My Favorite Places on Earth in 2019

20:19 has been quite the year so we're working on a lot of stuff right now a lot of head down out of computer I'm pausing for a second because I want to talk about my top five favorite places on earth in no particular order and based on no objective criteria other than I just really like to travel it to these places and I want to tell you about them and explain why I like them because people ask me all the time so here I am answering your question number one is Taiwan which is secretly tied with Hong Kong but I had to choose one here and Taiwan's from fresher in my brain and so I chose Taiwan I went to Taiwan with is and the boys to shoot is his show called traveling repeat which by the way is really good and you should just go watch it on the youtubes meter channel anyway what I loved about Taiwan is that it felt like this unique fusion of cultures Taiwan is at its root a part of China in history and culture but due to years of Japanese occupation there's also some very Japanese vibes to it in the architecture in the food and in just the general culture of the place definitely has some Japanese influence but Taiwan has its own very unique particular culture that it's not totally Chinese and is not totally Japanese it is Taiwanese a big part of that culture is food and a big part of that food culture is street food [Music] but of all the stuff we did in Taiwan my absolute favorite part was this you don't have to go very far outside the big cities to find these misty mountains they're like jungly and beautiful and they go forever and they're abundant you don't run into other people it's not like there's just one tourist destination we drove through these mountains shooting is a show from tea plantations to Hot Springs to noodle making operations it was so nice and peaceful and it was like lightly drizzling the whole time because we were like in a cloud there's not to make our own tea which was just a lifelong dream of mine it's wonderful like I said I'm incredibly torn between Taiwan which we just went to this year and Hong Kong where we were last year which are very different and unique and then right but have a lot of these similar qualities which is hyper urban culture street food mixed with like nature that's like woven into it all and both places are amazing number two southern Utah every time I go to Southern Utah I forget how amazing it is you drive just a few hours south of Salt Lake and you suddenly feel like you're entering a different planet the geology the color of the rocks even the way the light feels is just different what I love about southern Utah is the abundance of nature you don't have to go to the big national parks like Zion in order to see some incredible incredible stuff you can see it on the side of the road you can go down random gravel roads and end up in really beautiful spots it reminded me that even though I like to chase adventures in other countries sometimes here at home there are some of the most kind of exotic and wild things waiting so southern Utah is my number two here number three is a little town in Belgium club livin lovin is right outside of Brussels and while Brussels and Bruges and Antwerp tend to get the most kind of attention from visitors lovin is a diamond in the rough [Music] most people don't really know about it or think about it I only discovered this place because I was speaking at like a conference that was there for like a bunch of like Flemish speaking journalists Leuven is like effectively just like a big village that at least the inner city feels just so quiet and approachable while still having some bustle and buzz that gives it charm there are big old traditional European squares filled with amazing restaurants and bars the place is bikable there are amazing forests and parks you're right on the edge of a huge forest at part of Belgium and so you are just surrounded by really beautiful nature we were biking in love in one evening and stumbled upon this really old structure that is now I think a part of the University but for real what we just stumble on Lovan just felt like a peaceful wonderful place full of interesting culture and sights and just a well-designed town that was definitely worth a visit I'm really glad we found a live-in okay so number four on this list is southern Iceland I went there originally not as a tourist but as a journalist I was there interviewing the prime minister of Iceland for the Netflix episode of explained which is Fox's show that I did on the gender pay gap so we were interviewing the prime minister and I got to enter Iceland not from kind of the tourists door but from like the I'm there trying to understand the culture and talking to people members of civil society and the government and the Prime Minister and like having those types of conversations and so in that process I gained this appreciation for Iceland not just as a beautiful place but as like a hyper progressive country that is doing really amazing interesting policy experiments and kind of leading the charge on a lot of these social issues fast forward a little bit earlier this year is and I went to Iceland for just a few days I feel like I should feel like I should draw the graph on this beach yeah to go as tourists I surprised her for her birthday we found cheap tickets and we ended up in Iceland in January and everyone told us don't go to Iceland in January because it's gonna be dark and it's gonna be cold and you won't see anything and I was like but the tickets are so cheap so I couldn't help myself turns out going to Iceland in January is sweet because there's no one there and yeah it's dark some of the time but like you still get from like 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. of like this beautiful sunset sunrise light that is just really wild [Music] all of this contributes to Iceland just feeling like a different planet so we spent four days touring the south of the country which is a very well trodden very popular and touristy part of the country but even still we felt secluded and alone a lot of the time Iceland has obviously gotten tons and tons of tourism in fact I made this chart for an earlier video that shows how many tourists go to Iceland now and for some of us me included that can be a turn-off like Oh Iceland is cool I'm not gonna go to Iceland I will say there's a reason there is a reason why this place is a destination there are some really negative ramifications for the local nature and culture of all of this tourism which is a problem in of itself but if you're a respectful visitor and you want to go engage with this beautiful beautiful place you definitely should they might be trending but it's sweet [Music] whoa where did you come from yeah I need to I needed a change of space okay well I'm on number four southern Iceland did you like southern Iceland I should go back anyway number five and the last one on this list which by no means is comprehensive or objective as I've said but number five of the places I love most in the world right now is Porto Portugal [Music] so let's be clear about one thing all of Portugal is amazing it is a small country that has an extreme diversity of landscapes and histories Portugal's great at the very top of Portugal is this old old old city centre in fact it's like one of the oldest population centres in all of Europe a port though or in Portuguese like o port though I don't know for me Porto didn't have any specific one site or attraction that made it worth visiting it was just the general energy and vibe of the city that just like stole my heart the place is on this hill with this big bridge going across this river it's one of the older bridges in Europe and it just has this unique double-decker design you can get on a boat and see all of the bridges the architecture and the design of the city and the food and the culture like it just all felt very enlightening for me as someone who wasn't super aware of Portuguese culture and Porto felt like a good representation of at least some of this history of this country yeah Porto was good okay I know I said five but I like I'm having a bit of a hard time because there's one more that I can't not mention on this list which may be actually my favorite one and I don't know why I'm mentioning it last but here it is the Jungfrau region of Switzerland [Applause] [Music] this place had been on my mind for a decade probably the most popular part of the Swiss Alps and so a lot of people go there kind of is their first time but again like Iceland that didn't cheapen it for me you realize that these valleys these mountains these trains and cable cars and funiculars are seen as a world destination for a reason what I love about it is that the Swiss have mastered mobility movement moving around really really rugged terrain in like the smoothest most efficient way so they have these big mountains and they've just built all of this infrastructure to allow you to get around you by the Jungfrau paths and you can get on all of these transportation mechanisms and just weave around these valleys and mountains we happened to have gone at the very end of the season we went mid-october and off and just merrily and I've seen just risky because things are closing but it also means an empty drain and D restaurants not mad about it it's risky to because the weather could be yeah we got amazing weather somehow and there was plenty of stuff open and we just lucked out there was no one there I really felt like we had the whole place to ourselves which is rare in the entire region we like to kind of take those Gamble's with this offseason stuff look like right on the threshold whence the weather supposed to get bad and would go anyway and the lodging is usually cheaper less people sometimes we get hit with a lot of bad weather sometimes we don't and in this case we didn't and it was amazing and it chopped up as probably one of my favorite trips of all time is actually made an entire like guide of what exactly we did day by day in the Jungfrau region which I will link below so that's my list of five really six places that have made the list of my favorite places in the world right now this list is always changing I'm always changing myself but the reason I'm thinking about this right now the reason I'm talking about this is kind of a theme that's coming up a lot here on this channel but also like in my own life which is I'm trying to think about travel not just as the status quo part of my life that is my job I got into this because of the thrill of going and learning about new places and I want my travel which to me is a privilege is something that is something that humans have not been able to do for thousands of years and now we have the technology to be able to move around the world so seamlessly like I want when I do jet off on an airplane across the world like that I do it intentionally and I do it to add value to my life and that of my family we're learning that we're connecting that we are going as more enlightened and travelers and so I'm checking in a lot with my motives and my kind of approach to travel recently which is why I'm talking about it all the time I want to thank Skillshare for sponsoring this video today Skillshare is this amazing platform and community where you can go learn a bunch of stuff from creative skills to entrepreneurial skills to passion based skills to whatever skill you want to Skillshare probably has something for you on Skillshare you pay a monthly subscription fee and then you get unlimited access to all of these tutorials there's one course in particular that I can recommend from Skillshare which is this one about mastering illustrator illustrator the Adobe software as someone who does animation and video you might be like why are you into illustrator because illustrator has changed my life as a designer and someone who makes animation if I didn't have a fluency in illustrator I wouldn't be able to do what I do with animation in After Effects learning illustrator its kind of not the obvious choice but I can tell you it is a smart choice so skill shares got that great course among thousands of others because they're sponsoring this video you can go to the link in the descriptions which is the link with my name at the back of it so if you click that link you will go and get two months of free Skillshare I mean you won't pay for two months and you can decide if you like it if it fits within your world if you're interested I think after the trial ends it's like 10 bucks a month if you do the annual pricing so it's pretty darn cheap for what you're getting I'm a big believer in online learning obviously all of my skills came from online learning and so I have a soft spot in my heart for this kind of stuff so thank you Skillshare for sponsoring this video thank you all for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: Johnny Harris

Views: 376,891

Rating: 4.9584894 out of 5

Keywords: Johnny Harris, Johnny Harris Vox, Vox Borders, Johnny Harris Vox Borders, where to travel 2019, best destinations, where should I travel to

Id: aq1dsm5OzzI

Length: 15min 45sec (945 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 14 2019