STATE OF LOVE AND TRAVEL
SARA'S ROCK TRIPS
Some journeys have a soundtrack, and Sara's journeys have a rock sound, woven to the tune of Pearl Jam State of Love and Travel is the blog where Sara tells us about her do-it-yourself trips and chosen destinations to follow her idols.
Welcome to Easy Travel Hosting! State of love and travel, a very beautiful name for a blog. Where did it come from and why did you decide to open it?
Hi guys, thank you for this opportunity and for all the support I have always received from you since I decided to rely on your hosting!
The name of my blog is a tribute, a declaration of love to what is the great passion of my life, in addition to travel: the music of Pearl Jam. It all started with State of Love and Trust, one of my favorite songs. Traveling and rock'n'roll are two passions for me that are so strong and also so intertwined with each other, that this fusion was quite automatic. I like to think that every Jammer (Pearl Jam fan) who happens to pass by my blog instantly catches the mention in the name and immediately feels a bit at home!
I discovered this band when I was at university. At the time, not having a job, I invested my savings and Christmas/birthday/etc. gifts to follow them on tour around Europe. Tour life has shaped me a lot as a traveler: I have learned to be a citizen of the world, to have frenetic rhythms, organize multi-stage trips and above all to have a great spirit of adaptation! 🙂 Alas, the barriers don't rain from the sky so we adapt: sleeping bag on a sidewalk, dinners of dubious taste taken from the local minimarket, a few hours of sleep, km and km covered... and a lot of joy! And this is now the way I travel... excluding the sidewalk! 🙂
I started like this and gradually I started to travel more and more, combining both tours and other extra-tour trips, becoming very good at "multiplying" the days of vacation available to me.
There has always been the idea of "one day I'll open a travel blog" but I'll tell you the truth, I think in the end I would never have really taken the plunge. Thanks to this nice pandemic, however, at Christmas I found myself with two weeks of vacation to spend locked in the house and I knew I would go crazy. So I decided to take the plunge and at the beginning of January I bought your hosting!
A combination that we feel very close to is that of rock and travel. Could you talk about how a lot of your travels have been based around stops with what I imagine is your favorite band?
In the first few years my travels coincided with the European stages of the Pearl Jam tour (unfortunately not all but 5/6 dates yes). In fact this has allowed me to visit many capitals even if in a hit and run mode. I chose the cities based on a series of interlocking factors: places I hadn't yet visited / places where I imagined they would play the coolest setlists / places that fit together better as dates in order to be able to do as many concerts as possible in as few days as possible. This way I learned to multiply my holidays! 🙂
I have also been to see them several times in America. One of the trips I'm most proud of, the one that falls into the "madness that I would do again eight thousand times" category, was the one to Florida for their 2016 tour. They played in April, a very unlucky time for holidays. So what? 6-day trip to Florida with 4 days of vacation, 3 concerts, Fort Lauderdale + Miami + Tampa, a day in the Keys and return to work straight away after landing in the morning at dawn. Maybe a little crazy but I-am-wonder.
Vietnam and Cambodia, describe them with two songs and tell us why you chose them!
My Vietnam song is “Last Kiss,” the version made famous by Pearl Jam. I was in Hoi An (a delightful village and an unmissable stop on a trip to Vietnam) and my husband had a high fever so he was confined in the hotel. I went for a walk alone and stopped for dinner along the river which every evening is colored with lights and lanterns and becomes an incredible spectacle. Music was coming from the other side of the river and a girl started singing Last Kiss.
…Last Kiss! …in Vietnam!! Crazy.
My song for Cambodia is “Lullaby” by The Cure. In the video Robert Smith is happily about to become a giant spider's dinner. “I realize with fright that the spiderman is having me for dinner tonight”. I connect this song to my visit to Skuon, a small town that is called "Spiderville" because, to Robert Smith's delight, here the roles are reversed and spiders are listed on the menu. It has now become a tourist destination: droves of tarantulas that are raised in the surrounding villages and then fried and offered as appetizers. Some are deprived of their poisonous claws and happily wander around the village to take photos with tourists... at least until the Cambodians get peckish!
What do you do to make your travels greener?
I know that the first thing to do would be to avoid taking all these planes but unfortunately time is not in my favor. However, the good habit remains, once on site, to travel as much as possible on foot. Walking is good for us, good for the planet and allows us to discover many more views.
Another essential thing is general respect for the environment. The mountains teach a lot in this sense: leaving no trace of your passage is important, so waste should always be brought home. It seems easy but you just need to look around to understand that not everyone does it..
Finally, another nice thing is to always try to rely on local tour operators when organizing excursions. Maybe it's a little’ more complicated on an organizational level (but that's not necessarily the case!) but it helps the local people and many times it is certainly more interesting.
Easy Travel Hosting Thank you so much Sara for taking part in our interview.
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