This summer we have been lucky enough to have Ella join us as our lovely Maptia intern. An illustrating, tea-brewing, yoga-teaching, photo-essay-creating extraordinaire, it has been fun welcoming Ella to into the Maptia family. In this post she spills the beans on what being an intern at Maptia is really like. And yes, it does involve making a lot of maps!
Enter Ella
At the end of last year, when asked by Maptia's CEO Dorothy (disclaimer: my perfectionist older sister of the compelling, globetrotting variety) whether I would be interested in a summer internship, I tried to give the impression that I was giving it careful consideration and tactically weighing up my options...
Did I want to take up an opportunity that offered me experience in nearly every aspect of life? Probably. Would I want to live and work with 4 unusually awesome people while helping them bring an incredible idea to life? It was likely. And would I be happy with the long hours of sunshine, endless waves and outrageous adventures that Morocco promised? Affirmative.
Atlas Obscura is a phenomenal compendium of the world's wonders, curiosities, and esoterica. In their own words it is, ‘the definitive guide to the world's wondrous and curious places’ and we most certainly agree. Creating a pinterest board alone was never going to satisfy our cravings to explore their archives, and sure enough Atlas Obscuration has come back around as a photo essay. If this still isn't enough, and you are a believer in discovery, browsing through the 4,000 or so places on Atlas Obscura is definitely justified when you have some extra time on your hands.
Browsing through hundreds of unusual places and more than a little inspired by the weird and wonderful, it was challenging to choose just 20 of our favourite places on Atlas Obscura to feature.
Click below to go to the full post and see the photographs, quotes, and amazing stories we finally managed to chose in the end.
If you haven't watched designer Frank Chimero's talk about 'Doing things the long hard stupid way', from the 'DO lectures' series, he talks about how one of the most delightful side effects of designing things for a living is the ability to "put gifts out into the world".
We hope that these hand-written quote postcards we have created can be, as Frank says, miniature 'gifts' to inspire us all to live our lives to the full. If nothing else, we hope they will bring a smile to a few of our readers! Sadly, due to the rather unreliable nature of the local camel post ar our HQ in Morocco, this time around we aren't able to send the real paper versions winging all over the world like our 'Great Outdoors' postcards.
However, we couldn't wait any longer to share our 'Handwritten Quote' postcards with you and have uploaded the high res files here for you to download - enjoy!
And if you have a moment, why not share the postcards with your friends, pin them to Pinterest, use them as your desktop wallpaper or your iPhone background, or even print them out yourself and stick them up on your wall.
Click below to see all the postcards in the full post!
Enter ‘Maptia Moments’, a blog series that we hope will be inspiring and intriguing in equal measure. The idea is for people to share memorable travel or life moments with us, so that we can feature them here on our blog for everyone to enjoy, and so create a collection of awesome 'Moments' from around the world.
We are also hand-picking the most inspiring, moving, funny, or unusual moments we receive and creating a unique map graphic for each of these people.
To begin with we are featuring four of our pioneers who have all kindly taken the time to write down their stories, ones that were experienced while travelling or during everyday life that made a real, lasting impact on them. The type of moment that when they close your eyes they can always recall it with perfect clarity. We have also shared a couple of our own 'Moments' from members of the Maptia team.
Click below to read more and discover the Maptia Moments we have collected so far. Plus find out how you can submit your own 'Moment' for us to share here on our blog!
If you’ve ever thought that your daily commute could be made a quite a bit more interesting, then this photo essay is definitely for you. When discovering new cultures, travellers also often find that people in other places simply just do things differently. Whether it’s rowing your boat down the river with the paddle attached to one of your legs, or throwing caution to the wind and flying down a Cambodian railway track on nothing but a bamboo raft on wheels, these images will hopefully inspire you to do more adventuring, more exploring and through this, more living.
We have scoured the internet to find 20 amazing and unusual ways to travel, from Thailand to Alaska and everywhere in-between. Many thanks to all the charming photographers for allowing us to publish their beautiful images.
Click below to go to the full post and see the photographs, quotes and incredible stories we have found.
