How Do You Decide Where to Travel Abroad?

Hey there fellow travelers, Mark here with Walters World. Today we're in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and today we're going to talk about how you can choose your travel destination, because that's a question we get a lot. People are like, hey Mark, where should I go? And the thing is, if you're thinking about your destinations, you really have to think about what do you want to get out of your vacation. Are you looking for adventure travel? Are you looking for cultural travel? Are you looking for relaxation travel? Are you looking for foodie travel? Are you looking to find your roots? Having that idea about what you want to get out of your trip really will help you decide where to go, okay? Because if you're looking for adventure traveling and you want to go kayaking, ecotourism, spelunking, you're going to be going to certain countries that are better for that. Like if you want to do kayaking, you can come to some of the bioluminescent bays here in Puerto Rico and kayak with the water glowing behind you. Go to Costa Rica and go ziplining, or you can go to West Virginia and do ziplining, because some places are better for adventure. And even in expensive countries like Switzerland, there's places you can go, like Interlaken, to do more adventure tourism. So that will dictate you that way. I know for us, one of our favorite kind of, you know, adventure-y kind of places to go is Ecuador with a lot of stuff they have, from Mindoad and going tubing down the river, you know, to more exciting things like hiking and all kinds of stuff. But the adventure side of it, there's certain countries that are better for that, certain places that are better for that, okay? But if you're going to be looking for more of a cultural travel, you're about, I want to go to museums, I want to learn about the culture and take cooking classes, then you might be better going to, you know, Japan or maybe going to Italy or France or someplace where there's classes you can take. There's a lot of cultural experiences you can go on. The thing is, is when you're going through these, you have to think about, is there more stuff I want to do than just one type of thing? Because sometimes you're like, look, I just want to relax. I don't want to do anything. Because some places are really good for doing nothing. Turks and Caicos, Belize, they're great for beach, relax, repeat, or just chillaxing. I mean, those places are great. Here in Puerto Rico, if you're in San Juan, it's not relaxing. You could be up in the morning and night and there's noise and things going on, and it's not good for chill outing, okay? So you really want to look at and see, is like, what places are really good for just doing nothing? Because sometimes you just need that relaxing beach vacation or that relaxing mountain vacation, okay? Because I know for us, we rented a cabin in Idaho and just chilled out for two weeks, and it was the greatest relaxing experience we had. So think about that. But also, sometimes I know for my mom, her big focus now is she wants to do family traveling. One, with the family, but also to learn about her family, her genealogy. We've gone to the Shetland Islands and saw the graves of our ancestors. We've been in Edinburgh and we've been in Aberdeen and Aberdeen, we've seen the tombs. I mean, you have that kind of thing as well to see where your family's from, especially if you have, like, heirlooms, or you know your grandma talked about the homeland and back in the day. These things really can hit home. I mean, I have friends that their family's from Mexico and they go back and it's really, like, it's a goosebump-inducing, like, wonderful experience to go back to see where the family was from. So you have these kind of thoughts you have to have, and once you start to realize that I have a theme I want to do on vacation, that helps you focus down, okay? And if you're looking at doing family travel, you're looking at any kind of travel, you want to mix these things up. Finding destinations that have both or destinations that are near each other that you can get both done together, that can really help, okay? And another thing I think is important when you're considering destinations, you have to think, do I just want to stay in one spot or do I want to get a taste of a lot of different places? That will also influence you because if you want to get a taste of a lot of different countries, a lot of different cultures, a lot of different things, then maybe the backpacking through Europe, training through Europe might be a better way to do it, or backpacking through South America, getting different countries where you can do that, whereas if you're like, I want to really immerse myself in the culture, maybe you want to go to a country that has a lot more kind of destinations within their country that you want to see than some that only have a few spots, okay? So I hope this helps you kind of get on the track to kind of figure out how you can choose your best destination to go to for travel, and if you do decide on the destination, check out our videos. We might have a video on it, whether you're here in San Juan, Puerto Rico, or you're going to Ecuador, Japan, Europe, the U.S., all over, and we hope we can help you travel better wherever you go. And I'll say bye from here in San Juan with a special thank you to all of our members on YouTube and our patrons on Patreon who help make travel videos like this possible. Bye from San Juan!