inspired by bourdain, broadway or the beach?
A few weeks back we asked our global community the question “what inspires you to travel?” Well, the results are in – and thanks to you guys we now know a little bit more about what gets our travellers out of a daydream and into the real world.
When it came to inspirational people, perennial Intrepid favourites such as Shackleton and Nelson Mandela got plenty of love, as did Sir Edmund Hillary, who was clearly responsible for more than a few honorary base camp climbs. Also, apparently a few of you are sporting Che Guevara T-shirts in your wardrobe, because this mustached revolutionary (along with the Buena Vista Social Club) managed to get plenty of you dreaming about sipping Mojitos in Cuba.
We also discovered that you don’t have to be a hardened revolutionary or rugged explorer for others to follow in your footsteps, as David Attenborough, Anthony Bourdain, Bob Marley and Ernest Hemmingway seem to have done a pretty good job of pushing your adventure buttons.
Another thing we learned is that Fredrich Nietzsche mustn’t have been far off we he claimed that “An Artist has no home in Europe except in Paris” – because over 50% of you had ‘the city of light’ as your raison d’être when it comes to art and galleries. The Italians may disagree though, as the outdoor museums of Florence and Rome were very close runners up. When it comes to the performing arts and theatre, The West End of London is still king. Across the pond, New York’s museums and legendary Broadway featured heavily – with more than a few of you craving a bight of the Big Apple’s art and culture.
We also got a glimpse into the iPod playlists of our travellers. It seems that, if we were to get our Intrepid folk to make a mix-tape, they’d be grooving to a mix of contemporary hits and bona fide classics – with Mozart, Elvis and U2 inspiring everything from road trips and rockstar moments to European conservatory crawls.
When it comes to the ultimate travel read – it was no surprise that Eat, Pray, Love and Shantaram got lots of bookworm bums off seats and out into the world. Alex Garland’s famous backpack stuffer The Beach also set imaginations alight, but it wasn’t just great adventure tales that got the travel juices flowing, with Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha sparking a lot of interest in this mysterious part of Japanese culture. For those who preferred to be inspired by the big screen, the Lord of the Ring’s trilogy had plenty of hobbits scrambling out of the shire and toward Middle Earth (New Zealand). It also seems that the Sound of Music isn’t just a great sing-along, it also served as the inspiration for quite a few European sojourns.
With the Olympics just around the corner, many of our travellers have chosen the UK as their Gold Medal destination for 2012. But plenty of you say you would be prepared to follow the Olympic Rings to wherever they ended up, proving that sporting events are a great excuse to travel somewhere new. In the same spirit, many of you plan on using 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil as the perfect opportunity to head to the party capital of South America for some fun (and football) in the sun. And who knows? You might end up sticking around for a few years and catching the Rio Olympics in 2016. And lets not forget Tennis, Cricket, Rugby and the Tour de France as great reasons to check out other corners of the globe – while many of you plan supersize your experience by catching the one-and-only Superbowl in the U.S of A.
So whatever floats your boat, captures your imagination or motivates you to get moving, now’s the time to celebrate life’s travel inspirations!
* photo by Heather Ellis – Intrepid Photography Competition
