vacation with kids

The ultimate vacation. There’s nothing quite like sitting for two-three weeks on a beautiful tropical beach full of coconut trees and soft white sand. In those moments, where i lay, wet and relaxed, on a tanning bed, drinking coconut milk, put on my earphones and do some bonding with the sun, i feel the full extent of the good life.

There are loads of places in the world where that dream can come true and in ridiculous prices. So if you haven’t watched the waves rolling day after day in a long time, everything that’s left is choosing the destination that fits you, and promise the kids a lot of sand castles..

♦ When you go to choose your tropical beach, pay attention to the seasons. double check from a few different sources. Tropical weather isn’t at all like weather anywhere else. The rain in R-A-I-N and the humidity can teach Tel-Aviv at summer what humidity really is.. Check the average days of rain in the month you’ll visit in, the humidity percentage, the average hours of daylight. At the end of the day the weather is the most important factor in a beach vacation..

☂And pack an umbrella.

♦ Most of the tropics, sitting on both sides of the equator, are home to some very unpleasant diseases. Check the disease situation in the places you’re planning to visit. Especially mosquito transferred diseases. Visit the consultation center in a traveler’s clinic and get updates and recommendations for your destination. If you’re afraid, do some research and you can easily find some places where there aren’t diseases, or at least very little.

♦ Take with you some mosquito repellents, but don’t put them in your carry on bags on the plane. It’s just so you won’t have to search everywhere for them when you get there. And anyway know that anywhere touristic has a wide range of repellents.

♦ While on the beach- first put on sunscreen then the mosquito repellent.

♦ Check what kind of sand the beach has. If it’s a reef, a rocky beach or soft clean sand. Gear up properly. Special swimming shoes will protect the kid’s feet from sharp corals, crabs or sea urchins.

⛱ Don’t take with you all the toys for the beach. They take up too much space in the bag. Buy some after you get there and leave it there, for whoever comes next.

♦ Also, check the water level at the time of your trip. There are beaches that look amazing some times of the year and very bad in other times.

♦ Take with you small bag for the shells collection the kids will have after every visit to the beach..

tip: Try to eat lots of ? Tomatoes and foods with tomato sauce (Ketchup also works). Let the kids go wild with French fries, Pasta, shakshooka…it’s best to start a bit before you leave and continue throughout the whole stay at the tropical beach. In Tomatoes there’s something called Lycopene that functions like a natural sunscreen.

That of course doesn’t mean you should’nt use sunscreen. Although, a moderate sun exposure is healthy. Put sunscreen on the face, shoulders, back and chest but leave the arms and legs to soak all the good the sun has to give (of course, not overmuch)

♦ A bit before you leave expose the kids to as many kinds of seafood as possible. Clams, Squids, Shrimps. Some people are sensitive to those foods, and it’s better to find out about your kid resistance before you leave and prepare accordingly. That also goes for tropical fruits (especially Mangoes..).

? If you’re already at a tropical beach, and the Coconuts are so tempting and easy to get, don’t be shy getting them. Let the kids enjoy the clear drink straight from the nut. It’s very healthy and low in calories!

♦ There are places where it’s best to avoid any drinks with Ice. Up to you. You can always take a few Bananas and freeze them in the mini Fridge in the hotel. That way the kids canÂ freeze their throats, as kids do, and you can count a few less Popsicles for each kid daily..

♦ Don’t immediately go and purchase tour packages of the area. Wait a bit. Most likely you’ll find a fisherman who’ll take you around in his boat or you’ll find lots of nice places nearby you can visit without any need of a travel agent. Small natural gems can be found in any beach or tropical island. So you can keep the guided tours to a minimum, and still get to know the place and offer the kids enjoyable activities.

♦ Beware of motorbikes. Both on the road and when you’re riding them. And be even more careful of schemes by the Merchants that rent you the bike or any other equipment.

♦ Choose the hotel and room type based on the age of the kids. If the kids ate very young- you shouldn’t take a room with too easy an access to the swimming pool or the beach. You came here to rest, not to chase the kids and be on guard all day… And if the the kids are older- take a room with a view and close to the beach and the pool. That way you can sometimes go swimming alone (or as together â¤) without being worried.

♦ A hotel with Breakfast and a restaurant is always preferable to one without. That way the kids can eat alone and you can keep sleeping..

♦ And bring a walkie-talkie with you. That way you can easily communicate with the kids even if you are laying with a book on the beach while they are busy somewhere else.

? Swim a lot, eat well, drink a million shakes and go back tanned and healthy!

Check out two of my favourite places for an exotic beach vacation with the kids: muine, Vietnam and bohol, Philippines.

When people think about traveling they usually picture themselves on the move. They see a suitcase or at least a big bag, from which dangles a sleeping bag full of experiences, they see days of nonstop journeying and excitement. They see tempting shop windows and bags with foreign logos, smelling of cheese and wine and perfume. They see airplanes and trains and boats…
And thats the reason that sometimes I find it very hard to explain our style of traveling. People simply find it difficult to understand, because it doesnt fit their image of traveling.

We’re traveling in a way thats called nesting. That means we locate to one place at a time, for a long period. Nesting. Our style of traveling goes deeper, far beyond the touristic experience.

We’re not necessarily looking for the tourist attractions, but the truer experience. Usually we don’t even get a guidebook to the place we’re going to, but prefer to get to know it ourselves, without prejudice. Learn about their way of life, their culture, their customs, their routine through seeing the everyday of the place, and questions we ask the locals.

In a ‘Nesting’ trip the meetings with the locals and with other travelers crosses the border of ‘tourist’ and becomes a deep personal bond. And that has many implications.

When the kids learned about Buddhism and they had questions that didn’t have an answer on the Internet (why do today’s kids look for all the answers online?) they just went down to the street and found a few monks for a conversation. At the end of which they came back home excited and knowing more, and with three new friends that invited them to visit their monastery. And when we went to visit them, they gave us the full tour, and explained everything and served us tea and a special kind of bread and since then we go to visit them often. These are the type of experiences that only become possible in this sort of trip. And those are the ones we love best.

∴ How do we decide where to nest?
We try to find a place that attracts and interests us in ways of natural views and local population. We look at the seasons and see if the weather is good for that time. We look at the level of transportation, and at medical services, common diseases,if any. We check economically, if living there is expensive or not. And finally, since we work on the Web- how good a network they have there.

∴ Where do we live?
That depends on a lot. In Europe we chose to live in rented apartments, because living is expensive and we preferred to cook at home and save the cost of hotels. And beyond that, there’s something very comfortable in a real house. We chose to live on the edges of beautiful places, that way everything is much cheaper than it is at the center. In Europe the tourist centers are packed full and noisy, and the prices are needlessly high (the pizza in the town where we lived was just as good as pizza in Florence only much cheaper).

In southeast Asia, for example, we live in hotels or guesthouses, sometimes right in the middle of the whole tourist scene, sometimes slightly on the side. That way instead of travelling the whole world, the whole world comes to visit us. We meet people from all over the world, hear every language. And all that without even leaving the restaurant.

∴ And what about the kids?
In ‘Nesting’, what we’re actually doing is giving them a sort of a routine and a feeling of consistency. In other traveling styles you’re usually on the move, which puts the kids off balance after a while. When ‘Nesting’ they stay in the same place, in the same neighbourhood that slowly becomes familiar. We eat in the same restaurants every day, meet the same friends every day, go to explore the area, go to programs. A kind of a pleasant bubble.

The advantages of Nesting are many. For example, i have no doubt it’s one of the best ways to make travelling cheaper. Our personal acquaintance with the loacls, let’s us get most everything much cheaper. For example, when we stayed in Tuscany, our friendship with our owners of the apartment made our rent drop by half. In Pokhara, Nepal, the owners of our guesthouse lowered the price on their own, without any bargaining on our part. We could use their laundry machine, their kitchen, we bought water in bigger containers and many other things that eventually added up to a huge saving.

It was the same way in Vietnam and in fact anywhere else where we decided to nest.

Another advantage of being part of the local scene, and everything it means. Is learning to eat with our hands in Nepal (that’s how they eat) and knowing all the songs on the local charts. To get invited to an engagement ceremony to a wedding, to a celebration at a Buddhist monastery. Or on the other end of the spectrum, to care for a friend whose father died through all the Nepali mourning ceremonies. The personal acquaintance experience is different from any touristic experience, when you go to see a wedding of a stranger. For us they were friends, and that makes all the difference.

We hear the stories of our local friends about their lives, about how they educate their kids, about what the learn at school, politics, history, currency and a lot of other subjects in some of them we discover how much we’re all alike, in others we find an entirety different outlook than the one we have.

We spend time with them in their home and in their kitchen and learn about their lifestyle and customs, as well as their flavours and traditional ways to cook. We meet friends for life and know that when we come back to visit those places, there will always be someone to give us a warm welcome.

Short term Nesting:
Most families can’t afford to go to long term trips as long as a few months or years. But Nesting can work wonderful even when time is tight. We were only in Tuscany for three weeks, but made contacts and friendships that are with us even now and we really understood the place where we stayed. When we were in China we were in the city of Chengdu only for two weeks, and in that time we found a restaurant we went to every day (and that’s how we were exposed to the Chinese kitchen, helped them cook and made friends). And in the hostel where we stayed we discovered a whole world. We celebrated with friends our daughter’s birthday, went with them for walks in the city, and played many traditional Chinese games. And all that made our visit to this magicl city, to an experience that was far more impressive than any list of tourist attractions.

The principles of Nesting are simple. Settle in one place. Keep things consistent. Be open to meet everything the place has to offer (and forget about the ‘attractions’ list). Explore it slowly, peacefully.

Exotic vacation- a tropical beach with kids

Nesting Travel