Enjoying your festive break? We all appreciate time off for religious festivals and public holidays, but there’s a roll-call of calendar milestones that aren’t deemed important enough to merit 24 hours away from the workplace. These alternative dates have their roots in marketing (Eat a Red Apple Day) or encourage us to keep fit (Walk to Work Day) while some are rather more indulgent – February 3 is Ice Cream for Breakfast Day. Here are a few more travel-related events to put in your 2018 diary.
1Plan a Solo Vacation Day (March 1)
The entrance to an ashram in Madhya Pradesh, India. Picture: Alamy
There’s a lot to be said for taking a holiday without friends and family in tow, and a single-room supplement is a small price to pay for the temporary sense of freedom. Solo holidaymakers tend to be spontaneous, open to new experiences and are more likely to meet people. The trip could be a head-clearing weekend away or, annual leave permitting, a month at an Indian ashram. Even short breaks provide an opportunity to discover what makes fellow travellers tick and to evaluate whether our own lives are moving in the right direction. If going it alone sounds like a big step, choose somewhere you’ve been before and opt for accommodation in smaller, family-run establishments rather than huge impersonal hotels.
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2World Heritage Day (April 18)
The Blue House, in Wan Chai. Picture: Sam Tsang
A public-awareness-raising initiative, World Heritage Day highlights cultural diversity, and encourages us to step off the travel treadmill and focus on the protection and conservation of monuments and sites judged to be of outstanding universal value. Get involved by visiting a Unesco site such as Macau’s historic centre or the Blue House, in Wan Chai. There are now 1,073 World Heritage sites but, rather than being preserved for perpetuity, many are being steadily loved to death. Italian journalist Marco d’Eramo uses the term Unesco-cide to describe how, through their massed presence, tourists are destroying places of historical interest more comprehensively than wars, pestilence and earthquakes combined.
