Recent Travel

Well I am sure that everyone who reads this blog (yes my imaginary friends count) have lost a lot of sleep with the lack of posts recently.  That has all come to an end as we (my imaginary friends go everywhere with me) are now back from our travels.  And guess what I have made some startling discoveries on this trip.  Other places in the world also care about the world.  Now I know you may think that is crazy talk, but it is true.  Here are some awesome ways that I found people are trying to protect our planet.  Example one, a lovely hotel in Vietnam offered the same shampoo and conditioner as you find in most places, except for their bottles were not plastic, but clay pots that they refilled.  Now yes I know that means you can't take them with you, but seriously who wants a million plastic hotel bottles of shampoo.  I was super impressed with this effort and encourage all other hotels to look into it.  As always if you don't do it for the environment think about the cost savings.  Another hotel in Thailand did a similar thing, but instead of cute clay pots they just gave you a huge bottle of shampoo.  Same concept just not as dressed up.  But it worked.  And just fyi both of these hotels were super nice, so don't get the idea that they were some cheap dumps.  Far from it.  OK second example, again about hotel rooms.  We traveled through 4 countries in Southeast Asia and in each hotel they required you to place your key card into a slot in the wall that allowed the room to be powered.  What does that mean, when you leave the room nothing is running.  Why?  Because you have to take your key with you of course.  What a huge power savings this is.  I have also heard that this is done throughout other countries, such as Australia.  It is absolutely brilliant.  Now I will say that where we were was very hot so we did have to sacrifice a few minutes of our time once we returned to the room to let the AC cool things down again.  But after you have been out in the hot sun all day what is a few more minutes of heat, and the answer is,  nothing.  Such a great idea, again hope hotels that are not doing this look into it, just think of the cost savings with that one.  And my final environmental example is face cloths.  Don't worry I will explain myself.  In many of the restaurants we went to they used face cloths, wash cloths, or small towels, what ever you want to call them, instead of paper towels.  OMG BRILLIANT is all I have to say.  And not only brilliant, but charming as well, so much prettier to see a basket of neatly rolled towels than a box of paper.  This goes along with the leftover love idea of just cutting down where you can on unnecessary waste.  The restaurant yes may have to wash a few towels, but has saved a bunch of energy, trees, and other resources by not using something disposable.  So there it is, other parts of the world do care and hope remains that we can save this planet with a big group effort.  And yes 7 billion people is a big group.