I like travelling. I have had the good fortune of travelling quite a bit in my life. This is due to family history, choice of travelling vacations over other ways of spending money, and having a job that actually allows me to travel - sometimes to quite exotic locations.
I travel alone or I travel in company. Over the years, I have travelled with my parents and sister, with male and female friends and - as a married man - with my wife and sons. On occasion, I have travelled as part of a group, but by and large I avoid group activities, I prefer to fend for myself or travel with a few select people only.
I have a number of special interests, and I tend to integrate these into my trips - this will surely become apparent in my travelogues. One of my major interests is transportation - especially, rail-based transportation. If I have to make a special side-trip to find an obscure railway, or see a tram (streetcar) network for the first time, I will probably do so. But I do not despise other means of transportation: I like planes, buses, boats, funiculars, horse-drawn carriages - even cars, if I really have to. I also like zoos, museums, planetaria, bookstores, libraries, world fairs, IMAX cinemas and famous towers.
Language: I know a number of them. It is a pleasure for me that I can travel in places where I am reasonably fluent in the local language. There are four such languages, in diminishing order of fluency: Hungarian, English, French and Spanish. These already cover a significant percentage of the world's surface. But I have studied other languages, and I can use them sufficiently well to get by - Japanese and Portuguese come to mind. How many westerners can take their family on a day-trip from Tokyo to see the Daibutsu (Great Buddha) in Kamakura, Japan, without the need for a native-speaking guide? I can also manage enough German and Italian to survive in countries where these languages are spoken. After that I tend to be at a loss, and rely on English- (or other-) speaking locals: I saw a little bit of Thailand, for example, but surely I got less out of it than I could have, simply because the language and its script are unknown to me.
Food: I am adventurous, but not too much so. I will try local foods if they look and smell reasonable palatable, and of course I will try almost anything if social circumstances require me to. But I am not a masochist, and I will not indulge a blind desire to try absolutely everything just because it's there. The chocolate-coated ants of Colombia and the monkey brains of China will just have to be left untasted by me.
People: One of the pleasures of travel is meeting people. I am not the most sociable of persons, I am quite capable of entertaining myself. Nevertheless, I have met people on my trips who have become friends, and who have provided me with some knowledge of how local people (or fellow expatriates) experience a certain country. In addition, this is the Age of the Internet: I have met people on my travels whom I had encountered before only electronically. E-friends, as I call them, who then become real friends. There are risks involved in this kind of thing, I know - but we are not talking about Internet dating here, rather of meeting people with similar interests, with addresses, phone numbers, families and shared friends.
Photos: I bought my first digital camera in 2003. Since then I have been able to have a photographic record of my trips that can be easily placed on my web site. Before then, I had used optical cameras, with pictures of various quality and in various formats. These will have to be scanned, I have hundreds of them, some (but not most) I have managed to scan, but many await conversion into a digital format. Of even older trips, I have only slides to illustrate them, the negatives for these being long lost (or stored I do not know where). Commercial services exist to convert slides into digital format, I have used them for the slides I most treasure, but many have not been converted so far. Of course, of some trips I have no pictorial record at all - I may have had no camera with me, and once my camera was stolen.
So, onto my travelogues. The ones on the site will be in backward chronological order - but, clearly, it will take some time to put all (or most) of my trips on my site.
Travelogues of Gábor Sándi
South America - 2006
I am also an incorrigible list-maker. I shall include some lists related to my travels:
Travel-related lists
Copyright Gabor Sandi 1998-2024
Disclaimer: Everything on this site was written and/or prepared at the author's discretion. The author has tried to be accurate where facts are presented, but this does not mean that these facts are necessarily accurate. People needing more reliable information should refer to appropriate sources presented, on the Internet or elsewhere, by authoritative professional or academic bodies.
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