Josh Martin
Look beyond the much-lauded bucket list
We have a mildly successful 2007 Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman film to blame. The Bucket List. I haven’t seen it. I now wish millions of others hadn’t either, or at least hadn’t picked up on the technique of listing lofty goals for before you die, from which the movie draws its name.
The travel bucket list was born in 2007, but unlike Leona Lewis and that giant squid at Te Papa, which also graced us with their presence that year, this tourism phenomenon refuses to disappear.
My esteemed colleague, Ben Groundwater, recently wrote about why every traveller should have a bucket list, but I must, respectfully, disagree.
Of course, it’s illogical to disregard wanderlusting altogether – I do it all the time. It’s good to have focus and destinations that have a pull over you for unknown reasons. But a bucket list is more often a mind dump of pretty over-saturated places you saw on Instagram.
That leaves you striving to tick another box, and then another. A bucket list is also selling yourself short, perhaps even implying that the best travel experiences you will have are in places you already know about.
But nearly always the opposite is true. The resulting disconnect between expectations and reality is perhaps why I hear complaints about crowded Venice and Prague and dirty Paris.
The world doesn’t need your bucket list. The tourism backlash has started to gain momentum in precisely the places that have pride of place on many people’s travel bucket lists: Venice, Dubrovnik, Santorini and Barcelona, as well as the idyllic beaches of Boracay, Bali and Koh Phi Phi.
The problem is, whether influenced by similar pop culture, movies, school lessons or social media, we all seem to want to head to the same bucket list hot spots, while ignoring vast swathes of Earth.
Motivational speakers, TED speakers and business leaders can’t be fond of this travel buzzword either, surely. A bucket list is merely a list of wants, with no clear strategy of how to attain them. If these #travelgoals are something you aspire to achieve, writing them down wistfully is just one of many steps – and it’s not the most important.
That would be achieved by the happy-go-lucky types who save and then ‘‘just book’’, and end up having just as many adventures as your travel checklist promised and didn’t deliver.
A bucket list, for many wanderlusters, is a ranking of places they’d like to get to ‘‘some day’’. And while it’s all very well to dream of a life devoid of Excel spreadsheets and meetings, without a plan of action (savings, itineraries) ‘‘some day’’ becomes a more-digestible synonym for ‘‘never’’.
So, what’s the alternative? Instead of making a mind-dump of all the places you have to see before you die (where does it end? 50? 100?) just focus on the next place – you only get one, so make it a goody.
But don’t stop at ‘‘1. Maasai Mara’’. Plot out what time of year you’d go. Map out a dream itinerary, research flight routes and prices online or talk to a travel agent about tour options. And save . . . a lot.
This is a far better use of your time and is far more likely to culminate in your dream trip than fiendishly scribbling bucket-list destinations on a notepad.