Well, it’s just about the end of 2006. It’s been an interesting year for Brave New Traveler — or in fact, an interesting 3 months.

When I started this publication in early October I wanted to create an informative, entertaining, and enlightening online travel magazine for the emerging era. With my own posts and the help of some talented guest authors, I think we’ve succeeded.

So to celebrate, here’s a look back at the best of the past 3 months.

October

In our inaugural month, we learned the ecological footprint of the human species has started using more resources per year than the earth can hope to regenerate. In response I wrote about how make your flights carbon neutral which is still secondary to the best idea: fly less.

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You may know I’m the co-founder of the online travel journal community TravelBlogger.

I started developing the site back in the summer of 2004 with two friends, after I had the epiphany one day in the car, “Hey, what if there was someway for backpackers to blog their journal automatically?”

(Remember, this was when the whole ‘blogging’ phenomenon was just getting started).

Anyway, after months of development, TravelBlogger finally launched in Feb 2005. Since then a lot has happened with blogging — as the idea has become much more mainstream. Everyone had a blog for awhile. It was the cool thing to do.

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My friend has a sense of humour.

For Christmas, he gifted me a darkly hilarious “Global Warming Mug” - a mug featuring the world’s continents in all their glory. Except there’s a catch. When you pour in a hot liquid the heat alters the continents, revealing the edges of the world that will be swallowed in the future due to unabated climate change and rising sea levels.

My initial thought was the wonderfully depressing feeling the mug would invoke with every morning coffee, but then I realized it was an effective reminder; a “call to action” that climate change isn’t just going to go away if everyone ignores it.

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Social travel community TravBuddy has come up with a pretty cool map building widget for those travel bloggers with their own websites. (Check out my own example above).

Basically you head over to their travel mapping page, and you check off all the countries you’ve visited so far. Afterwards, you’re presented with 3 different sizes of your travel map, which can be embedded on any other website to show the world just how much of the planet you’ve seen.

Of course, nothing is ever entirely free. In exchange for providing this cool feature, the highlighted countries on your map can be clicked, which takes you to Travbuddy’s travel blogs, photos, and members for that location.

It would be nice if they gave you the option of creating your own links from the highlighted countries, which would allow someone to navigate to your own online journals, instead of others’. Ah well. You can’t have it all, I suppose.

Technorati Tags: travel, world map, travbuddy, travel widget

Derek Wallace is a guy on a mission. He’s embarking on a world-wide tour working on organic farms and in exchange for room/board through a network called “World-Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms” (”wwoofing” for short).

The purpose of his trip is two-fold: to write a book about how other cultures have tackled the issue of sustainability and to bring back methods of organic communal gardening that United States citizens can employ to help combat their addiction to petroleum-based produce grown on factory farms.

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I’m soaked, damp, wet, sticking with my own fluids and gritty under a haze-laden sun. Or say I’m in Nepal, trekking alone within the Himalayas. A snowstorm descends upon me and I’m instantly lost, wandering from the trail by blinding white winds.

This is the present moment. This is the only situation that exists.

You’re in it, alone or accompanied, and it’s that which you’re experiencing. Whatever the circumstances might be, you have access to inspiration, you have the key to its discovery.

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I lived in Sydney, Australia for 4 months.

During that time I worked a variety of jobs, including (failed) bartender, deejay, and junk mail stuffer in a warehouse outside of town. My goal was to save a bit of cash to fund the rest of my trip backpacking around the country in the new year.

Renting an apartment didn’t make sense at the time, since I didn’t want to sign a lease or get into any complicated relationships with other friends looking to share short term accommodation.

So aside from a temporary attempt to room with a drug-dealing friend of mine outside the city (which is another story entirely), I stuck to staying in various downtown hostels - a nuisance with a transient backpacker population, but what else could I do?

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In the spring of 2002, I spent two weeks trekking through the Australian Outback. Our party included myself, a retired naval officer for a guide, and eight other backpackers eager to touch the desert sands beneath their fingers.

Adelaide was our starting point, amid the rolling grasses of the parched landscape, soon giving way to the towering peaks of the Flinders Ranges.

Along the way we spotted lizards and camels, ancient cave paintings and even a prehistoric trilobite, revealed in the rock only when soaked from a few splashes of our bottled water.

From there we made our way across the vast plains of dry scrub and pale salt lakes, with temperatures sometimes soaring into the forties.

Though our Jeep Landrover was equipped with air-conditioning, our Aussie guide thought it would use too much fuel - and gas stations were a luxury around those parts. The air conditioner remained off.

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