Laura, Little Travel Bee - Travel Blogger Interview

Today we have Laura from Little Travel Bee tackling our five travel questions. At 29, Laura set herself the goal of visiting 30 places before she turned 30. She’s achieved that so I thought she would be the perfect travel blogger for our interview!

1. Why do you love travel?

My love for adventure started when I was about 13. I’d had a sheltered upbringing in the countryside but a school trip to London changed everything. I remember looking out of the hotel window somewhere near Wembley, seeing all the bright lights and hearing all the emergency vehicle sirens and thinking ‘wow, this is AMAZING, I’m coming back here!’. And I did, after finishing university I moved to London to work and this is when I was able to start travelling properly. Before this I’d been on family holidays and maybe the odd city break but with my own money and great transport links out of London, the world really was my oyster! My first big adventure was to New Zealand and I have since managed to complete my bucket list of visiting 30 countries before hitting 30. 40 countries before I’m 40, easy-peasy right … we’ll see! What I love about travel is that no place is ever the same, you always meet some fantastic, weird and wonderful people on the way and there is always a story to tell. Travel also doesn’t mean you have to travel to the other side of the world; there’s plenty to see on your door step.

2. What destination is top of your bucket list?

This is a hard one as there are so many places I want to go to right now but top of my hit list is Rwanda, I really want to see the mountain gorillas … hopefully soon!

3. Where is your most favourite place you have travelled to?

I get asked this question all the time and I find it a really hard question to answer. There are very few places I have really disliked when travelling and there are lots of places I have liked e.g.. USA for its shopping and its big and boldness, India for its intensity and culture, Japan for its love of all things cute and quirky and Italy for its yummy food and laid back vibe but where was my favourite place … it’s very hard to say just one but I guess if I really had to pick one place that I would return to tomorrow it would be India. I found it to be the most intense and overwhelming but absolutely fantastic country I’ve ever been to. There is so much to see, hear, smell and taste!

4. What is your most favourite memory or experience whilst travelling?

A lot of my big trips have involved travelling with my best friend and I don’t know whether it’s just us but we always seem to have a few travel mishaps. These are what we always reminisce about and to be honest kind of made the holiday (even if at the time we didn’t find them quite so funny!). An example was when we lost our hire car in a multi-storey car park in California and then getting picked up by the Community Wardens. Another from America was when we accidently called 911 when trying to make a restaurant reservation from our hotel and embarrassingly the Police arriving at the hotel. Two from New Zealand are, not realising the length of the ferry crossing from the North to South Island resulting in us arriving late on the South Island, our hire car was running extremely low on petrol, we couldn’t find our hostel in the dark so in the end we slept in a car park. And finally, we completely messed up our return flight back to the UK from New Zealand and ended up sleeping at Hong Kong airport!

5. What is your favourite photo from your travels?

I think I’ve just spent an hour looking through all my old photographs and there are so many that mean different things to me but I think this photograph of a fisherman on Inle lake (Myanmar/Burma) is my current favourite. He looks so graceful (if it was me I’d be in the water!) and I love how he is wearing a football shirt too, the locals were always talking to us about football, it really is a sport that translates across the world.