Jeremy founded Living the Dream in 2008 to chronicle his long-term trip around Asia. Since then he has been on two long-term trips, visited 69 countries, and is just getting started. He is now on a Lifestyle Design quest to build businesses to pursue a life of travel.
Prior to leaving to our 465-day trip around the world, we were really excited to be sent a few pairs of KEEN shoes to wear on our journey.
We were particularly interested in these shoes as they were clearly designed by someone who had our type of journey in mind.
Comfortable for city walking, rugged for mountain hiking, and waterproof just for good measure, they really did seem to be the best shoe for traveling on an adventure such as ours.
But did they live up to the hype?
After 15 months on the road, visiting 38 countries on 5 continents, you could say that we put them through the ultimate test to find the answer.
There has been a blow-up in the travel blogging community over the recent inclusion of captive dolphin experiences at a bloggers’ conference in Cancun, Mexico. Those against the idea of captive dolphin experiences started a boycott, published a lot of posts with “facts” taken from documentaries like Blackfish and The Cove, and overall made me shudder at the poor form with which the argument was presented. I could go into the dozens of reasons as to why this was a horrible choice for our industry, but to sum it up in one statement, my biggest point of contention was that bloggers were fighting to restrict their own access to research a hotly contested topic- one we were personally invited to come and see firsthand.
Rather than take part in this debate once the conversation degraded past the point of being civil (so, about 5 minutes in), we decided to take matters in our own hand. We had to find out the facts for ourselves.
We had already done a wild dolphin encounter in Mauritius earlier this year, but to be able to adequately talk about the captive alternative, we made it our quest to take in a private dolphin experience during our conference stay in Mexico. We were signed up for the provided tour with the conference, but unfortunately the boycott got the event to be cancelled (or at least, we think it did. We never received an official notification from our sponsor, which makes the industry-declared “cancellation” seem very suspicious).
Luckily, a representative from Dolphin Discovery invited us to check out their dolphinarium during our stay, outside of the official conference itinerary, to experience their dolphin encounter for ourselves.
When the media talks about the Mayan ruins in the Yucatan, it is all Chichen Itza, Chichen Itza, Chichen Itza. You can hardly read a report about Mexico without this famous site coming up time and time again.
We understand why the hype for these ruins is the way that it is- the ruins of Chichen Itza are large and incredibly well preserved. But when such rapid-fire promotion comes out to the world, the crowds are sure to follow.
If you are one of those people who just cannot stand the sight of 50+ tour groups in one day, I’m sorry to say that Chichen Itza may not be for you.
Luckily, the ruins of Uxmal just a few hours away offer a wonderful alternative that we think all visitors to the Yucatan should check out. (Okay, maybe not all visitors since that would defeat the purpose, but definitely the amazing readers of our blog).
