Now that the excitement of Christmas has passed, it’s time to reflect on the year gone by and make resolutions for the year lying ahead. Let’s have a look at last year’s travel resolutions:

  1. Have more local holidays. This resolution started off well, but then sort of fell by the wayside as the year progressed. We had a… memorable… experience camping in the Pilanesberg in January. In April, we camped in the Krugersdorp Game Reserve with friends, followed by a chilly, but fantastic, few days in the Golden Gate Highlands National Park. And I’m afraid that was the end of it. Oh, we did a few daytrips here and there, but nothing that could be called a holiday.
  2. Improve the quality of holiday pictures. I think I’m slowly getting the hang of learning how to make the best of my little point-and-shoot camera. Having Photoshop to edit and touch up helps a lot, though.
  3. Save more money for holiday purposes. We’re lucky enough that our income exceeds our expenditures, so once again we’ve managed to pay off all our holidays long before we actually went on them.
  4. Continue improving the quality of this blog. This one is a little debatable, perhaps. I love writing for this blog, but sometimes I either just don’t have the time or the inclination to write long posts, resulting in shorter or infrequent updates.
  5. Engage with more travellers on Twitter. The 34 people who currently follow me will know that I am hardly ever active on Twitter. I’ve decided that Twitter is a tool (a very effective one, I’ll admit) for people with too much time on their hands. I’ll continue tweeting my latest blog posts and discovering new bloggers on it, but I will not be using it much more than that.
Image courtesy of Inspirationline.com.

Once again, it seems like I’ve managed to keep some of my resolutions, but most have not gone quite as planned. Nevertheless, and despite certain bloggers’ recent advice to live life without goals, I still think it’s good to have something to strive for. So, without further ado, here are my travel-related resolutions for 2012:

  1. Save money for holiday purposes. As said before, this one will always be on the list. It might be a little trickier in 2012 however, since we will be starting to build a house as soon as the rainy season has passed, and I have also enrolled part-time at university for a postgraduate degree, so we might be a little strapped for cash this year.
  2. Exlore more of South Africa. Gareth will be starting a new job in January, one where he won’t have to work weekends or public holidays any more, so we might actually have the opportunity to go away more often. Now we just need to make sure we can afford it.
  3. Be more adventurous in trying out foreign food. Whenever I read about the street foods of Thailand or the vibrant colours and flavours of  Moroccan or Indian cuisine, I’m always disappointed that I didn’t sample more local dishes while on my travels. Perhaps it’s time to try something new.
  4. Improve my travel writing. When I reread some of my posts I notice that an awful lot of detail is missing, things I remember but don’t necessarily write down while telling the story. I was taught that all good writing includes the five senses, something I’ve been neglecting in my own hurried posts. Since the degree I have enrolled for is centred around English literature, I hope it will teach me to write better, more descriptive, prose.
  5. Read more widely. Not necessarily a travel-related resolution, but I recenly realised that I’ve been limiting the genre in which I mostly read and I think it’s time to branch out a bit more, perhaps into the history of destinations I intend to visit.

Let’s see if I can do better in the coming year. What are some of your new year’s resolutions? Do you make them? Do you keep them?