On my lunch break in a discount bookstore shopping for Christmas presents in 2015 my world of travel completely changed when I purchased the 2015 Lonely Planet Ultimate Travel List - The 500 Best Places on the Planet...Ranked.
This book cost me $35 and I gave it to myself for Christmas. I needed vision and inspiration on this journey. I could not believe that The Temples of Angkor in Cambodia were the number one destination for Lonely Planet travellers in the world at that time. This was a place that I (who considered myself a well educated and culturally sophisticated person) had never even heard of.
It was this paradigm shift that really challenged my destination choices and what I was travelling for. I quietly resolved to start working my way through these destinations. It was amazing to me that places that were some of my favourite destinations in the world didn't even make the Top 100 on the list.
I was out of touch with the younger, more sophisticated world travellers of this generation that made travel choices based on a different and unique value system. I started to get systematic and inspired and worked my way through that book marking every destination I had already been too and those I wanted to go to in the future.
Most surprisingly to me the Tian Tan Buddha in Hong Kong was not even in the Top 500 destinations in the world. When later on my travels I was taking a boat down the Tonle Sap in Cambodia I met an Australian women lawyer who was also over 50 and a very experienced traveller who was able to contextualise the Lonely Planet traveller experience for me.
The landscape of the world of travel and adventure had changed since I was a young person. I grew up in an Australia where nobody flew around the world on holidays and the furthest people travelled if they did travel by plane was to the Gold Coast or Bali.
I certainly didn't know any older women who regularly travelled alone.
This indeed was a new world and I was now on a journey to embrace all the experiences that travel could afford me. And this guide was to be the launchpad and inspiration for that journey.
Lonely Planet Ultimate Travel List. The 500 Best Places on the Planet...Ranked. Printed August 2015.
