Holiday Opinions

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Speaker 1: My friends talked about taking a cruise, that it was great for seeing places without taking risks, and I’d actually wanted to give it a go for a while. I could imagine the excitement of waking up somewhere new every morning. I opted to cruise around South America, which took me to incredible locations I could only have reached after hours of planning. Actually getting to them all would have taken ages, too. I guess that was the bottom line for me. My job is demanding, and I value my leisure time, so I need to use what time I have wisely. I admit to a certain nervousness before leaving because the sea can get rough, but I soon got over that.

Speaker 2: I hate being told what to do and where to go on holiday because my working life is so organised. I love surfing and last summer my mate and I planned a trip where we played it by ear, just rolling up at beaches as we chose. I bought a campervan to make this easy, although it was pricey. As we had no particular destination in mind we kept our eye on social media to check where the good surf was. I was looking forward to it, but there was a surprising amount of hassle trying to find inexpensive places to camp overnight. That spoiled it really. That’s the problem of travelling on a shoestring. I plan to sell the van and do something different next year.

Speaker 3: My friend and I are quite different in what we want from a vacation, though we both love seeing new places. He likes to do active stuff, while I’m happy to lie on a beach reading. To satisfy both of us, we decided to fly to Los Angeles and hire a car so we could get off the beaten track, especially into the mountains. The only thing was, some of the roads we ended up driving on had very big drop-offs. I was too frightened to drive along them, so my friend had to do it all. We did do sightseeing stuff in the cities, which, predictably, we both enjoyed.

Speaker 4: I went on an all-inclusive holiday last summer at this amazing spa. There were pampering treatments, of course, but also loads of different things I could do for fitness. Take a dip, do yoga, go mountain biking, stuff like that. I wasn’t sure I wanted to go at first. What swung it for me was not that friends who’d done something similar said how good an experience it was, but that I was able to pay for everything in advance. I’m hopeless at budgeting. My spa resort happened to be way up in the mountains, isolated and stunningly beautiful, so I could disconnect from everything that normally gets me down. It was great for unwinding and reducing tension. By chance I met lovely people too, and I’ve kept in touch with them ever since.

Speaker 5: Last year I needed to do something different, even if it was challenging, and that was certainly how it turned out, but I have no regrets. My friend and I settled on a trek in Iceland where the volcanic landscapes were so incredible we had to pinch ourselves to believe they were real. Although we expected a feeling of getting away from it all, the fact that hardly any of our friends had been there was what really motivated us. Trekking was certainly hard going with the backpacks. Luckily, by staying in shelters each night, we were able to travel fairly light. As we’d booked each shelter in advance, we were told we always had to reach the next one or lose the money, so we had to walk every day. But at least this meant we came across lots of other trekkers with colourful stories to tell.