The Thoughtful Travel Podcast

I'm excited to share this episode of Curious Tourism, a fabulous podcast about responsible travel, which I recorded recently with host Erin and producer Kattie, who generously agreed I could also share it here in my feed. We start off by chatting about some recent visa news for visitors to Europe and the UK, as well as the outrage in Australia to see our passport is the most expensive in the world...

Want to know how to be the favourite aunty or uncle? This episode about taking your nieces and nephews travelling will give you plenty of ideas! Mike Day, a wonderful uncle, starts off by explaining how he really hoped he could give his nephews something special by giving them the gift of travel. It seems to have worked as he has a wonderful story to tell about the impact a trip over a decade ago...

Overtourism is a buzz word of late, but not a good one. We've all read about the cities and regions being overrun by tourists, who might be damaging natural or historical sights, or making an area unaffordable for its original residents to stay in. In this episode of The Thoughtful Travel Podcast, I speak with three guests with an interest in overtourism and ask for their thoughts. First up, I spe...

If you're a sports fan (and as one guest will prove, even if you're not), travelling to play or watch sports can be a great combination of two enjoyable pastimes. It's one way you can immerse yourself in something that local people enjoy as well, and can even be a great way to connect or make new friends.  In this episode I hear firstly from Julie Kaplan who has had some fun table tennis expe...

Learning more about being a responsible traveller when it comes to seeing or interacting with animals on my trips is one of the biggest learning curves running this podcast has given me over the past decade. In this episode, I hear from three professionals working at the intersection of animals and tourism, in three different but equally fascinating roles. First up, I chat with Nora Livingstone of...

2024 is reaching an end, and I'm honestly looking forward to getting on with 2025! This year was a bit of a bust: the sudden loss of my Mum tainted most of the year with various repercussions, and even this podcast suffered from some neglect! But with a shiny new year ahead, I'm happy to look back on what travel I did manage in 2024, as well as talk about what seem to be the most likely travel tre...

Like many parts of travel, in recent years I've started to rethink some aspects of museum that I just took for granted in my early years of travel. In this episode, I chat with three guests on a variety of aspects of the ethics of museums, which all gave me great food for thought. First up, I spoke with Chris Christou, who articulates some of the key ethical issues many museums face, especially th...

Almost 40 years after my first trip to Hong Kong, I returned in November with my teenager son. Back as a nine-year-old, Hong Kong was the very first place I'd been to outside of Western Australia, so it made quite the impression.  This time, I was there to visit friends who've recently moved there, and to do some extra sightseeing while they were at work. In this trip report episode, I'm going to...

A huge reason many people travel is to get away from city life and into nature. In Episode 327 of The Thoughtful Travel Podcast we don't just get into nature - we hear about some really rare and unique encounters with the natural world. First up, I chat with Satyajit Das, a veteran of many intriguing wildlife encounters on his travels, who explains how lucky he was in coming across the small cats...

This episode is a joyful collaboration with Tracy of the UK Travel Podcast. When one of your best friends invites you to his wedding in the Lake District in England, you say yes! We first met Cham in Cambodia - back in Episode 114 - and we've holidayed with him across Asia ever since, but meeting up in the UK to celebrate his wedding was our most exciting adventure together yet. My 14-year-old son...

If you think of Australia, you're bound to imagine a few stereotypes of what life here is like: sun and sand might feature, and you will perhaps imagine we're a laidback nation of permanently relaxed people. Over the last year, the topic of what people think about Australia has come up with quite a few guests so I decided to compile an episode about these ideas. I chat first with Michael Jensen wh...

Meeting new people is one of my favourite parts of travelling, and when these chance encounters turn into long-term friendships, that's just perfection! My most recent trip, three weeks in England and Wales, came about because my son and I were invited to attend the wedding of a dear travelling friend, who we originally met in Cambodia and have also travelled with in Vietnam, Malaysia and Thailand...

Learning other languages can be really hard - especially if you're sitting in your home country trying to learn from a boring textbook. The guests in this episode all decided that they'd learn another language - Thai, French, Polish and Welsh - by travelling and immersing themselves in the language, in varied and interesting ways. First up, I hear from Paddy Jenkins about his experience of learnin...

Although I never studied abroad myself I have no doubt at all that I would have loved every minute of it - and my three guests today certainly remind me of all of the many ways a study abroad experience can be life-changing. I start off chatting with Pam Petro who studied a graduate program in Wales, and not only learnt something from her course but began a lifetime obsession with all things Welsh...

For travellers like us, knowing a tourism business we are about to use is properly thoughtful, taking into account the impact we will have on the community and the environment, is important. But with an industry full of greenwashing and unsubstantiated eco-credentials, it's sometimes difficult to know what we can trust. Over the past few years now I've had a growing awareness of B Corps but was ve...

This is an episode I never imagined I'd need to make; family lore was that my mum June would live to a hundred. But very sadly, after a sudden terminal cancer diagnosis in late January, my beautiful mum passed away early in February. As the biggest fan of The Thoughtful Travel Podcast, I knew I couldn't restart it after my time away without mentioning my mum and how she encouraged me to travel - I...

Staying in someone’s home is the ultimate in starting to understand the local way of life when you travel, and I’ve had some brilliant homestay experiences in the past. In this episode devoted to homestay accommodation, I first tell you my own tales of Russian homestays, with some of the delightful interactions with homestay hosts in Vladivostok, Yekaterinburg, Moscow and St Petersburg. I then cha...

When I was first introduced to Gevorg Babayan and his company LikeLocal.io, which matches travellers with local experiences, I knew he'd be a good guest for The Thoughtful Travel Podcast, but as I got to know him more through interactions in the Thoughtful Travellers Facebook group, I soon realised that a quick chat wouldn't be enough - we would need a deep dive! In this chat, I learn more about G...

Tales of things going wrong - or almost - are always popular, and I think if you throw in the trickiness of a border crossing, these stories are top-notch entertainment! In this episode, I start off chatting with Michael Jensen about a triple-border experience in northern Thailand recently - made more fun by knowing exactly the spot he was talking about as I was lucky enough to visit that same spo...

I am absolutely convinced that taking kids travelling is one of the best things you can do for them, and in this episode I've gathered together the thoughts of four fathers who agree with me! First up, I chat with Rupert Grey, who took his daughters across the world at a young age - in particular, he tells me about their experience visiting Bangladesh in the 1990s, and the impact that their travel...

Connecting with local people when we travel is a true joy for me - whether it's just a quick conversation in a queue, or a deeper day or more spent together, learning about how our lives are the same and different - I love it all! In this episode I chat with three guests who agree, and have found various ways to meet locals when they travel. First up, I get the tour operator perspective from Crist...

If you decided to escape the corporate world, would you buy up a plot of land in an isolated part of Japan? It's not my first thought, but this is what Walk Japan CEO Paul Christie did at the age of forty, and with many good consequences. One of these is that Walk Japan has a strong social, "giving back" element, between the Community Project in Kyushu - which springs from Paul's initial plot of l...

It's common knowledge that train travel beats air travel in the sustainability stakes, but in recent months I've put this to the test a bit more than usual, in a country where it can be hard to do: my homeland, Australia.  It all began when Dr Susanne Etti, the Global Environmental Impact Manager for Intrepid Travel, challenged me to fly the shorter route to Melbourne and then take the train with...

The statistics tell us so: more and more of us want to give back and do good when we travel. This is heartening, right? Now we just have to start figuring out the best ways to contribute to the places we visit, in genuinely useful ways - and some of these are described in this episode. First up, I chat with Roger Smith of Echidna Walkabout who gives a good overview of giving back, and shares his w...

I had the absolute pleasure of meeting Micah Kamohoali'i when I was in Sydney for SXSW recently, and I knew immediately we would need a LONG chat! This discussion was a pleasure from start to finish: we start off discussing how Micah found himself working in the tourism industry, and what tourism in Hawai'i has been like over the years: with ups and downs of how responsible it was (and wasn't) and...