Of boundless travel dreams and never-ending wishlists

You have to dream before your dreams can come true.– APJ Abdul Kalam

I believe in my dreams, especially my travel dreams. I’ve known them to come true. So I dream about places, I dream about the fascinating things about these places, I dream about all that I can see there, I dream about all that I can do there. And then I work at making those come true – one trip at a time.   As such I have a long wishlist. And when I tick something off , it doesn’t get any shorter because with each tick I tend to add a few more bullets to the list. 
When Airbnb put up a happy-hour campaign on Indiblogger, I was tempted to look up the accommodation listings on the website. And I just had to sign up and take another step closer to making some of those endless travel dreams come true. 
For the next Happy Hour, here’s ‘an-eighth’ of my wishlist. 

1. Hammerfest, Norway– Experiencing the Aurora Borealis has been one of the underlined bullets on my wishlist. I remember studying about Northern Lights way back in school, almost two decades ago. Back then I could only imagine what that looked like and it all seemed surreal. Then later, I saw it on TV and when I got into watching videos on the internet, I’ve been through several videos that showed me the Northern Lights, making it more believable. With every Aurora Borealis – travel story I read, my wish to see these natural lights only gets stronger. I think it’s time to think about making this one come true. I hear that Hammerfest is one of the best places to see the Northern Lights, but honestly, I’ll go to any place that promises to show this wonder to me.

2. North Pole, Alaska. A few years, I happened to watch a programme on Travel Channel — it was about a small town in Alaska. This little town was called North Pole and guess what — it’s said to be a very Christmas-y town. You know, like its Christmas all year through, with decked up streets and ornamented trees and all of that. There’s a Santa Claus Lane and a St. Nicholas Lane too. Imagine a place where street lights are on posts that look like Candy Cane! I learnt that the mails addressed to Santa Claus who lives in the North Pole end up here in this town’s post office and what’s more — the residents actually take the trouble to write back to all the ‘nice children’ who write to Santa. It all sounds so dreamy; I have to see it, to believe it.  

 3. Yellowstone National Park – I want to go there too. I want to see all its geological features, see the geysers and actually see everything that earthquakes and volcanic activity have done to the area. I’ve been to the Volcanoes National Park on Big Island, Lassen Volcanic Park, Mount Rainier and Mount St. Helens. I’ve been to the Old Faithful Geyser in Napa Valley and the Petrified forests near it. That’s not enough. I want more. (And I also wouldn’t mind seeing the fauna and flaura that is place is famous for. 😉  

4. Talking of fauna, who doesn’t want to go on an African Safari? I would love to visit Serengeti or Masai Mara and see the lions and African elephants and the Gazelle and the Wildebeests and every creature in between. And while I’m at that, I’d like to stay in a tent and also learn about some new cultures and have new culinary experiences too. 

5. That’s not all. Among other things, I have several wishes close to home too — like spending a day and a night on Kerala’s backwaters, taking a sip of local ‘Kallu’ and the spicy dishes that are paired with it. No I haven’t done all that, yet. But I do hope to cross this one off the list sometime soon. And then, I still haven’t done the… Oh! never mind, my list can just go on and on. But Airbnb asked me to stop at five.