Kick a hole or two in the bucket list of life

I HAVE never been a fan of those books that suggest all the things you should do before you die.

Whitewater rafting is far more attractive at an IMAX theatre. Illustration: Tom Jellett

YOUR increasingly saggy-sprung Departure Lounge has never been a fan of those books that suggest all the things you should do before you die.

whole premise seems ridiculous. Of course you need to be alive to do them (and better one foot in the Algarve than in the grave); you would hardly be going over Victoria Falls strapped in a planter's chair or journeying across the Bugaboos by pogo stick if you were dead. Although you could well be expired by the end of such capers.

Of much more sense is just to make a must-see list and, without becoming obsessive about it, tick off those inclusions you achieve, with no expiry date, save the obvious one.

If you don't, no matter. With wide-screen televisions, fabulous cable documentary channels such as Nat Geo Adventure and Nat Geo Wild, and a plethora of You-Tube downloads, we can live more vicariously than ever.

Lounge would much rather go whitewater rafting at her closest IMAX theatre than put on an inflatable lifejacket and head to Colorado. Because Lounge is of an age when the wearing of costumes of any sort should be banned. Accordingly, when drawing up a travel wishlist over the gloriously idle summer holidays, she studiously avoided any eventuality where rubber, stretch fabrics and unfortunate hats could be involved. She has also eschewed the trendy term bucket list, in case she ends up wearing one on her head.

It's therefore not an ambitious list and Lounge won't be fretting if boxes are left unticked. We must remember, too, that lists, especially those to do with travel, are vulnerable to factors such as low airfares and last-minute deals. Out the window go the plans to visit Machu Picchu when the Northern Territory is on sale.

There are 10 items on Lounge's list and some are to do with changing her mind on certain things. Take Burma, for one. As Michael Gebicki's T&I cover story this week reveals, exiled leader Aung San Suu Kyi has reversed her stance about tourism to her military-run homeland.

When Lounge was appointed travel editor in 1992, she banned Burma coverage of the golden spires and saffron-robed monks variety, paying heed to Suu Kyi's plea for tourists to stage a boycott. Our travel section is one of the few in the world to have done so, and Lounge has never set foot there, although she has come close, working as an ambassador for the refugee organisation Austcare in camps on the Thailand-Burma border housing Mon and Karen tribespeople fleeing the junta's regime. Taking Suu Kyi's cue, a sea-change is due, but only using those operators and services that are not government-run.

Similarly, Lounge has never been a fan of China, finding its human rights lapses and the Tibet situation rather hard to stomach, and the cruelty to animals she witnessed in remote regions in the 1980s still gives her nightmares. Her trip to Yunnan province in southwest China in 2006 gave her altitude sickness ("valleys and mountains, mountains and valleys" is how early foreign explorers described this staircase of a place), but between bouts of dizziness she was captivated by the unsullied scenery and the small kindnesses of the people of Lijiang. It felt like being pitched into the Ang Lee movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but without any new-found proficiency for executing tumble-turns.

So in an about-turn, China is on the list and so are the destinations Lounge has somehow forgotten to visit, such as Greece (apart from a day in Athens, during which five tourists asked her for directions; a curse on my rogue Mediterranean genes, which transmute at will in brunette places, from Lisbon to Lima) and the West Australian region of Margaret River, which apparently is beautiful and everyone Lounge knows and their canary seems to have been there.

The problem with such lists is that we always want to strive for the new, and it is allowed, of course, to return to places we love, which is why Lounge has clocked up 31 visits to India and has no intentions of slowing down, although there's no need for nostalgia overload and sleeping on railway stations as she did in her backpacker youth. Ditto for Bali: twice a year, every year, please, until the bucket is kicked.

The American co-author of the best-selling book 100 Things To Do Before You Die, David Freeman, died at home in 2008 at the age of 47, after falling and hitting his head. Who knows what number on the list he was up to, but he'd run with the bulls in Pamplona, Spain, and risked frostbite at an ice hotel in Finland, among other shows of derring-do, so he was no tour coach potato. But it must have been stressful, counting off the places, doing the math, afraid of not fitting in the lot.

There is also an ambitious website, 1000 Places to See Before you Die, which is a daunting prospect. Lounge has left it too late and so, I suspect, have most of you for a list of 1000 options. You'd have had to start in nappies, crawling along the Great Wall of China, toddling through the Kalahari, mastering the two-times tables in Tuscany and learning to ride a tricycle in the Cotswolds.

Travel should be all about pleasure, not pressure.

Roll on 2010.