Explore the ups and downs of travel, from local buses to faraway escapes.

Nothing is more universally suggested, desired and celebrated as a life experience than travel. People who have traveled love to talk about how it changed their lives, opened their eyes, or just was the most fun they’ve ever had.

People who haven’t traveled will cite it as the first thing they would do if they woke up the next morning a millionaire.

And people who haven’t traveled as much as they thought they would say it as a deathbed regret.

There’s something about finding yourself in a completely new and foreign environment that invites a broadening of perspectives and the emergence of a cooler version of yourself every day. People are different when they travel. Maybe it’s just that people are different when they’re not working, but I think that’s only a small part of the problem.

In short, few people say they don’t want to travel. Perhaps they will say that they want to travel less than before. Or maybe the way they travel has changed (there’s a reason cruises remain stubbornly popular). But it’s a rare breed of people who have no desire to experience another place.

That’s why The Spinoff devotes an entire week to travel, near and far, extravagant and basic, life-changing and delightfully boring. We’ll see how New Zealanders travel differently now. What it’s like to travel with kids, parents, a climate crisis, pets.

We’ll have stories from My Greatest Journey and a look at when traveling feels like a competition. What are the best holiday books of all time? And how can you not be an asshole while camping this summer?

While all this is happening, Wellington editor Joel MacManus will undertake a near-impossible adventure: traveling from Stewart Island to Cape Reinga using only public transport. He left this morning and will live blog every day of his journey until he reaches the top of the country. Follow his unrecommended journey here.

Travel Week is supported by our friends at AA Travel Insurance. And while the following may sound like a customer testimonial, trust me when I saw that it was written before they even signed on as a partner.

And that’s my only good advice for traveling: take out insurance.

I traveled a lot in my early 20s and never bought insurance. Why did I need it? I was jaded enough to not worry about changing plans and not being able to get a ticket or accommodation refund. I traveled extremely frugally anyway, so the insurance seemed more expensive than I paid to go there in the first place. When I was 21 and spent months in America, I sometimes wondered what would happen if I fell and broke my arm or ankle. I saw a story about a $30,000 bill for a tourist’s broken arm and got worried, but I had a simple plan: If I broke a bone in America, I would just book a flight home and would stock up on painkillers until I could see. a doctor here. I was young and stupid and was lucky not to have a health emergency for six months.

Like any insurance, it’s so easy to dismiss travel insurance until it’s too late to get it.

In 2018, my parents went to Samoa to spend time at my mother’s childhood home and do some work there. They didn’t have travel insurance because we’re cut from the same cloth and my mom probably felt like she was coming home. You don’t need insurance to return home. But two weeks later, she had a stroke in the middle of the night and the hospital in Samoa did not have the equipment to treat her. Suddenly we were all thinking and talking about travel insurance. And my siblings and I realized that most of us never cared.

An emergency airlift to Wellington Hospital and a deposit to pay later, my mindset completely changed. Since then, I have never traveled abroad without some form of insurance. Have I ever needed it? No. Will I ever forget the extent of medical care provided outside of this country? No either.

In December, I travel to Japan. I’ve been to Japan once before and it was in the middle of a burnout in 2019, after spending three extra nights at a journalism conference I attended for work. I had absolutely nothing planned and I knew absolutely nothing about what to see or do. When I decided on a whim to take the bullet train from Tokyo to Kyoto, I arrived without a plan and ended up running to the famous Fushimi Inari-taisha (the shrine with the big orange doors) 20 minutes before it closed, arriving exactly nothing during my race.

This time I have a spreadsheet with directions, Google Maps pins, and ramen apps ready to use to plan each meal. I don’t know which approach will result in a better trip, but that doesn’t matter. What’s important is that I’ll be in a new place without responsibilities, waiting for a cooler version of myself to emerge.