What about visiting the colourful bushy jungle of Brazil on a Friday evening and exploring the deep seas and oceans on Saturday? From travel and nature documentaries I can recommend ‘Our Planet’, ‘Colombia Magia Salvaje’,’Deep Sea’, ‘Africa’ and many others. You can also have a good laugh with Jack Whitehall’s travel documentary/road trip comedy television series ‘Travels with my Father’.
Those who travel because they’re constantly hungry and love exploring new tastes and scents will find themselves happy when watching Somebody feed Phil. Amazon has some travel/nature stuff in its fairly long list of documentaries too, but I haven’t watched any yet. If you prefer feature films, put on your list the classic solo travel adventure movie ‘Into the Wild’ or the thrilling ‘Jungle’ which is still in my opinion a quite underrated piece. There are many famous and less popular travel films out there. Check out this list from IMBD.
4. Write a Story about Your Previous Travels
This is another way how to bring back your lovely travel memories! You need just a laptop, tablet or a diary and pen to write down the most spectacular stories about your experiences abroad. You don’t even need to have a personal travel blog. It’s more about expressing your feelings and getting back to the days when you travelled to a beautiful destination which stole your little adventurous heart! If you’ll become extremely happy with the piece you’ve written, you can share it on social media or ask people with blogposts for publishing. Maybe you’ll even decide to start with your small travel blog which will help you to get through the hard times like these.
5. Read a (Travel) Novel
If you’re more a book person rather than a movie geek, you can start a little excitement with finding an adventurous e-book of your taste. It doesn’t have to be a travel piece, you get some getaway feeling also from classic novels which take place in faraway countries. Fetch a book from Gabriel Garcia Márquez for a little Colombian escape or get goosebumps from Scandinavian winters by reading a crime story from Jo Nesbo.
I’m reading a book about Nikola Tesla now and a big part of it is happening in New York and even though it’s set in the end of 19th and the beginning of 20th century I’m feeling like travelling to the USA and back to Croatia where the genius was born! If you really prefer some hardcore travel stuff you have a pretty wide selection to choose from: On the Road by Jack Kerouac, The Alchemist by Paolo Coellho, The Adventures of Tintin by Hergé, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and much more. Here is a list of the best fictional travel books. You can check the best real-life adventure novels and other literature in this article.
6. Get Away with Virtual Tours!
Thank you, Mr. Internet! What would we do without you during this coronavirus self-isolation? Only because of you there are seas of options how to visit faraway exotic destinations or historical places without a necessity to step out of our apartments or even getting up from our comfy coaches. Most of the museums have opened its virtual doors lately offering virtual tours so if you fancy New York, go to New York (virtually)!
You can ‘visit’ zoos, national parks, pyramids in Egypt and even the outer space! All these are suitable for people living alone, couples, roomies and families who are pushed to live their travel adventures virtually.
Are you more of a listener than a watcher? No problem at all, you can find a great spectre of travel ambience sounds on YouTube. Here is the sound of a Tropical Island. You can find there even videos of campfire on the beach! If you want to get a little deeper travel virtual experience and you’re willing to pay for it, check out the big travel agencies like Kayak who started with virtual destination experiences a couple of years ago.
Some international official tourist sites have also prepared some cool things for lockdown travellers. The top one is definitely VisitJapan which has a set of 360 degrees videos of the most beautiful Japanese places.
7. Plan Your Next Holiday
It’s delightful to get back into the bright past and to enjoy the present but what is truly wonderful is dreaming about your future holidays! That’s why I love planning because I need to have at least one trip ahead to look forward to. We all believe that the situation of us being self-isolated and being afraid of our health and health of the others is really just temporary. Why not to plan a trip several months or even a year in advance?
Many airlines are selling now discounted flight tickets for 2021 and the hoteliers and restaurant owners will need some extra help when getting back on track. So those who didn’t lose their jobs can plan their holidays to support the smaller or bigger businesses which had to stop operating for months and appeared on the edge of a bankrupt. Travelling will be something like an aid programme for people working in hospitality and hoteliers! So if you want help, plan some HOLS!
Thanks to the great powers of the internet there are unlimited options how to get a little virtual getaway during these hard quarantine times. I hope you find my tips helpful and if you have in mind any travel documentary, movie or a book which is helping you to get sane during the times of coronavirus just comment below!