After two days facilitating an industry conference on the Sunshine Coast, and grabbing bites in between sessions for sustenance, it was a luxury to sit back, drink a chilled glass of sauvignon blanc and watch a man slice vegetables.

First, a fat, chunky piece of fennel. As his knife sliced through the vegetable, you could smell the essence of fennel in the air. Then he worked through two ripe juicy oranges. Followed by two of the lushest greenest avocadoes I’ve ever seen. All locally grown, of course. Sean had promised me local, fresh food.

Talking about my trip to New Zealand, he said, “One of the differences between Australians and Kiwis is, the Kiwis are much more connected to the land. They’d be able to tell you more about the exact origin of the food we are eating than I can.”

Sean and his wife are making a conscious effort to eat local as much as they can. For the main course, we had fish cakes which he had bought from a local man who only sells fresh Australian or New Zealand seafood, and nothing frozen. 

Just last weekend, I was at Sampran Riverside (formerly Rose Garden and guess I’ll always know it as Rose Garden) which is as local as one gets in Thailand. There’s a market where farmers from the area come to sell their goods and everything has to be grown naturally.

The resort has its own organic farm across the river. In the old days, it would have been called just a farm but today, to plug into the new food fad, it is called organic.

Vegetables and fruits grown here are used for cooking at the resort and I reckon this is one of the reasons why the Thai food at this 40-year-old family-run retreat tastes so pure and fresh.

Living in urban cities, we do not know where our food comes from. Ask a kid in Singapore where chicken comes from and he’ll say either Cold Storage or Sheng Shiong.

We also forget how much metal we are surrounded by – metal which shields us from being connected to the land and nature, from which we are so far removed anyway.

It’s why the 70% of humanity that will live in urban spaces by 2020 will need to travel to plug into the rest of earth that’s inhabited by the 30% of us, at the very least to preserve our sanity and, at the very best, to be inspired.

The theme of “Unplugged” first took root after last year’s WIT Conference where we hopefully found our groove.

I was unplugging in Thailand’s Golden Triangle and amid the cool hills and flowing river, my mind went into auto-rewind and I reviewed and deconstructed every moment, and had a moment of clarity.

Caught up in the everyday grind of business, it is hard for us to see clearly sometimes where we’re going and where we need to go. This is particularly so today where the noise is overwhelming.

We are suffering from sensory overload. We are so plugged in with our devices that maybe we are not plugged in at all. We zip in and out of interactions, like the characters in video games. We are so busy with social networks that we are not sharing with the person in front of us.

At WITX-Women In Travel last week in Bangkok,, Blanca Menchaca from Wego, who was speaking for her generation, had me thinking when she said, “I don’t know how to read a book anymore.”

More and more, I meet people who want a break from being too plugged in.

Literally, “unplugged” means to pull the plug from the socket. Musically, it means to play without electric amplification so that the sound comes out pure, organic, so that you listen to it as it is.

It also means to deconstruct, to break down something in order to create something new. You need to do that to transform, inspire, innovate, disrupt, motivate, and grow.

It’s what we want you to do at the WIT Conference this year. We want you to unplug from your daily work and plug into the experience we will create.

And as we unplug that overwhelming universe of stuff out there – whether it be crowd sourcing, disruption, execution, transformation, socialization – we will take you on a journey through the core themes of what makes a successful travel business in today’s age of accelerated change.

Join us on the journey.