Pam Grout - The 100 Best Worldwide Vacations to Enrich Your Life

A ldous Huxley once said that to travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries. In this book, youll discover thats a good thing. All your preconceived notions about other countries, other cultures, even your own abilities are nothing but a trap, a prison that keeps you stuck, revolving on the same old, tired axis.

With this book, we hope to shake things up a bityour travel plans, your ideas, the very core of your existence. Weve included 100 vacations around the globe, each with the potential to change your life. Theyre divided into four categoriesvacations to work your creativity, your brain, your heart, and your potential. Youll find arts and crafts getaways, learning retreats, volunteer vacations, and wellness escapes. Take your pick.

Each of the 100 vacations is guaranteed to expand your possibilities which, of course, starts with the premise of what a vacation is meant to be. Instead of coming home from your next vacation with a suntan, why not return with a Malaysian kite that you made at the open-air workshop of an 70-year-old Muslim kitemaker, or with a snapshot of the wheelchair you assembled and the 10-year-old Cambodian land mine victim who is using it to get around? Instead of souvenirs, bring back memories of the Ugandan widow who invited you into her rural homestead or of the Tuareg who fed you bread baked under the Saharan sand.

Just know that each and every one of these vacations will grow your heart, stretch your soul, and make you realize that much of what you think you know is a very tiny piece of the greater puzzle.

Pam Grout

I f youre like most people, you think of creativity as belonging to members of a private club, reserved like that corner table by the window for a select few. You believe its passed out at birth to the Beethovens, the Matisses, and the Spielbergs of the world.

You, on the other hand (sigh!), are fated to be a consumer of creativity, decorating your foyer with other peoples sculptures, spending your evenings watching other peoples visions on a 26-inch TV screen. But the truth is that all of us are creative. All of us have the ability to think up new ideas, solve baffling problems, even produce art. This is why we sing in the shower, why we write jokes in the dirt on unwashed cars.

In this chapter, youll find 23 vacations around the globe that will prove it to you once and for all that art is not a spectator sport. In fact, in many countries, art is a way of life, something thats impossible to separate from breathing. Kids in Senegal, for example, learn to drum and dance along with learning to walk.

In this country, where we learn to work from the time were born, our job is to follow the rules, to rein in the imagination. But on vacation, you need a chance to wonder, to be surprised, to play. The vacations in this chapter not only offer time off from your everyday world but also will give you long, uninterrupted hours to finally write that screenplay, finish that quilt, or learn to tango.

Whether youre interested in pottery, painting, drama, photography, mosaics, or just writing a pithy Christmas letter, theres an international arts-and-crafts vacation in this chapter with your name on it.

Confucius said a nations character is defined by its dancers. Certainly, Argentinathe inventor of the sassy, improvisational tangowould agree. Historically, the now world-famous tango was one of the first dances where partners were actually allowed to touch each other (only the Viennese waltz and the polka came earlier), and its hard to separate Argentinas history from the brash dance that began in the disregarded periphery of the culture and gradually, over time, worked its way into polite society and indeed into the consciousness of the whole world.

The tango, in fact, was so popular in Argentina that after the 1955 coup which ousted Juan Pern, the new military government in a knee-jerk reaction not only imprisoned and blacklisted many tango artists but also imposed curfews, changed tango lyrics and titles, and banned meetings of more than three people. To the wealthy members of the new regime, large numbers of tango dancers seemed suspicious, an obvious cover for political agitation. After the 1983 fall of the military junta, a spectacular renaissance occurred, and today a tango fan can choose between up to three dozen milongas a day. And thats just in Buenos Aires.