The Secret of the Incas

My my, things have been busy over here at The Secret of the Incas. We had, in fact, hoped to be far more actively blogging our experiences in getting ready for our “big trip” but unfortunately the real world demands we heed other concerns; our regular jobs, promoting the expedition at the Edinburgh Fringe festival and trying to get everything sorted pretty last minute. As Communications Director though, one of the things I’ll be doing while I’m away is keeping our Twitter and Facebook up-to-date live from the depths of the Amazon rainforest. A task made infinitely more gratifying should we have a sizeable audience whilst ‘Tweeting’, *hint* *hint*.

I stumbled onto a community / Twitter event known as “Travel Talk on Twitter” (by the hashtag #TTOT) whilst looking for some Travel-based lists to follow (having never really explored ‘lists’ previously), which is organised by a guy called Melvin who runs a website called traveldudes.org. The premise of this event is that frequent travellers from all over the world band together and share their experiences for an hour, twice a day, on a Tuesday so that other like-minded people can learn from their adventures. While I was confident of the remote chance anyone in this group had attempted the exact expedition we are about to embark on, I joined in one of these events yesterday (Tues 9th Aug) to try and gauge the mindset of other people who just enjoy ‘getting away from it all’.

The event lasted an hour and was split up into 5 questions, presented by hosts of the event (including the likes of @traveldudes, @roniweiss, @hjortur and more) and covered different angles pertaining to the overall theme of ‘travel websites’. Given that, at some point soon, we’re planning to implement a part of the website that details our own travels, including where we stayed and the route taken, places visited along the way etc, I figured that I’d find at least a little relevance. I can tell you now, I was literally blown away by the activity of the people participating in the event, and there was a great balance of information and humour thrown into the mix. The hosts replied to questioning, and retweeted comments to open them up to discussion from the group as well.

I’m still no-wiser about snake anti-venom for the Amazon, but then ‘magic answers’ are pretty hard to come by! Still, if I hadn’t said anything and one of us do get bit, I’d not have been able to say “we exhausted all lines of investigation” with any degree of earnest heh. What I did do is meet some great people whose individual experiences all dwarf my own, but hopefully this trip will mark the beginning of my own life of travel and adventure and someday I’ll have picked up enough hints, tips and tricks to help others make the most of the world and all its potential.

I shall be joining the next #TTOT event scheduled for the 16th August, and recommend that anyone with even a minor interest in travel give this thing a shout, as if nothing else it’s an impressive spectacle of social media at its finest.

Check out the facebook page here

Thanks,

Ken H

@khalfp // @SecretOfIncas