Should natural disaster stop you from continuing with your travel plan?

For all avid travellers out there, I'm pretty sure you are more than aware with all the natural disasters news going about since the beginning of the year. So the question is now, should natural disaster stop you from continuing with your travel plan? To answer this questions, you need to bare in mind the followings:

1. Keep yourself updated on the latest news about the place you will be travelling and contact embassies if necessary to find out on any safety issues for your travel. In short, you have to be aware and update yourself on all the latest news about the place that you have planned to travel to.

2. I would still think, it is fairly safe to continue with your travel plans if you are planning to visit the country probably 1-2 months from the date of the disaster. Well, it is still very highly necessary to take precautions on things but personally, I would say it will be fine to continue with your travel plan by then.

You may want to cancel things altogether if you are planning to travel on the same day or anytime from days/a week after the day of the disaster struck. That will be a bad choice to keep on continuing with the travel plans. Well that's what most rational and logical person will do.

3.  Always follow your guts or intuitions whether you need to continue or not for your travel. If you just feel confident that things are going to be okay and there are no doubt inside of you, then by all means, do continue on with your travel journey.

4. Good judgments and again, constantly updating yourself with the latest news on the country you are planning to visit is very important to decide on things. There are many ways to keep yourself updated online. One of the best things we can have right now is the to simply Google on the latest news. For example if you Google : Japan Earthquake, you'll get to view these links at the very top of the search result page:

The Google Crisis Response website - for news, media, maps and others related:

http://www.google.com/crisisresponse/japanquake2011.html

Pacific Tsunami Warning Center website :


http://ptwc.weather.gov/

And for updates on New Zealand :

http://canterburyearthquake.org.nz/
With all the information you can gather from the websites, live news and even contacting your embassies to find out details on the safety of your future travel, that should help you to decide on whether you should stop or continue with your travel plans. All in all, there are no certain answers to what should stop you from travelling. However, always make wise judgment and what's important is if you are going to continue with your travel plans, let's just take whatever that is going on on the country you are planning to visit as part of the extra adventure that should accompany you during your travel. Who knows, it could be a life changing experience for you and I'm definite that we all at the end of the day can learn so much from the things that had happened.

So, travel safely if you are leaving for Japan or New Zealand any time soon. :)