The Thoughtful Travel Podcast

Getting out into nature is a common reason for people to go travelling but everyone chooses to experience nature in their own preferred, different ways. In Episode 45 of The Thoughtful Travel Podcast, Amanda chats with three travellers about their experiences with nature and they vary widely. First up, Sarah Ridout explains the amazing Australian outback of Uluru and the national park of Kakadu -...

Slow travel is easily one of Amanda's favourite topics - taking your time when you travel instead of rushing around to see all the sights as fast as possible is a much more satisfying way to experience a new place, she thinks. In Episode 44 Amanda chats with three like-minded guests, starting with Brooke McAlary who, as the creator of the Slow Your Home blog and the Slow Home Podcast certainly kno...

Have you ever read a novel set in a foreign place and wondered just how the author knew how to describe everything in this place? Chances are they took a trip there as part of their research and in Episode 43 of The Thoughtful Travel Podcast, Amanda chats with three novelists who have done just that. Natasha Lester is a fellow Perth-ite who writes historical fiction set in such wondrous places as...

Great Travel Souvenirs What do you bring back from a trip besides photographs and stories? I talked with three Australian travellers about their favourite souvenirs and how important they are as a means for remembering travel experiences. Sarah Ridout lived abroad in France, England and Ireland for over a decade before returning to Australia, and she collected a very smart kind of souvenir so that...

Travelling to countries with different customs and cultures from your own can induce varying kinds of culture shock, and Episode 41 of The Thoughtful Travel Podcast looks at a few examples of culture shock across Asia and the Middle East.  Amanda begins by speaking to Matt Treglia about some of his very first travel experiences abroad, and especially the terror that came with trying to cross...

Amanda is always looking for great reasons to persuade others to travel more and Episode 40 of The Thoughtful Travel Podcast provides quite a few of those. Amanda chats with three guests who each have had interesting experiences teaching them something important on their travels Jeff Ryan, who in previous episodes has taught us the dangers of porcupines eating the rubber parts of your car, returns...

It’s 2017, everyone’s making plans for a new year, and it’s time to talk about one of the things that sometimes stops up making travel plans: fear. In Episode 39 of The Thoughtful Travel Podcast Amanda talks with two great travellers who have had various worries before they’ve embarked on big trips, but they did it anyway, and of course are glad they did. First up, she spea...

Episode 38 of The Thoughtful Travel Podcast is the final episode for 2016 so Amanda is talking about New Year’s Eve Travels. Celebrating a new year is fun wherever you are but being somewhere away from home can make it even more exciting and memorable. First up, Kim-Ling of Travel-Ling has a great story to tell about a New Year’s Eve she spent on the island of Ibiza. Let’s just s...

Merry Christmas! With Christmas just around the corner, Episode 37 of The Thoughtful Travel Podcast turns to travelling at Christmas time and Amanda chats with several travellers who have spent Christmas in far flung parts of the world. First up is Annalicia Lynn who had an interesting Christmas in Taiwan while she was teaching English there. Amanda and Annalicia chat about the cultural difference...

It’s all about Japan in Episode 36 of The Thoughtful Travel Podcast. It’s rare that Amanda chats about a single destination but she's made an exception for Japan, because a bunch of my guests have talked about it and she's just come back from a fabulous week exploring one of her favourite countries in the world. Photographer Martin Bailey moved to Japan 25 years ago to work in a lace f...

In Episode 35 of The Thoughtful Travel Podcast Amanda has a lot of fun chatting about the magic of making friends while you travel. There are so many bonuses of travel they don’t advertise in the brochures and developing friendships with people from all around the world is certainly one of them. Julie Jones joins Amanda to chat about the lifelong friendships she has formed while travelling a...

Stereotypes of people by nationality are rife in the world, and come up all the time when we travel. In Episode 34 of The Thoughtful Travel Podcast, Amanda chats with three people of different nationalities about their experiences with stereotypes on their travels. Jeremy Kloberdanz of The Life Bohemian has an interesting story to tell about an immigrant man he and his wife met while travelling ar...

You might just be able to get the best of both worlds by travelling around the world and helping people by volunteering. It’s not always that simple, but in Episode 33 of The Thoughtful Travel Podcast Amanda talks with three guests who have volunteered across several continents with a huge variety of organisations. First up, she chats with Serena Star-Leonard who started off a project to cre...

Lots of people keep a travel journal when they travel and in episode 32 of The Thoughtful Travel Podcast, Amanda talks with three guests about their travel diary habits. Chris Christensen of the long-running Amateur Traveler podcast kicks things off by describing the journalling habits he has learnt from his wife, a hardcore travel journal keeper from way back! After Chris, Amanda speaks with...

In Episode 31 Amanda is talking about the different ways, both good and bad, that the internet has changed travel - how we plan and book it, how we act when we’re travelling, even how much money we spend on it! Jeff Ryan has a great perspective on this topic having spent 28 years gradually hiking the Appalachian Trail in the US. Over those three decades, he has seen the internet change many...

It's time for another round-figure episode of The Thoughtful Travel Podcast, and Amanda is celebrating Episode 30 with a random mix of chats with some of her favourite travellers. What do they have in common? They're all talking about topics which start with L and have four letters! That's good enough for Amanda! First up, she returns to the story of Martin Bailey, who moved to Japan pretty much o...

Whether or not you have any artistic talent, Amanda believes that sitting down and doing some sketching on your travels is a great idea, and in Episode 29 she chats with two travellers who do just that (although it must be said that they both have great artistic talent!). Candace Rardon is an amazing artist who has sketched, drawn and painted her way around the world. She chats about the connectio...

Getting around on our travels can be fraught with both fun and difficulty. In Episode 28 of The Thoughtful Travel Podcast Amanda chats with fellow travellers who’ve had some hairy experiences while getting from A to B, or have had some problems actually finding B! First up, Stephen Henson shares some stories of getting lost in Germany and China. Despite spending a large amount of time in Chi...

In Episode 27, Amanda covers a very serious question: Are all Aussies tanned and tall?   It’s all about stereotypes of different cultures but especially those of people Amanda's countryfolk - Australians. The first guests are Katie and Jeremy Kloberdanz of The Life Bohemian who have all these delightfully nice things to say about Australians (which gets a big thumbs up from Amanda!...

Encountering foreign languages when we travel is both a challenge and a joy - and some of us dream not only of learning a few phrases when we travel, but becoming bilingual. It’s definitely not easy to be bilingual but the guests in this episode of The Thoughtful Travel Podcast show that it’s not impossible, either. Amanda starts by chatting with Leyla of Women on the Road, one of...

So just how slow is slow travel? We can probably all have some kind of similar idea on what slow travel is - being more mindful with how we spend our time travelling, not rushing around to tick off lists of all the sights, and possibly spending longer than usual in one spot - but how slow is slow?   Amanda's guests in this episode all have a different take on how we can travel slowly, an...

Lots of people with a deep sense of wanderlust develop it by travelling at a young age, but as Amanda chats about in this episode, it's definitely not the only path to developing a love of travel.  Today she speaks with three guests who love to travel now, but never really got to travel much as kids. First up, Amanda speaks with Lisa Luken who grew up on a farm and didn't do&nb...

Are you an adventurous eater? The topic of food in foreign countries is always a fascinating one and today’s episode addresses it on a couple of different fronts. To start with, Amanda speaks with Lola Akinmade Åkerström, who has built a fabulous career as a travel writer and photographer. One way she approaches foreign food is to get down to grass roots level which has seen her c...

Recently Amanda has started asking her guests about their craziest travel moments, but really, what she's looking for is those particularly memorable experiences that stick with you forever - the kind of stories you tell over and over. The three guests in this episode all have fascinating stories to tell of memorable things which happened to them in various spots across the world.  ...

Episode 21 of The Thoughtful Travel Podcast is all about the internet. What did we do without it? On the surface, the advent of the internet can surely only be a huge bonus for travellers, right? We can research, book and communicate with so much ease.   But as all of today’s guests point out, there are definitely both pros and cons of the internet for travellers. This whole discussion...