Jan 3: New Year resolutions - "explore lightly"

The start of the year is a time for making new resolutions, which you plan to keep up with in the year ahead. I have a few plans for this year, some of which I won't make public yet, but which will involve me in new writing and travel-based projects (the latter being contingent on the world opening up again). 

A reconnection with nature is not a bad resolution to make for 2021. This image is of some of the street art from Upper Goat Lane in Norwich, one of several pieces relating to this theme.

My book shelves are full of nature and landscape books which I've collected for the last thirty years, and I particularly like visiting the places mentioned in their pages, and making them come to life with some personal connections, and also reading about places that are familiar to me and seeing them from another person's perspective.

Visitors to Palau, a small nation in the Pacific (find it on a map now if you aren't sure where it is...) are being asked to do something special.
According to this Guardian article, visitors are asked to sign a pledge which is stamped into their passports on arrival: to 'declare something worthwhile at customs'.

Visit the Palau Pledge website to see (and sign) the pledge.
This was written along with children in Palau. There are various downloads from the website, including

The Mission:Explore philosophy was that we were inclusive and wanted everyone to be an explorer, and not feel they had to travel somewhere dramatically extreme or 'new' to do this - there was exploration on the doorstep if they looked in an appropriate way. Mission:Explore helped them 'see' the potential in their local environment, and we worked with National Geographic to produce a pack for exploring the local area, and with other organisations such as Discover the World Education.

Everybody flying to Palau will now see this inflight movie which shows the purpose behind the pledge. It's worth watching - I will be using this with all the students I teach in 2021 at some stage... 

The Palau Pledge places an obligation on visitors to "explore lightly", so that's something that I'm going to adopt as my motto for the year as much as possible. It would be tempting to join what is likely to be a mass exodus from the country on holiday at the first opportunity - I wonder whether Brexit will mean a reduction in travel to neighbouring European countries?

Where do you intend to go for your first overseas trip as soon as you can?

Please leave a comment below.

Images copyright: Palau Pledge website / Alan Parkinson