There are bad travellers. The ones who cannot understand why someone in a small Asian village cannot speak English, so just yells at them louder. The ones who get absurdly drunk and vomit on sacred monuments. The ones who always seem to have their passport/wallet/tickets/bag stolen, mostly because they’re wearing a t-shirt that says “I’M A TOURIST ROB ME” written on it.
But then… then there’s us.
Once we were getting on the plane for a two-month trip to Europe, and realised we hadn’t packed a bra between us.
Another time, we travelled to Morocco despite not really knowing what a ‘Morocco’ was. It was 51 degrees which was absurd.
Then there was the time Jessie put her passport through the wash in Croatia, or the time she severely sprained her ankle the night before a three-day trek through the Chiang Mai jungle.
You’d think with all our combined experience, we’d get better at it.
But you would be wrong.
Sure, some of our failures have led to our greatest memories. A night spent at the movies in LA because we were staying too far out of the city to do anything touristy. A fascinating Jewish museum in Paris that we only discovered because we got terribly lost. Seeing phosphorescent plankton in Thailand because we missed our early snorkelling trip and had to do one at night.
It's these moments, in all their chaos and unpredictability, that make a trip so unforgettable. And Hotels.com agree.
Somewhere between us being seriously interrogated by security in the Bahamas, and not wanting to swim in the idyllic water of Vietnam because of an irrational fear of stonefish, we realised that in technical terms - we're quite possibly the world's worst travellers. But that's why we always have so much fun.
So Mamamia has teamed with Hotels.com to appoint us Mamamia's Travel Blazers, which, needless to say, is an ironic title.
More specifically, Hotels.com came up with a plan - to send us on a mystery holiday, where we had no part in planning our accommodation, so even if we tried, we couldn't stuff it up.
So please follow us on our journey to somewhere within Australia, where we will likely miss flights, lose our luggage, drop our phone/s, cry for no reason, discover we only packed one shoe, get food poisoning, injure ourselves, have a fight in public, and only show the very best parts on Instagram.
But no matter what happens during the day, Hotels.com has our accommodation sorted, with the touch of an app.
And something tells us that the only part that won't be a disaster, is the part we have nothing to do with.
We'll keep you up to date on how Mamamia's Travel Blazers, aka your TV recap queens and podcast faves Clare and Jessie Stephens, go with their mystery trip. Embrace the unknown and give yourself a break with Hotels.com now.
And follow Clare and Jessie on Facebook!