Top 9 vicarious travel portals

Wanderlust, itchy feet, travel bug. Those of us with an urge for new passport stamps have been hit hard during Covid. Thankfully, many vicarious travel thrills have helped keep us grounded (pun intended).

Many friends and family have told me this travelblog has helped them travel vicariously, even before Covid forced us to store our backpacks and quick-dry clothes. I feel the weight of that responsibility! Writing and sharing our travel stories has helped me stay sane. But we also have relied on others for armchair travelling in 2020.

In the early Covid days, after we finally boarded what we believe was the last Air Canada flight out of Argentina to return to Canada, I couldn’t even think of vicarious travel. It made me too sad, too frustrated. A first-world problem for sure, but nevertheless….

Then my yoga friend Val sent me a link to Cocktails with a Curator – a weekly video from The Frick Collection art museum that pairs a themed cocktail and a painting or sculpture. Brilliant! I fell even more deeply in love with The Frick when I discovered Travels with a Curator.

The Frick broke through my wall of travel despair; now I’m enjoying vicarious thrills all the time. I’ve virtually walked along the Great Wall of China, boated up the Nile to Luxor, admired an Oscar Peterson street mural, listened to Parliament Hill carillon concerts, got clammy hands on a roller coaster, and revisited the Sagrada Familia without the crowds. 

Here are my top nine vicarious travel portals – each leading to multiple e-adventures. These are free, open to all, and not time-limited (as some virtual performances are). My list leans towards the arts, but there are endless travel possibilities to soothe all interests. In the comments below, tell me what your favourite vicarious travel thrills have been.

Warning: you can fall deeply down rabbit holes and get lost for hours as you click, dream and ignore the dishes. This blogpost took a long time to write…

1 Cocktails and Travels with a Curator

The Frick Collection, a major art museum in New York City, instituted a virtual happy hour every Friday at 5 p.m. EST when it launched Cocktails with a Curator in April 2020. It’s BYOB, of course, as the curator “offers insights on a work of art with a complementary cocktail.” Recipes are provided. Most episodes are hosted by Xavier Salomon, who is enthusiastic yet solemn, a curious mix that is strangely compelling. You come away fascinated by the detail and history of the painting or sculpture or ceramic examined. With 38 episodes so far, The Frick is continuing the series. Cheers!

Sadly, the 20-episode Travels with a Curator ended in September. Still, you can “join a Frick curator on an exciting virtual journey to cultural and historic sites relevant to the museum” by watching the videos. Travel to Rome, London, Venice, Warsaw, Jericho, Lisbon, Honolulu and more. No recommended cocktails but we often raised a glass while watching.

2 Rick Steves’ Monday Night Travel

The more I learn about Rick Steves, the more I admire him. You may have read one of his European guidebooks, heard his travel show on American public television or radio, or even gone on one of his European tours. He has built a huge travel company that offers enough free information on its website to keep you clicking for days: all his TV and radio shows, plus travel tips, country profiles, travel articles and blogposts. We downloaded his free app and used his audio walking tours when we visited Rome, Athens and Lisbon in pre-Covid days. I highly recommend his book Travel as a Political Act. 

During Covid, he launched the Monday Night Travel series, which we’re enjoying every Monday night at 7:30 p.m. PST (also at 6:00 p.m. PST, which translates to 9:00 and 10:30 p.m. EST). From his living room, he shares one of his travel shows via Zoom, and he stops the video many times to “share his personal, inspirational, and sometimes hilarious behind-the-scenes commentary.” He’s goofy but loveable. Along with European travel, he has also taken us to Cairo, up the Nile, and explored Ethiopia’s hunger solutions. You learn how his shows are made, how he runs his company, and his travel philosophy. He takes what he’s learned through travel and puts it into action through support of many philanthropic organizations. When Covid hit, he gave full refunds to everyone who had booked a trip. He invests $30 per traveller in carbon-reduction projects – a total of $1 million in 2019 – to offset carbon emissions from flying to Europe. Hence my admiration.

Go to the Rick Steves website to register in advance for Monday Night Travel, or you can watch episodes any time on the website. For fun, check out Rick’s Top 20 “No Travel Tips”: #9 is “Place your La-Z-Boy in front of your partner’s favorite chair, recline it all the way back as if in economy class on an airplane, then say, “Mi scusi, per favore.”

3 UNESCO World Heritage Sites

Sagrada Familia in Barcelona is a stunning cathedral – it feels like you’re in a soaring forest lit by flowers. It’s packed for good reason, as we discovered in 2016. But you can visit virtually without the crowds thanks to a partnership between UNESCO and Google Earth. Just click a red button on the spinning globe to choose amongst 30 sites, including the Towers of Angkor Wat, Kew Gardens, Hiroshima Peace Memorial, Versailles, Great Sphinx of Giza, and Pompeii. Then click on the arrows to move around and look up and down. I got just as lost in the virtual Pompeii as we did when visiting the real maze-like archeological site. Then I zipped over to the Taj Mahal, whose stone and tile work, with intertwined flowers over a pointed archway, really is dazzling. This portal doesn’t give you enough detail to really know what you’re looking at, but the gorgeous pictures can help you dream of your next explorations.

4 The Thinking Traveller podcasts

How could you not be curious about a country with a Department of Gross National Happiness that vets all laws before they’re passed? Bhutan has long intrigued me and The Thinking Traveller podcast about the Himalayan country just increased my desire to visit. I learned that its mountain peaks will never be climbed because they’re protected, forest cover can never drop below 60 percent (currently at 70 percent), and the country recently became carbon negative, meaning it eliminates more CO2 emissions than it creates. Then I spent another 25 minutes on the history of Japanese gardens as an art form. Cued up are podcasts on how to avoid the crowds in Venice, uncovering the truth about Pompeii, and Antarctic archeology. Created by the Australia-based Academy Travel tour company, the podcasts are available on the website, or you can listen via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts and Spotify. There’s also a blog and a YouTube channel with countless other ways to pass the time until you get your Covid vaccine.

5 Ontario Attractions

Steep drop-offs and upside-down curls like a mobius strip. I don’t even like roller coasters but couldn’t help myself from taking virtual rides on the Leviathan and Yukon Striker at Canada’s Wonderland. Even those gave me sweaty palms and a pounding heart. The Ontario Attractions portal links you to dozens of museums, historic sites, the CN tower, the Elgin and Winter Garden Theatre, live web cams at Ripley’s Aquarium, and a helicopter tour over the Thousand Islands.

6 Google Arts & Culture

Google has an astounding array of vicarious travel opportunities, subdivided into various collections, projects, and stories. What they lack in depth (not always enough detail, at least for me), they make up for in breadth (covering a wide cross-section of the earth).

Partnering with about 2,500 museums and galleries around the world, Google Arts & Culture lets you virtually explore science, art, history, and sports museums. If you’ve really got time on your hands, you can download apps to compare your selfie to major portraits to find your twin or see how Claude Monet’s Grainstacks painting looks hanging in your living room. Google Arts Project: Street Art shows off the world’s graffiti art and profiles the artists behind them. Google’s Heritage on the Edge features sites at risk from climate change, while the Open Heritage project investigates cultural and sacred sites that have been documented using 3D digital conservation: cave art, places of remembrance, and city sites (such as Fort York in Toronto).

Here are some of the treats I uncovered:

• The Canada Aviation and Space Museum has two excellent online exhibits. Canada’s Jet-Age Dream: The Avro Arrow tells the story of our ill-fated jet in photos. “There was certainly more excitement for the several thousand Avro employees watching my first flight than for myself seated in the cockpit trying to remember hundreds of do’s and don’ts,” recalled Janusz Zurakowski, Chief Experimental Test Pilot, after the March 25, 1958 inaugural flight. The other is about Elsie MacGill, the first female aeronautical engineer in the world and a women’s rights advocate.
• Tribute to Montreal’s Great Artists profiles street art murals that pay homage to greats such as Oscar Peterson, Michel Tremblay, and Oliver Jones.
• In addition to a massive overload of gilt and mirrors, you can learn about science at Versailles in an eight-part story. “If Louis XIV and his successors are not recognized for their science policy, it is not for lack of having conducted one. They supported scientists, put a framework on their research, always betting on progress and modernity.”
• Rock Art Sites of Somaliland, Somalia are some of the oldest and best-preserved cave paintings in Africa.  

7 World Tour 360

In March 2020, we should have been visiting Iguazu Falls in Argentina when Covid forced us to abandon our plans. World Tour 360 allowed me to see the Devil’s Throat section of these spectacular falls. Click on the arrows to spin around for 360-degree views of hundreds of sights, mainly in the Americas and Europe. Canada’s list is strangely heavy on Thetford Mines.

8 Grab bag of individual destinations:

While portals 1 to 7 offer a multitude of options, many individual destinations, museums and tourist sights offer their own virtual tours. Here are some I’ve enjoyed:

Great Wall of China: See what it’s like to hike the longest structure made by humans. Go to 14 spots along the wall and click to see all around. Looks pretty steep in places! But the views are outstanding.  

Peace Tower Carillon concerts: Listen to the daily noon-hour concerts (9 a.m. PST) by Dr. Andrea McCrady, Dominion Carillonneur, from Canada’s Parliament Buildings.

Oeno Gallery: We’ve enjoyed this lovely little art gallery, part of Huff Estates Winery in Prince Edward County (about three hours from Ottawa), for years in person and online. It always has worthwhile exhibitions (plus an outdoor sculpture garden) and offers video walkthroughs on its website. The current exhibition, Winter Tonic runs until Feb. 28, 2021. After that, you can simply go to the gallery’s exhibitions webpage to find the next one.  

Paris catacombs: We’ve been to Paris twice but somehow to managed to miss this intriguing set of underground tunnels, some lined with bones and skulls. Click through six different spots, some with readable signs.

9 Create your own Zoom travel group:

We happily take part in Zoom Around the World – a group of travel-loving friends from Trinity United Church in Ottawa. Every other Monday, someone shares their PowerPoint presentation of travel photos via Zoom. We’ve been to Peru, walked long hiking routes in Japan and England, explored the “Stans” of Central Asia, and revisited our own travels in Portugal in 2019. We’re soon off to New Zealand and Bolivia. I urge any Netflix-weary grounded travellers to create their own Zoom travel groups to share experiences.

Happy vicarious travels!