Six travel videos to inspire wanderlust

I know, I know. You don't come here for lists. You don't come here for videos. You can get that stuff at roughly 10,312 other blogs. All true. Nonetheless, here we are.

Of late, I've been getting itchy feet and trying to think of my next adventure, which has led to some random Googling and travel-blog-reading, plus too much time spent on YouTube and Vimeo looking at videos and feeling all inspired ... and then clicking over to the next video rather than, you know, planning a trip. So here are some of the greatest hits of the many videos out there that will pique your wanderlust.

First up: "Where the Hell is Matt?" It's an obvious choice, and everyone reading this is probably among the 38 million (!!) people who have watched it already, but this viral video of Dancing Matt doing his thing all over the world still makes me smile. Mesmerizing.



In a somewhat similar vein are these newer videos posed about a month ago. There are three: Eat, Learn, Move. Instead of following a dorky dancer around the world, though, these ones show a guy participating in each of the titular verbs around the world. Quirky, delightful, subtly thrilling--like eye candy for the traveler.






Granted, most of the above videos would be hard for the rest of us to replicate. I, for one, don't have the means to fly all over the world (forty-four countries for dancing Matt Harding, eleven for the eating, moving, learning guy) and put together epic montage videos. So in the more realistic "I could maybe do that" realm, here are a couple of others. Ironically, these more accessible-seeming adventures are, unlike the more epic ones above, entirely fictitious. They're ads for a language-learning program, so I suppose the very intent of these videos is supposed to be to make us feel like we could live out these stories--they're travel fairy tales, but still relatable.





There are also similar videos for Beijing and London.

And finally, on a more humorous front, here's my pal Darren Garnick discussing his blog Tacky Tourist Photos and showing off some of the best submissions.

Anyone have any to add? What videos make you want to hit the road?