Who has planned holidays, a trip or a weekend getaway recently? These days, we do not leave just once a year, we do it all the time. The more we work, the more we want to travel to escape the stagnation of everyday life, spend the hard-earned money, experience luxury of expensive hotels, fashionable restaurants and snap an instagrammable photo we can show off. However, the more we travel and the more photos we take, the more common it becomes. What is more, we start to see the drawbacks of obsessive globetrotting. What used to be the privilege of the elites, has now become a mass entertainment, which is often devoid of any meaning apparat from an Instagram high-five: yes, I’ve been there too.
Of course, we can have a plan, like following the art or architecture routes, setting off to run in marathons, join cycling raids or eat in a restaurant at the end of the world, where you need to book a table one year in advance. Alternatively, we can do it spontaneously, nothing planned, on our own or with someone we have just met on some online app. We have plenty of options, but they all start to look the same, don’t you think? We whisper: “You come to someplace new… and everything looks just the same”, like the protagonists from Jim Jarmush “Stranger than Paradise”. On top of that, we need to face the music – our mass travelling is changing the world. It generates significant carbon footprint, and makes some places so spoiled by tourists that they become impossible to travel to. Many such places have terminally lost their pristine character. With this in mind, we do want to continue travelling, however, we want to do it in a more responsible and conscious way.
We asked five young travellers where, with whom and why they get around. We crossed Japan in a campervan with Janek and Marta, we walked the Gobi desert with Mateusz Waligóra, we swam across the ocean on a container ship with Ula Ryciak, and we wandered along the Icelandic coast with Olga Urbanek. We cracked the hobo code used by nomads and vagabonds; we marked paths in the Kampinos National Park with Rafał, we watched the travelling style of Chiang Yee, the author of the cult “The Silent Traveller”, we visited Warsaw’s Vietnamese bars and had ice-cream at Lukullus with Ola Wasilkowska.
The most significant of all these journeys was a mini-trip to the Warsaw outskirts to meet writer Manuela Gretkowska, who brilliantly talks about travels, also the spiritual ones and how they influence our development: “Each journey, even the “micro” one, for example from Warsaw to Kutno, is a work-out for the mind. Hundreds of new incentives stimulate the mind, create new synaptic connections and bend the time”. Therefore, we set off for Kutno, hopefully with USTA in hands!
Oh, and finally, we have a beautiful excursion across Scotland for you, a handful of recipes to use on the road and an extended guide to Warsaw. You can buy the new, summer USTA issue HERE.
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