| | 8 July 2018HIGHERReviewIN MY VIEWTRAVEL FOR TRAVEL'S SAKEBy Vishal Hanmattekar, CEO and Co-Founder, The Blueberry TrailsSomewhere between ac-cepting and negotiating the leave applications of employees, specially before Summer or Christmas vacations and planning for the upcoming Board meetings, the thought does cross our heads if we should put some more effort in the much promised chasing of the Northern Lights trip or the month long Amazon Forest trail. Then the next email pings and we slot the thought into the `To-Do some other time' Box and get on with the day. While we do realize the value of taking a break from our work and emails, we barely manage to squeeze in a weeks (or two if lucky) vacation in a year, many times combined with the Conference we are attending in London or Singa-pore. While this does qualify as a vacation, it definitely falls short of the travel boost we need ­ to quench our thirst for the exploration, discovery and wanderlust.And, before we dismiss such thoughts as desires of our much younger, much forgotten hippie self and not something which fits into the current exhilarating Corporate CXO lifestyle, we need to really un-derstand the value such kind of travel brings to us, to en-hance our personal as well as professional lives.Spending enough time in a country or region, exploring cultures, meeting interest-ing people with varied points of views, sharing meals with strangers is a life changing ex-perience. Travel and being out-side our comfort zone makes us more open and accepting of others points of views. I have found this to be such a fabu-lous way of shaking me out of my sometimes very fixed mind-set. I have found it makes me much more accepting of ideas and solutions, which I probably would not have considered in day to day discussions. Being on the road for a lon-ger period of time, more than 10 days in a particular country or city, makes us understand the seemingly strange rituals and practices of the locals. We start echoing the commonly Vishal Hanmattekar is a Travel Entrepreneur & Co-Founder of The Blueberry Trails, an Experiential Online Travel start-up. He is also a freelancing Travel Photographer who loves travelling solo and has already been to over 20 countries. Vishal left a successful Corporate career in Marketing & CRM to pursue his passion of Travel and Photography.Vishal Hanmattekar
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