Health and Wellbeing, Social Media, Travel

Training to be a tourist and producing a blog

I’ve always loved the idea of working on what I want and exercising the way I want at the same time.

So a few weeks ago I started testing out the idea of going for a walk and creating content for my blog on my iPhone using Voice Record Pro.  I wanted to produce more results without doing more work.

My hope was that by doing two really important things at once, those two activities will enhance each other and be better as a result.  That’s the theory anyway.

Fortunately, technology is on my side.  My smartphone can do a lot of things at once.  I am  using it in conjunction with a Fitbit, the Flex 2, which I wear on my left wrist.  I can record my activity in real time and it lets me know my phone is ringing.  These seem like very small functions but for me they are worth the inconvenience of having something on my arm all the time.

I like the fitbit flex because it’s light and reminds me a lot of the sort of bracelets you pick up on your travels around the world, the kind that are made by local villagers or that priests and monks offer with blessings.  So it’s kind of a modern high-tech version of that.

And that brings me to why I’m doing all this exercise—training, in effect, to be a tourist.

I live roughly 1.5 kilometres from a community pool, so my aim is to walk there, swim 300-500 metres and then walk home most days, a level of activity that I would consider fit enough to enjoy traveling and exploring the world.  As a tourist, I’m committed to seeing as much of any place on foot as I can.  And I’m always interested in things that are built locally and have a good story.  I buy and own so little that if I’m going to purchase anything, it better have a pretty good yarn connected to it.

This was my first recorded blog and I didn’t know what the outcome would be.  My plan was to email it to someone from freelancer.com, where I have had good success, get somebody to transcribe it and then I would edit the final release.

I ended up partnering with a friend who is a real editor with skills way beyond what I need to get the job done, and if you are still with me, this is what you have just read. Cheers.

 

About the photo

Circa 2013, ticking off my bucket list and visiting Egypt with one of my all time favorite travel buddies. I have walked hundreds of miles with this amazing friend of mine, and I even taught her to swim.

Our tour guide asked us if we wanted to do something off the normal itinerary, of course we said yes.

So we met him in Cairo, and sure enough he turns up with his mate and a couple of camels.  Cairo after dark was chaos; there was every type of transport imaginable, including horses, donkeys, motor bikes and camels.

So we rode off on our camels into the Sahara desert moonlight to find a Bedouin tent.  Halfway there, I was drifting off into the magnificence of the scene, the pyramids in the background lit up by the moon, when suddenly things felt kinda weird.

Next thing I am flat on my back on the sand.  The saddle had slipped off the back of my faithful ride and I definitely had a moment of shit this is the end.  I got my wind back and started to breathe.

I figured nothing was broke and knew that I had to get back on the Camel no matter what.  I did, we found the tent, where we smoked Shisha and partied with some locals.  We rode back without incident and now I have a story about falling off a camel in the Sahara Desert.

9 thoughts on “Training to be a tourist and producing a blog

  1. Howdy! Someone in my Facebook group shared this site with us so I came to take a look. I’m definitely enjoying the information. I’m bookmarking and will be tweeting this to my followers! Terrific blog and outstanding design.

  2. Hello! Quick question that’s entirely off topic. Do you know how to make your site mobile friendly? My weblog looks weird when browsing from my iphone. I’m trying to find a template or plugin that might be able to correct this problem. If you have any suggestions, please share. Many thanks!

    1. I use WordPress that does most of the hard work for me. Most website builders deal with the mobile side of things.

  3. I was curious if you ever considered changing the layout of your website? Its very well written; I love what youve got to say. But maybe you could a little more in the way of content so people could connect with it better. Youve got an awful lot of text for only having 1 or 2 pictures. Maybe you could space it out better?

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