Photo: TheAlieness GiselaGiardino²³

We’re ripping out a page from the popular Notes from the Road series over at the Traveler’s Notebook and asking you to take a moment to sketch out something that probably crosses your mind now and again: A Personal Manifesto.

When I happened upon Gwen Bell’s, author of the Unconventional Guide to the Social Web, process the other day, I immediately became excited at the notion of going through my own.

Check out her guide on the myriad of ways to go about developing your own manifesto.

Here are a few highlights of possible road-map choices:

Vision Map

Yep, this means breaking out the magazines, scissors, and glue. Good magazines, with positive images, by the way. Cut out pictures of what you want in your life, whether that includes traveling the world or owning a yoga studio. Don’t forget to write yourself a little note about your beauty.

Put it all together in a systematic or wonderfully haphazard fashion on a big piece of cardboard, and hang it up on your wall. I also like Bell’s suggestion of scanning the map in order to have a travel-version.

Life List

Life list, bucket list, whatever you want to call it – just write down a 100 things you want to do before kicking well, you know, the bucket. I like the look of Maggie Mason’s (the inspiration for Bell’s list), and the idea of having mine sitting pretty on my computer and crossing through the ones I’ve completed. Oooh, I want to stop writing this post and go do it right now.

Digitized Goals

Photo: TinyFizzyPop

Bell provides a link to an online questionnaire, which can be helpful for those of us that need prompts. Or cut-offs. Plus, who are we kidding – haven’t most of us forgotten how to write in cursive anyway?

Microactions

To continue the tradition I began of stealing ideas from the Traveler’s Notebook, take a look at their new series, Micro Notes, in order to get primed for this one. I know I can sometimes be wordy in both writing and speech (have you noticed?), and often, the best way to get things done is to define them with brevity. Index cards, short lists, to the point=making things happen.

Finally, here’s one I’m adding to Bell’s list:

Visioning/Meditation On Your Goals

A former dance teacher of mine will freely tell you that without a doubt, “visioning” her future every single day has led to her dreams becoming a reality. After passing the bar exam, Vicki decided to chuck the lawyer-life and pursue her true passion, dance. Now, she along with her business and life partners throw one of the most consistently sold-out club nights in San Francisco, Non Stop Bhangra, and her dance troupe, Dholrhythms, performs up and down the Western Coast of US and Canada.

Vicki has had a daily routine of reciting and meditating on her dreams, and says that everything that has come to fruition began as a thought in this process. In other words, don’t forget the power of intention.

Since fall always feels like a good time for introspection, I’ll be working on my manifesto this weekend, and then will post some of my results and musings at my blog, Living Holistically. I’m hoping to see some of yours, even just bits and pieces, too.

Add parts of your manifesto to your personal blog, and then come back here and paste the link in the comments section below!

Community Connection

While developing your manifesto, don’t forget about the beauty of transparency in your writing, whether for yourself or others. David Miller takes a look at the importance of Material Transparency in creating a personal brand.

As you go to or home from work today, possibly dealing with rain or very cold temperatures, trying to protect yourself from the swine flu or thoughts of the looming end of the world, think about what a little laughter can do.

The video starts off a bit slow, but give it a minute:

I love how the annoyed faces can’t help but start to smile. Hopefully it’ll do the same for you. Happy Friday!

What are some other ways to get people smiling? Share your thoughts below!

Feature photo: adobemac

Community Connection

Need some more laughter to take you into the weekend? You can’t help but bust a gut when you read Tom Gates’ piece, The Five Worst Pizzas In the World. And maybe it’s time to be reminded of why Southwest Airlines is Still Cool After All These Years. For more great travel videos, check out the brand spankin’ new MatadorTV.

Sometimes, you just have to walk. With this idea mind, Christoph Rehage set out on November 9, 2007 with the goal of crossing 4646km through China. Almost every day, he snapped a photo to document the journey (and his beard growth).

After a year and roughly 4500km, in the desert of Gobi, Chris decided to stop walking. He boarded a plane, shaved his facial hair, and went home.

I caught up with Chris to talk about the journey, the biggest challenges, and the existential feeling every traveler has when they look at a snapshot of themselves “before” their life-altering experience.

BNT: What compelled you to go on this journey?

I am thinking about this question as well. I think it has to do with a spontaneous walk I did in 2003, from Paris to Bad Nenndorf in Germany. The memory has been with me ever since.

Why did you choose foot? What are the benefits of a walking journey?

It is nice to walk towards the horizon, not knowing what’s ahead. The good thing about walking is that it is a rather slow method of movement, so I imagine you have more time to take in more of the details on the way.

Did other famous (or non-famous) long-term foot travelers inspire your trip?

Well, my original walk from Paris to my home was inspired by an article I had read about the Roman armies, who had to walk all around their vast empire back then. That’s when I kind of got the idea. There are two more influential people though: the first one is early 19th century German traveler J.G. Seume, who traveled to Italy and did quite a bit of walking there.

The second and maybe more important one is German journalist M. Holzach, who walked around Germany in the early 80s – without a penny to his name, and wrote a brilliant book about it.

What were some of the biggest challenges of long-term travel on foot? What were your biggest surprises?

The challenges come in different stages, foot-pains being the first one. Then there are all kinds of different pains to follow, hopelessness and self-doubt being the most difficult to overcome. It sounds a bit tacky, but the biggest obstacle is always within ourselves.

You dedicate the film to Teacher Xie; how did you come across him and how did he influence your journey?

As fate would have it, we crossed paths somewhere in the Gobi desert, after I had already been walking for more than a half year. I was then to find out that he had already been walking for 26 years! Teacher Xie taught me something very valuable: “you set the rules yourself” he said, “and you are always free to change them. You only have to know what it is you want!”

You never completed your original route; does that affect your definition of a successful journey?

I don’t know. I have never really thought of it in terms of “success”, I guess.

At the end of your film, you ask the question “was it really me?” which can mean a number of things. What does it mean to you, and how have you changed from the person who started the journey?

I remember it very clearly, when I was about to start walking in Beijing, this whole thing had an immense importance to me. I was ready to put everything on the line for the walk, and I got into huge fights with my family over this. Looking back now, I think that maybe it had to be that way, but I am looking at that face on the starting day, and I recognize something strange in those eyes.

What’s the best part about having a wacky beard?

Finally a question that’s fun! Well, the best part about having a wacky beard is of course the look! I don’t think it made me very attractive at all, but I have always had a strong kind of sympathy for that goofy hairball in the mirror!

Read more about Christoph’s journey on his site The Longest Way.

You playful yogi, you / Photo: Satyakki Bhattacharjee / Feature photo: Sanjay B

Even if you love the work you do, are traveling around the world in search of adventure, or are working your little heart out toward spiritual enlightenment, sometimes the daily grind just takes over.

We forget about one of life’s most important qualities: play.

From the photographer who shot the above scene:

In Rishikesh (upper India) which is a spiritual abode of yogis from across the world, I saw a bunch of yogis in a rare playful mood. So much so, I caught one taking a playful shortcut. It was very nice to see that. I realised he may have given up everything in life but there is still a bit of child left in him, which sometimes makes him be on air.

Since it is Friday, stop whatever you are doing for 10 minutes and go do something that you consider to be fun as hell (as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else). Swing on a swing, jump on a trampoline, play hopscotch. Or go have a scotch (probably best to do at the end of the day).

Just be sure to do it with gusto, and most importantly, awareness.

Bet these yogis are highly aware of their feet hitting the water.

What are you going to do with your 10 minutes of play? Share your fun moments below!

Photo: stig nygaard

We all know that travel lets you experience new cultures, see incredible sights, and meet fascinating people.

However, being on the road and jumping from hostel to hostel, especially alone, provides another unique opportunity: the chance to acquire an entirely new personality at every fleabag dorm room of your trip.

Not since the first day of freshman year has such a golden opportunity arisen, so be sure not to miss out with this handy guide to the new you on the backpacker trail.

Step 1: Acquire a fancy new accent

That Southern drawl might attract the ladies back home in Raleigh, but it just doesn’t have that certain je ne sais crois to cut it with the unwashed traveling bourgeois. Have no fear – at the hostel, nobody knows that you really sound like Sean Penn in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

Just roll that “r” a bit, swallow that “g,” and soften your vowels a hair, and suddenly you’re a veritable citizen of the world.

With this unidentifiable but notably cultured accent, you can pontificate at length on the differences between tea quality in Northern and Western China, and no one will suspect that you have no idea what you are talking about. Which brings us to step two.

Step 2: Become an expert

I’m not talking about actually putting in the work to be an expert in something new. (That would take way too much time).

Lucky for you, on the road, just use some personal experiences and then add any commentary that pops into your head, and voila, you’re the hostel/backpacker bar expert.

Took a rafting trip in Kenya? By all means, present your analysis of the electoral problems there. Volunteered for a week at an orphanage in Guatemala? You’re the Richard Feynman of Fair Trade coffee! Went on a day trip to the West Bank? Write an article on the state of Palestinian tourism for an online travel magazine!

Step 3: Change your life plans

Photo: aoifgejohanna

Deep down you know that you’re going to go home, finish your CPA, and work at a faceless corporation for the next thirty or so years. Suppress that realization as hard as you can, and take the opportunity to indulge your wildest fantasies about dropping everything to live a life of expatriate leisure.

Go ahead and tell everyone at the bar that yeah, you’re “pretty much set on starting a little café on the Peruvian coast”, or whiling away the next few decades “surfing and designing websites from the South Pacific.”

You can even add a bit of weight to your proclamations of life in self-imposed slacker exile by making a few inquiries into real estate prices in the area – “I actually already looked into acquiring the lease on a little bar in Budapest. Think I’m gonna go ahead and make an offer.”

But be careful what you wish for or it might come true; you could end up fifteen years from now spending all your nights with this expat crew.

Step 4: Try a new religion

It’s no secret that for many people, travel and spiritual discovery go hand and hand.

Put aside that annoying inner skeptic who tells you that your sudden interest in Buddhism might have more to do with those mushrooms you ate at the full moon party last night than any long-term religious awakening.

Go East, young man, and let your soul take you wherever it should wander: Hinduism, Baha’ism, Zoroastrianism, Shintoism…the gringo trail will present you with an incredible spread of delicious religious offerings.

By all means, make your way to the buffet table. (Besides, everyone knows that ashram chicks are totally hot).

Step 5: Go native with the clothes

Photo: Y-Not

Is that Lawrence of Arabia over there, walking into a Jordanian desert sunset in a brilliant white dishdasha and checkered red kuffiyeh? No, it’s the new Bedouin you!

Or consider that local Bolivians will have no idea that you’re a tourist hiding under that traditional poncho (if you to tuck the Nikon D300 inside).

Show the world that your mind has been liberated from the corrupting influences of rampant Western polyesterism by donning some of the local threads. Just remember when you get home: email your boss in advance to make sure that the Cambodian monks’ robe is good to go for casual Fridays.

Step 6: Become an instant outdoorsman

It doesn’t matter that your longest “hike” on a typical day back home involves getting from your car to your cubicle. Get yourself some $250 hiking boots, a set of topographical maps, and an absurdly over-featured GPS, and as far as your hostel mates know, you’re Henry Morton Stanley.

Make a point of regularly staring quizzically at your laid-out maps, muttering comments under your breath about “precision bearing” and “attack points.” Then just hire a local guide when it’s actually time to start the trek.

Step 7: Find out that you’re still you

You’ve got a sore throat from all those fake French “r” sounds. You get called out on the fact that you keep referring to Sydney as the capital of Australia yet claim to be intimately knowledgeable of Aboriginal burial rites.

You get bored after swinging in a beach hammock for three days, much less the rest of your life. You realize that real Buddhism actually involves more than a yoga session and a Putumayo CD. That Jamaican Rasta woven hat is really itchy, and it turns out that the great outdoors is actually filled with things that bite you.

And you realize that at the end of the day, or month, or around-the-world year long trip, all of the new personas which we acquire while traveling slip away just as easily as they came about.

Travel does indeed change us, but luckily these changes tend to be more profound than a new accent or organic diet.

And although travel may give us the opportunity to try out new personalities, in the end it teaches us more about who we really are, if only through the process of elimination.

What you do think think of reinventing yourself abroad? Share your thoughts in the comments!

Photo by Marc Sebastian

So you finally did it. You moved back home. You gave up on your dreams of being a lifetime traveler in exchange for a pension, a steady paycheck, and a stable home environment.

Good for you. The only problem is, we both know it may not stick.

You can feel it already, can’t you? Not exactly a sense of loss, but rather, some part of you is being slowly diluted, your true self fading from a lack of stimulation.

Escape. Get out while you still can. Hit the road, and be grateful you pushed yourself.

How do you know when it’s time to go traveling?

10. Recycled Coffee Starts Tasting Good

You’ve become so complacent with your 9-to-5 cubicle job that that caffeinated mixture of grounds and office sweat is actually making your mouth water. You’re spending too much time staring at an LCD screen. Water cooler talk is fascinating to you.

GET OUT NOW, while you can still remember what sunlight feels like.

9. Celebrity Gossip is the Most Interesting Part of Your Day

Like celebrity gossip? It may be too late…

You watch too much TV. You have excuses for not reading books. You’re unchallenged and unfulfilled. The best way to break this? You need to feel uncomfortable in a totally new environment, do some volunteer work, meet people from different backgrounds. Carpe diem.

8. You Can’t Find Authentic Foreign Foods At Home

The Thai food in Boston isn’t nearly as spicy as you remembered it from Chang Mai. That Japanese fugu tastes more metallic than sweet. Some business executives have no problem driving hundreds of miles for a decent meal.

Although you should be hesitant to take a page from their books, food is a good motivator to cross the border. Satisfy those dormant taste buds.

7. You Got Dumped

Doesn’t have to be a dumping. Any traumatic event that makes you feel like you need a fresh start could work: your boyfriend cheated on you; you got fired; a close family member died; you’re about to get married and feel like one last blowout; a baby is on the way and will surely tie you to a domestic life.

Whatever the reason, you are in some kind of emotional upheaval that only exploration will cure.

6. You Talk With More People Abroad Than You Do At Home

Your friends from Germany on Facebook get more attention than those living a hundred feet away. Go and be a part of their lives again; you miss them, and hopefully they miss you.

5. Sick And Tired of Being Ignorant of World Affairs

“Hey man, did you hear about all this protesting in Thailand?”
“[A market in Iraq is] like a normal outdoor market in Indiana in the summer time.”
“What’s Mugabe done now?”
Stop listening to others describe it (assuming they even know what they’re talking about, i.e. quote #2). Go and live it.

4. You Have Too Much Money

Even bumper stickers need a vacation / Photo just.luc

Do not buy yourself a dozen iPods or blow it all on a 64,000 square foot mansion for one. You could help out a fellow traveler (perhaps one needing sponsorship for his Antarctica Marathon in 2010… shameless self-promotion), but really, go out into the world yourself, don’t just send your money into foreign markets.

3. The City Skyline Just Isn’t Doing It

The shades of grey towering over the horizon just don’t provide that same sense of excitement or visual stimulation as when you first arrived in the big city. You need a change…unfamiliar surroundings…a new city, a green mountain, endless ocean, ice, ice baby…whatever works for you.

2. Spite

Other people – boss, girlfriend, family – are telling you not to go, or even you can’t go. You’re a rebel. Traveling sounds like the best idea in the world when you’re forbidden to do it.

1. You Don’t Want to End up Like Those Guys in “The Bucket List”

You know: The Bucket List. Two old guys find out they’re dying. They do everything they can before they kick the bucket.

Instead, do it while you’re young and healthy. Keep it up. Maybe along the way you’ll discovery the secret of immortality and eternal youth, in which case, no worries, mate.

What are some other reasons you know it’s time to go traveling? Share in the comments!

Tony enjoying a cool beverage.

Many people dream of traveling around the world. Only a few people get the chance — and even fewer circle the globe without the aid of an airplane.

Tony Robinson-Smith is one of those few.

Tony was living a fairly cushy life running an English school in Japan. But after five years, he was ready to shed his regimented lifestyle and tackle the world firsthand. What began as a study of a world map turned into a long, wiggly journey across hot sands, open roads, and stormy seas.

Five years and nine months later, his journey came full circle, and Tony published a travel memoir, >Back in 6 Years.

In this interview Tony reveals a little about his motivation, and what it was like to crawl around the world.

BNT: Tony, you wrote that your inspiration to travel around the world without flying came from Ted Simon, who wrote:

“It is no trick to go round the world these days. You can pay a lot of money and fly round it non-stop in less than forty-eight hours, but to know it, to smell it and feel it between your toes, you have to crawl.”

Is there anything that you would add to that quote?

Tony: I would add little to this quote because I think Simon clearly understood that surface travel is a combination of hardship and reward, and that the rewards are worth the hardship.

As the Shakespeare quote at the beginning of my book indicates, the greatest reward is indeed often gained by embracing the unpleasant.

Thus, I crawled, so to speak, and learnt many things, but the greatest lesson was that it was worth crawling.

I got the impression that the idea for your trip came out of restlessness and grew very quickly – even though you were living in Japan, you were tired of the routine. What else was behind your decision to take a sabbatical from the everyday?

The fact that I was living in Japan before deciding to take to the road is important. Japan is an orderly, duty-conscious and decorum-conscious nation where space is in short supply — roads are narrow, houses in towns and cities are built close together, and paddy fields cover much of the cultivatable countryside.

Resident foreigners must learn to make do with less physical space and, to succeed in work, they must conform to a fairly strict code of conduct.

After five years, I was ready to break out of this limiting environment, as I was feeling a bit like a caged bird!

I wished for the opposite of Japan: wide open spaces, wilderness, fewer sanctions on my conduct, unstilted conversations. I also felt that if I wanted to truly learn about the world, it would be best for me to go out and experience it firsthand.

Media reports cannot be trusted and are too readily digested as truth. I was confident that I would gain a more real, less skewed appreciation through direct experience.

I also nursed the belief that adventures happen to the adventurous and now was the time when a sustained period of global wandering would likely be rewarding and yield the extra-ordinary.

During the first part of your journey you seemed fairly lonely and uncomfortable and not really enjoying yourself. When you started out, was it less about the thrill of travel and more about completing a task that you had set for yourself?

Africa was certainly a rude awakening after Japan. In a short space of time, I switched from the regulated to the chaotic. In Japan, I had a cozy life – a steady job, good salary, apartment, friends, girlfriend.

The change brought discomfort, uncertainty and a measure of loneliness. The appeal of my self-imposed mission, to travel without flying, did give me something to focus my mind on while I adjusted to my new lifestyle, became less defensive and began to enjoy the ride.

Did you ever think of throwing in the towel and booking a flight home?

Sure. I got frustrated, bored, sick, tired and lonely many times and wished to return home, but these feelings never lasted.

I was aware from the start that circling the planet by land and sea would take time and test my patience and resolve, but I was convinced the rewards would make the long journey worthwhile.

As you know, I traveled in as many different ways as possible – bus, train, truck, bike, pirogue, yacht – and this helped keep the journey ‘fresh’ and stimulating.

I think I would have found it tougher had I traveled only one way. Stops for work also helped; returns to a routine quickened the appetite to be on the road once again.

The pace of the book really seemed to pick up in Canada. Did that mirror the pace of the trip?

Before Canada, I was traveling mostly in the less-developed world where, I guess, there were more delays, making the pace seem slower.

But the most convoluted and slowest stretch of my travels was through Asia.

When Nadya [Tony's now-wife whom he first met in Canada] came to see you in China, you said that she countered your “tendency to rush.” Which leg of the journey – if any – do you feel that you rushed?

I think there were times in Africa when I felt hounded or in peril, so I tended to keep moving. If I had been more at ease, I could have lingered longer and explored further on this fascinating continent.

Once in Anglophone Africa, visas weren’t necessary and frontiers were easier to cross. Maybe if Nadya had been around, the black line on my world map crossing Africa would have turned out wigglier!

Looking back – no regrets, of course! – what would you would do differently? Would you have learned a bit of Portuguese before entering Brazil, or listened to the voice in your head telling you not to sail long distances with an inexperienced crew?

Indeed, no regrets! I’ve written a lot about the sticky situations I got myself into and out of, and I think these serve to color the book, making it entertaining — instructive even.

A solo journey around the world by land and sea inevitably throws the intrepid traveler into trouble; in fact, he or she seeks it.

Having said that, it is wise to cross the Sahara Desert with a full jerry can of water rather than an empty one, and it is also wise to inspect the sailing vessel you will cross an ocean on carefully and assess its seaworthiness.

Also, as far as you are capable, be sure of the competency of its skipper and the mental stability of its crew.

What surprised you the most over those six years of traveling?

The willingness of strangers to help me out. In my hour of need, there was almost always someone about to offer a helping hand.

French expeditioners in jeeps bailing me out of the African jungle; the Hovington family in Canada feeding a hungry cyclist; an Australian [Leo Learoyd] who made our Indonesian canoeing adventure happen.

I was also surprised to discover that fortune indeed favors the bold. I refer to myself at the end of my travelogue as a “common or garden variety English teacher.”

I’m not especially practical and have no survival skills, but I was determined and my determination to succeed led to good fortune.

Now that you’re back and settled, do you feel that it was a once-in-a-lifetime thing? Is it out of your system, or do you think you’ll be itching to set off again? This time entirely on a bicycle, perhaps?

My journey was a rite of passage that answered the need I had at the end of my 20s to break away from a routine existence and discover the world for myself.

While on the road, I had the feeling that I would not travel this way, this far or for this long ever again.

My subsequent trips have been shorter and focused on single countries — I’m just back from the Kingdom of Bhutan in the Himalayas where I spent two years lecturing and traveling; the subject of my next book.

Having said this, I note that Ted Simon, my source of inspiration, retraced his wheel-tracks round the world some 40 years after his first world circuit.

It would be interesting to see how places have changed and write a book about that.

Be sure to check out Tony’s book Back in 6 Years: A Journey Around the World

Photo by Felipie Morin

Modern life is stressful. This is a fact you can rely on. There is rarely any time to take a breath, let alone stand and stare.

At work you see the same faces everyday, people you are forced to be with. A boss/guilty conscience telling you what to do on an hourly basis.

Your brain hurts from the metaphorical weight that is fast consuming your every free thought. There is a sense that your life is spiraling out of control.

As a welcome distraction, desktop computers will flash up holiday snaps or screen savers with places to daydream about. However, hiding behind the pretty vistas are spreadsheets with numbers to crunch and 100-page documents that someone has to read.

No wonder people run screaming to the nearest beauty spot. Some take a two-week vacation; others go the whole hog, quitting to travel. Good for them.

Regular Versus Extraordinary

It is said that travel broadens the mind. Conversely, monotonous routine squeezes the mind into a dark corner where imagination evaporates and inspiration dries up.

I want to say I have perfected the Buddhist monk technique of “nobility in every task“, but unfortunately my patience is wafer-thin at best.

Besides, many Buddhist monks get to look at the Himalayas all day, so it’s unsurprising they are at peace. I’d call it an unfair advantage. Faced instead with a mountain of ironing or a lawn that could feasibly hide a Bengal tiger, escaping for a vacation seems the ideal solution.

I could be accused of putting off today what I can do tomorrow, but countering with another adapted adage – if you live every day as if it’s your last, would the housework get done? And more importantly, would you care?

Restoring The Balance

Photo by Marielito

No matter how much is spoken about work/life balance, the modern world is designed to be out of kilter.

People are striving to be thin, pretty and successful while the message from the media is “must try harder.” It’s as if they have forgotten how to be happy.

Being humbled by nature puts things into context, making the bigger picture easier to see. Spending a couple of hours on a deserted island, just being yourself rather than the frazzled, harried person you are on a day-to-day basis is unquestionably good for your soul.

A difficult trek up a mountain may be challenging, but the rewards from the journey as well as the euphoria of reaching the final destination are incomparable. Experiences like these allow you to be introspective, directing your energy inwards. It’s enough to make you realise that life is so much bigger than the box you are pigeonholed into and rarely fit perfectly.

Contemporary society compels you to rush from one thing to the next, never really appreciating anything and achieving little. Finishing a book or allowing the waves to lap at your toes for an hour would never be described as “achievements”.

They should be. Time spent reading a second-hand book in a tropical garden is never wasted.

Dream With The Fishes

I was once taught by a dive master to picture myself as a manta ray: calm, graceful, elegant, at peace. I have been fortunate to see a manta ray glide effortlessly through the ocean and it was the embodiment of tranquillity.

This technique was invaluable when diving, but is much more difficult to apply when faced with the urge to throttle a particularly annoying co-worker.

However, while snorkeling or diving in the ocean, those spreadsheets and tedious documents are far from your mind. And you will feel all the better for it.

To allow things to wash over you, rather than drag you down into the depths is something everyone is capable of. This is easier said than done – a good reason why many people change their lives rather than let a particular situation beat them into submission.

If you don’t like the view, go look at something else.

The desire to be somewhere physically beautiful is instinctive. In a world where time is everything, a moment spent just being in front of a mountain, watching a turtle swim by or sitting under the shade of a palm tree is balm for the soul.

Don’t put this off, do it now.

What do you think about the life/work balance? Share your thoughts in the comments!

Photo by Kirsty Pargeter

In a recent post traveler, journalist (and BNT co-editor) Tim Patterson provided a how-to guide for traveling free (or very cheap) – a practice that could be called “vagabonding.”

Soon after publication, he was promptly assailed by a number of readers for advocating a kind of “shiftlessness” and “irresponsibility.”

He was nailed with all manner of epithets – called irresponsible, a hippie, a bum, an idealist, impractical, a “rich, privileged, arrogant hipster,” the list went on.

In reality, Tim was just offering some practical low-budget travel advice. As such, the vitriolic feedback from the readers is way out-of-proportion.

But why is that? What brought on this storm of denouncements?

As humans, whenever we have a strong emotional reaction to something, it’s an opportunity to learn something about ourselves, the way our psyche works, the way our minds are wired.

When we react strongly, that’s usually an indication that some fundamental metaphysical axiom, in other words, some deeply held belief, is being challenged.

Mainstream Beliefs

Tim’s practical, low-budget travel advice struck a nerve with some folks. And my sense is that these are not oddball folks – rather they are probably fairly typical, fairly mainstream in their beliefs and attitudes.

I suggest this because one of the fundamental axioms held in our dominant Western “civilized” culture has to do with the importance of “getting somewhere in life.” From a very young age, we’re urged to achieve this or that, “become responsible,” and to make something of ourselves.

But aren’t I already something?

Of course, that isn’t what’s intended by the phrase – we’re meant to make something important of ourselves. And in this case, “important” means to embody success, as understood in the conventional way.

Stealing an illustration from Alan Watts, we ask: What’s the outcome of success in business as we know it? More business!

More business means more investment, more production, more stuff, more expansion, more proliferation of mostly material ticky-tacky, and to go along with all this, more bulldozing over ecosystems to make it all possible.

Now, granted, all this business – this busy-ness – has produced some technological marvels and various benefits to our lives and to society. But if one is to take a reasonably objective view, one has to ask the question, “At what cost?”

The Price Of Busy-ness

For all our technology and busy-ness, we’ve got nuclear weapons, climate change, deforestation, a precipitous decline in biodiversity rivaled only by the extinction event that did away with the dinosaurs, GMOs, And an environment full of toxic chemicals.

We’ve got Reality TV, high-density Confined Animal Feeding Operations and the largest disparity in wealth between the rich and the poor in human history.

To top it off, we’ve got an insane economic system that itself survives by accelerating the rate of all of these forms of destruction, desecration and depravity.

Even so, a belief held very deeply by most folks is that we are now better off than ever before in human history. But considering the above, I’m not sure about this.

Responsibility in our society means getting somewhere in life. It means making something of yourself. Yet as a vagabond traveler, there is only one requirement. To relinquish any notion of, or attachment to, getting somewhere in life or of making something of oneself…other than what one already is.

Being a successful vagabond traveler requires one to understand that the fundamental metaphysical axiom of our “civilized” culture is an illusion and is absurd.

A vagabond traveler realizes that naught but frustration, anxiety and suffering can come from blindly applying oneself to the futile task of endless consumption.

Examining Success

To illustrate this emptiness, here’s a short animation charting the conventional course of success.

To ask this question another way:

At what point when you have amassed X amount of personal fortune, accumulated Y amount of material possessions, and achieved Z status as ‘an upstanding member of society’ do you shout “Enough!” and commence living a life of contentment?

Looking around our society, it seems that hardly anyone has reached this point.

This is the defining characteristic of the conventional mind in our society – never satisfied in the present, never content with what is, always grasping for something more.

And we’re certainly inundated with enough marketing and advertising and PR to encourage this mindset.

The Awakened Vagabond

Photo by Julien Bastide

In a sense, the vagabond traveler is a kind of avatar for our society.

She is one who has seen the inherent emptiness behind the conventional understanding of success, who has realized the futility of living a life in unending pursuit of an illusory future happiness.

The vagabond traveler embodies the realization that there is no place other than here, and there is no time other than now. So if one is going to enjoy one’s life, it has to be done in the here-and-now.

If one is incapable of enjoying life in the present then one is incapable of enjoyment, period, because the present is the only time there is and “future enjoyment” does not exist.

In the Tao Te Ching (as translated by Stephen Mitchell), the word “content” appears 11 times. Here are some examples showing what Lao-Tzu was trying to tell us:

Chapter 44:

“Fame or integrity: which is more important? / Money or happiness: which is more valuable? / Success or failure: which is more destructive?

If you look to others for fulfillment / you will never truly be fulfilled.

If your happiness depends on money / you will never be happy with yourself.

Be content with what you have / rejoice in the way things are.

When you realize there is nothing lacking / the whole world belongs to you.”

A Higher Responsibility

The vagabond traveler represents a higher kind of responsibility – one who is more in touch with reality and the true nature of the Universe; although the typical mind will always label her as “out-of-touch,” “impractical,” and a “denier of reality.”

This mis-labeling and the anger that comes with it – the anger that was showing up in several of the reactions to Tim’s post on low-budget vagabond travel – arise because the deepest Self, beneath all those layers of conventional Mind, resonates with the truth exposed and illustrated by the liberated vagabond, the free-spirited wandering ascetic.

For one strongly identified with the egoic mind and thus caught up in conventional notions of success, that resonance is frightening.

This deepest Self, this universal thing that the Hindus call Atman, has hidden itself inside each of us, playing this colossal game of hide-and-seek.

This hallucination that we are “isolated centers of sensation locked up in a bag of skin” (what is indicated in Western psychological parlance by the term “ego”) – hides our true nature from ourselves.

The Universal Self

Tim’s essay on traveling for free struck such a nerve with folks because he wasn’t addressing individual egos in terms that are comfortable, but rather speaking directly to the Universal Self hidden within all of us in terms intended to draw it out and expose the ongoing illusion of our conventional lives.

This Universal Self knows full well the illusory nature of success in the conventional, egoic sense, and moves naturally to embrace the Tao of Vagabond Travel that Tim illustrates in his piece.

A strong negative emotional reaction to this Tao of Travel is simply indicative of folks’ identification with the ego. And when the ego is threatened, it gets defensive (we all know what that’s like). Who among us has never reacted angrily and all-out-of-proportion before?

Don’t be too hard on yourselves. Or each other. (Which is to say the same thing.)

As Lao-Tzu said:

I have just three things to teach:
simplicity, patience, compassion.
These three are your greatest treasures.
Simple in actions and in thoughts,
you return to the source of being.
Patient with both friends and enemies,
you accord with the way things are.
Compassionate toward yourself,
you reconcile all beings in the world.
(chapter 67)

Share your own thoughts on the Tao of Vagabond Travel in the comments!

Resist the urge.

When I came home after my first significant travels, my experience matched that worn-out definition that most call “re-entry culture shock.”

I felt disappointed at how uninterested my friends and family seemed towards my trip. I felt betrayed at how quickly my life-altering experience seemed to slip away.

Years later on another trip, I stepped off the plane in West Africa, a more hardened traveler.

Not this time, I thought confidently, as Africa instantly swallowed me up in its colour and life so indescribably different from that of the West. I would know how to keep myself together this time; to deal with the conflicted feelings of “re-entry” when the time came.

After four months in Benin and Ghana, hitting Cairo and Zürich on my way home weaned me away from the African reality back towards full Western industrial comforts. By the time I arrived in Montreal, not even the fluorescent supermarkets and sparkling bathrooms seemed unexpected.

It turned out that I had matured since that first trip back in the day – I felt a bit of disappointment, but mostly it just felt great to be home after a great trip.

I had learned much and was more motivated to change the world than ever.

The Urge To Spend

At home I had eagerly tossed my traveling clothes in the donation bag and set out to buy a few staple items like a sweater and jeans.

I didn’t feel the need for more – after all, I had always been the “thrift-store queen” among friends, making do with about a third of the wardrobe burdened on others.

What’s more, Africa had taught me a lot about needs. I felt happy to ditch my well-worn threads, and committed myself to becoming even more scrupulous about making the distinction between “necessary” and “unnecessary” clothing items.

What happened next changed the very understanding of myself.

I became excited about fashion; even more than my early high school years, which was the last time I felt aimlessly “shopping” was a viable past-time. After the jeans and sweater I realized I didn’t own dress pants, and that had to be remedied. I threw in some new summer t-shirts as well.

A friend opened a designer consignment store, and I quickly dropped $250 in a little over a week. Then it was a new $100 bikini, a belt, a summer dress, a designer jacket, all of it purchased new at, horror of horrors, the mall.

I was buying something almost every day. And the line between what I “needed” and didn’t was getting hazier.

The Trend Continues

Photo by fafoutis

What was worse than the gratuitous purchasing was the attitude I seemed to have adopted towards it: after a couple hours of working on a paper for school, at break time I’d excitedly log on to shoe website and browse for half an hour.

I would casually add things to my cart with little or no intention of buying them; just for the sake of imagining having those clogs or these sandals.

While shopping centers had saddened me immediately after my trip (I had vowed to never let myself slip into that consumer-crazed mindset), two weeks later, I barely resisted the urge to stop by the mall on my way home from the library.

I felt a lack of control over my behaviour and unease at how I didn’t recognize this person.

“Don’t worry about it,” my mother would say, “you’ve spent so many years shopping at Value Village, I think buying some new things evens it out, don’t you?”

Getting Rid Of Stuff

Coming home I knew it would not be possible to live with African simplicity in western society. I had not, however, expected to fall prey to the common western problem of wanting things just because they were there, or more importantly, buying things just because I could.

Having momentarily forgotten the swollen abundance of available products, and the general “if you’ve got the money, you deserve to buy it” western attitude, I was suddenly overcome by the distorted value our society places on having stuff.

For me “that stuff” just happened to be clothing. Friends and family congratulated me repeatedly on getting good deals or good purchases, but inside it all felt wrong.

Moreover, in Africa I had seen it’s possible to live with less than we could possibly imagine.

How could I walk into the store and buy a $130 dress, when that same amount of money would pay for six kids to go to school for a year in Benin? How could justify this, after seeing how my fellow human beings were living, in squalor or filth, and poverty?

How could I spend hours sifting through shoes online when I could use my time and brains to change things, to help those with less, to learn more about what forces had given me so much and they had so little?

Enough Is Enough

One night at dinner it almost became too much for me. I suddenly stopped short of putting a luscious spoonful of rosemary lentil soup with feta cheese in my red wine-stained mouth.

What were my friends in Benin eating for dinner tonight?

I have since learned that this is a struggle that many other travelers returning from developing countries have experienced. Once we know with how little it takes to live, how can we apply these lessons to our lives at home?

We must learn to consume in a way that does not perpetuate economic inequity, while acknowledging the fact that we live in the West and therefore must live within a reasonable western standard.

The challenge for all of us is to find a space where we can balance these two objectives. Where we can take realistic action towards change and let go of any unproductive guilt for having what we have.

The outcome of my somewhat unorthodox “re-entry shock” is sure: it caused me to think.

I re-evaluated my level of self-awareness and became committed to testing out ways to find that balance for myself. This is the real magic of travel: that it finds ways to keep teaching you long after you have come home.

It ensures that you’ll continue to question your ways and the ways of the world, and you’ll try to come to terms with your place in it, even if you never set foot on foreign soil again.

What do you think of the consumerist urge? Share your thoughts in the comments!

Photo by Mikael Damkier

After today, I can’t wait to sprint away from American culture.

I have decided to visit Europe in two weeks; I consider it a Culture Dash.

A Culture Dash is a rapid dash away from the culture of a country. This can be accomplished by traveling far away from the familiar.

You can go to Paris for a Dash, or you can go meet the new neighbors, or you can get away from it all inside your own brain.

This last type of purely mental Dash is a bit tricky, as it requires you to ignore important cultural icons such as Matt Lauer, Oprah, and the Bush family.

Why the urge to dash?

Recently, I spent 10 minutes watching The Today Show, and quickly found myself gasping for another culture like a fish out of water. In the span of ten minutes, the one person who spoke of the soul reaching its true potential and other issues I deem important was… Madonna.

She alone spoke sense.

The rest of the time, I was invited to play one of the seven video games on Today.com; note that more than 6 in 10 American women are calorie prisoners and secret eaters; wonder if text messaging is really the best way for families to stay in touch; and bid Matt farewell on his trip to discover other cultures while keeping up our manic schedule.

I was enticed to experience Chili’s Bottomless Express Lunch, including Big Mouth Bites and Kickin’ Chicken, with unlimited refills!

Leave It All Behind

After my Culture Dash, I will sit at a sidewalk café under a bright awning, amid red geraniums. I shall sip a Bordeaux and nibble at soft cheese and fresh baked bread.

I will not need to Create My Own Combo. Bye bye American fries, Bonjour pâtisseries of Paris.

I have many options this day in America. I could carry with me Neo-to-go, to protect my kids from evil germs-every cut, every time, everywhere!

After my Culture Dash to Paris, I can view motherhood from the perspective of the French, who regard “the insane sort of perfectionistic and hyper-controlling behaviors” that American mothers engage in today as Perfect Madness.

Today I could practice the codes used in texting, so I could be a hip parent. God forbid I assume LOL means “lots of love”.

I have a sneaking suspicion my kids would much prefer to have me in the dark about their codes, no matter how hip I wannna be. GTG on a Culturedash.

Right this very moment I can whiten my teeth “anywhere I want” with Listerine White Strips, puckering up my lips at the gooey texture of slimy bleach clinging to my teeth, gums, and even lips.

Sitting right here at my computer I could rapidly develop teeth a person can see right through when I smile in a patch of sunlight.

Gotta Keep Moving

Photo by Alanishere

I want to Dash from the American obsession with perfection. I can’t wait to stride down the Champs-Elysées feeling irresistibly beautiful despite my varicose veins, wrinkly neck (which I feel bad about thanks to Nora Ephron), not to mention my dull teeth.

I live in Seattle. In my neck of the woods, there are scattered showers with low elevation snow expected in the next few days. The temperature is in the 60s right now on the Champ de Mars, the grassy, cushiony paradise I’ll sit on (post-Dash) while gazing at the intricate Eiffel Tower. Beam me there, Scotty.

I could contemplate Oprah offering the House of the Future, with features that have been in European homes for decades, such as toilets that take forever to flush, causing Americans to impatiently tap their foot. Merde!

Air France, take me away. In less than a month I’ll be at the Louvre losing myself in contemplation of Michelangelo’s perfectly carved marble male sinews and muscles (and rounded buttocks).

Another way I could spend today in the US of A would be dissecting the Clinton-Obama tussle . Hillary’s been looking refreshed after grueling weeks on the campaign trail, seemingly recovered from running the late night talk show gauntlet.

On the other hand, Barack appears visibly relieved that his pastor has finally catered to the hoards of hyper-analytical American voters by clarifying that he’s a pastor and Obama is a politician.

A Breath Of Fresh Air

It’s enough to make me admire Nicolas Sarkozy, who refreshingly refuses to attend the Opening Ceremony of the Olympics in Beijing unless China opens a dialogue with the Dalai Lama.

I wish to Dash this minute.

It’s April in America, and who can resist chuckling at the Today Show’s celebration of Earth Day. Special guests are the wife and daughters of the president who declared,“We need an energy bill that encourages consumption”.

When I am in Paris, maybe I will catch a glimpse of Sarkozy’s new wife, Carla Bruni who once dated Mick, a claim to cool our own First Lady can only feverishly fantasize about (compare the finesse of Bush’s softshoe routine on the White House steps with the sexy Jagger-esque strut).

Today’s examples of American culture are all buzzing around my head like a frenzied tangle of angry wasps: calorie prisoners, Big Mouth Bites, LOL, slithery Listerine strips, The House of the Future, Hillarack ‘08. I want to flee-to Culturedash straight to Paree.

Will you join me? Share your thoughts in the comments!

Photo by xwhitelie

It’s been 4 years since I graduated from college.

My immigrant family had envisioned that I would now have an established career, a house and plan on settling down within the next few years.

Instead, I have spent my post-college years pursuing international travel, funded by short-term employment, while maintaining residence at chez les parents.

It’s hardly the life that I, much less my family, envisioned when I left home for college.

My parents, both UC Berkeley graduates in engineering who grew up in Hong Kong, had high hopes for me, their firstborn child, to follow in their footsteps.

In fact, it was assumed that I could accomplish much more because I grew up in middle-class America, as opposed to the tenements of Kowloon City, Hong Kong.

But while most of my relatives have made comfortable lives for themselves and their families despite their humble beginnings, I have yet to settle into a full-time job and have no concrete plans for the future – aside from more traveling.

A Lifelong Passion

I was groomed to be a global citizen from the time I was a child. I began to develop a keen ear for languages at family gatherings, where I was exposed to Cantonese, various regional Cantonese dialects, Mandarin and English.

My parents enrolled me in Chinese classes, though reading and writing the language was a challenge I never mastered. I also picked up Spanish on Sesame Street and in school.

I remember staring at the world map in our hallway, wondering if I would ever journey to those distant lands.

I heard about the exotic travels of friends and relatives, but was told that I could not pursue such adventures unless I had a well-paying job.

I was always aware that my parents’ childhood in Kowloon City, Hong Kong’s equivalent of Brooklyn, was one without the opportunities that my sister and I had. For them, a ferry ride across the harbor to Hong Kong Island was a big deal.

Even my older cousins consider foreign travel to be extravagant, something they could not have fathomed during their childhoods or as young adults. It wasn’t until after they finished college and worked for many years that they began to dream of exotic journeys.

International Awareness

I documented my grand plans for international travel in a Spanish essay in high school.

Photo by Kevin

It was wishful thinking at the time, but I knew that I wanted to fulfill those plans sooner rather than later. Other people may have been content staying at home and not traveling until they were in their 40s, but I could not fathom such a long wait.

For college, I wound up at Eleanor Roosevelt College of UC San Diego, which emphasized international awareness and strongly encouraged its students to study abroad. In the summer after my third year, I participated in an internship program in London.

Even before I returned to San Diego for my final year of college, all I could think about was going abroad again. What I valued most while in Europe was the close proximity to other countries, each with their own distinct languages, cultures and customs.

Growing up in the United States, I could travel across the continent without encountering vast differences as I would have in Europe or Asia.

It became increasingly apparent that the world was a fascinating place, and I wanted to acquaint myself with the myriad of cultures inhabiting the earth.

The Value of Travel

Travel teaches me many things I will never learn in a classroom. I am forced to tackle challenges such as adjusting to new languages and customs, orienting myself to new cities and transportation systems, and appreciating different cuisines.

I have also learned to make sense of the historical, political, and cultural complexities other countries. I do not want to possess an outdated or ignorant perspective on the world like many of my countrymen, and travel is the best way to prevent that from happening.

Though it sounds boastful, such experiences are an accomplishment unmatched by previous generations of my family.

Yes, I’ve been given lectures about how I need to get serious and forget about traveling. I should get a real job that pays well and provides benefits, they say, and think more about the future.

But the bottom line is that I am happiest while traveling, and my dream job is to be a travel writer, just as the dream job of many of my relatives was to become engineers.

A Generation Gap

Like many members of my generation, I am putting off the commitment to a regular job and taking the time to find my passion and enjoy life before I have to settle down.

I have also encountered individuals who are unhappy with their jobs and envy the freedom I have to escape a monotonous day-to-day routine and travel the world for extended periods of time.

My coworkers encourage my pursuits, knowing that there is much to be gained from these experiences. My parents, who initially found it difficult to accept my choice, now support me because I am doing what makes me happy.

In the end, life is about the choices we make.

Some people dream of owning a luxury car or the latest electronic gadgets. Others would rather save for a house and family.

I am choosing to take the time to learn about the many cultures and peoples inhabiting the earth, and am happy to put the rest of my life on hold to do so.

Have you also shunned the career in favour of travel? Share your experiences in the comments!

Illustration by Jacob Bielanski

Take a look at this website. The text, the picture above, the pictures below, the logo – all of them represent a separate request by your computer to a server hosted somewhere else on the planet.

With each request, a packet was generated that had to find a path through a myriad of trails. It is very likely that each one of these requests took a different path. And it will be a whole new set of paths and destinations when you click away from here.

In a way, technology embodies the spirit of adaptation so prevalent in travelers.

Throughout history, technology has found a home only when it can be taken for granted.

What seems like a simple act today (reading the seemingly benign musings of a short, unshaven, American writer) represents the culmination of over 60 years of communications theory, practice, business, revision and exploitation.

Millions of minds, with millions of hours of training devoting millions of hours of sweat, have developed a multi-homed, self-rectifying infrastructure that can link editors, photographers, writers, and readers who may as well all be 10,000 miles from each other.

We can book our plane, hotel, car, hostel, hotel, itinerary, museum, tour guide, bus and restaurant reservation before we even take those first tentative steps out of our comfort zone.

A plethora of sites offering pictures, reviews and personal testimonies ensure that we know exactly what’s going to happen long before we even attempt to do it.

Yet, in the cataclysmic-yet-searchable flood of information that has become known as “the Internet” do we lose the sense of adventure that comes from discovering a destination?

Any Trip, At A Price

I have a confession to make: I’ve watched “Legends of the Fall” approximately five times.

I’m always enamored with Brad Pitt’s character, Tristan, and his mysterious travels. Riding off into the sunset on a horse, he somehow finds himself on a ship at sea. The scenes flash between those anxiously awaiting his return, and his exploits as a hunter/fisherman in exotic island nations.

Googling “Pacific rim sailing boar hunting” shows me that I can have Tristan’s adventures, sans Frontier-style heartbreak, for only $3,170.

Wherever there is a desire to “do something”, there is a business waiting to capitalize on that desire. (And they always seem to have a website).

Reservations At An Instant

A chance encounter between an IBM salesman and the (then) CEO of American Airlines C. R. Smith in 1953 led to a technological framework that would become the core of all airline reservations.

The Semi-Automatic Business Research Environment (SABRE) made it easier for Airlines to manage reservations internally. It used punch cards.

In 1976, a similar system developed by United Airlines was first offered directly to travel agents, in order to extend the grasp of efficient airline reservations. It wasn’t until the mid-nineties that reservations would leave the ticketing agents and fall into the hands of the common Joe.

Thank you, “Internet.”

Why does this break down an economic barrier? Prior to Computerized Reservation Systems (CRS), Airline reservations were taken care of using a series of cards and 8 people.

The “shopping” process of locating and securing a reservation on a flight took-at best-90 minutes. Even after the advent of reservation systems, a traveler wasn’t home free. If you weren’t at the mercy of an apathetic Airline employee, you were still leaving your itinerary in the hands of a travel agent’s competency.

One was either ridiculously dedicated to travel or saved a ridiculous amount of money to cover the travel agent’s surcharge.

When I was a small lad, a ticket from Houston to Chicago cost almost $300. In 2005 my wife put together a flight to Germany. By sliding dates around and checking with multiple travel sites, we came to an excellent itinerary. Chicago to Dublin, Dublin to Frankfurt. It was less than $400 a person.

The economic impact of traveling to Texas a few years ago is almost equivalent to that of crossing the Atlantic today.

Been There, Done That

What I hate most about planning any trip is the ultimate deflation that occurs upon ‘Googling’.

Having pointed at a map and said “That’s where we’re going!” I get a rush, a feeling like I’ll be stepping into uncharted territory – until I type it into Google and discover that tours run there daily, between 10 and 5 in the summer.

Apparently a lot of people–and developers–have been to Ocracoke since Blackbeard’s death in 1718.

This doesn’t mean that people didn’t go to these places prior to the Internet age, but it does make the process of reading about it much simpler.

While thousands of travelogues published daily help 9-to-5 prisoners transcend their bounds and become mentally transported to exotic locales, they also serve to destroy the nomad’s private fantasy of trailblazing.

That’s Going On The Blog

The watering of the over-consumed, all-inclusive travel liquor doesn’t end once the flight takes off.

In the bygone era of a pre-imperialist United States (Canada and the War of 1812 doesn’t count, sorry), American author Mark Twain documented a journey on the first Trans-Atlantic pleasure cruise in the book “The Innocents Abroad“.

The book was based on letters dispatched to his sponsors. Hand-carved lithographs (I made some in high school Art…they’re not easy) provided a crude, grainy representations of the sites that Twain–in his infinite literary abilities–could only begin to describe.

It took two years from the time the letters were written, to the book’s publication in 1869.

Perhaps it’s unfair to place a Travelpod user’s recollection of a dingy cafe in Mexico City side-by-side to a classic work of American non-fiction. Yet the reality remains that a drunken night in Sydney can be recollected, edited, and posted to a “universal” audience faster than it takes to fully recover from the hangover.

A well-meaning writer’s analysis of a culture can be misguided at best, or downright inaccurate at worst. We’ve all felt the sting of misinformation that that breeds rapidly in a democratic pool of blogs.

Information must now be tagged, indexed and amalgamated by sites such as the venerable Brave New Traveler if it is to hold any merit. The market value of travel information has dropped significantly.

A Long Story Short

The first noble truth on Buddha’s path to enlightenment is that suffering is a part of life.

While technology hastens the dispersal of information, it does not improve its ability to be processed by the end user. Travel has entirely to do with what we bring with us; our wits, our hopes, our preconceptions and–most importantly–our failings.

Here is an example of the marvelous power of modern techno-travel:

I booked an itinerary from Barcelona, Spain to Krakow, Poland while camping along the Mediterranean Sea. The reservation was made for me vicariously via an email to a relative.

I also arranged for a money transfer to greet me upon arrival. All I had to do was make it to the Barcelona-Girona Airport at the right time and money would be waiting for me in Krakow.

Barcelona has two airports. There will be no prize for guessing which one we were at, penniless, an hour before takeoff.

The experience following is a long story, but involved cheating a cab with a bad credit card (and failing), almost having luggage confiscated by an angry non-English speaking cab driver, a mad race through Barcelona, some well deserved beers at a nearby bar, and a night sleeping outside of the train station.

It changed me forever. It was the time of my life. Funny enough, the actual experience had little to do with the technology that set the wheels in motion.

Capturing The Dimensions

My technology peers and I used to giggle at people’s claims that computers “did things” by themselves. Technology only does what we request of it.

A web server cannot coerce you into reconsidering your destination. A MySQL database cannot catalog how we feel during a given experience nor capture the extent to which it changes our life. Even YouTube can’t capture the smell of a crowded market if its viewer lacks the frame of reference.

As a result, technology is a reflection of only what we’ve put into it. It’s an organic system, so complex-and yet so robust-that it has begun to evolve alongside us.

Don’t believe me? Since you’re sitting at a computer, try this (Windows users only, sorry)

• 1. Go to Start->run
• 2. Type “cmd” (no quotes) in the box that appears
• 3. Press enter
• 4. Type “tracert www.google.com” (no quotes) into the box that appears
• 5. Press “enter”
• 6. Watch as the request tells you the path it took to get to Google
• 7. Wait a minute, then repeat

Think of each of those entries as a “turn” in a list of directions. Watch as the request to Google finds a new path, determined by speed, reliability and congestion.

Though it is not impossible for two packets to take the same path, they have been designed to react in the same way as humans. Just as in the real world, the two journeys to the same destination don’t necessarily take the same route.

The line between what the Internet can and cannot do for us can seem fuzzy. There are many skeptics in the realm of technology-I should know, I’m one of them.

It’s hard to remember that in this forest of bits and electrons, two roads can still diverge. The road less traveled is still there, reminding us that the universe continues to operate with or without our consent.

Do we allow the Internet to take us down that road that many have traveled or do we, like the data, follow the best opportunities?

Technology won’t cheapen our travel experience. Only we will.

What do you think about the Internet’s impact on travel? Share your thoughts in the comments!

Jacob Bielanski is a Technical College dropout from the boonies who drinks too much. His one-eyed cat “Spudnick”, travel-sized dog “Norm” and sexy photographer wife do most of the work. You can find his ramblings on his blog and his “real” writing at any place that ponies up the dough.

-Tim Patterson

I always wanted to travel.

I wanted to know other places and escape the routine of everyday life. For many years I dreamed of making a trip like this, slow and independent, without a car or motorcycle.

One day a childhood friend suggested we travel by bicycle to Ushuaia, at the southern end of South America. At the beginning I thought such a trip would be very difficult, maybe impossible, but the reality of this journey is much more difficult than I ever imagined.

If my brother were to make a similar trip, this is what I would tell him:

Accept Uncertainty

Forget your ideas and plans. Total control is impossible. You must mentally prepare for unexpected situations. Keep your ultimate goal in mind, but do not become overly attached to specific outcomes along the way.

Control What You Can

There are some things you can control, such as your mindset, the mechanical condition of your bicycle and your choice of equipment. You must plan well, cultivate self-control and take great care in your preparations.

Be Patient

Patience is very important. Sometimes you will break down, no one will pick you up and you will become frustrated. You must accept this, and stay calm in difficult situations. This is especially important when traveling with a partner, because uncontrolled frustration can quickly lead to conflict.

The Story Of Two Lemons

One day, two lemons were crossing a street. A truck came along and crushed one of the lemons. The other lemon screamed in anguish – NOOOOOO!!! A passer-by came along and asked what was wrong. “I got lemon juice in my eyes,” the lemon howled.

Choose your travel partners wisely. Look for people who are not self-centered and who demonstrate empathy. Know their motivations, and be sure they are physically and mentally strong.

Study The Terrain

You must not travel blindly. Carry a good map, and study it everyday. Think hard about how much food and water you will need in order to traverse a section of road. Determine what shelter will be available along the way. The price of a mistake – like running out of water – is one that you cannot afford.

Let Off Steam

Even if you are on a strict budget, eating only rice and bananas, you must go out and have a party once in a while. You must drink, laugh and forget about your troubles for a time. Doing this will keep you sane. This is very important.

Keep Moving

You will make friends on your journey. Sometimes you will relate to people strongly, but you must realize that you are traveling. You are in your place, they are in theirs, and always you must move on.

Many times I’ve thought I could stay in Argentina, and that’s a very crazy idea.

Time moves slowly when you travel. I feel much older now. It seems like years have already passed. Sometimes, when I wake from sleep, I forget that I am traveling. I think I am only a few kilometers from home. It’s a beautiful feeling.

But then I remember where I am – 9,000 kilometers from Colombia – and I know I must prepare myself for another day, and the long road ahead.

Alvaro Galvis dreams of arriving home and eating a big meal of his mother’s lentil stew, with rice, some meat and a large glass of fruit juice.

Traveling permanently is a privilege – and akin to the holy grail for some people.

Yet permanent travel can be draining, both physically and mentally, involving constant moving from place to place and regularly experiencing new and challenging situations. This means living out of your comfort zone for much of your journey.

If you’re also trying to run a business at the same time, it’s likely that you might suffer from burnout.

This happened to me in Buenos Aires – a mere 3 months into our permanent trip. I felt exhausted, drained, emotional, guilty, greedy and spoilt; there I was living ‘the dream’ and yet I felt miserable.

I hadn’t allowed for the fact that selling our apartment, putting all our worldly possessions into storage, leaving for foreign climes where we didn’t even speak the language, all at the same time as trying to run our business, would naturally take its toll. It’s no wonder I couldn’t handle it all.

Here are tips I recommend for dealing with burnout on the road:

1. Acknowledge and Go With It

Burnout is often inevitable if you’ve been on the road for a while or you’ve experienced a particularly challenging period. Accepting it, acknowledging it and dealing with it is far healthier in the long term than pushing on through and forcing yourself to keep going. Ignoring it won’t make the stress go away.

2. Look after your physical health

It’s one of the most important things you can do while traveling.

As an ex-health coach, I’m very aware of the long term effects that chronic stress can have on your body. While many travelers would not consider traveling a ’stress’ – it is, if your definition of stress is an activity that takes your body out of an optimal state of functioning.

This includes dodgy food, parasites/bugs, too much alcohol, frequently changing time zones, poor sleep, constant adrenalin rushes…in the short to medium term, it’s not always serious but in the long term it can end your travel plans faster than you can say “brave new traveler.”

3. Take some time out

If you’ve been on the go, determined to make the most of your travel experience and see, hear and taste as much as you can, then take a few days to slow down. Do nothing but chill and give yourself some time out to recharge the batteries (like doing beach yoga).

You could even take a “holiday.” Leaving the laptops in temporary storage and taking yourself off to stay somewhere else, even for a weekend might seem an odd thing to do when most people think you’re on a permanent holiday, but it can work wonders for your energy levels, motivation and your relationship!

4. Get your head straight

Make a list of all the wonderful things you’ve done on your travels: include the things you’ve learned about the world, yourself and other people. Reflect on the journey you’ve taken and acknowledge just how far you’ve come (physically, mentally, spirtually…or in whatever way is applicable to you).

Focusing on the positives at a time when you feel negative is a great way to change your state of mind and regain your zest for traveling. On a practical note, you can also apply these learnings to your upcoming plans and make any adjustments required.

5. Reconnect with friends and family

New faces, new friends in every country. Having to be smile and be friendly while meeting new people can all become a bit exhausting.

As great as new meetings are, sometimes I wish I could have a juicy gossip with an old friend who knows me well (warts and all), with whom I can have a moan without fearing judgment.

With the advent of Skype/VOIP services, it is now far easier and cheaper to catch up with friends and family while you’re on the road. I recently had a great 2 hour chat sitting in a coffee shop in Dubai with my best girlfriend who lives in Sydney. Total cost = under $2.

If you’re dealing with burnout on the road…remember this: It’s not a race to see who can do the most, travel the most, experience the most – it’s simply your chance to experience more of the world you live in, in your own unique way. Take your time and enjoy it!

What tips do you have for dealing with burnout on the road? Please share in the comments!

Lea Woodward is a Business & Technology Coach and the creator of LIPliving.com. Lea also writes regularly on her personal blog Success Rocks!

Call it a delayed reaction, but after months and months of planning my trip, the fear and trepidation of traipsing across a continent all by myself occurred only at the last minute.

Although this solo European adventure was not my first excursion outside my home country, it was the first time I would be traveling alone.

Why did I decide to go solo? During my previous travels, there was always a part of me that longed to separate from the group. I wanted to take in every sight, sound and smell like a greedy child. With a travel buddy, the journey felt too safe. I felt as if I had cheated and taken the sterile route.

The goal for this trip was to escape the four corners of my cubicle, the frightening comfortability of a daily routine, and my approaching quarter-life crisis. I thought of the comments and protests made by my family and friends, who told me that my plans were impossible and unsafe, and that I was “only a girl.”

Determined to prove them wrong, I reminded myself why I decided to travel solo:

1. Enjoy Complete Freedom

Traveling alone allows you to be the “Captain Of Your Own Destiny.” It is an experience of ultimate freedom. You can choose to satisfy your every desire or indulgence.

You can taste-test an array of cuisines from the local market without someone crinkling their nose in disgust; and alternatively you won’t have anyone forcing you to eat anything you would rather not try.

The time you lay your head on the pillow or decide to rise is your prerogative. You can wander the streets of Madrid at 3 a.m. without a travel partner pouting in annoyance. There is no need to sacrifice any plan for the sake of compromise.

2. Challenge Yourself

With only a backpack for company, traveling alone is one of the greatest yet most rewarding challenges you can choose to take on. It forces you to be confident in your choices. Every decision is based upon your own sense of self-belief.

There is no one to seek counsel or rely upon, and so trusting your own instincts becomes a necessary survival skill. If the first step of travel is to take the plunge into the unknown, then walking the road alone requires leaping headfirst off an 80-foot cliff.

It is precisely these challenges that make you stronger. You are responsible to no one but yourself. Thus, every wrong turn or misstep is yours – and yours alone.

3. Attain Deeper Insights

Risk is always a factor when traveling. However, oftentimes there is greater danger to a group of unprepared travelers than a single prepared one.

Loneliness is inevitable. Even so, I have found that the quiet solitude of solo travel has led to my deepest insights about my own nature and the realities of others. The sensation of being connected in a world so vast and varied leaves you humbled and filled with gratitude.

The solo traveler can revel in the the long-lost freedom of becoming ‘one’ with the landscape. There is no need to fill the empty gaps of time with desperate, painful dialogue; rather you can retreat into the deepest recesses of your mind and imagination.

Everything taste better, shines brighter, and seeps deeper into your bones when all you have are your thoughts and a notebook. You become a sponge, absorbing every detail and sensation of a new location. The intensity of your aloneness magnifies this privilege.

4. Leave Home (And Travel Companions) Behind

Taking the road with a companion (or a hoard of them) often means that you’re packing remnants of home along with your guidebook.

As a solitary traveler, observation became my main means of entertainment. I observed people traveling as a couple or in a group who, rather than noticing the windmills of Don Quixote’s Spain, or the different characters that boarded the train in Malaysia, all too often were lost in conversation about the latest gossip from back home.

Thus, they often failed to see the flashing landscape of a country and the habits that made its people unique.

Another tendency that I noticed by observing packs and pairs of backpackers was that they seemed to be surrounded by an “invisible shield” – a force field that appeared impenetrable and intimidating to fellow travelers and locals. It was as though they had a sign stating Do Not Approach in bold, neon lights.

5. Meet The Locals

As a lone traveler, you become more curious and active in your new environment.

I remember wandering down the beach in Asilah, Morocco, encountering a kif-smoking goat-herder. Despite the language barrier, we struck up a friendship. He took hold of my guidebook and started pointing out places on the map and gave me their names in Arabic, while I stated the county names in English.

Though most of our conversation was dominated by clumsy hand movements and mutual laughter, it was an interaction that I will never forget.

It was also an encounter that I highly doubt I would have experienced if I had been with a partner or a collection of friends.

6. See With Clear Eyes

Whether or not you travel with others can also affect the “eyes” with which you view the journey. The desire to please and be accepted, most especially by those whom we consider our peers, is an innate and almost inescapable social need.

Thus, a traveler may often see the world through his partner’s eyes and censor her opinions for the sake of “peace” or “agreement.”

The travel writer Alain de Botton elucidates this point in his 2002 book “The Art of Travel,” stating:

It seemed an advantage to be traveling alone. Our responses to the world are crucially molded by the company we keep, for we temper our curiosity to fit in with the expectations of others. They may have particular visions of who we are and hence may subtly prevent certain sides of us from emerging… Being closely observed by a companion can also inhibit our observation of others; then, too, we may become caught up in adjusting ourselves to the companions questions and remarks, or feel the need to make ourselves seem more normal than is good for our curiosity.

Traveling with others may not only hinder us from being truly ourselves, but also thwart the spiritual growth that comes with a journey. The partner or group serves the function of preserving the identity we constructed for ourselves before the trip.

Shedding the shell that one has built over time becomes an unlikely possibility when fellow travelers are there to constantly remind you of who you were – and who they think you still should be.

The Road Back…or Forward

We return home from travel with a transformed view of the world. People often say that ‘you are not the same person you were in your twenties when you are in your thirties,’ and travel accelerates this metamorphosis. Every trip enriches you in ways that can never be recreated or reproduced.

A traveler who sets out alone is like a bird pushed out of the nest and obliged to take flight on its own. Travel solo, spread your wings, and soar above and beyond your greatest hopes and dreams.

It all began with a volcanic eruption. Caught in a storm of ashen rain and almost walking into the ocean, Michaela Lola realized at the tender age of eight that life was meant to be an adventure. Her escapades include riding the midnight train to Marrakesh, partying with the katoys in Thailand and sampling insects in China.

I accompanied my boyfriend to the game’s midnight release and, comparing his passion for video games with my passion for travel, I considered the following question:

“Why would you spend $1000 dollars to sit on a plane for 12 hours when you can spend $50 for a video game and be transported to another world in an instant?”

I’m speaking of a digital world.

I’m sitting on my boyfriend’s leather couch with a wireless controller in hand and, with a few pushes of a button as he logs us into X Box Live, I am in that new world. 50,000 other players are with us in this virtual reality – from all corners of the globe.

I hold a gun in my right hand as I walk down a stone corridor in some kind of forested temple. This is my virtual reality but one that I completely buy into-albeit temporarily.

Guns and enemies aside, I feel like I know this place. I have been here before: Angkor’s Ta Prom temple, where the Tomb Raider movie (inspired by another video game) was filmed. This virtual reality reminds me of Ta Prom so much it’s a little frightening.

Maybe world travel and virtual reality video games are not so dissimilar. There are several games-old and new-that ask us to be informed about the world.

Nothing Like The Real Thing?

I can’t help but be reminded of Crazy Taxi (Sega) when walking the streets of any major city in Southeast Asia. SimCity allows users to recreate ancient civilizations. Prince of Persia (X Box) and Discovering Babylon (California’s Learning Federation) posed as entertaining and educational tools to teach us about the world and historical moments in time.

An article in the Washington Post reported that shoot-‘em-up video games prepared real soldiers for the war in Iraq.

Other forms of virtual media like the Travel Channel and GlobeTrekker TV (PBS) show viewers what it is like to be somewhere else when they are really in the comfort of their own home.

There is no easy answer as to whether virtual media cures or causes depression. There is evidence to support both claims.

Why spend the time and money to travel the world? For some, the choice between real and virtual travel can be difficult. For me, however, the choice is very simple.

Virtual reality is ultimately a poor substitution for the real thing. Nothing can truly compare to the actual feel of a place.

To witness the sunset from atop Angkor Wat is an experience that can’t be compared to seeing it on a TV screen. To struggle for words in a foreign language in a place not your own is a real-life challenge.

Carpe Diem!

In a video game, you have an infinite number of chances to get it right-you can die a thousand times over and not be dead. Right here, right now, we each have just one chance to live well.

On the afternoon soon after the release of Halo 3, my boyfriend and I had planned on going surfing. Instead, we sat on the couch for three hours “killing” his friend in California through X Box Live.

“One more game,” he said, picking up the controller again. I gave him a cold, hard stare and he understood the problem. We had gotten lost in a virtual reality.

We lost track of time and, in this world-the real one, time is the most valuable thing we have.

Brenda Yun is a freelance writer based in Honolulu, Hawaii. When she’s not busy spoiling her pug Iris, she’s busy missing Iris because she’s traveling the globe. Read about her latest whereabouts at http://surfeatsleep.blogspot.com.

You’re not a typical “traveler.”

You’re not on vacation, you don’t really have a “home” and you’re certainly not running a business in the usual manner of other business owners.

With this in mind, here are some choice bits of advice I wish I’d known before we took the plunge.

Plan for downtimes.

Focusing on running and growing your own business is hard enough with the best of circumstances.

When you work as you travel there are times when it’s almost impossible – like when you’ve just arrived in a new city, realize you don’t speak any of the language, and your first priority is to find somewhere to live for the next few months.

From a financial perspective, be prepared for times when you won’t feel like working or simply can’t. Make sure your business can cope.

Being able to put your business on autopilot is a great way to sustain yourself during the rough times, so make sure to build it into your business strategy from the start.

Don’t over-commit yourself.

For our first few locations, we booked flights and accommodations well in advance. We also prepaid (yes, our credit cards and bank balances took a massive hit!)

It helped us feel a bit more ’secure’ about the fact that we no longer had a home. After all, we were traveling indefinitely and it gave us that bit of structure we needed.

The downside was that we had to fork out money to change flights and accommodation plans when we gained more confidence and realized that we are indeed a bit more adventurous.

Now we rarely book things for more than a month at a time so that we can be flexible about where we go and what we do next.

Assess what’s really important to you.

As former city lovers, we persisted with our choices of staying in major cities (Panama, Buenos Aires, Toronto) when we first left home.

It soon became obvious that while each had its charms, we were far away from the experiences we’d set out to find.

If we had taken more time to assess what we enjoyed, what we disliked, what inspired us and what turned us off about each destination, before booking the next one, we’d have saved ourselves the money, stress and hassle of visiting places that were utterly wrong for us.

Having said that, they’ve all been part of the journey and part of our learning experience, so we have absolutely no regrets.

Pack right, pack light.

As usual, the same old advice of “pack light” applies to packing when you run your business on the move.

You need to make sure you take everything you need to keep your business running and earn an income while you travel.

This includes:

• backup disks of essential software
• an external hard drive of your programs and files should something happen to your laptop
• global travel adaptors
• screen wipes
• digital camera
• and more

I like to have a couple of notebooks to scribble in, a pyramid-shaped rose quartz crystal, a very small portable office kit which includes a mini stapler, some sticky notes, a mini hole punch and a mini highlighter, all in a handy little case.

As a LIP (Location Independent Professional), traveling the world while you run your business is a huge learning experience.

Every single place you go expands your horizons from a business perspective and teaches you something you never knew.

Learn as you go, keep tweaking your business approach and you won’t go wrong.

Lea Woodward is a Business & Technology Coach and the creator of LIPliving.com. Lea also writes regularly on her personal blog Success Rocks!

We struck out to find our ‘ideal world’.

What we’ve learned along the way is that we’re not ready to settle down yet. In fact, our ‘ideal world’ lies in moving from place to place, going wherever we fancy next and continue to earn a living as we go.

As long as we have an internet connection, of course.

If you daydream of becoming a Location Independent Professional (LIP), there are a few questions to consider before making the leap.

1. Can you still earn a living if you just pack up and wander off?

This is the crucial one. If the answer is “no”, then it’s something you need to work on unless you’re happy to with few options other than teaching English, picking grapes or working in a bar.

A LIP life is different – it’s not the usual “traveller” lifestyle but a permanent way of life for people who run professional businesses that can be done from anywhere.

Consider learning professions like graphic design, illustration, coaching, web design or any other service that can be provided ‘virtually’.

2. What ties do you have at ‘home’?

Think dependent family (elderly parents, young children or needy friends), property, location dependent businesses and possessions. While these are not deal breakers, you will need to think long and hard about what to do with each one.

Do you sell or let your property? Do you store or sell your possessions? Can your family manage without you? Do you want them to? Can you sell your existing business or turn it into a location independent one?

Any ties that you do have will need to be properly dealt with before you head out on the road.

3. Where do you want to go?

While this is usually the exciting bit, you need to ensure your chosen locations will enable you to continue to run your business and support yourself.

Trips to more exotic locations can appear appealing in the early stages, but the lack of internet access or infrastructure may make it a bigger challenge previously considered.

The last thing you want to do, having made the move to go mobile is run out of income, destroy your earning potential and have to go back home.

4. What are you looking for?

We left originally because we knew we didn’t want to settle our ‘home’ in the UK. We’re now on the lookout for the few places in the world that feel like home – the places you instantly feel at ease, that energize you and that excite you.

Aimless traveling can be great but if you’re running a business at the same time, then you may find that too much uncertainty and flux will have a negative effect in the long term.

5) Are you mentally ready to live out of a suitcase…permanently?

Hard core travelers are no doubt screaming “YEEEES!” but seriously, living life as a LIP means having no real “home” to go back to.

It means rationalizing your possessions so they don’t drag you down or cost you the earth to store and living a totally nomadic life.

From owning a 1,500sq feet loft apartment with expensive, designer furniture, all our worldly possessions now fit into a 45sq feet storage room and a 90 litre suitcase.

It’s a lovely feeling of freedom but hoarders beware!

The life of a location independent professional can be an enviable one but it is not a decision to be taken lightly.

If you do all your homework, take care of your ‘affairs’ before you leave, then the world is literally your oyster…go and enjoy it!

Lea Woodward is a Business & Technology Coach and the creator of LIPliving.com. Lea also writes regularly on her personal blog Success Rocks!

After following your guide into an old sunken ship, suddenly, you lose sight of him. You are lost, running out of air. You taste fear in the back of your throat.

You reflect on your life, the accomplishments, regrets, past memories, things you had always wanted to do yet never got around to doing.

As the air drains out of your tank, you become disoriented. You lose consciousness, all becomes black.

What would you do?

If you were Phil Koeghan, host of The Amazing Race, after regaining consciousness back on the surface, you would immediately write a list for life: things to accomplish before you die, and proceed to complete every single one of them.

I had read this story with awe a few weeks before I met Mr. Koeghan in person.

It returned to me again when thinking about a realization I had this week in my One Week Job project: we sometimes need a certain disruption in our lives to act as a catalyst for change.

Shifting Your Worldview

I see this certain disruption as anything that causes us to re-evaluate our current situation.

Not all disruptions are or need to be as dramatic as the one Mr. Keoghan experienced, yet I feel such events serve as a wake up call that force us to re-evaluate our lives.

They cause us to ask: why am I doing what I am doing? Characterized by a new way of looking at the world, we see the familiar with fresh eyes and spot new opportunity.

For example, a disruption could happen during a vacation. Everything is new, we are outside of our normal environment, and view our surroundings with a sense of wonderment and curiousity.

When home again – we are refreshed, almost as if we are a tourist in our own city. We begin to see our current situation from an altered perspective.

This new perspective leads us to question the familiar and why things are a certain way.

The Constant Flux

With One Week Job, I am in a constant state of disruption. I am never in a job long enough to attain a comfortable routine and am continually entering new environments.

As a result, I have noticed that I am vastly more creative, open to new experiences, willing to step outside my comfort zone, and prepared to take more risks than when I’m in my comfortable home environment.

Since graduating, I have done quite a bit of traveling. I remember how when it was time to return home, I always felt somewhat reluctant.

Being in my comfortable home environment, I know how easy it can be to fall into a complacent routine where everything feels static and I simply go through the motions, falling victim to preconceptions of myself and others.

I now understand and recognize the value in exposing myself to new situations and foreign environments – to seek those situations that force me to learn about myself and evaluate what it is that I want to do.

To shake it up every now and then, and bring a little disruption into the equation.

Finding Inspiration

Although it was not a disruption of choice that Phil Keoghan experienced at the age of 19, it changed his life forever.

I was inspired by his story – and so when I heard he was coming to my hometown of Vancouver, I realized I had to meet him.

It was week ten of One Week Job and he was coming to sign autographs for his new book. I had my reservations, but I felt as if I needed to go.

I stood nervously in line waiting for my turn, the crowd anxiously jostling to get a glimpse. Then suddenly, we were face to face.

I told him how his story had inspired me, and explained what I was doing with One Week Job. He was impressed with the idea, looked me straight in the eyes and said with genuine sincerity, “do something with it.”

This interaction served as an important disruption for me: it inspired me to continue.

I don’t know where it will all lead, what will happen next, or where my path will take me, but I am enjoying journey.

Sean Aiken is traveling around the world working 52 jobs in 52 weeks, searching for his passion. He share his story with a road journal and weekly video episodes of his web tv show. Visit his site One Week Job and join the journey.

It all started with books – I enjoy reading books, researching and studying. So I had kept all my books from high school, because I never knew when I would need them again.

Then I moved on to college and began saving all the papers I wrote for classes, because I might want to refer back to them at some point. I was getting prepared for the future.

Then there were the recipes I had cut out from magazines, newspapers and printed from the internet, plus all the wonderful cookbooks I had collected. I liked cooking and wanted to have a family some day, so I figured recipes would likely come in handy.

I also held onto clothes that I didn’t like, because they looked like something I could wear for a job someday. What job I didn’t know, but I was being prepared and practical

During college I moved frequently between my home state and the college town where I lived during the school year. I felt weighted down by all of this stuff I had accumulated, but I couldn’t get rid of my collection.

I was worried I would regret it someday when I needed that extra pair of shoes or the paper I wrote on child development sophomore year. Then, everything changed.

An Important Lesson

In junior year I went to the Navajo Reservation and spent six months living in the middle of the desert.

I brought with me only a sleeping bag and a backpack with two pairs of pants, several shirts, a week’s worth of underwear and socks, one pair of shoes, one wool sweater and a coat. I lived with a family who had very little in terms of material goods and I learned not to waste anything.

It was the most important lesson of my life.

I learned to prioritize. I learned that material goods do not bring happiness and I realized I did not need much to be happy. I brought those lessons back home with me and I began to de-clutter my life.

I got rid of things that I didn’t like – clothes, shoes, books, knick-knacks, pillows, blankets, sheets, whatever. I knew other people who needed these things more than I did. So why not give these things to them?

I looked at every possession I had with a critical eye. If I hesitated even for a second, it went to charity.

I began to feel lighter and freer. This opened up more options to me. If I wanted to move somewhere else, or had an opportunity to travel, it would be easy for me. I was no longer weighed down by all this stuff.

It became an addiction – I wanted to get rid of more and more. I weeded out the things I did like. I kept only truly sentimental pieces or things I could not imagine living without.

My goal was to be able to fit all of my belongings (minus furniture) into my car. I wanted to be mobile, flexible and adaptive. I would no longer be held down by my possessions. I wanted to free up my life and my money.

A Pound Of Cure?

I moved on to the next step: prevention. I adopted a buying policy – I pledged not to buy anything unless it was absolutely necessary. Nothing was bought on credit anymore. I only bought things I could pay on cash or debit.

This worked fine until I needed to have some repairs on my car. I charged it to my credit card and I felt trapped again, suffocating. So I thought about it for a long time.

My fiancée and I were planning a big move – from Vermont to Florida. He had a car and we didn’t need two as we were both planning to do freelance work, mostly from home.

So I sold my car, got rid of that big debt. He sold his house, another burden gone from our shoulders. Then we began the process of cleaning out his house, applying all my clutter policies to his belongings as well.

We donated to charity three quarters of our belongings. Many of the things we gave away we would not need in a warmer climate – heavy bedspreads, trunks of blankets, winter boots, gortex coats, gloves, hats and tools, lawnmowers, snow shovels and fertilizer spreaders.

Not only were we planning to downsize our possessions, we were downsizing our lives.

When you get rid of things you don’t need, it opens the door for the universe to give you what you really desire. We decided we needed to de-clutter our lives so we could make a new start.

But we wanted to take it even further – to lessen our dependence on the matrix of external control through money and debt. We want to get off the grid. We want control over our own lives.

Finding Your Freedom

Without debt and huge investments holding you down, your life is fluid. The less money you owe others, the more you can travel, help other people, move to another country, retire early, and more.

With this understanding, we made a joint decision to stop working for other people in favor of our own projects and dreams. We knew we would have to make sacrifices initially, but if we didn’t do something drastic…we would stay trapped.

We sat down, made a budget and figured out how long it would take to pay off our debt. And then how much we would need per month to live the kind of life we want – nothing extravagant, but comfortable.

In order to reach that goal we can’t spend money on things that are not part of this new life.

We would use our money towards getting rid of our debts and then for things we really want from life – things like traveling, organic healthier foods, quality clothes and equipment, and more time to helping others.

Now we are conscious of all we buy. We splurge on the occasional treat, but we are aware of it, plan for it and work around it. (Everyone needs a break once in a while).

This all started from my desire to release that heavy feeling I had when I got back from the Navajo Reservation, my desire to live a freer, less complicated life. That inner knowledge that I just didn’t need all of this stuff I was carrying around.

If you want to de-clutter you life, start by prioritizing your life. What do you want from life? Where do you see yourself in 10 years?

Once you start you’ll realize this journey is a work in progress. You learn there is much more to clear away than you first thought. If you have clear goals in mind, it can make the work much easier, but realize there is no way around it.

I still have a long way to go. But at least each step feels lighter.

Jenn DiPiazza is a freelance writer living in Florida. She has a degree in Anthropology and Native American studies. You can check out her latest reviews, recipes and travel destinations on her food and travel blog at TravelCloseUp.

When I began to share my world adventures with friends and cubicle dwelling ex-coworkers, I either received blank stares of bewilderment or cold, hard looks of envy.

Like most things, a life of travel has been romanticized into something that unwitting people dream about whenever the going gets rough at home.

The word “backpacking” seems to conjure up images of sexy, adventurous people spending hours doing nothing in sunny and exotic places as they clink .25 cent beers together.

I was no different. I clocked hundreds of hours surfing travel blogs and sites to help keep myself sane while listening to people drone on about “cost initiatives” during corporate conference calls.

Friends still chuckle when I tell them that traveling is not all it is cracked up to be.

A Short History Of Travel

Our ancestors knew the real deal. The word “travel” comes from the old French word “travail” which means to work.

That word, is thought to have come from “tripullare”, which is the three sectioned whip that Roman soldiers used to strongly encourage productivity out of the laborers in their expanding empire. They associated the act of moving from one place to another with hellish torture.

Ask any backpacker what they thought of country X, and they will usually answer “amazing”. What they will not tell you is that behind every story of cultural survival and every picture of themselves with the locals, there is another story of darker roots.

There is an ominous background noise of tumultuous and painful truths that build the foundation for every happy travel story shared with ex-coworkers and family.

I have decided that it is my responsibility to shed some light on the myths of backpacking travel and hit other potential budget travelers on the head with the mallet of truth.

Don’t show your boss some universal sign language just yet, the cubicle might not be so bad after all!

Here were the five most frequent responses I receive when I ask people why they want to travel.

1. You can learn exciting new cultures

The universal cop-out for my question. I can confirm that after spending an entire afternoon on the phone with a support person from Mumbai just to recover my long lost E-ticket, that new cultures CAN be pretty exciting.

Especially when you sit on hold for 45 minutes and get to listen to dueling sitars while furiously pumping your complimentary stress ball.

2. It’s cheap

No it isn’t. Sure, food and rooms in developing countries don’t cost much, but let’s not forget the addictive nature of travel. More than once I have scoured my house looking for items to sell to fund a ticket somewhere.

I have even been eyeballing my truck in the driveway. Forget everyday things like movies and eating out, you will be converting everything that your date orders into Baht, Kip, or Riels and thinking, “Wow – that’s a lot of noodles I could have saved!”

3. Try exotic foods

Exotic foods come with exotic bacterias which, in turn, produce exotic intestinal experiences while you stand in a Shaolin monk kung fu stance over a squat toilet for hours.

4. You can see new things

Exactly. Like mosquitoes with disease filled abdomens that are so aggressive they fly in formations and use covert actions to find the holes in your mosquito net.

Or better yet, foot-long centipedes having an orgy under your mattress while you try to sleep. I even had the privilege of witnessing a standoff between my moving train and a water buffalo that chose to stand on the tracks. The train won.

I have to admit, I would have probably never been treated to that sight in the city.

5. It makes you a better person

This one is true. After crossing the street in Cairo a couple of times, I no longer fear death, and feel that I could make deadly bullets fall harmlessly to the ground like Neo.

Also, I no longer paint a tapestry of obscenities when the train I am traveling on breaks down. At least it was climate controlled, didn’t smell like 10,000 unwashed feet, and I was never once asked to ride on top due to overbooking.

The bottom line is that no matter how much negativity you hear from people still sitting in cubicles, most backpackers have been in situations when they would have closed their eyes, tapped their flip-flops together three times, and chanted “there’s no place like the cubicle…there’s no place like the cubicle….”

Now time for my disclaimer:

In case your brain has been numbed by too many Thai buckets or the infection oozing from your native bamboo tattoos, this article was only a fabrication.

The author firmly believes you should travel (but make sure you ask him before a long trip, not after).

This article was originally published on Start Backpacking. Reprinted with permission.

Gregory Rodgers is a cubicle dweller turned vagabonding travel writer and is a self-proclaimed travel addict. He is editor of Start Backpacking and has been spotted on rare occasion in his hometown of Lexington, Kentucky – USA.

There is no feeling that quite describes being stuck in a corporate office, worse yet, in a cubicle, when the sun is burning through a cloudless blue sky.

For 7 years, I miraculously managed not to throw a phone, flog away an intruder, or hang myself in the corner of my office with Ethernet cabling. Like everyone else, I knew there was more to life than waking up at the last minute and jockeying through traffic to make a bunch of old men richer.

However, a strange and powerful force kept me glued to my seat, sorting through corporate memos, reminding me to file my TPS reports properly.

Bills. Lots of them. Always creeping into my mailbox when I least expected it. There were the usual suspects like electric, water, and a mortgage on a place so over-sized for me that I hadn’t even opened some of the rooms yet.

Then there were the bothersome credit card statements that included all my internet purchases. Among the damages, there were expenses for high tech toys I thought would make work more bearable.

My cell phone could play MP3s, games, movies, and open random gateways to alternate dimensions with the tap of a stylus. Also included were new clothes that were sure to impress my dates and restaurant tabs in overpriced places that make you feel important.

A Revelation

Being a well trained IT geek, I decided to do an analysis of where my money was going and constructed a simple spreadsheet where I recorded purchases for 1 month. Unfortunately, I have the attention span of a bored cat, so a couple of months passed before I found the spreadsheet again hiding in a dusty corner of my hard drive.

“Oh yeah…I remember this,” I said and opened it with a snappy mouse click. I nearly swallowed my tongue at the results inside.

Things needed for daily life, like groceries and Redbull, made up the lowest expenses. Not just a few, but a majority of my purchases were unnecessary and compulsive moves to keep me distracted. I was putting at least one kid through college with my cable bill alone – all so that I could catch hot dog eating contests on ESPN 13 at 4:00 in the morning.

I went into work slightly more enlightened than I was the day before, but I wanted to be sure. Was I just being too negative about my job? Was I beginning some sort of just-turned-30 midlife/depression/crisis? Was I about to run out and purchase a red convertible and pierce my tongue in a desperate cry for attention from women almost half my age?

As an experiment, I decided to count the number of smiles I received around the office and cafeteria for one day. Other than one nearly mad and shaking engineer that was watching the coffee machine fill his 1 liter mug for the third time, the only smiling faces I saw on this beautiful June afternoon were the ones walking at a quickstep toward the door at closing time.

Things were quickly beginning to make sense.

Planning The Escape

Like a twitchy convict that just discovered a tunnel under his bunk, I kept my findings to myself and starting building a plan. I made a conscious effort to slow the bleeding of money from my account on useless toys. When I was in private, I started researching exotic destinations on the internet.

Soon, I was quickly consumed by my escape plans. For 7 years I had been a rat in a never ending race, and had finally discovered that someone had left the door open on my cage. Quickly, my happiness and my bank account began to build — and on one bold evening I set a date.

My date was Jan 1, 2006. What better way to start a new year than to start a new life altogether?

In the 6 months between my enlightenment and the start of my new less paying yet more satisfying career as a backpacker, I managed to save money and sell my house myself. I picked up a copy of Rolf Pott’s book “Vagabonding” and realized that I was not alone.

Many have made this walk before me. During my meetings, I had visions of living on an organic farm, picking fruit in the sunshine, and meeting hippy girls to go surfing with. Was I heading for sure financial doom? The thought did cross my mind, especially when I started trickling news of my plan to friends and family.

Vagabonding and even gap years are not really popular concepts in America, so my announcements were usually responded to with less-than-positive enthusiasm. I did not care. I was determined not to spend the best years of my life (while I was healthy) saving money to retire when I was too old to enjoy it.

In December, I gave myself the ultimate Christmas gift, I bought a one way ticket to Bangkok and turned in my letter of resignation.

The Journey Begins

When the wheels of my plane left the ground and pointed its nose East toward the Pacific, I breathed an enormous sigh of relief. Luckily, the 23 hour flight provided lots of time for decompression and contemplation, which I took full advantage of.

I still had no idea where I was going or what I was getting myself into, but it had to be more interesting than learning new acronyms at a company whose name was an acronym.

As I sit here and write this, exactly one year has passed since I left the US for the first time. I grin when I read back through my early journal entries and blush slightly — thinking of what an inexperienced newbie I was.

I still do not consider myself a hardened traveler, but I do want to share my beginnings with others and inspire them to chew their way out of the maze as well. Anyone can do this. I never met a single person out of hundreds of backpackers that had regretted their decision to give up the cheese and escape the rat race.

I would not trade my adventures, experiences, and new friends for all the promotions, cable channels, or wacky tie days in the world.

This article was original published on Start Backpacking. Reprinted with permission.

Gregory Rodgers is a cubicle dweller turned vagabonding travel writer and is a self-proclaimed travel addict. He is editor of StartBackpacking.com and has been spotted on rare occasion in his hometown of Lexington, Kentucky – USA.

You know who you are, sitting there in your cubicle with one eye on the “to do” pile and the other on Kayak.com. The desk is littered with trinkets from exotic locations and your computer wallpaper is a photo of your favorite beach or monument.

When a co-worker returns from vacation, you’re the first to start the Q&A session. Sound familiar? You may be suffering from Travel Separation Anxiety.

Being chained to a desk is tough when you want to trade the suit for a suitcase. It seems everyone is out traversing the globe while you languish in corporate prison.

But whether it’s financial or personal commitments that keep you grounded, your inner adventurer doesn’t have to become a casualty of the cube. Keep the dream alive by planning your E.S.C.A.P.E.

E-stimate

Map out your ultimate game plan. Do you want a killer week-long vacation or a year-long nomadic journey? Consider buying a notebook or journal to jot down your ultimate travel fantasy to map out the steps toward reality. Estimate your budget, timeline, re-entry needs, flights and lodging. This will put all that Kayak.com practice to good use!

S-ave

With a budget in place, it’s time to watch the savings grow. Deposit your cash into a safe place like a savings account or flexible CD with a high APR (annual percentage rate). Check out www.lendingtree.com for help finding the best one for you. If you are super organized, break down how much you need to save each month to reach your goal. (If you’re an ultra-Type A, put it in an Excel spreadsheet).

C-ut Corners

Finding money to feed your hungry savings account can be tricky. Take a look at where you spend your money. Can you trade that daily latte for a regular coffee? You just saved yourself $2/day, $14/week and $60/month (also known as $730/year and $7300/decade, cha-ching)!

Try cutting your cable habit for a few months (or forever!) Call up your bank and see if they offer a ‘Keep the Change Program’, like Bank of America, which deposits your leftover cents into savings. Speaking of change, save it!

Market your skills and pick up a part time or freelance gig to put a few spare hours a week to use. Also, check out some websites like www.bootsnall.com for discussion boards with creative tips on fundraising.

A-ppease The Travel Gods

All travel planning and no fun make Jack (and you) a dull boy. Exercise your travel skills by noticing adventure in your own backyard.

Wander around town, visit a park, or head off on a daytrip to somewhere new. Notice the smells, sights, sounds and recognize the personality of the place. Grab your camera and carry a journal to record your experiences, just as you would if you were a thousand miles away.

P-repare

Time passes quickly! Don’t let your travel plans falter in the pit of poor planning. Make a list of things that require preparation.

Check your destination for visa and immunization requirements. If you have bills that require payment while you’re gone, set up a checking account or direct bill pay service to make sure you don’t fall behind (and make sure there’s enough money in there).

Spare your loved ones unnessecary worry – give them your contact info and a flexible itinerary so they can track you down. And finally, keep a credit card or extra cash handy to use in case of emergencies.

E-liminate Doubt

Chances are good that someone (or everyone!) will spout off reasons why you should put the travel plans on hold. But the only person you need to impress is yourself. Trust your desires and abilities to see your travel dreams come true.

So, cube-dwellers, there it is, your very own escape plan from the desk to the destination. You can thank me by sending a postcard.

For those looking for a job, a career, a mere direction in their lives, travel can seem like a meaningless distraction-a money-sucking way to delay those awful first few years in the working world.

When I got out of university, I was obsessed with finding the ultimate job in my career of choice. I paced the living room floor of my parent’s house nightly, raving like a maniac about interviews and resumes. They absorbed my frustrations and then meekly suggested I travel instead.

“Travel?!” I asked, wild-eyed. “Travel? Then, I’d come home and do what? Huh? What then?”

Within a month or two, I’d landed an internship, and then another. After that, I got a real job. After five months there, I hopped to
what I considered the ideal position.

Life Catches Up With You

I’ve now been working solidly for more than a year, but because of my position hopping, I won’t be able to cash in any vacation days for a good six months.

My mind now wanders back to what everyone said about taking my spare time and filling it with a trip somewhere, and let me tell you, it isn’t fun confronting the harsh reality of your own decisions.

One very uncomfortable and unfortunate thought sits at the back of my mind and resurfaces on every bad work day:

You should have gone traveling when you had the chance.

It’s true the opportunity will always be there, but not without potential for ruin by sticky grown-up details such as job contracts,
family responsibilities and financial stability.

As time passes, age creeps up upon you, and before you know it, your ability to sleep in a hostel, wear the same underwear for three days and haul a backpack through six countries has evaporated.

And when you’re stuck in one place, your travel fantasies become all the more graphic, making it hard to get excited about a day of fact-checking and proofreading.

Solace In A Daydream

I find myself browsing last minute flights to Cuba and signing up for newsletters about backpacking trips through Vietnam. With jealousy, I pour over the travel albums and videos of friends and colleagues, wishing I was next to them on that Thai elephant.

But dwelling on your stationary status will only encourage you to hate where you live. Travel doesn’t have to take you across the globe or even across the country.

Even the smallest efforts to distance yourself from what you call home can reduce the desire to quit your job, sell your belongings, close your eyes, stick your finger on a map and go.

As a journalist, I travel on a daily basis. Twenty kilometres to the recycling plant. Six kilometres to City Hall. Sixty kilometres out on the water with the Coast Guard.

I’m trying to expand my coverage, but my bosses will only let me go so far.

Meanwhile, I’ll keep planning that trip to India, and the one to South Africa after that. I’ll also invest in a blow-up doll to place at my workstation while I’m gone.

Allison Cross is a journalist who lives in Nanaimo, BC. While she enjoys undertaking communication of all kinds, she has a focused interest in print media that addresses culture trends, travel and youth rights. Visit her personal blog.

Have you ever had to make this choice yet? How did you decide? And do you ever regret your choice?

Not enough money. Not enough time. I have to work on my career. I’ll get to it when I’m older.

The truth is that the external realities are rarely the reason we choose to stay in a job, relationship, or 30 year mortgage. It’s our internal inability to make that leap of faith; to deal with the uncertainy that comes along with a life on the move, with little more than the clothes on your back and your items in your bag.

Here are 12 websites filled with 12 people who decided to make that leap.

1. Down The Road

www.downtheroad.org

Quote: “We are Tim and Cindie Travis, an ordinary American couple who decided to live out our dreams. We saved our money, quit our jobs, sold our possessions, and set off to travel around the world by bicycle. We left our home in Arizona, USA on March 31, 2002 and have been on the road ever since. Our plan is to continue to bicycle tour and travel for the next several years.”

2. Gone Walkabout

www.gonewalkabout.com

Quote: “The term Walkabout comes from the Australian Aboriginal. The idea is that a person can get so caught up in one’s work, obligations and duties that the truly important parts of one’s self become lost. From there it is a downward spiral as one gets farther and farther from the true self. A crisis situation usually develops that awakens the wayward to the absent true self.

It is at this time that one must go on walkabout. All possessions are left behind (except for essential items) and one starts walking.

Metaphorically speaking, the journey goes on until you meet yourself. Once you find yourself, you sit down and have a long talk about what one has learned, felt and done in each other’s absence. One talks until there is nothing left to say — the truly important things cannot be said.

If one is lucky, after everything has been said and unsaid, one looks up and sees only one person instead of the previous two.”

3. Modern Gonzo

www.moderngonzo.com

Quote: “My tiny Modern Gonzo has now become a horde of inspiration from my journeys to over 50 countries (and counting) on 6 continents. I built and maintain the site myself, for I’m certain that within its pages lies a spark that can help others fire up their dreams too. Things appear to happen for a reason after all. You hear about these dream stories, and then one day, you wake up and find yourself living one. ”

4. Expedition 360

www.expedition360.com

Quote: “I had absolutely no interest in the watery sections of such a proposal, having always failed to be convinced by recreational mariners of the supposed fun to be derived from being cold, wet and seasick all at the same time and for extended periods of time.

But the overland sections sounded intriguing: my head was filled with wildly romantic images of riding bicycles across the steppes of central Asia, trekking through the frozen wilderness of the Himalayas, staring into the flames of a roaring campfire after a hard day hacking our way through the Amazon jungle.

And the 2 years the expedition was projected to take traveling through predominantly warmer climes sounded like a welcome escape from that cold, wet island known to us natives as England.”

5. Let Me Stay For A Day

www.letmestayforaday.com

Quote: “My name is Ramon Stoppelenburg . When I was 24 I left my house in The Netherlands, on May 1, 2001, with a backpack filled with clothing, a digital camera, a laptop, and a mobile phone. From May 2001 to July 2003 I traveled the world without any money, visiting people who invited me over through this website. I crossed distance with my thumb or with help of sponsors and supporters. In return for all support I wrote about this all in my daily reports on this website.”

6. Mark Moxon

www.moxon.net

Quote: “In early 1995 I visited a friend who had just bought a new house. I remember it quite clearly: at the top of the stairs he had a perfectly formed bathroom in which I had what can only be described as a religious experience. The bathroom was one hundred per cent peach. It had a peach-coloured bath, a peach toilet, peach tiles on the wall and a peach basin on which sat a bar of peach-scented soap.

Hanging on the racks were fluffy peach hand towels that neatly matched the peach carpet below, and sitting on the windowsill was a bowl full of peach-coloured potpourri. I realised then and there that if I didn’t do something pretty radical, I was going to end up with a peach bathroom all of my own, and the thought filled me with dread.”

7. Where The Hell Is Matt?

www.wherethehellismatt.com

Quote: “Matt is a 29-year-old deadbeat from Connecticut who used to think that all he ever wanted to do in life was make and play videogames. He achieved this goal pretty early and enjoyed it for a while, but eventually realized there might be other stuff he was missing out on. In February of 2003, he quit his job in Brisbane, Australia and used the money he’d saved to wander around the planet until it ran out.

A few months into his trip, a travel buddy gave Matt the idea of dancing everywhere he went and recording it on his camera. This turned out to be a very good idea. Now Matt is quasi-famous as “That guy who dances on the internet. No, not that guy. The other one. No, not him either. I’ll send you the link. It’s funny.”

8. Hitch50

www.hitch50.com

Quote: “Why are we doing this? We both just graduated college and didn’t exactly pursue the typical business jobs our classmates were chasing, so we needed something to do. Something fun to do, which involved traveling and meeting people and sharing experiences with them. So… we decided to hitchhike to every state capital, in 50 days or less. This gives us the opportunity to meet fun people and see fun places all over the USA.

As much as we’re into seeing all the great places we’ll visit, we’re even more excited to meet the people that will take us to those places. Hitch50 isn’t really a project about places; it’s about people. Are you one of those people?”

9. Vagabonding

www.vagabonding.com

Quote: “I view travel as life’s great educator. There’s no better way to learn about people and nature and your place in the world.

I got hooked on travel during my final semester in college, when I studied literature and theater in London. After school ended, I stayed in Europe for a year, working at pubs, record stores, and Italian restaurants to fund further travel. I managed to get as far south as Morocco and as far east as Turkey.

Those dramatic, vivid destinations fueled my appetite for more travel, more experiences, further-flung places. The more you travel, the more you realize how little you’ve seen.

I came home from Europe penniless and began to write for a newspaper in my hometown. These vagabonding dreams were born at that newspaper. I figured I’d travel around the world and write a column for the paper as I went. Of course, travel is hard to fund on a bottom-rung journalist’s salary.

I took a job in Chicago a little later, writing copy for web sites. I’d never seen a web page, had never sent an email before that job. It doesn’t seem like a day’s gone past since I haven’t. I bought the vagabonding.com URL while at that job. That was 1998.”

10. The Travel Junkie

www.thetraveljunkie.ca

Quote: “My year around-the-world taught me a lot of things: never turn down an invitation, bargain hard and always carry a roll of toilet paper. Most of all, travelling made me globally aware.

I learned about abducted child soldiers in Northern Uganda; the loss of indigenous culture in Tanzania; the construction of the “separation wall,” also dubbed the “apartheid wall,” across the disputed Israeli-Palestinian land. I learned that the Turkish government has been accused of denying the Armenian genocide; that despite the AIDS epidemic in Africa, humanitarian aid money often doesn’t reach the people it is supposed to help. I learned about the persecution of the Falun Gong and saw the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide.

I may be a McGill University graduate but travel has been the ultimate education. My trip has given me a deeper understanding of what’s going on in the world and where I fit within it.”

11. The Argonauts

www.theargonauts.com

Quote: “Ask yourself this question, “If you could do anything — anything in the world — what would you do?” You can guess my answer. I feel that life is a gift and that I have only one chance to live. In the words of Henry David Thoreau, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

And, to be honest, I had more than my fair share of angst and riding around the world was the only option I could see to overcome my malaise and become (or is that prove) to the world who I thought I “should” be.”

12. Goliath Expedition

goliath.mail2web.com

Quote: “Many years ago, when based with the Army in Dover, I would stand on the white cliffs looking out across the English Channel at the distant shores of France in wonder.

I swear, some days I could almost see a ragged figure looking back at me, a spectre from my future. I could not help but wonder what he had seen along the way and who he was now. It was difficult to imagine what he’d given to get to that point. What would he be thinking, looking back across the Channel at that young paratrooper on the other side?

Well now my life is all about closing that loop. It’s about standing in France looking across the Channel at the White Cliffs of Dover. Maybe I’ll be able to spot that young man so eager to prove himself, prove that he could hold his own and go the distance. Prove it to himself more than anyone else…

One day I will stand on the coast of France, closing the loop and you will be there with me.”

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Are they any websites I missed that have inspired you to go traveling? Please share them in the comments.