Boy praying outside the destroyed palace, Haiti / Photo: United Nations

While most Americans strongly sympathized with the victims of the Haitian earthquake, and were quick to fundraise for humanitarian aid, a Christian evangelist by the name of Pat Robertson offered a different response. He inferred in the media that it was God’s retribution for a pact the Haitians made with the Devil in the nineteenth century.

Although this view might seem incredulous to most rational people, the use of natural disasters to convert or radicalize victims is not a new phenomenon.

‘Fire and brimstone’ was preached by Puritans in Britain before they carried it across the Atlantic to the New World.

In 2003, Islamic fundamentalist Abu Hamsa Al-Masri asserted that the Space Shuttle Columbia explosion was an act of God against the trinity of evil (Christians, Jews and Hindus) opposed to Islam. And purporting to speak for Judaism, the Rabbinical Alliance of America recently blamed natural disasters on the use of gays in the military.

Ironically, CNN reported that after the devastating earthquake Haiti, Christian belief strengthened or spread among the survivors.

Haitian service / Photo: United Nations

The strengthening of faith in the face of awful loss was no surprise to anyone who viewed the recent documentary Tsunami: Where Was God? Former Dominican friar Mark Dowd investigated how belief in a benevolent God can be reconciled with natural disaster as he visited areas hit by the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004.

While Dowd expected that religious faith would have diminished in the areas, instead he found that even people who had lost all their family and belongings in the tsunami had more faith after the disaster. Here’s how each religion responded:

The Muslim Response in Banda Aceh

Banda Aceh bore the brunt of the 2004 tsunami in Indonesia. Fadil, who had lost his whole family to the tsunami, told Dowd that his faith was stronger now. Yusuf Al-Qardhawy, of the Islamic Defence Front, said it had been a warning from God, as there had been too much carefree living, (such as the wearing of loose clothing). Prof. Yusny Saby, an expert on Islamic Philosophy, said you cannot know God’s reasoning: it is a test, and if you pass you get closer to God.

Dowd did not think there was much difference between Saby and Al-Qardhawy: they both believe people have to earn their virtues rather than being born with them. Life is a test.

The Hindu Response in Tamil Nadu

15,000 people died off the coast of Tamil Nadu. Dowd interviewed Prof. G Bhaskaran, who told him that destruction was one of five qualities held by the Shiva deity, while its son, Ganesha, builds life. This meant that Hindus were spiritually prepared for the devastating tsunami. Ramayee, a local woman, believed the child she lost to the wave would be reborn, since all children are one anyway. She saw her son in other children she sees and believes God shows them to her for a reason.

On the question of karma, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, a member of the Art of Living Foundation, said there was positive and negative karma in everyone. Karma is not the same as fate, and you have freewill to turn your life around. He said that humanity cannot understand everything as we have limited intellect. When Dowd said he didn’t like the idea of children dying so others can show compassion, Shankar correlated the Islamic viewpoint when he said that “there can be no compassion without suffering.”

The Buddhist Response on the Thai Coast

Dowd travelled to Thailand next. 5000 people died when the tsunami crashed into the west coast. Dowd explained that Buddhism is derived from Hinduism, so karma was once again invoked. A Buddhist nun called Dhammananda explained that karma does not mean that a person who dies is reborn as that same person.

Rather, it is like a candle being lit by a flame from another candle: the original flame does not pass to the new candle; a new flame is lit. She also thought that fixed identity or the self is just a social construct or illusion; we are all part of an aggregate energy, and only those who discipline mind and spirit escape the cycle. When Dowd asked her “is there a God?”, she said it is not her main concern; she makes the best of her life whatever its reason.

The Christian Contribution from Kansas to the Vatican

While on the Thai coast, Dowd also arranged for Bjorn Muller, a Swede who lost family members to the tsunami in Thailand, to phone the Kansas Baptist Church, as they had blamed the disaster on ‘gay Swedes’. They defended and reiterated their position, citing a biblical passage, but when challenged to identify it they angrily hung up the phone.

Dowd travelled to the Vatican Observatory next for a more rational Christian perspective. Father Chris Corbally, Vice Director of the Vatican Observatory, asserted that God was still the best explanation for the universe, and that “creation reflects the creator.” When asked why the planet was not created perfectly, Prof. Nancey Murphy attested that if the Earth was smooth all over it would be marshland and only good for basic life.

The Atheist Perspective

Dowd spoke to Richard Dawkins for an atheist perspective. While Dawkins acknowledged there may be a creator, who set up the physics needed for evolution, he said that it’s ridiculous to claim that it intervenes to cause individual disasters such as the tsunami.

Conclusion

Haitian girl / Photo: United Nations

Dowd concluded the film by outlining the strand of opinion running through all the religions he’d investigated: that there was a need for suffering and tests so that people could show compassion and grow closer to God. This is similar pattern repeated after the Haiti earthquake.

If God is thought to have created our world then believers don’t seem to feel as if they can blame it for their losses. Rather, that same God offers hope for those who died and the survivors. As the alternative is a belief in nothing, and total loss, it is not a surprising position. This is similar to the ancient worship of pagan deities, where anything from bad harvests to natural disasters were blamed on angry gods.

If the Haiti earthquake had hit the USA, Pat Robertson would likely have adapted his blame to those Americans with irreligious behaviour he does not agree with. Abu Hamsa Al-Masri would also have seen it as the intervention of his God, and probably blamed it on American foreign policy.

The truth is that disasters can be harnessed for hope or blame. The interpretation depends largely on the individual, and if they’re free to make their own decision, or told by various religious leaders how they should feel about ‘God’s judgment’.

What do you think about disasters and faith? Share your thoughts in the comments!

Photo: Francesco Rachello

Imagine a hostel in which revelers tip-toe silently through the dorms, cups of tea appear beside your bed while you’re in the shower, and your bill has already been paid when you go to check out.

A figment of my imagination? Not necessarily.

Inspired by Danny Wallace’s book Random Acts of Kindness: 365 Ways to Make the World a Nicer Place, here are 20 ways to spread the love this February:

1. Do the washing-up in the hostel, even when it’s not yours.

Photo: mynameisharsha

2. Write your top tips for nearby places and post them on hostel notice boards.

3. When you’re hosteling with friends, invite solo travelers out for dinner and drinks.

4. Travel with a plug-in mosquito repellent and keep the dorm mossie-free. Raid makes a good one.

5. Offer to guard other people’s stuff at bus stations while they buy their tickets.

6. Buy a CD from a local busker, copy it onto your iTunes and leave the CD in the hostel.

7. Pack some biscuits and a magazine from home and give them to a compatriot who has been traveling for ages.

8. When you’re heading out for a heavy night, leave your toothbrush and whatever else you need out on your dorm bed so you don’t have to rifle through you backpack at four in the morning.

9. Offer to make the hostel reception staff a cuppa joe.

10. Call or Skype your friends on their birthdays. It’ll mean all the more that you’ve remembered to call from the Amazon.

11. If you’re next to a nervous flier, keep them talking during take off and landing to take their minds off the flight. Hold their hand if need be.

12. Rinse the hostel shower after use and clean the plughole.

13. Use cloth bags for your stuff rather than plastic ones. Your dorm mates will love you for not rustling in the morning.

14. Pack a few pairs of extra ear plugs and offer them to people trying to sleep in noisy dorms.

Photo: m-louis

15. When you get on a local bus, pay for the person behind you too.

16. Buy a bag of dry dog food and feed the strays as you wander around a new city.

17. When you leave a country, give your left-over currency to travelers heading in the other direction.

18. Support new businesses that aren’t in the guidebooks.

19. After you take photos of other travelers, email them your pics. If you take a great shot of a local, consider printing off the photo and taking them a copy.

20. Call your mum and tell her where you are.

Got one of your own? Add your random acts below.

All photos courtesy Christina Rivera.

At age 22, I was doing a lot of “grown-up” things; putting in 60-hour work weeks, making timely payments on my student loans, securing health insurance benefits, upholding loyal and loving relationships with friends, family and a partner, managing a stock portfolio where I was investing substantial savings, filing my taxes, early, without the help of parents or accountants, and managing the overall and on-time upkeep of a healthy household, body and life.

But there were more question marks than periods in my life; not multiple-choice questions, but opened-ended statements reduced to the common denominator of:

I am…

It was a relentless self-inquiry; the blank drawing longer and the question only spinning more furiously with each book I pulled off the metaphysics shelf.

Finally I put the books down. Put everything down. Realizing that I would find none of my answers in their conclusions and that these were chapters only I could write.

My parents cringed as I put their interpretation of “growing up” on hold: deferring my student loans, quitting my job, losing my insurances, saying open-ended goodbyes to all those with whom I’d formed attachments, and liquefying all my assets and savings into one chunk of an easy-access cash account.

What was left fit easily into my backpack.

The Journey Begins

Photo by Seeking Sol.

As the reader might, I too thought I knew where this was going: six months, a year at the most, following my every whim and fancy, at the end of which I would have found the answer to my question.

Yes.

Yes, there were many wooden docks off of lakes and leading into oceans, on which I sat beneath midnight skies and pondered a philosophy that paralleled the blanket of night to my surface experiences, through which only my most minuscule of life understandings had yet penetrated the depths of my unknowns as stars.

No.

No, a year of pondering the darkness was not enough. It’s taken me many years to come to peace with, and self respect, the fact that I am a slow learner. And I may have left my grown-up tasks behind, but I did not leave my sense of responsibility for being thorough.

Had I been quicker, perhaps my quest could have been confined to a year or less, but as that was not my nature, my earthbound pilgrimage found itself extending, re-tracing, doubling over, making multiple evolutions around the earth, past a cumulative total of seven years.

Destinations

Community Connection to India

Tentative Conclusions

I did, however, find and scribble into pages upon pages of my journal, possible conclusions to that open-ended sentence with which I had set forth.

In Latin America – in Guatemala, Spain, Colombia, Honduras, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Brazil and Peru – countries and cultures I admire for their heart and heat for passions of the human spirit and connection to pacha mama, or Mother Earth, I felt confidence and pride in my completion of that sentence with:

Seeker. Woman. Dancer. American. Student. Scuba diver. Volunteer. Lover. Writer. Human. Spiritualist. Photographer. Pilgrim. Dreamer. Foreigner. Alchemist. Explorer. Magician.

Yet then I carried that same journal to South Asia – to India, Nepal, Tibet and India (again and again) – countries and cultures whose affinity for cyclical existence and non-attachment, to a merely earthly existence brought enormous peace in their rational arguments for something I had always intuitively suspected, but could not lineate into logical sense.

And thus I returned to my question, reviewed all that I had contrived to fit under my umbrella of ego, and erased it. And with a huge sigh of relief, I drafted a new conclusion to that sentence:

Nothing. Emptiness. Silence. Service to others. One life of many. One cell of a much greater organism.

Growing Up

Photo by Seeking Sol.

One tiny drop of evolution’s sweat.

One miniscule being with the same opportunities, as any other, of taking delight in the chances of witnessing moments of beauty and light, afforded us each, in a mysterious blessing of life.

While these conclusions matured me, I still didn’t feel “grown-up.” Quite the contrary; I felt smaller than ever! But I was content enough with my vague answers to begin the search for my life vocation.

“Vocation,” not so much as it is defined as an occupation or profession, but as the term was refined by Frederick Buechner as:

The place where your great gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.

Of course, my intentions at the time were hardly so eloquently realized, and I believe it was only by divinely-orchestrated chance that I stumbled right upon exactly such a thing: Experiential Education

For those new, as I was, to the term, it means structuring education so as to engage the learner into taking the initiative in the investigation, experimentation, digestion and reflection of direct experiences with the aim of learning natural consequences, mistakes and successes with ownership and authenticity.

Logistically, this meant that my new job was taking small groups of teenagers for three-month learning adventures in the developing world: Fiji, Guatemala, Nepal and India.

It was one day, on exactly one of these assignments that something shifted.

The Arrival

We had just arrived, after 27-hours in transit, at the airport in New Delhi, and the disheveled looks of my student group accurately reflected the distance traveled around the world:

A girl, who had inadvertently fasted from food for two days in anxiousness, was still white from fainting in the aisle of the plane on the way to the toilet. A boy, slurring run-on sentences in residue of the miscalculation of the timing of sleeping medications prescribed to him for the plane.

Photo by Seeking Sol.

Still another student with a stack of vomit bags tucked under her arm, of which she’d already used two. The quivering, perspiring, group of overstuffed backpacks, like a line of awkward ducklings, followed my step, too closely and without any awareness outside of the feet in front of them, through the airport.

As we filed through the air-conditioned and last reservoir of the First-World familiarity of the international airport, past the heavily armed guards, and out the double doors of the airport’s first line of security, the group was smacked simultaneously with the full force of India’s chocking humidity, shouting taxi driver mob, and dizzyingly dark swarms of mosquitoes.

With a soft and straight pace, I led the group through the crowd and to a clearing in the parking lot. There I directed them each to drop their heavy bags and cinch the circle in until it was safely airtight of the foreign chaos around us.

Intentionally modeling a moment of unhurried presence, I slowly made my eye-contact way around the circle, riding the highs and lows of their roller coaster of emotions:

Shock. Elation. Curiosity. Fear. Excitement. Regret. Trepidation. Courage. Confidence. Illness. Disbelief. Awe.

No Longer About The Answers

And it was at this moment that I, for the first time, realized that I was elated by their excitement, aghast in their shock, knew their fear intimately, and admired their courage – more than my own. I also saw their questions; many variations of the same open-ended one that had morphed into so many continental directions for me.

But it was no longer about the answers; theirs or mine. I only saw in each student a unique path that was just as in need of mentorship, as it was well-timed moments of silence.

And something shifted.

It was no longer about my search for meaning and identity. My joy in life and the world’s need met.

I felt I had suddenly stumbled upon a very important clue as to why human beings procreate: for exactly this reality-shifting realization – (and enormous relief!) – that it is simply no longer about me.

Somewhere along that rollercoaster of faces and emotions, I had traversed to the other side and got off my own life’s ride – as much of an adult as I think I’ll ever grow up to be.

And the, “I am…” trailed from a heavy sigh off into silence:

Content. Simply. In empathetic open-endedness.

Photo: maureen sill

Preparing for my trip to South Africa was a blur of warnings, an avalanche of don’ts and watch-outs.

Once there, however, my dear friend Jess (born and raised in South Africa) explained the real meaning of the oft used phrase “This is Africa” (TIA) over two cool glasses of Savannah Dry. Essentially, that things here rarely work out like you expect them.

As we rambled about the differences in legality in our respective continents, she shook her head with regret and added: “The world’s gone soft.”

As many of us are undoubtedly aware, savvy traveling is a fickle see-saw; on one side, confidence can become arrogance, and on the other, caution can become paranoia. The former will get you into trouble, and the latter will deny you the best experiences.

The trick is to decide for ourselves how adventurous we’re willing to be, and, consequently, how much of the world we’re willing to experience.

Yet the mishmash of advice and horror stories with which the media inundates us makes it almost impossible to decide objectively. These occasionally useful hand-me-down prejudices are why people so confidently, and so foolishly, insist on branding country X as ’safe’ and country Y as ‘unsafe.’

Definition Of Dangerous

The area where Jess grew up is filled with more tragedy in one week than could fit in my local paper back home. It makes me ask: what defines a dangerous country? And how can we avoid letting fear paralyze us?

Worried parents say, “Go with a buddy.” Doctors say, “Get vaccinated.” But your backpack says, “What are we waiting for?”

This is why someone who has camped out in Burma might still fear walking alone at night in Brooklyn, or why someone can improvise à la 007 when his car breaks down in Egypt but can’t change a tire in Montana. This is why so many of us crave those hard-knock travel lessons like junkies: because that kind of traveling very easily shreds the definition of ‘dangerous’ into tiny pieces of arbitrary, amusing confetti.

As I silently observe the strength of people here in Africa, something irrationally pops in my head – a law midterm I wrote in college about the elderly woman who sued McDonald’s because she was burned by their coffee. Jess is right. The world – part of it anyway – has grown much, much too soft.

I see the electric fences around everyone’s farms, the orphaned Zulu children looking for work, the wrecks on the highways… but I also see how vibrant and breathtaking the country is, and how everything – the volume, the emotion – is seemingly turned up.

I can’t help but wonder if I myself have grown soft along with the world, and if it’s possible to de-soften – to scrub away the sterilization until the resolve, the spirit, and the dirt under my fingernails to reflect those of the people who embody the hardness I so admire.

The World In Common

Sometimes there does seem to be an overabundance of crime and suffering in the world. The fact is, people act desperately when faced with desperate situations. And it’s difficult to comprehend the mentality of extremism without seeing extreme conditions with our own eyes.

Photo: maureen sill

Perhaps this is why we tend to label countries ‘unsafe’ – out of misunderstanding.

A developed-world upbringing can obscure one’s perception of suffering. For example, war that is so horrific and arbitrary from the front lines can seem, from our safe classrooms, simply necessary in the course of history – both as a mother of invention and as a primal standard for survival.

And yet the same human problems – like hunger or heartbreak – exist regardless of what side of the picket fence you call home. The difference is that we can usually find a way to distract ourselves from those problems, while the overwhelming majority of people in the world have their eyes peeled back Clockwork-Orange style.

Whether it’s poverty or consumerism that we battle, whether it’s governmental corruption or political apathy that undermines us… when the shiitake hits the fanfaronade, the world does have more in common than one might think.

Getting Ready To Live

A country is only ‘dangerous’ if you choose to define it as such. Without labels, all places on this earth have their upsides and downsides, have certain elements of risk that can be foreseen and unforeseen.

This is not to say one should charge merrily into Somalia and start teaching soldiers to line dance. Savvy traveling is all about the tentative and skilled balance between confidence and caution.

If we travelers can embrace our adventurous attitudes boldly and responsibly, we can help to alleviate those media-charged fears just by understanding them. This is not mere danger tourism, but a realization that life is continually chaotic.

There’s an old Chinese proverb: People in the West are always getting ready to live.

How many of us would, if we could, trade our Purell and SPF 70 for some wicked scars and stories? Think of your best travel stories; I bet they involve a mishap, a scare, or some averted danger that is your new party trick.

Every one of those surreal travel moments is another millimeter your comfort zone gets stretched. And though some of our loved ones will still worry when we travel to a ‘dangerous’ destination, we travelers know that the only real danger is pretending we are ever in control.

Perhaps this mentality could be captured in a new phrase: T.I.L. – This Is Life.

What do you think about the definition of dangerous travel? Share your thoughts in the comments!

Photo: h.koppdelaney

The usual collection of travel quotes tend to focus on inspiration and reflection. These, however, are meant to tickle your funny bone, and remind you of the inherent humor of the journey.

1. “When you come to a fork in the road….take it” – Yogi Berra

2. “Kilometers are shorter than miles. Save gas, take your next trip in kilometers.” – George Carlin

3. “If you’ve seen one redwood tree, you’ve seen them all.” – Ronald Reagan

4. “I’ve been to Paris. And it ain’t that pretty at all.” – Warren Zevon, from the song Ain’t That Pretty At All

5. “Too often travel, instead of broadening the mind, merely lengthens the conversations.” — Elizabeth Drew

6. “Another well-known Paris landmark is the Arc de Triomphe, a moving monument to the many brave women and men who have died trying to visit it.” – Dave Barry

7. “The major advantage of domestic travel is that, with a few exceptions such as Miami, most domestic locations are conveniently situated right here in the United States.” – Dave Barry

8. “Thanks to the interstate highway system, it is now possible to travel from coast to coast without seeing anything.” – Charles Kuralt

9. “The worst thing about being a tourist is having other tourists recognize you as a tourist.” – Russell Baker

10. “You can find your way across this country using burger joints the way a navigator uses stars.” – Charles Kuralt

11. “You got to be careful if you don’t know where you’re going, because you might not get there.” – Yogi Berra

12. “Do not insult the mother alligator until after you have crossed the river.” – Old Haitian Proverb

13. “Canada is the vichyssoise of nations – it’s cold, half French and difficult to stir.” – Stuart Keate

14. “On a New York subway you get fined for spitting, but you can throw up for nothing.” – Lewis Grizzard

15. “Gaiety is among the most outstanding features of the Soviet Union.” – Joseph Stalin

16. “San Francisco is like granola. Take away all the fruits and the nuts and all you have left are the flakes.” – Unknown

17. “France is the only country where the money falls apart and you can’t tear the toilet paper.” – Billy Wilder

18. “Boy, those French. They have a different word for everything.” – Steve Martin

19. “Climbing K2 or floating the Grand Canyon in an inner tube. There are some things one would rather have done than do.” – Edward Abbey

Always look out for the hostage Buddha / Photo: antwerpenR

20. “There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California.” – Edward Abbey

21. “If you are going through hell, keep going.” – Winston Churchill

22. “I told the doctor I broke my leg in two places. He told me to quit going to those places”. – Henny Youngman

23. “Two great talkers will not travel far together.” – Spanish Proverb

24. “Why buy good luggage? You only use it when you travel.” – Yogi Berra

25. “I dislike feeling at home when I am abroad.” – George Bernard Shaw

26. “I had a prejudice against the British until I discovered that fifty percent of them were female.” – Raymond Floyd

27. “Living on Earth is expensive, but it does include a free trip around the sun every year.” – Unknown

28. “When preparing to travel, lay out all your clothes and all your money. Then take half the clothes and twice the money”. – Unknown

29. “Knock Knock! Who’s there? Tibet! Tibet who? Early Tibet and early to rise!” – Aha Jokes

30. “Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.” – Mark Twain

Add your favorite funny travel quotes in the comments section below!

Photo: Natalie Grant

If someone tells you they think a passionate kiss goodbye at the train station seems romantic, that’s because they’ve never had to do it.

The dreaded farewell is the one inevitable remainder at the end of your travel equation. Alas, such is the bittersweet lifestyle of those who are constantly in motion.

It’s a double-edged sword, because bonding with someone you meet along the way does make your trip that much more special; but when forced to part ways, it can be downright depressing to journey on alone.

Seasoned travelers are pros at it: they’re delighted to have met you but not conflicted about nudging you back out of their day. Newborns tend to sink that grappling hook into the first English-speaking human they see (’Can I friend you on Facebook?!’)

The rest of us let things come as they will, heart-strings tugged or not tugged accordingly.

Whether it’s a new best friend or a sudden soul-mate, having someone you care about depart for the other side of the world just plain blows.

Which is why traveling is like gliding: if you’re too worried about hitting the ground, you miss the view. Instead seek to master the tricky art of farewells, here are some suggestions that might help.

Golden Rule #1

Hang on tightly, let go lightly. Think of your brief friendships as the best kind of bear hugs – warm, close, and strong. The more you fight the release, the less chance you’ll be left with that sensational just-hugged feeling.

If you doubt your ability to let go lightly, just keep pretending you will and you might do it on impulse when the time comes. Simply recite this rule as a mantra on repeat until you give yourself over to your inner emotional ninja.

Golden Rule #2

Photo: Natalie Grant

Try to live only in the present moment. I received this slice of “mind-blowing wisdom” from the Greek man who tied my bungee cord at the Corinth Canal bridge.

The reason he loves his job, he admitted to me, is because he gets to watch people transform: when they’re about to jump, the only thing they can think of is breathing. No emails, work schedules, cable bills, dogfood, lost car keys… What they see and feel in the moment – that’s it.

We’re constantly fretting over what needs to be done tomorrow, what happened last week, what our future’s screaming at us. Even while you read this you’re probably thinking about three other things. Life would be sweeter if we could train ourselves to live in the present more often.

Trust me, enjoying your last minutes together at the airport is better spent without glancing at your watch.

Golden Rule #3

Embrace weak excuses to reunite. A distant cousin’s ex-wife, an internet graduation, a possible part-time unpaid internship that you have no intention of applying for… stretch it out. It’s not that hard to arrange a visit – save money, book a ticket, and just go.

Even if it doesn’t work out the same way it did the first time you met, you’ll probably still have a hell of a time, and an even better story for the grandkids.

When you make promises to meet up with people across the world, and follow through on what some (*cough* boring) people might call a whim, the feeling of being together again is more exhilarating and precious than you can imagine.

Two ocean-divided friends of mine followed through to meet up this year, and now they’re married. Life’s too short for heavy thinking and rational planning.

Golden Rule #4

Turn the time limit around until it works to your advantage. Knowing you don’t have the luxury to play those ridiculous dating mind-games people are so good at these days (i.e., “call you next week sometime?”) allows you to get over yourself and just do what you genuinely feel like.

We used to joke at a hostel I stayed at once that travel-relationships were normal relationships on speed. Three days feels like three weeks, and a month two years. You get to know each other much too well in a very short amount of time, and you battle random obstacles you’d never even ponder at home.

So why not embrace that seldom-offered opportunity to hit those relationship curveballs, sans the heavy commitment? If you want to be closer to someone, heave the mind-games out the window and be upfront. There’s no time but now – literally.

Golden Rule #5

Learn from the masters. Ah, the goodbye scenes. And the reunions! Buy some full-fat popcorn, put your feet up and re-watch those classic moments of farewell (and moments of ‘I changed my mind’): Before Sunrise, Same Time Next Year, Serendipity, Love Actually, Romancing the Stone, Casablanca… the list goes on.

What mistakes did those fools make that you’d rather not emulate? What moments have you secretly reenacted in your foggy bathroom mirror?

See You Later

When in doubt, adopt the “let’s not and say we did” philosophy: as in, just don’t say goodbye, and then you won’t have to say goodbye. A simple “see you later” has much the same effect. If he or she really is that special to you, then you’re not lying. You will see them later.

Like anything, it takes practice. Grow a thicker skin, learn to love your naïve little heart until that which is inconvenient becomes endearing; keep those relationships special, even if they end when the terminal gate closes.

Remember: happiness makes up in height what it lacks in length.

What are your tips for goodbyes on the road? Share your thoughts in the comments!

Photo: pareeerica

The New York Times recently ran a story about unemployed Japanese men who sleep in tiny bunks that are stacked on top of each other.

Shocking? Sad?

My initial reaction was that sleeping in Japanese capsule hotels is no big deal. Capsules are safe, clean, and centrally located, with traditional Japanese baths and easy access to fast public transport.

I’ve stayed in Japanese capsules a couple of times, though my favorite budget accommodation choice in Japanese cities was always the 24 hour internet cafe with private cubicle.

After all, who needs a full-on hotel room when you just want to sleep for a few hours? You’re in Shinjuku, man!

But there’s a difference between crashing in a capsule for a night, and using one as a home of last resort.

Home – reduced to a tiny locker in a vast, heartless city – is a deeply saddening idea.

The importance of how we look at our homes is the powerful message in The Recess Ends, an excellent new documentary film about the American recession.

The Recess Ends opens with a man talking about homes. He speaks about Americans who’ve stayed inside their big homes for the past decade and are just now starting to emerge, take stock of their communities, and take true ownership over their collective future.

Worldwide, billions of people are losing their jobs, losing their homes and losing their livelihoods. It’s happening in rural Africa, India and China, and now it’s happening in rich countries like America and Japan.

Most Americans and Japanese, though, are still rich enough to barricade themselves in shrinking homes, getting more and more frustrated and alone.

Reflecting on shrinking Japanese homes and The Recess Ends reminds me of one of the most profound lessons of travel – that home is not a building, an apartment, or a bunk.

Home is a community. Home is a refuge. Home is wherever our loved ones live.

What does home mean to you? Share your thoughts in the comments!

Photo: Wonderlane

Mom always said it’s important to hang out with the right people.

Well, not my mom, of course – she’s a bit anti-social. But you know, moms in general. And I have no doubt that mine at least hoped that the people I decided to hang out with would not be hoodlums and dark-side types.

As I find myself reading a few blogs lately about surrounding yourself with the “right people,” I can’t help but wonder exactly what that means. I understand these authors are saying that the people in your life should support you, be positive lights of energy, and help in guiding or lifting you to the next level. But what exactly is the protocol here?

D. Paul Reilly tackles this subject in his recent article at the Nassau Guardian, Surround Yourself With the Best. He states:

…For someone to continue to have a happy, successful, and indeed contented life, I honestly believe, that a person needs to have friends who are literally on the same ‘Wavelength’ so to speak, as he or she is; a person who is for the most part positive, enthusiastic, and upbeat for most of the time.

Alright, I can dig it. Upbeat is good, and feeling this way propels us forward.

Havi Brooks over at The Fluent Self takes the idea a bit further. She notes in her post, Re-explaining the Right People thing, that surrounding yourself with the right people is key, but that this doesn’t mean there are “wrong” people, or that some of us are the “chosen” ones. Everyone’s got their right people, which makes everyone a right person for someone else.

We just have to figure out who our right people are:

It’s not about exclusion. It’s about discernment…When I surround myself with stuff/people/concepts that are loving and supportive, it makes it easier for me to be the kind of person who can have love and support in her life.

More sentiments I can stand behind. Yet, what I can’t help but wonder is how often our preconceived notions block out people that could be fantastic allies or even a simple growth instigator? (Like that term? I may trademark it).

What if Wrong is Right?

Photo: Wonderlane

I can honestly say one of the reasons I’m so drawn to travel is that I find myself more open to people that might be considered “wrong” for me than I would at home. Given, they may actually be the “right people,” just not obvious to the naked eye.

But if we are closed off to those who we “intuitively” sense (which is sometimes mixed up with reactions based on previous experiences in our lives) are not good for us, how will we ever know they are actually right?

I admit, I struggle with this issue. Some of my closest friendships developed from the other person seeking me out, sometimes over and over again. People I initially didn’t feel a connection with or a particular interest in getting to know better, or even those who seemed “against” me, are now definitely some of my biggest allies.

Susan J. Elliott, author of Getting Past Your Breakup, tackles the issue of situational unfairness in her post Life Is Not Fair. She comes out the other side with this nugget:

We can’t expect fairness and we can’t expect positive outcomes to all of our dilemmas. The most we can do with what we are given (whether it’s good, bad or indifferent) is to do our work and be the best person we can be surrounded by the best people we can surround ourselves with…love is an action and love makes everything else easier.

Love is an action, and feeling as much love as possible feeds us. But can love for those who may seem to be our enemy, or even lack a supportive nature, feed us too? I’m not saying everyone in our lives should be unsupportive bastards. I’m just wondering if there is wiggle room around deciding who is “right” to have in our lives, especially around the less obvious ones.

Is life more about being open to all people, and trusting the “right” people will find their way to the top, or about constantly assessing through intuition and other means who is helpful to keep in, or cut from, your life? I would really love some feedback on this, because I’m actually (for once) at a loss.

What do you think about having the “right” people in your life? Share your thoughts below.

Photo: aturkus

Travel opens us up to other ideas, cultures, and ways of living life – this is something we all know, and more than likely is a part of the “why” we travel.

But lately I’ve been contemplating what it actually means to be open. “Open-minded” is the phrase most often associated with being receptive to that which we don’t necessarily believe or relate to, or even to that which makes us uncomfortable. But I want to reclaim a word used less often: openhearted.

Interestingly (at least to me), Merriam-Webster defines openhearted first as “candidly straightforward”, and second as “responsive to emotional appeal”. Candidly straightforward is not what I’m going for here – seems a very Western approach to a heartfelt function, doesn’t it? Instead, I think being openhearted is literally about opening your heart to that which is given – or plopped – in front of you.

I think the reason I’ve recently thought so much about being openhearted is because mine tends to get stuck in halfway closed mode. Call it life beating you over the head, or just a deeply-ingrained personality quirk, but I keep myself safeguarded. It’s seemingly easier to survive with a little protection cup over your heart.

I’ve written in the past about how you can heal a broken heart through travel. But what I’ve realized, as I begin to look back over 2009, is that I love to travel because this is the time my heart finds itself fully open to life and the world around me.

It’s almost a survival mechanism in reverse – in order to “make it” in an unfamiliar place, the walls have to come tumbling down. Sure, basic precautions around safety are a must, but the reality is, you must often rely on people you don’t know that well to make it through.

Opening To Survive

Photo: liquene

Preconceived notions (or delusions) fly out the window when it’s dark and you’ve just stepped off the plane in Dar Es Salaam without a clue of where to go. Or when the winding streets of Venice keep leading you back to the same place – nowhere near your hostel. You’re forced to ask for help.

Maybe those notions leave fastest of all when you stay up all night talking to someone you meet just hours before, revealing tidbits of both beauty and ugliness you’ve never told anyone.

Travel (of a particular kind) not only forces us out of our comfort zone, it pries open the lid under which our true self – one inextricably linked to all those with whom we share this Earth – has a chance for outward expression.

I snuck in a couple of months of travel around the US this year, and as I sit here settled for a bit, I recognize the luck in feeling that sacredness. It can be a bit hard to recreate “at home”, with all of the directions life likes to pull us, but I’m working on it.

Taking chances when the door is slightly ajar, meditating on a feeling of spaciousness in your chest, simply stopping to chat with the neighbor you’ve never spoken with before – life really is just about possibility.

Leave it to a Poet

As I was writing this, a friend posted the poem The Journey by Mary Oliver that expresses the sentiment more eloquently than I ever could:

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice –
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do –
determined to save
the only life you could save.

What are ways that travel has helped you open your heart? Share your thoughts below.

Community Connection

Read a very open and heartfelt letter against institutionalized racism from Matador’s Managing Editor, Julie Schwietert, to the judge who refused to marry an interracial couple in Louisiana earlier this year. And as a reminder to stay open and not pre-judge people – especially when it comes to travel writing – check out David Miller’s 8 Ways of Seeing People that Can Sabotage Your Writing.

If you grew up in the 90’s, it’s likely your after school hours consisted of the following: Saved By The Bell, Full House, and Family Matters. But there was one show that transcended the corny sitcom genre and was actually clever and consistently funny – The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air.

The success of the show was largely the result of Will Smith’s comedic timing and aw-shucks likability. It wasn’t a surprise then when Will made the leap to the big screen, all the while continuing to release non-offensive rap albums, and befriend all of Hollywood.

These days, while many of the top names have dropped off the A-List, Will Smith remains the world’s most bankable star.

What’s the secret? Apparently, it’s that he’s “willing to die on a treadmill.” See what I mean by watching below.

You have to hand it to Will. His obsessive drive has certainly served him well, and offers a number of takeaway truths for any wisdom seeker.

Feature photo: Andrew Eccles/JBGPhoto.com

What do you think of Will’s wisdom? Share your thoughts in the comments!

Photo: notsogoodphotography

When I flipped over the handlebars of the bike I’d rented in Vancouver, BC, I earned some impressive bruises, a badly lacerated spleen, and new fears stifling my wanderlust.

Luckily, I was hospitalized in an English-speaking country only a few hours from friends and family in Seattle. But what if an accident like this happens on one of my pipe-dream adventures elsewhere in the world?

Turner Wright previously published a piece at BNT about how to handle medical emergencies on the road. It gives good advice, such as learning the word for hospital in the native language and cultivating patience.

But even if I’d been prepared with traveler’s insurance and – had I been in a non-English speaking country – learned the words I needed to communicate, I would still have had to cope without the support network I have at home.

Simply being in another country without my friends and family made my problems more complex.

Future Plans

During my five nights in the hospital, I thought about how my ordeal would affect future travel – my dreams of backpacking in remote places or spending a year living abroad. Would the fear of potential injury or illness change me?

Photo: delicategenius

I fluctuate between feeling that I’ve paid my dues to karma and can’t possibly have any more bad luck, and the rather jarring realization of my body’s fragility.

As J. Raimund Pfarrkirchner notes in his piece, The 5 Deadliest Travel Fears (And How To Defeat Them), “Fear of the unknown hails from something deeper, something practical at times…had the dodo been frightened of visitors to its native Mauritius, where it had no natural predators, the dodo might be flourishing today.”

While I’m eager to continue traveling – and cycling – I don’t actually have any plans for the foreseeable future. I may feel differently when plans and ideas become more concrete. Inspiration comes from people such as Robin Esrock, who was hit by a car while driving his scooter, and ended up on a stretcher instead of going to work that day.

Instead of staying home and buying a car, Robin decided to buy a solo round-the-world plane ticket and backpack around the planet.

The Stranglehold of Fear

It’s likely these fears will fade and I’ll get back to my normal, travel-hungry self, but there will probably always be a part of me that wonders if this can happen again. Phobias can take hold at any time in one’s life; author Samantha Ang discusses how, after being “born traveling,” she developed a fear of flying based on overhearing a mother’s words to her child about the dangers of take-off and landing.

And what if another accident does happen? If I endured serious injuries in a first world, English-speaking country a mere three hours from friends and family, what are the chances of something happening while traveling solo, to remote places, or to countries with less advanced medical technology? Pretty high.

I hope this fear will teach me to be as prepared as possible, but there’s always the possibility of an accident, a mistake. There will always be factors out of my control.

Tragedies can happen even to the most careful people.

Has fear or risk ever prevented you from traveling, or changed your plans in some way? Share your thoughts below.

Photo: nattu

Everyone’s favorite traveling mover and shaker, Nomadic Matt, recently wrote about a question that many – no, most – long-term travelers eventually have to face: ‘What in the bejesus are you running away from?’

Matt states:

…For those who make being a nomad a way of life or people who just linger a bit too long before they make that final stretch home, we are accused of running away…People assume that we are simply running away from our problems- running away from “the real world.”

There is certainly an attitude in much of the world that travel is for fun and should be enjoyed as a break, but sooner than later, you need to ‘get back to work.’ If for some reason you decide that you want travel to be your work, then, well, you’re a) not taking responsibility for something, b) a trust fund baby, c) lazy and incompetent, or d) all three rolled into one.

This is certainly a topic we’ve explored from many different angles here at BNT. As Josh Kearns waxes poetic in The Tao Of Vagabond Travel, Western culture in particular insinuates the importance of “getting somewhere in life” (i.e. becoming a professional of some sort that makes a decent wage), and that unfortunately, very few people believe that experiencing life and its beauty is worthy enough in and of itself.

Travel Envy

Fact is, long term travel is not easy, nor is it something that many people can withstand. As Matt adds:

People may want to travel, tell you they envy what you do, wish they could do the same thing but really, they don’t. They are simply fascinated by a lifestyle so outside the norm.

Or, as Cameron Karsten points out in his piece, 10 Things To Learn About Yourself When Traveling Alone, to travel sometimes means taking on greater responsibility, something that not everyone is ready to do: “To take one’s life within one’s hands and have the freedom and maturity to mold it into shapes, forms and experiences of one’s desires is to embrace (responsibility)…(which) provides us with the power to change.”

Don’t forget, travel can sometimes be more healing than staying at home, as I pondered in Healing a Broken Heart Through Travel.

But, there is an important distinction between two types of travelers, as F. Daniel Harbecke notes is his piece, Response: Would You Be A Perpetual Traveler Or World Citizen? The perpetual traveler “discards the sense of home…for a more profound sense of privacy or non-affiliation,” while the world citizen “sees the entire planet as home, and one’s citizenship as only a historic formality.”

Neither one is better than the other, but both help in defining the ‘why’ of the long-term traveler – some people are not made to stay in one place. Something deep within calls them to roam the Earth, and no manner of guilt, skepticism or attempted coercion will persuade this person otherwise.

And why should they?

What are other reasons that long-term travel does not necessarily mean running away? Share your thoughts below.

Photo: LA Times

The photo to the right certainly represents a open-minded, poly-religious, world traveler’s dream wedding (or worst logistical nightmare?).

Yep, that’s an East Coast Rabbi, Catholic priest from California, and a European Shinto priest who gathered in Greece to unite a Sephardic Jew groom and a bride with both Shinto and Catholic roots. Pretty darn unique.

Both wanted to please their traditional parents, but also the traditions alive within themselves.

Made me think about all of you out there that have connected with and honored people of different races, creeds, and socioeconomic statuses, and yet remained proud of your own. And just how beautiful that is.

Whether we are debating the nature of love between a white man and Asian woman, or the spiritual implications of a polyamorous relationship, it seems we still can agree that sometimes, love just conquers all.

And maybe it is simply love that we need to bridge different religions. As the groom noted, “Religion should unite people, not separate them. And after all, aren’t all religions one?”

Do you have a story of a religiously-complicated relationship that broke through the barriers, either your own or someone else’s? Share your thoughts below.

Photo: viaj24h / Feature photo: wandering angel

You’re sitting in a dirty alleyway, perched on a bright blue plastic stool eating the best bowl of noodles you’ve ever had.

A group of fanny-pack toting tourists shuffles by, following their guide’s umbrella and craning their necks to hear her narration. You let out a chuckle, happy to be on your own, free of the constraints of an organized tour and content in the knowledge that they have no idea what they’re missing.

You return to your hole-in-the-wall guesthouse, only to find that the tourists and their umbrella are staying on your floor.

The tour group mentality has always been an easy target for anyone who travels, making us feel better about our own adventures and providing a convenient Other to poke fun at.

It’s getting harder and harder though, with companies like Urbane Nomads billing themselves as “travel mixologists” and blurring the line between hardcore travel and hand-holding tours.

According to them, they’ve:

“turned the typical tourist itinerary on its head- taking the tourist through a city’s back alleys, revealing its seamier (and/or more interesting) side , continually testing the limits of accessibility in travel or using a local folkloric legend as a premise for an itinerary revealing current social and political problems.”

The Back Door Philosophy

Up until recently, almost all tour companies have presented their services with an image of ease and relaxation – you can’t open an issue of Conde Nast Traveller without seeing the words “style” or “luxury” – but what they’re selling is ultimately far more about leisure than travel.

Going it alone and spending as little money as possible provides a far richer experience, something everyone’s idol Rick Steves has always espoused with his “back door” philosophy.

It’s true that a lot of backpackers do it on the cheap purely because they’re broke, but most at least pay lip service to this idea of staying close to the ground.

Rightly or wrongly, travelers often feel like their journeys are constantly under siege by everyone else’s.

Think of the backpacker who laughs at you for paying 140 Baht for a guesthouse when he only paid 115 – we’ve all met that guy and a lot of us have been him. Examples like that come off as a little insane, but that sentiment is a common thread even among veteran travelers.

Much as we’d like to play the part of the hardened vagabond, we’re all afraid of everyone else cheapening our “authentic experience.”

From what I can tell, Urbane Nomads actually does threaten to do that.

Urbane Nomads is offering tours that guarantee life-changing experiences without having to exert yourself to get there. It’s presenting hardcore adventure – placing yourself in unfamiliar and unexpected situations for the purpose of discovery and personal development – as something that can be done free of worry and hardship.

This is totally antithetical to the things I’ve come to believe through traveling. Adventure isn’t just about the highlights; it’s the everyday misery and difficulty that produces the best stories and clearest insights.

Departure From The Urbane

If, in twenty years, this sort of thing becomes the norm, will anybody really value travel as a holistic experience anymore? If it’s acceptable to watch a Mongolian polo match on the steppes and go home to a perfect cosmo in your five-star hotel bar, have you learned anything about yourself, Mongolia or travel?

Camels in Mongolia / Photo: mooney47

Sure, no one will stop you from riding a bicycle down the Karakoram Highway, but as writers, artists and photographers we all know that it’s never just about us. If the image of adventurous travel as a series of dizzying highs and backbreaking lows is watered down to a flattened, five-star package tour, where will you and I fit?

Of course, there are two sides to everything. As dire as I’ve made it sound, there seem to be some great things about Urbane Nomads.

It’s run by one person, not a huge corporation, which makes me believe that their commitment to sustainable, ethical and personally enriching tourism is sincere. Their owner says that, “Under her guidance, the itineraries and destinations offered by Urbane Nomads reflect a concern for the social, cultural and historical nuances of the destinations visited.”

It’s also probable that, before this company existed, their clients would have spent ten thousand dollars on a luxury tour of Western Europe instead of hot air ballooning in Burma.

As a concept, I think Urbane Nomads is the sort of tour company we’d all like to run. It’s the “urbane” part that bothers me.

Adventure has always been a departure from the urbane, and if we begin to blur the lines between everyday comfort and eye-opening experiences we stand to lose the most important aspect of travel: to transform ourselves.

Community Connection

Check out F. Daniel Harbecke’s classic The Last Article On the Tourist/Traveler Distinction You’ll Ever Read. Also don’t miss From Tourist To Travel In 5 Easy Steps.

What do you think? Am I being too hard on companies like Urbane Nomads? Share your thoughts in the comments!

Photo: smoothmasterflex

The quest for happiness, like that for love, is one of the most common shared human experiences. When we travel, we often consider potential destinations based on historical sites, culture, sightseeing, activities and location.

But what about happiness? Can we learn something from people who live longer and more satisfying lives? Or can our own happiness be increased simply by being around them?

An organization called The Happy Planet Index recently released the first ever index to combine environmental impact with well-being to measure the length and contentment of life in world countries.

The index doesn’t claim that all citizens of its top-rated countries are happier than everyone else, but it does show how nations can produce high well-being without excessive consumption of the Earth’s resources.

The Happy Planet Index combines life expectancy, satisfaction, and ecological footprint to process its ratings – when all three components are good, the country’s overall well-being and happiness is rated high.

Nine of the top ten countries are in Latin America – a finding that might be surprising, until you consider the mindset of Latin American culture and what values are given importance. “Latin Americans report being much less concerned with material issues than, for example, they are with their friends and family,” states the HPI data. “Civil society is very active, from religious groups to workers’ groups to environmental groups.”

The takeaway? Having a close network of family and friends, forming intimate bonds, being social and involved in your community may lead to longer and happier lives that almost any other factor.

Countless research has told us for years that being married and having close friendships – even pets – increases longevity and lowers stress. The Happy Planet findings seem to be one more corroboration of this.

According to the HPI, here’s more insight we can learn by examining the Top 5 countries:

Photo: wagnert.cassimiro

#1 – Costa Rica (Score: 76.1 out of 100)

Costa Ricans report the highest life satisfaction in the world, and enjoy the second-highest average life expectancy of the West (only behind Canada). Costa Ricans live slightly longer than Americans while reporting much higher levels of contentment – all with an environmental footprint less than a quarter the size.

A haven of democracy and peace in turbulent Central America, Costa Rica has taken deliberate steps to reduce its environmental impact; with a footprint of 2.3 global hectares, it just narrowly fails to achieve the goal of “one-planet living”: consuming a fair share of natural resources.

It also has the fifth-lowest human poverty index in the developing world, with clean water and adult literacy almost universal. But Costa Rica’s biggest secret may be found in the country’s motto, pura vida. Literally meaning “pure life,” citizens base their fulfillment on spending time with loved ones, doing what they most enjoy in life, and protecting their beautiful natural resources.

Photo: Ulises Jorge

#2 – Dominican Republic (Score: 71.5)

The Dominican Republic’s condition is similar to many other countries in the region – a medium Human Development Index score, high levels of inequality and dependence on the USA for trade – yet it manages to achieve a life expectancy of over 70 years with a very small footprint.

The country has led the way in environmental conservation in Latin America since the 1970s; 32% of its land is covered by national parks and reserves, the highest proportion in the Americas.

As politics in the Dominican Republic have become more democratic, local NGOs have begun to flourish. Whereas most environmental NGOs in many developing countries tend to be imports from the rich world, here local groups dominate – again demonstrating the idea that when citizens engage in their communities together, they tend to live happier and longer lives.

Photo: Bruno Henrique

#3 – Jamaica (Score: 70.1)

Jamaica’s appearance in the top three of the HPI table comes somewhat as a surprise. It is fair to say that the country has been in some economic trouble for over 30 years, resulting in high levels of inequality and unemployment, and some of the highest homicide rates in the world.

Yet despite these problems, the island is able to maintain some of the best levels of health in the developing world, as indicated by its high average life expectancy. 97% of babies are born with the assistance of skilled health professionals, with only 4% underweight – a figure comparable to richer nations such as Argentina.

Most Jamaicans have access to clean water, unusual in a county with a GDP per capita one-tenth that of the USA. Together with its extremely family-oriented populace and small ecological footprint – approximately 5% of its energy is renewable – is what puts Jamaica towards the top of the HPI table.

Photo: themikeless

#4 – Guatemala (Score: 68.4)

Life expectancy is where Guatemala ranks lowest, with an estimate between 60–75 years. This falls in the middling range, and is what brings the country’s score below Costa Rica.

When it comes to life satisfaction, however, Guatemalans are right there at the top, reporting 7.4 on a scale of 1-10 for being “satisfied with their life.” The nation also comes in under the minimums for one-planet living, consuming resources at a rate of less than one planet’s worth.

Photo: etrendard

#5 – Vietnam (Score: 66.5)

The only Eastern nation to crack the top ten, Vietnam racked up 8.5 in the satisfaction index and has an average life-span of 73.7 years. The country’s ecological footprint only narrowly misses the one-planet goal. Sociologist Andrea Fonseca says that Vietnam’s high happiness rating “has a lot to do with social imagination.”

The bottom ten HPI scores were all suffered by sub-Saharan African countries, with Zimbabwe bottom of the table with an HPI score of 16.6. And how does the United States fare? Below the middle, with a score of 30.7 at 114th place and consuming resources as if we had four planets to live from.

The highest-placed Western nation is the Netherlands at 43rd, and the UK ranks midway down the table at 74th, behind Germany, Italy and France.

Perhaps the European and North American focus on consumerism is actually making us less happy. In fact, while most countries’ scores increased between 1990 and 2005, the three largest countries in the world (China, India and the USA) have all seen their scores drop during that time, suggesting they are indeed less happy now than twenty years ago.

The Happy Planet Index begs us to ask how many resources are we wasting – both as individuals and as a culture – on things that don’t even improve our lives?

If we made a rule of targeting resources only at things that delivered quality of life, we would end up automatically saving the planet – and at least according to the Happy Planet Index, living happier lives as well.

What do you think – any other lessons we can learn from these happy countries? Share in the comments!

Community Connection

Check out Carlo’s 5 Key Ingredients in the Search For Happiness. And for a laugh, read The Hunt For Happiness comic.

“Looking forward, thinking back”/Photo: HAMED MASOUMI

Whether you are a part of the world of travel, finance, or simply a human being in the Western Hemisphere, today certainly marks a tragic day in history.

Around the internet, you’ll find all sorts of pieces related to that fateful day in 2001, all the way from how Obama is handling terrorism to an extremely poignant recount of being in New York the morning of 9/11 by Matador’s own Tom Gates.

Here is a blurb from a 9/11 conversation on Reddit which asks, What were you doing on September 11th, 2001 when the planes hit?:

I called my girlfriend at the time and told her to stay at home because some bad stuff was going down. I made it to work in time to see the second plane hit the towers. Within hours, my company had 6 million dollars worth of software contracts canceled. A week later, 90% of the company was laid off. Over the next 7 years my rights were systematically destroyed, billions were wasted on an unjustified war and the name of America was dragged through the mud.

The terrorists won.

You may need to tweak the story a little, but the last sentence describes how many people feel.

Memorial To The Future

Memorials tend to remind us of the past. In essence, that is their purpose, beauty and how we honor innocent lives lost. But what if, along with remembering the horror of what happened, where we were when a tragic experience took place, or the sometimes painful repercussions of that experience, we contemplate all of the other amazing things that have happened since?

My big question for you on the 8th Anniversary of the US 9/11 is: where have you gone? Where have you traveled that you had previously never even contemplated going; what life work have you accomplished that might have once seemed impossible; what love has been brought into your life?

What have you learned about yourself, and the world, in order to make both better?

How have you memorialized lives lost, whether those lives were in New York at Ground Zero, fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan, your grandmother, or your 23-year-old friend that died of cancer? Beauty begets tragedy and tragedy begets beauty; what I think counts most is what you are doing with the only moment we are guaranteed: now.

Those who have given their lives willingly or unwittingly wouldn’t want it any other way.

What are some of the amazing things you’ve done since September 11, 2001? Share your experiences below.

Community Connection

Check out Julie Schwietert’s thoughts on last year’s anniversary of 9/11 in “History is ours, and people make history”: Some thoughts on 9/11. And I can’t reiterate enough the importance of reading Tom Gates view of 9/11 in 8:46 am, 9/11 Manhattan.

Beachwalkers / Photo: Allison Cross

Most of the foreigners in Sierra Leone are here to work or volunteer, rather than to travel for the sake of traveling.

I have yet to encounter a bona fide tourist who’s in the West African country purely for pleasure and exploration. Most of the sun worshippers at River No. 2 beach on Saturdays – arguably the nicest beach in Sierra Leone – are NGO workers like myself, taking time off work to enjoy the country’s undeniable beauty.

It’s not particularly surprising tourists are largely absent from Sierra Leone.

Most people only know of the country because of its brutal 11-year civil war that ended in 2002, where rebel and government soldiers murdered thousands of people and cut off the hands and feet of many others.

Since then, Sierra Leone has gained a reputation for being one of the poorest countries in the world, with extremely high rates of maternal and infant mortality. Crime and petty theft are common. Advanced medical care is largely unavailable and most of the roads are in awful condition.

Even if these conditions that discourage tourism didn’t exist, anyone wishing to visit Sierra Leone must still obtain a visa, at least three or four vaccinations and a generous number of malaria pills before they enter the country. It’s no doubt intimidating for many.

Heed the Warnings

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair was in Sierra Leone a few months ago, trying to promote the country as a tourist destination for Europeans, even though the country still confronts major infrastructure issues like the inconsistent supply of water and electricity.

No 2. River beach / Photo: Allison Cross

As a result of this list of warnings and dangers, development workers are full of stories about what you should and shouldn’t do. Many of them make sense for any sensible traveler.

You shouldn’t walk alone at night. You shouldn’t carry large amounts of cash. You should be cautious about making friends, until you know you can trust them.

But some of their advice I find myself ignoring. I eat at local restaurants where the food is cheap and I take motorcycle taxis that drive far too fast. I do this partly because my budget is much smaller than the average development worker in Sierra Leone.

No one drives me to work in an SUV and my budget for training is small, as is my living stipend. It’s enough to live and eat, but it’s nowhere near extravagant or comparable to a North American wage.

Even though the house I live in leaks when it rains too hard, is sometimes overrun by spiders and snakes and has no running water, it’s still far plusher than the home of an average Sierra Leonean. But when I tell other foreigners how I live, they often shudder and proclaim: “I could never live like that.”

Experience What Is

I go further to ignore other pieces of advice because I’d rather get to know the country I’m living in for what it is, rather than
experience the niche foreigners have carved out for themselves.

It’s certainly comforting to enjoy some overpriced bacon and eggs and a coffee at an assortment of popular ex-pat hangouts, but I’m careful not to make a habit out of it. Why travel halfway across the world to eat the same food I can get at home?

Admittedly, I often pine for the ease of a vehicle, and its air conditioning and seat belts, but I still believe I’d miss too much if I went everywhere in a car.

The journalist in me would ask the car to the stop, so that I could explore that village on the other side of the bridge on foot or talk to the women who wave to me as they sit in a circle, cooking their food.

If you’re always in an SUV with tinted windows, always in Western-style restaurants with air conditioning, you will indeed miss experiencing the real culture and atmosphere of your destination.

Of course, the manner in which you travel and the risks you take are personal choices. Living in a country as chaotic as Sierra Leone isn’t easy and every foreigner will have a different way of coping.

But human beings are incredibly adaptable, as I have very quickly learned about myself.

If you don’t push yourself into new and uncomfortable experiences, it’s unlikely you’ll ever discover how adaptable you really are.

How has travel pushed your own personal boundaries? Share in the comments!

Dreamers / Photo: withanyluck

“You shouldn’t move around so much. Did you know that take-offs and landings are the most dangerous parts of flying?”

A mother once said to her giddy eight-year old daughter, who was swinging her legs wildly, to somehow calm her down as the plane began its ascent.

Those words haunted me since.

I was born traveling. I was a fetus when my mom rode the plane to the US, and a month-old baby when she brought me back to Manila, Philippines, my hometown. My parents loved going abroad, and they took me and my younger siblings everywhere at least once a year.

It used to excite me as a kid to watch the landscape become smaller and smaller until the clouds blocked the view from the oval plane window until it re-emerged again, every time different. That was, until my fear of flying kicked in.

I should have been used to traveling by plane, but what began as a few innocent words of a parent trying to make her child behave morphed into a phobia.

Growing up, I tried to talk myself out of it, to be rational about it. Nevertheless, it was as if my phobia took on a life of its own. The symptoms emerged soon after: the sweating, the heart palpitations, the tears, and the paralyzing fear.

What Lies Ahead

Since then, I dreaded getting inside a plane. A month before a trip, I would make a futile attempt to talk my way out of it. A week before the day, my hands would get all clammy, and I would be short of breath at the thought of being airborne.

Photo: stratocasterman

A day before, I would clam up and face borderline paralysis. I wouldn’t talk to anyone; I wouldn’t even eat.

On the plane itself, I would curl up into a ball, bury myself in a blanket, and cry as soon as the plane took off. I never travel without a rosary, and I hold on to it as if my life depended on it every time.

But here’s the important part: I still did it.

Masochistic as it may seem, I still forced myself to travel. Even though riding planes was torture for me, knowing what lay ahead as soon as the plane touched down gave me strength to go on board.

As a kid, my incentives for enduring a plane ride were meeting the fairytale princesses in Disneyland, getting lost inside the gargantuan Toys R’ Us in Hong Kong or being surrounded by thousands of books in an American bookstore that have yet to arrive to Manila.

As I grew older, these would be replaced by the giddy anticipation of bargain-shopping in Bangkok, the experience snow for the first time in Canada, or the sight of koalas and kangaroos in Australia.

Never would I see or experience all these by being stationary in my own country. Flying was a necessary evil.

Taking Risks

Staying within our own comfort zone makes us feel safe and secure. At home there is very little possibility of getting lost.

We know the bad places to avoid, what to expect throughout the day, the places to find the best food or bargains. We deal with the same people everyday. We already know who to trust, who to be wary of, and how to treat them.

It is like living in a fishbowl: predictable, with little room for change and excitement.

Some people are content with that, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with it. But for people who have seen and experienced a bigger world out there, the thought of living in that sort of monotony would just as well make them feel claustrophobic.

I am one of the latter. Staying put in one place, without ever having to ride a plane again, would be nice, yet knowing that there are numerous surprises waiting outside is even more unbearable than the thought of flying.

After all, what is a few hours of enduring mental agony to gain an enriched life? So, I chose to rise above my fear.

While I eventually learned how to stop crying days befpre a plane ride, I still find myself closing my eyes and covering my ears during take-offs out of habit. The fears never goes away.

But as the engines roar into life and the plane’s wheels leave the runway, I remind myself that the destination is going to be worth it. Gradually along the ride, I lean back, and anticipate the adventures to come.

What fears have you conquered in order to travel? Share in the comments!

Holy man / Photo: lylevincent

During my recent solo trip to India, I found myself thinking about the darker side of traveling – the sense of distrust, alienation, and confusion that can result from negative or disturbing experiences with another culture or traveler.

These thoughts came to me as I walked along the ghats in Varanasi. I’d been in India for less than 48 hours. Already I was joyfully immersed, but I’d also never felt so unsure of who to trust.

It wasn’t long before a male Sadhu (holy man) accosted me and made grotesque sexual advances. Without realizing it, I’d decided Sadhus were not to be trusted.

Later, a female Sadhu with an unflinching stare and a wide smile walked with me along the ghats. I grew uneasy in her presence and turned down an invitation (made with hand gestures) to go to her temple. At the last minute, I changed my mind. I ended up participating in a puja (worship), which now stands out amongst my most interesting experiences in Varanasi.

I realized that my fears had been unfounded – she’d had good intentions. But how was I to know how to distinguish between the false and the friendly?

The Threat Of Uncertainty

When frequent and intense interactions with strangers are combined with a lack of stable social support, our sense of safety can be challenged. The exhilaration of endless possibility can morph into threatening uncertainty.

Of course these challenges aren’t always related to travel. Our species is a social one, and thus we are forced to learn and re-learn about social trust and safety in our everyday lives. For these critical moments of uncertainty can determine whether or not we withdraw and cling rigidly to our perceptions or plunge forward into new territory despite our fears.

In the development of these skills, travel presents particularly difficult challenges – but the rewards can be vast.

What exactly tries our sense of trust and openness while we’re traveling? First, being in a new culture forces us to work harder to establish an initial sense of trust with local people.

Unable to understand cultural nuances, we must rely on facial expressions and body language, and recall abstract information we’ve absorbed from a book or a person. Local con-artists are quick to exploit this with false smiles which can fool even the most experienced travelers.

The Shock Of Deceit

Whatever the case, negative experiences can drain a person of their energy and enthusiasm for a place or culture. We may become bitter, withdraw, and experience feelings of anger and disappointment.

Begging woman / Photo: gregor_y

No matter how many people tell you beforehand to watch out for the tuk-tuk drivers in Bangkok or warn you of the false friendliness of the store owners in Varanasi, many of us have found ourselves in precisely the situations we were warned of.

We are duped, and if we imagine it happening again and again, this tends to fuel our feelings.

In the midst of navigating through strange physical and cultural territory, we often turn to other travelers or expats for relief.

One of the great joys of traveling is the opportunity to meet and share experiences with people from all over the world. Conversations flourish as we meet other excited travelers, opening ourselves up in ways that we might never do at home.

I’ve had unforgettable conversations and intense adventures with people I hardly knew, simply because of the open heart and spirit of adventure that so many travelers have.

But what happens when things go wrong? When you open up to someone who turns out to have ulterior motives, is dishonest or disrespectful? The sense of community, bonding, and intimacy is jeopardized. Feeling naive, we begin to question our ability to sense other people’s motivations.

A Woman’s Challenge

Women are bound to encounter more difficulty in establishing straightforward relationships with both locals and expats.

In India, I found that it just was not possible to be “friends” with an Indian man – even saying hello and making eye contact was seen as an invitation for sexual attention. In other places, such as South America, it can be outright dangerous to make eye contact, let alone speak with a man.

In some ways, this makes interactions simpler, but it also belies a sadness. As female guests in certain cultures, we are aware that any interaction with a local man may lead to a negative experience. Our only option, then, is to ignore them.

I’ve seen and heard of women who do meet the exceptions. I wonder what barriers these women came up against in establishing that rapport.

For much of my time spent in Varanasi, I felt quite raw – I’d had some negative experiences with locals, and had found that a new male expat friend was not someone to be trusted or respected.

I often had to withdraw and rest – I found that my continuous suspicion of people, my feelings of powerlessness and insecurity, were draining. Yet I kept on going – I continued to meet new people, reminded myself to keep an open heart, and reconciled myself with the culture and other travelers.

The Payoff

I won’t lie and say that this was easy. But it was worth it.

Looking back on my time spent in Varanasi, I realize how much I learned about myself and about our species. As humans, we take risks every day when we open ourselves up to other people. Unfortunately, many people who are willing to take advantage of that, whether consciously or unconsciously.

Our greatest task is to learn how we relate to others, why we relate to them in a certain way, and how our ways of relating affect not only ourselves and our intimates, but the entire world.

What do you think of the challenges of trust abroad? Share your thoughts in the comments!

Photo: Evil Erin

At first I thought this would be an easy topic. Five things that bring me happiness. Simple. But then I started to actually think about it. What makes me happy might not make you happy (and vice versa).

So I asked around the Matador team for what they thought brings them happiness, hoping for at least a couple of unanimous points. The responses were as random and varied as lottery results.

The more common replies were related to friends, family and health. While all of these do bring most people happiness, my concern was with those who preferred being alone and people in poor health.

If I included these things, what does this mean for them? Is it impossible for the loners and the sick to be happy? I don’t think so.

Borrowing a page from Buddhist philosophy

Buddhists recognize that happiness — unfailing happiness — can only be found internally. The goal is to stop trying to change the world around us to bring happiness, but to change our minds.

Anything external that we chase cannot bring everlasting happiness, only temporary and fleeting happiness; at some point it will let us down.

Many things that we think will bring us happiness — a new car, new house, more friends — usually just cause us more pain and suffering. We’re constantly worried someone’s going to scratch or bump our vehicle, rob our home, or break our hearts and hurt our feelings. A source of true happiness would not be able to cause us any suffering.

To find happiness is a lofty goal and takes a dedication that most of us aren’t willing to give, even though it’s in our own best interests. Instead, we continue to try to shape the world outside us, rather than trying to fix the inside.

Here are five points to ponder as you search for your own happiness:

1. Introspection

Facing your demons…being a victim. ‘Everything is always fucked up for me, nobody understands’. It took me years of not being honest with myself, running from the truth, denying what was in my face, blaming everybody else. ‘She’s nasty, she’s fucked up…look at her, look at them’…but then there was a common denominator: Me. – Liza Jessie Peterson

If we can’t face ourselves and recognize that we are the source of our own happiness, what chance do we have? Happiness is not “out there.” It’s in here. Easy to say, hard to put into practice.

But the first step to solving a problem is to recognize the source of it. Once we admit to ourselves that we — and only we — are responsible for our own happiness, then we can move forward in trying to attain it.

2. Freedom

I do think people could fall into the trap of understanding freedom as ‘I do what I like’. I don’t really think that’s freedom because you’re still bound by your desires. So where is the freedom? Freedom would be…you understand your desires, the compulsion of those desires, the addiction of that, and you are able to transcend that. Otherwise…your passion is determining your behaviour. – Father Lancy Prabhu

Photo: Capture Queen

Freedom as we know it in the Westernized world is not true freedom. And this “freedom” will not bring us happiness. One need look no further than free-market capitalism. Go on, you’re free to do whatever you want.

Combine this with our society’s way of making us feel inadequate and marketing manipulation by the media (who, ironically, are exercising their freedom), and we find ourselves always wanting. This wanting and the attachment to things we’ve managed to accumulate are the banes to our happiness. We must free ourselves from our own desires to find true happiness.

Freedom and restraint are two sides of one thing. How can there be freedom without restraint? It’s impossible. – Prof Xu Yuangzhong

3. Compassion

Why are we compassionate towards friends and family, but rarely towards strangers? It’s because we share a connection with our family and friends, either through blood or through similar interests.

What if we could find a connection with complete strangers? With the rest of humanity? Might it make us more compassionate towards everybody? Because we do share something common: everybody — no exceptions — wants to be happy.

This desire to be happy is the motivating force behind every single thing that we do, from the moment we wake up to the time we fall asleep. So recognizing that the people we see on TV, the people we pass on the street, the people we’ve never seen and never will see — want to be happy. Just like us.

Compassion gained through accepting this will make us better humans, will help us help each other, and will help to make ourselves happy.

4. Generosity

The mind has a very bad habit, which we call self-cherishing. And I call it ‘What about me?’…it’s a bore. And it’s a drag. And nobody wants to hear it. So you can just shut up…and get off of it. And give. That’s all. GIVE. Be here and give. Connect with people…and you’re so busy giving, you don’t have time to think about yourself…um, you’re gonna be a lot happier. – Baghavan Das

This is closely linked to compassion. After gaining compassion comes our willingness to help out others, even complete strangers.

Photo: pattista

5. Contentment

If you substitute ‘content’ for ‘happy’ you’ll probably find that you’re happy. ‘Cause we’ve associated happiness with laughing and smiling…throwing beach balls to your children…and I’ve never been that guy.

So I’ve thought maybe I’m not happy. If you switch it for content…the practice of contentment…’oh god I’m happy. I’m a happy man. Oh, look at me! – Billy Connolly

I would venture to guess that all of us, anyone right now who is reading this article, has everything they need to be happy. So why does continued happiness seem so elusive?

In general, we may say we’re happy. We might even have those moments where we sit back and realize how privileged we are, count our lucky stars, and genuinely feel like we have the world in our palms.

But how long does this last? How long until the next person pisses us off, until we see the next thing we “need,” until the next feelings of anxiousness steal away our happiness? If we can make the wanting stop and be content with what we have, we would find we can be more consistently happy.

Do you think these are the keys to happiness, or are there other important points we missed? Share your thoughts below.

*All quotes used are from 1 Giant Leap’s documentary What About Me?.

Photo: Photographer Christine Taylor

I’ve witnessed quite a few painful breakups over the past couple of months, where people I care about deeply continue to have a very hard time.

My situation is a bit different – it’s not exactly a broken heart, per se.

It is more of a lingering connection that I couldn’t seem to shake without giving myself the medicine that has always worked in the past.

I realize it might be taboo to say that it is a good idea to take off traveling in order to deal with a broken heart. Many would say this is running away, or at least acts as a way to not deal with your feelings head on.

Trust me, I’ve spent months working on how to fully let it go, with all the tools in my mind-body-spirit tool chest. There’s been sitting with my feelings, whenever and wherever they’ve come up; affirmations of better things (and people) to come; rituals to help me let go.

But being in the same small town and wondering when I’d run into him again maintained an energetic tie that I just couldn’t seem to break.

And so, as the people that lived above me were driving me crazy, I was feeling a general lack of inspiration for the things that usually inspired me, and my two-year-travel itch kicked in, I decided to take off.

Knowing that my travels would make me quickly forget about him was just icing on the cake.

The Healing Power of Travel

I can relate that as an undergrad, four months of the food, wine, and spirited Italians of Florence finally got me over the boy to whom I had been attached for way too many years.

The intense year-long crush (that never would have worked out) was mostly gone after two weeks bouncing around Islington, London. It was never to be remembered once I was white-water rafting on the Zambezi River in Zimbabwe.

Photo: Unlisted Sightings

Traveling allows you to see places and meet people that are so different from the situation you may have been stuck in.

It may, in fact, make you realize you’re a very different person than you thought you were. A better, stronger person.

And I’ll admit it, I’m a wallower. I have to get out into the world to get out of (and over) myself.

I’m certainly not saying you should travel just to get over a person, but I’m not too worried that many of you would. You must have the adventure bug and a love for travel for this option to even work. If you aren’t up for meeting new people and having new experiences, then you’ll just end up wallowing somewhere across the world.

But if the spirit of travel implores you to search for a new perspective, I say go for it and don’t let anyone tell you to stay home.

Have you gotten over a break-up by taking off on an adventure? Share your thoughts below.

Community Connection

Need some help deciding where to go after a break-up? Emily Dilling shares her five favorite trips to deal with a broken heart. If you find yourself ready to move on once on the road, be sure to check out The Laws of Love on the Road.

Does life have to involve regret? / Photo: ekler

Regret seems to come with age maybe because, as writer David Sedaris wrote, “when you’re young, it’s easy to believe that such an opportunity will come again, maybe even a better one.”

At the age of twenty, I firmly believed in a “no regrets” policy because it was hard to think mistakes couldn’t be set right somehow. With the distance of time, my perspective has become a bit more informed.

The attitude behind my policy at twenty was arrogant; especially since it masked my timidity to really live up to it.

In Voltaire’s Candide the eponymous hero can be crudely separated into two categories: the young optimist and the provincial minded youth.

His breakneck brand of innocence serves him well throughout his globetrotting adventures where he doggedly pursues every opportunity.

But by the end he has shed the proverbial rose-colored glasses viewing the heart of his past self with weariness and insists that “all that is very well […] but let us cultivate our garden.”

The Cost Of Living

Many face this dilemma at one point or another – where reconciliation must be made between the cost of living and all it entails and fulfilling “the dream.”

For roamers it is an itch that festers until suddenly you’re on a bumpy bus ride far away from a zombie existence and filled with an overwhelming sense of freedom and affinity for the moment. Some of us never turn back and continue trekking; feeding that ever increasing gorge whose only demand is that you keep on going.

But what if you lose the ability to stop and recognize the moment for its potential?

Although my time spent in Italy was happy and full, I look back at my twenty year old self and recognize two moments with an apologetic heart for my youthful rashness.

Moment #1

One lazy afternoon in Florence, my roommate and I were at the train station purchasing tickets to Paris. We split off to browse the nearby newsstands.

Photo: yanig

A backpacker asked what map I was looking for. I told him Paris. He had just come from there! He needed a map of Lucca. I had just been there!

Earnest and sincere he drew me in. Talking to him was easy. When discussing his favorite Parisian museum his face became adorably animated. But, I was shy and incredibly pre-occupied.

Abruptly my roommate and I left to continue our errands. He looked a bit bewildered when we turned the corner out of the station. The encounter had been all too brief and yet indelible.

Did I leave like that purposely? No, I just didn’t know any better; I couldn’t hold onto the tease of something more sparked by that instant connection. After a few moments of gasps and curses, I shrugged him off, thinking that providence would give me a chance to correct my blunder.

A delusion only the very naïve and young could enjoy.

Moment #2

The other offense was that I didn’t loiter around in Rome.

I barely noticed the Forum due to the crowds, sacrificed a detour to a personal favorite Bellini statue, didn’t even venture inside the Coliseum and skipped an evening out in Rome all because annoyingly, I was too cheap to catch a later train back to Florence.

During the sprint across the city like a mad woman to catch my bus I gave up on forming a swath of Roman memories.

Are these two incidents regrets? I’m hesitant to categorize them as such; instead I’d rather think of them as important lessons.

Obliviousness happens. The “no regrets” thing isn’t a rule. It’s a warning to remember that missed chances occur, and the only safeguard is to be mindful of that knowledge.

Frank Sinatra, one of the masters of living, summed it up perfectly in his finely aged voice, “Regrets, I’ve had a few. But then again, too few to mention.”

Have you had any travel regrets? How did you deal with them? Share your thoughts in the comments!

Your perception of place depends on your mind.

Travel is not just a physical experience. It is a state of mind, a life journey. And it can be all kinds of different things to different people.

Some of us travel all the time, some of us travel occasionally, and some of us only travel in their heads.

For some, it’s an exploration of museums in Florence, or a week at the beach in the Canaries, or a spiritual retreat in India. And some travel while staying where they are.

Travel is often an escape, a relaxation, a search, a dream. Many people work the whole year long thinking about their holiday. Some try to get away every weekend. Others plan a trip to a different country as soon as time and money permit it. And there are those who are on the road all the time.

But whatever is the destination, whatever is the journey, usually all of us have a place called home. A place where we rest before traveling again, or simply the place where we were born.

And quite often, we fail to see its beauty.

We talk about other destinations. We often dream of a better place, a better life, a different country, another journey. But how often do we talk about enjoying the place called home?

Your Inner Journey

Travel, you may have noticed, is directly related to the state of our minds.

If we go to Paris on a with the biggest love of our lives, it’s highly unlikely that we won’t enjoy the place. (Paris is actually very difficult not to like, but it happens).

If you go there while you are miserable, you might find that Paris is a very miserable city. Even if you stay at the best hotel and visit the best restaurants, even if you explore the whole Louvre.

The same with other destinations. You might stay at the worst hostel, have your camera stolen, and eat only bread the whole day long…but still enjoy your journey.

And this has nothing to do with the place. It has to do only with you, and how you perceive your own existence.

Osho, the great mystique of the last century said that “beauty lies in the banality of things”. He also said and quite often, that the world’s misery lies mainly in the West. The richest countries in the world is where you find the biggest misery.

Pack Your Baggage

Happy people don’t travel in order to escape. Happy people travel simply because they just love to travel.

Photo: jojiang

And that is why travel starts with you, because whatever your destination, whatever your journey, you always take yourself with you. You always carry your misery or happiness within you.

It happened to me. I visited one of the best cities in the world – Barcelona, and failed to see its beauty.

That’s because I was miserable at that time. My parents, who had brought me there, thought that it would help. I managed to laugh once while being there, but as soon as I came back to Amsterdam (my other home) I was back in my misery. I hated Barcelona. But I hated Amsterdam as well.

But Barcelona was a lesson. It was an opening for my eyes. It was a push to start life-changes in the place where I lived. It was a push to transform the place called home.

Amsterdam became my home. Even if I wasn’t born there, even if I hated it and loved it at the same time.

It became my home because once I was back from Barcelona I realized that it wasn’t the city which I hated, it was my own life.

The Choice

If you feel miserable in your life, you should travel within your own city. Look for another job, find a dancing class near you, discover a new café, find an unusual bookshop, make new friends, or find people who can help you.

Photo: littlevanities

The travel which I started in Amsterdam eventually led me to another place, another job. A totally different life in a new country.

You always have a choice, and you always can ask for help. But here’s the key: you need to travel into your inner mind.

We are happy when we have balance in five important spheres of our lives: money, job, relationship, health, and creativity.

One of the main lessons I learned in my life is that you usually always have the money that you need. It’s other spheres of our lives which ask for a bigger effort.

The Value Of Home

My misery is not gone entirely, partly because I still live in the West.

Misery is everywhere, even if people can afford a lot of things, even if they can travel to the Caribbean islands and stay there in the best resorts. Even if they have Internet at home and plan their journey from start to the end with the help of the computer.

You can be the richest person in the world, but fail to enjoy your journey.

You can be the poorest man in the world and still enjoy your journey.

And this is because you know the value of home.

It starts with your soul. And each human soul has an enormous beauty. Each human soul has an exploration, a journey, and a discovery, which can tell you all about life and the world without the necessity to take a plane or a train and go somewhere.

The beauty of the banality of things is what you do in your daily life, and how you perceive the place where you live, and your own inner journey.

Travel starts with you.

What are your thoughts on how your mind influences your perception of travel? Share your thoughts in the comments!

Photo: Dan Queiroz

Ever pondered what the future has in store for you?

Sure you have. Everyone has.

But, not everyone has been to a psychic. For some people, they may have not had the opportunity to see a real psychic (or intuitive, as I like to call them).

For others, the idea of someone actually being able to tell the future is bull shit. Then there are those who fall in between, and this guide is for you.

I feel it’s important to note that to me, seeing a psychic is more about finding out what is happening for you on an energetic level than anything else. I don’t necessarily believe any person can tell you what your future holds, because there are endless possibilities. What actually happens depends on the choices that you make.

But while most of us can easily tap into what is happening for us physically, mentally, and to some extent, emotionally, quite a few of us don’t understand what is going on with what is sometimes described as our aura, or qi. And this is where an intuitive can shed light that helps you in making decisions about your future.

Here are five ways to make your first time seeing a psychic…ahem, intuitive, a success.

1. Get a recommendation.

I’ve only had the pleasure of seeing one “psychic” who I thought was recommended to me, but actually wasn’t. Turned out the other woman who worked at the “parlor” was the one I was supposed to see.

Anyway, this woman was awful. And although she “read” my palms and got a couple of things right, as soon as she said I was going to be married and have two kids (code for: ‘this is what I tell everyone’), I thought, “WRONG! I’m outta here.”

Trust me, it is best to see someone who at least two people you know really well, or at least 25 people on Yelp!, would lay their lives down for. This means no random woman on the street when you are in Thailand and have an extra $5, because when she is completely off base, you’ll deem every intuitive a fraud. No need to waste your time or money.

2. Go in with an open mind.

Photo: David Sifry

If you are set on not believing what the intuitive is going to say, again, you might as well not waste your time and money by going to see them. It is a much more enjoyable experience if you actually think they may have some good advice to give you.

And if you follow rule number one, than you pretty much have a guarantee that they will give you at least one or two juicy little tidbits.

3. Refrain from asking questions about your future.

‘What?’ you ask. ‘Why?’ you demand. “Isn’t that the whole point of seeing a psy…I mean, intuitive?”

Apparently, you aren’t reading carefully. Ok, you caught yourself on the whole psychic/intuitive thing, so I will give you credit there. But as I mentioned before, seeing an intuitive is mostly about finding out what is going on for you energetically.

And honestly, you can get into some sticky places if you ask specifics about your future. A friend had an intuitive tell her that her dad was going to die within a year or two, which actually made sense since he was a walking-heart-attack-waiting-to-happen.

My friend freaked out and ended up living with her parents again due to this and several other circumstances. Although he had some health scares, he is still alive four years later.

I think intuitives can be of great help in seeing what is happening with different issues in your life. I also think they are horrible at timelines and accuracy of the future (not through any fault of their own–again, things happen due to the choices we make).

4. Be up front with the intuitive about what you want to hear and what you don’t.

Personally, one of the most helpful things that came from meeting a great intuitive was digging deeply into some childhood stuff.

This was the very same stuff that it had taken me three years of therapy to simply to scratch the surface. All the pieces fell into place and I thought, “Oh, now I get it…”

But we were dancing around an area I wasn’t quite ready to face, so I told her I didn’t want to go there. She had already “read” that I wasn’t ready to touch the subject, but it was still good for my own sake to assert myself and boundaries. Do what is right for you at the moment.

5. Work with someone more than once.

Just the same as a doctor, therapist, or tattoo artist, when you find an intuitive you connect with, stick with them for a while. It’s not that you need to see them weekly or anything – I find that every six months to a year, or as I’m encountering a big life change, is plenty – but you get to build on what you’ve already discussed, and “dig a little deeper” each time you go in.

That can end up being 20 times as emotionally rewarding as cranking up that visualization CD when you go to bed every night (not that Deepak doesn’t have his place). It feels a bit like hypnotherapy on crack.

Right before leaving for my current trip, I went to see the woman I call when I need a little guidance. She helped me to take a look at some of the stuff that I was trying my damndest to ignore concerning my travels.

Just remember, sometimes awareness sure can muck things up.

Do you have any recommendations about seeing a psychic for the first time? Share your thoughts below.

Wisdom from experience / Photo: tiago.ribeiro

“Up top,” the old man said. He demonstrated, opening wide to reveal his tongue touching the roof of his mouth. “Easy, see?”

Sure. Already the tiny hut was hot. We sat in a half circle around the rusted oil drum, five Americans and the old Aleutian. Inside the drum a fire torched, causing sweat to run down our naked torsos. A rough ceiling hung inches overhead. Heat and sweat.

A small room. The old man wanted to know if we were ready. Sure.

Gently he dipped the aged soup can into the bin of boiling water. We watched him stretch the crudely fashioned dipper over the heat. He smiled, then began to methodically pour the water onto the small rocks covering the drum. The rocks hissed and belched narrow towers of steam.

For three seconds nothing more happened. Then a blanket of heat struck, reflecting from the outer walls. The painful burn flayed my back and I felt real fear. A blur of human flesh bowled through the tiny door before me, pursued by Hell’s climate.

Then a layer of steam clouded the tiny room, diminishing visibility. Remembering the old man’s words I pressed my tongue upward.

A Traveler’s Tale

When I think on travel it’s the truest moment that comes to mind, like the old man sharing his life in the midst of Alaska.

The river wild / Photo: code poet

That my own story should strike me as a traveler’s tale seems odd. For so long I’ve idealized the true traveler. He’s always shown superior understanding, enlightenment, and fulfillment. A man of the road, heightened by awareness.

I am not that man. Yet, I’ve traveled and seen places, acted occasionally as a tourist, but attempted to learn. Did I somewhere unknowingly become the true traveler? Or am I a tourist fascinated by travel? I can only answer by returning to the beginning.

First, there was the desire to travel. Then there was the plan. We’d carry backpacks, stay in hostels and explore without a plan, all in an effort to capture the spirit of travel.

But even as we moved I felt us failing my romanticized notions. Yes, Christina and I ran to trains lugging our packs and lost our way in the streets of Venice.

We thwarted the Lonely Planet recommendations in order to find the world’s best kept dining secrets. In Rome we crossed verbal swords with an unscrupulous guide and took victory. We overcame logistical obstacles and breathed the experiences, history, and culture home couldn’t offer.

We were, in short, on vacation. And isn’t vacation the enemy of travel?

A Wealthy Warlord

That realization introduced guilt to an otherwise rewarding experience. By scanning online posts, watching documentaries, and reading insightful articles I began to educate myself on the parasitic tourist.

Words and pages filed by the Zen nomads reprimanded me for my apparent disregard for human suffering. I became, through their words, a “wealthy warlord lobbing missiles into the hearts of the environment and foreign cultures.” I was entirely disconnected from the art of travel.

So I decided to change. I couldn’t—or wouldn’t—eliminate travel. But I could determine to travel responsibly, with an eye for local immersion. Travel and understanding, I reasoned, could coexist.

Feeling my “rich, white man’s burden” lightening, I chose Alaska as a destination. Not Anchorage, Denali, or cruise ship Alaska, but working Alaska. Westbound for a job in a salmon cannery.

Go North

In western Alaska I spent a month mucking about with dead fish. I lived in housing constructed of plywood and corrugated siding, beside the gray Naknek River. Bald eagles flew over daily. A grizzly heaved himself into the mess hall dumpster occasionally.

Alaskan ship awaits cargo / Photo: author

I toiled through long hours and lost too much sleep. My coworkers were Ukrainians, Dominicans, Mexicans, Japanese and Turks. Many were Aleutian natives who annually hopped from cannery to cannery, following the fish. Together we worked and ate and walked into town.

The old man taught us about the native sweat hut. His tongue trick allowed us to grit through the inferno until we began to sweat like Aleutian men.

In the heat the old man shared a sliver of culture, a moment of camaraderie, a touch of humanity in a wild land. Something museums and tours couldn’t offer.

Since Europe and Alaska I’ve struggled with the traveler versus tourist debate. The words from both parties are too irate for sensible, worldly citizens who claim awareness. Neither group, it seems, can accept that I view my experiences as equally rewarding. So I’ve been forced to manufacture my own ideas.

To Plunge Right In

The difference between a tourist and a “true” traveler is not that their directions are so misaligned. It’s that their stopping off points differ.

Where a vacationer goes to view another place and culture a traveler goes to plunge right in. Europe for me was informative, pleasurable, and wildly exciting. It was a world where each day was a joy. Do I now know how the Italians, Swiss or English live? Not really, I tell the pundits, but I know how they welcome foreigners.

The salmon cannery showed me a side of Alaska beyond the glaciers and grizzlies. I learned what life is like for thousands of natives, but never did I misinterpret that knowledge as total understanding.

At times it was fun, mostly it was work and waiting. I wasn’t on vacation. Instead I was living ordinary life in an extraordinary place. The good was tempered by the bad.

Now when I travel I prefer to journey on a budget. Often I sleep in tents, cook meals on a camp stove, and take strangers up on offers of dinner, a backyard, or coffee.I ride a bike because it’s cheaper and more enjoyable than a car. I do these things because it’s the only way I can afford to travel.

If I won the lottery tomorrow, would I give it up for first class and fancy restaurants? Never, but I’d probably spring for a vacation once a year. I now have a tough time believing that my enjoyable week harms underdeveloped nations.

Miserable people don’t change the world.

What are your thougths on the myth of the true traveler? Share your thoughts in the comments!

Gulliver is swarmed by little people.

There’s a reason why some tales, like Gulliver’s Travels, are considered classic works, contrary to what one may have believed in high school.

I received some out-of-class instruction upon this matter on a recent trip in Southeast Asia when I picked up the book due to its voyaging theme. What I found was a very applicable (and surprising) parallel between Jonathan Swift’s 18th century novel and my own life.

The Proper Context

The book is split into four different voyages that Gulliver undertakes. The first is the most well-known, where Gulliver is captured by a race of diminutive peoples, but the trip that most interested me was his final adventure.

Like his previous three seafaring episodes, Gulliver once again (you’d think he’d learn by now) finds himself bereft on the shore of some unknown land.

The creatures populating this particular isle are the most unusual of the whole novel. The principle inhabitants are a race of ultra-intelligent and extremely logical horses, called Houyhnhnms. The Houyhnhnms initially react suspiciously to Gulliver because he closely resembles the other species that lives on the island — a barbaric, speechless humanoid race called Yahoos.

In time, Gulliver learns the language of the Houyhnhnms and finds himself enamored with the noble creatures, whose society lacks base desires such as greed, selfishness or violence.

He begins to dread ever facing humanity again, unable to bear its multitude of vices after observing the equine utopia. While he began his tenure on the island explaining and defending his fellow humans, he has now changed to the point where he cannot go back to what was once so familiar.

Solo In Asia

Gulliver speaks with a Houyhnhnm / Source.

While Gulliver found himself disgusted with all of human natural in general, I struggle with one vice in particular – procrastination. I’ve spent my life consistently putting things off and constantly endeavoring to distract from any task I attempt to undertake.

Yet, as I traveled solo across the Asian continent, leaving behind a whole host of distractions, I felt a sense of liberation and energy not typically present in my day-to-day. I tackled day trips and night life with equal enthusiasm, made new friends every day and only slept on the bus rides.

The first leg of my solo journey went through China, starting in Beijing then by train to Shanghai and on down to Vietnam. My Gulliver moment (as it were) occurred on the 28-hour trip from Shanghai to the small town of Nanning.

I had been traveling for a little over a week with little pause. I had seen the Great Wall and Tiananmen Square, explored tiny Beijing alleys on a bike, walked around downtown Shanghai for hours and drank beer with a British telecom consultant. For a guy who often has trouble even finding the will to send the occasionally email to his parents, all this activity was a rare feat.

I had wondered, prior to my leaving, the wisdom of such an endeavor and even more about the prospect of doing it alone. I feared I might reach a few weeks into my trip and start longing for the comfort of a couch and my laptop. I had been afraid that if I pushed my boundaries, the boundaries would push back.

Would I retreat back to safety rather or apply enough force to break free?

Given No Choice

What I found is that when given absolutely no choice but to do, I did. As human beings, we all tend to under-estimate our abilities. On the road, I surprised myself with what I was capable of, and the resulting discovery has shifted the way in which I want to live my life.

Yet, along with this sense of discovery there was a growing worry. When finally faced with eviction from the Houyhnhnm lands, Gulliver despairs; so did I as the date for my flight home approached.

My experiences had changed me, but it had been a product of my surroundings. I wondered how much would stay once the scenery changed.

Gulliver knew that he was not capable of achieving the kind of serenity exhumed by the Houyhnhnms, but could only observe and absorb it by being around them.

In the same way, I knew that the kind of energetic, adventurous and outgoing self that I had found out in Southeast Asia would be hard to reproduce once I arrived back home, surrounded by conveniences and excuses.

The Road Continues

This whole scenario is often both the reason for and challenge of backpacking abroad.

We displace ourselves in circumstance in order to relocate ourselves in mentality. I don’t have any secret insight on how to carry home the things you find while traveling that you can’t pack.

Unfortunately, neither did Gulliver, who was so disgusted by the presence of his family when he returned home that he bought two horses and conversed with them for four hours a day.

The challenge of travel is not to recreate some mythic mindset on the return home, which is what Swift satirizes Gulliver for doing in the book’s conclusion.

Instead, take your experiences from the road and let them help you move further along, no matter where your path finds you.

What are your thoughts on Gulliver’s relevance to you own travels? Share your thoughts in the comments!

Photo: Sweet Trade [Photography]

MSNBC recently ran an article noting which US cities will reign supreme, population-style, come 2025.

Shock of all shocks, NYC will remain number 1 (yawn), and Raleigh is set to break records with its fastest pace of growth (minus the banks in Charlotte, I assume).

Detroit is expected to slip out of the top 10, but poor Cleveland is gonna move out of the picture entirely.

Ok, that’s great information about American cities, but what about the cities in the rest of the world?

Right now, Tokyo clocks in at number 1 with a stifling 33,200,000, just about double New York’s population. Sao Paulo, Brazil, Seoul-Incheon, South Korea, and Mexico City, Mexico round out the top 5.

But if you think back over even recent history, there have already been some population shifts in the last century that indicate 2025 could look a bit different than 2009.

20th Century Decline

Paris’ population has declined 27% since 1927. Entire countries have also been hit: in Russia, deaths currently outnumber births, with the most of those dying between the working ages of 29-49. Growth in Germany has been so slow that the UN says the country needs to take in 3 million workers a year for the foreseeable future.

And despite what is often said about the insane growth of China, its population is expected to stabilize by 2030 thanks to the “one child” policy (which is also said to also be contributing in a negative fashion to a large over-65 population and shrinking work force).

Somewhat surprisingly, the population of sub-Saharan Africa continues to increase rapidly, despite low life expectancy due to disease, war, and famine. According to Voice of America, by 2050, Africa will constitute 20% of the world’s population.

So which cities are expected to be on top in 2025? Tokyo is expected to stay in the number 1 spot, according to a Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs report. But it looks like Mumbai is going to take over the second spot, Dehli the third, with Dhaka, Bangladesh in the fourth spot and then Sao Paulo rounding out the top five.

The news is pretty clear–out with the West, and in with the East (with Africa and South America thrown in for good measure). But you knew that already, didn’t you?

The Bigger Population Picture

Since we are talking about cities and countries handling their business or dying out, why not take a look at the world’s population as a whole?

Worried about the future / Photo: Ali Brohi

We’re used to hearing about how the world is growing at an alarming rate.

One future scenario predicts that although it took “from the beginning of time” to 1950 to reach 2.5 billion peeps, it’ll only take another 41 years from now to almost quadruple that number.

There will be famine, water shortage, huge repercussions for global warming; you know, all the stuff we hear about on the news everyday.

Scary, isn’t it?

I appreciate Steven Mosher’s, from the Population Research Institute, milder take on the subject:

Since even the most frantic of population alarmists now agree that the world’s population in the early nineties was only increasing by some 90 million per year (an increment which has since fallen to 76 million) there was zero chance that the world would “soon be adding a billion people a year,” much less “every month”…listen closely, and you will hear the muffled sound of populations crashing.

PRI’s projections show that underpopulation may be the real evildoer by the 22nd century, as the population will peak in 2040, and then will fall back to current levels by 2082. That population will be quite a bit older than our current one, though.

And already there are complaints that birth rates are too low, with not enough people in the younger generation to take care of the current ailing generation.

Mosher adds: “By 2004, the U.N. Population Division (UNDP) found that 65 countries, including 22 in the less developed world, had fertility rates that were below the level needed to ensure the long-term survival of the population.”

Uh oh. We can only hope Jason Silva will hurry up and figure out how to break that pesky death trap.

What do you think the world’s population, and possible demise, will look like by 2025? Share your thoughts below.

Kuta Beach, Bali / Photo: bobby-james

Barely a year had passed since the September 11th attacks in New York City, when bombings struck the small Indonesian resort town of Kuta Beach, Bali.

Two popular night spots for tourists, the Sari Club and Paddy’s Pub were destroyed, one by a suicide bomber, the other by a car bomb. A year prior I had spent several nights in a row partying at both Paddy’s and the Sari Club.

The sting of knowing how easily it could have been me instead of those killed was undeniable.

In October 2008, I watched news reports coming out of India, detailing the horror of gunmen storming the corridors of a Mumbai hotel, exterminating people based solely on their nationality.

I’d walked the same halls a year earlier and once again, felt that same sinking understanding of how easy it is to simply be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Earthquakes, tsunamis, cyclones – more threats to our personal safety, none of which would discriminate based on nationality or religion. Even now, I’m writing this as the world looks to be on the brink of an influenza pandemic.

Terror, it seems, is forever lurking around the corner.

How then, can we possibly consider travel while such horrible things continue to exist? Can we escape the Enemy, be it in the form of disease, natural disaster or human being?

The Truth About Danger

Bali Memorial / Photo: antwerpenR

The fact of the matter is that there is no easy answer, no simple remedy. Danger exists, it always has and it always will.

Perhaps that isn’t much of a comfort, but once we allow ourselves to surrender to that concept, the easier it is to gain perspective.

The vast majority of the time that I’ve ventured out of my own little world, I’ve found that by and large, kind and generous people populate the earth. People whom in many cases, will go out of their way to help or lend a hand if need be.

True, I’ve also been robbed at knifepoint and on one particularly bad occasion, hospitalized after receiving a beating by a gang of skinheads.

I don’t wear these unfortunate experiences as any sort of badge of honour, but I have learned that bad things do happen. That much is inevitable.

Studies done by the National Safety Council show that one is far more likely to perish by drowning in the bath or accidentally suffocating in bed than as a result of travel.

And while such statistics are in no way consolation for those who lost friends and family in the Bali bombings, or the Mumbai attacks, they do emphasize the heart of the matter: that risk isn’t restricted solely to the adventurous.

A Broader View

Bali children hold candles in memory / Photo: leoniewise

Perhaps it is too easy to build up a false sense of understanding about the world around us. Without the first hand experience that travel provides, we tend to rely on hearsay and news snippets to define our opinions of foreign lands.

Unfortunately, too often, this information gives us a microscopic glimpse, rather than a broad view of the whole.

For example, which of these four countries would you guess to be statistically more at peace both within and without, than the United States: Syria, Rwanda, Cambodia or Jamaica? According to the 2008 World Peace Index, all of the aforementioned nations rank as statistically more at peace than the United States.

Nonetheless, we can only read so much out of such information. These statistics, as with all news and information are simply guidelines.

The reality of your experience is impossible to predict. I’ve travelled through dangerous places and encountered dangerous people, but these are isolated incidents that no more tire my resolve to travel than does losing my luggage.

Relinquish Control

What is possible to define however, is that we’re all unified by more or less the same desires: those of peace, health and happiness.

The borders that separate us aren’t arbiters of where good ends and bad begins. We live the lives that we want to live and while some decisions can lead to better results than others, in the end there’s only so much control we can apply over any given situation.

I can’t imagine a world where the art of travel was lost and I don’t want to, either.

If we are ever to bridge the gaps that divide us and if we strive to make the world a slightly less frightening place, then surely our only real option is to continue to see it firsthand, come what may.

What do you think about traveling and danger? Share your thoughts in the comments!

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!

Travel on a shrinking globe / Photo gadl

Thanks to technology, our presence is unparalleled: we can hear whispers around the world, and be anywhere on the globe in less than a day.

Transportation and communication have developed at an incredible pace in the past 100 years, and have had staggering impact on who we are.

Now that the doors to the global village flung wide open, how do we meet this reality?

Joel Falconer frames the new dimensions with familiar terms: perpetual traveler or world citizen. His definitions are summarized here:

A perpetual traveler is:

“…a person who designs their life so that they’re not the legal resident of any of the countries in which they actually spend most of their time…. Whatever the reason (for becoming a perpetual traveler), it means disowning your allegiance to your home country without giving it up to another. It means becoming a citizen of your own empire.”

While a world citizen is:

“…someone who decides to stop seeing the world as something segmented by nation, and look at it as the home of humanity where we’re all entitled to enjoy, and mandated to be responsible for, the territory of each nation. The world citizen doesn’t see any sense in national citizenship and decides to stop seeing things through the lens of patriotism or from the perspective of the country they grew up in.”

Which Do You Consider Yourself?

Both roles reject borders, but the difference between them is subtle.

A perpetual traveler discards the sense of home – often to avoid paying taxes, or for a more profound sense of privacy or non-affiliation. The world citizen sees the entire planet as home, and one’s citizenship as only a historic formality.

As Falconer says, “The concept of the perpetual traveler is about reducing your dependency and responsibilities and the world citizen is about increasing (them).”

If the question really is about dependency and responsibility, let’s look at each facet separately:

• Dependency – What cause or group do you belong to? If borders are truly irrelevant, how do you define yourself? Is your identity determined by affiliations, or something else?
• Responsibility – What are you accountable for, and to whom? Who do you feel deserves your loyalty? What works do you put your energy into? Who or what do you protect or care for?

The choice is about the significance of two groups of people: those in your life, and those in your community.

Defining Your World

Perpetual travelers minimize their influence confining it to their immediate location. Because of this, a perpetual traveler is always based in the present experience – the past is irrelevant and the future is unscripted.

Perpetual traveler focuses on their undiluted contact with life, and is less concerned with being the fixture of a culture.

World citizens broaden their scope to an unlimited degree – a degree that will most likely never be realized. Being so conscious about cause and effect places them within a wider consideration of time. They draw from the rich palette of borderless relation, basing their experience by the potential to connect through social schemes.

Because the judgment is shaded by personal bias, it’s shortsighted to judge one way as entirely right or wrong. Together, they reveal a variety of meaning that’s invisible under normal conditions.

To see the consequences of these roles – or disregard them entirely – is an attitude that may suggest which emphasis you lean toward.

Do you see yourself as a world citizen or a perpetual traveler? What importance does one role have versus the other? Let us know what you think.

Hot off the 2009 SXSW film fesival, “Sweet Deams” by Kirsten Lepore was just named for a Special Jury Award.

The film follows the sugar coated journey of a cupcake who longs to head out on the open sea. When he finally scrapes together the courage to set out, it isn’t long before he is marooned on a lone island.

From there… I won’t spoil the ending for you.

But the film highlights a number of timely themes of travel: the excitement of the journey, the loves we meet abroad, and the knowledge and experience we bring with us when we return home.

What themes did you see in the film? Share your thoughts in the comments!

Given the current economic climate, it’s interesting to ponder the message of the fisherman. Some might argue that life without striving is a life wasted.

But for anyone who’s ever found a quiet beach and watching the sun go down with a beer Chang, I’d bet they’d beg to differ.

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

To many, Albert Einstein is an iconic figure. Scientist. Humanist. German-accent-ist.

But he also had the spirit of the traveler, evident in his essay “The World As I See It.”

On being a lone traveler:

My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities. I am truly a ‘lone traveler’ and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude…

On the pursuit of happiness:

I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves — this critical basis I call the ideal of a pigsty. The ideals that have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth.

Without the sense of kinship with men of like mind, without the occupation with the objective world, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific endeavors, life would have seemed empty to me. The trite objects of human efforts — possessions, outward success, luxury — have always seemed to me contemptible.

On the marvel of life:

The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed.

And finally, on how to be a good person:

It is the duty of every man of good will to strive steadfastly in his own little world to make this teaching of pure humanity a living force, so far as he can. If he makes an honest attempt in this direction without being crushed and trampled under foot by his contemporaries, he may consider himself and the community to which he belongs lucky.

Read the entire essay online here.

Feature photo by eric dickman. Photo above by matsukawa1971.

The week went like this: on Tuesday I was sipping red wine, discussing philosophy and the human condition as I drove through the fields of France. By Thursday I was guzzling light beer on the back of a pick-up, debating The Simpsons or Family Guy as I cruised around the cow pie-splattered pastures of Nevada.

The fact that within the span of three days I had such diverse experiences in such far-flung locations speaks to both the marvel of modern travel and to the irrevocable, unwavering melancholy I always feel at the conclusion of a big trip.

Travel is my addiction. My heroin. And when I’m nearing the end of an especially good fix, there’s not much that can save me from being bummed out.

And so, after this last (especially wonderful and thought provoking) trip around Europe, I was so totally in the dumps about being home that I did the unthinkable: I hung out with people from high school.

I know that sounds snobby, but for those of you that grew up in a small town like I did, then went to college just a stone’s throw away from said small town, then you might also take pride in the fact that since high school you’ve gone outside your comfort zone and scored new friends.

Photo by josephaskins.

I remember dorm move-in day. While kids from out of town were sizing each other up as possible bedmates, I was scampering around, looking for new friends. Didn’t matter if their faces were covered in piercings and they had a penchant for bands with names like “Cradle of Filth” — if they were from the out of state, or even better, The East Coast!, then I wanted them as My New Friend Not From My Hometown.

So I was surprised to find myself, after such a high-minded journey around Europe, back in the fields of my youth with the people of my formative years.

I had been wallowing around my apartment in a jet-lagged, “No one here understands me (dramatic sigh)!” stupor, when my old buddy Josh invited me to a pig roast. Apparently, he and our other friend Chad had bought two little pigs at the beginning of the summer, named them Wilbur and Petunia, and slaughtered them when they were good and fat.

They were going to roast Wilbur first, over a big pit they made on Josh’s brother’s ranch, sit around and play the guitar, mess around on the bongos, and did I want to come?

Wait a minute. This sounded suspiciously like something I’d want to be invited to while traveling. If someone in another country asked me to attend such a down home, laid back, authentic event, I wouldn’t dream of saying no. In fact, I would feel like I had really succeeded in getting off the tourist track.

So I said yes.

And I haven’t had as much fun in a long time.

Photo by nikoretro.

It wasn’t that anything especially crazy happened, or that it was some life-changing, life-affirming evening. We basically sat around the big pit, chanted like tribal people when we lowered Wilbur onto the fire, dared each other to walk on the flaming coals, sang songs and told stories.

I did three manly tricks for the first time: threw an axe, drove a quad, shot a gun-and this little trio of activities acted out in a Nevada grassland was as exhilarating as black water rafting in New Zealand and zorbing in Australia.

We named our cook-out Burning Pig, in honor of that most famous of festivals held annually in our state.

It was just a good time with good people. The type of people I would probably be thrilled to meet abroad.

COMMUNITY CONNECTION:

For more on the always-tough post-travel re-entry, check out The Hardest Part of a Journey is Coming Home, or Six Simple Ways to Beat the Post-Travel Blues.

Feature photo by Hazel Motes.

Most of us have seen the movie Fight Club. When it hit theaters in 1999 with an unbelievably carved Brad Pitt and ingeniously beleaguered Ed Norton, author Chuck Palahniuk found himself with a giant, rabid, new fan base dedicated to Tyler Durden and his philosophy.

Avowing anti-consumerist ideas and an explosive refusal of passive acceptance, Durden led the other characters into a violent awakening and encouraged audiences’ vicarious participation.

Whether leaving the theater or flipping the last page of the book, viewers and readers alike were left with the stinging thematic message: “This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time.”

For travelers, this message has been the underlying pulse humming in the background of every flight, ticket, hostel, and trek.

Subtle, but never forgotten, the drive to make the most out of life is the communal thread linking backpackers, flashpackers, travelers, and adventure-seekers alike.

Ten years later, Tyler Durden’s philosophy still has a lot to teach us about travel:

“It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything.”

Photo by Marko Bucik.

This is less about wiping our slates clean of all accomplishments, relationships, or manufactured goods, and more about cutting free from the obsessive attachment supported and fed by modern consumerist and business culture.

When we board that plane or get that visa stamped, we are instantly reminded that we are fundamentally free beings. We are free to go where we want and do what we want. Our car payments do not dictate our life choices.

Travel shows us that we’re free to do anything. We can stomp grapes in Italy, surf in Costa Rica, or fire dance in Thailand. We just need to make that choice. Freedom is inherent in travel and imperative in Fight Club.

“You’re not your job. You’re not how much money you have in the bank. . . You’re not your fucking khakis.”

In the shuffle of seductive television ads, competitive social comparisons, and overbearing societal barometers telling us just how far in life we should be, we tend to misplace our own identities.

We measure our feelings of self worth on how shiny and new the plastic of our recent purchase is. We define ourselves by the brands we wear or don’t wear. We allow automated computer programs to categorize our likes and dislikes for us.

Travel reminds us who we are and what we aren’t. We aren’t jobs, currency, automobiles, or textiles. And that’s never more clear than when drifting down the river in a bamboo raft on a sunny day. We’re never more in touch with our identity than when we’re navigating the streets of a new city whose language we can’t understand, using a map we can’t read.

We can be nothing but ourselves when we travel. And we should always remember that.

“People do it everyday, they talk to themselves… they see themselves as they’d like to be, they don’t have the courage you have, to just run with it.”

Travel takes courage and teaches us courage. Many are afraid to step outside their comfort zones and be without an anchor in the familiar.

As travelers, our bravery is continually challenged. Whether it is packing up all our belongings to move to another country or joining in a cliff diving session during a summer trip, travel is relentlessly asking more of us and testing what we’re made of.

But once we’re there, flying over borders or off the cliff’s edge, the rewards are immense. We are no longer seeing ourselves as we’d like to be; we are becoming the people we’d like to be. And that feeling is incomparable.

“I say never be complete, I say stop being perfect, I say… let’s evolve, let the chips fall where they may.”

Every new trip breeds new understanding. We see new landscapes, meet different people, gather new experiences. Travel helps us further along our intellectual, psychological, and emotional evolution.

Travel reminds us that life isn’t a series of boxes to be checked off or a succession of requisite motions. We are alive to be alive, learning growing and along the way. Everything else is minutiae.

Stop being perfect. It is more important to be evolved.

As with travel, Fight Club warns us to never lose sight of the essential. It’s easy to get hustled along on a guided path, but much more satisfying to forge your own way. As travelers, we need to keep in mind these reasons and our goals for why we travel.

And always remember, “This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time.”

COMMUNITY CONNECTION:

For a list of other movies that have changed travelers’ lives, check out “The Red Pill: 10 Films Guaranteed to Blow Your Mind.”

Feature photo by Christopher Chan. Photo above by shimonkey.

How many times have I done this – 30, 40, or even 50 times?

It is simple, isn’t it? I wheel my bags to the airline ticket counter, show my ID to the agent, say goodbye to my friends and family, pass through security, find my gate, and away I go. Most of my international adventures have followed this same routine at the start.

But this simple trip to the airport often manifests many different thoughts and feelings.

Sometimes, what I bring to the airport is more than just baggage filled with clothes, toiletries, and books. Sometimes, the baggage is a bounty of emotions that forces me to perform a gut check, especially if the distance to be traveled stretches across the Atlantic.

“I can do this,” I say to myself. “I can separate myself from the people and a place that I love in order to fly thousands of miles and write yet another chapter of my life.”

I look at the people at the boarding gate and wonder what other chapters are also being written. The airport provides the most interesting of backdrops for someone who enjoys imagining other people’s stories.

There is amusing simplicity in sitting and watching your fellow travelers stroll by, guessing what their backgrounds are, what their homes look like, and what they might be feeling as boarding time approaches.

Photo by Giacomo P.

The young mother carrying a baby in a shoulder sling might be anxious for her parents to finally meet their first grandchild. The scruffy-faced teenager sporting a Lands End backpack could be returning home after a week of intense final exams.

Very often, there is also the traveler with a heavy heart, sad because of separation from a loved one.

The airport brings all these people together, reminding us that we are not alone on the journey. The emotions I feel are felt by everyone, and the paths we cross, albeit at different times, are quite often the same.

Every airport has this special role, acting as a crossroads for all of us.

It can mark the transition from one stage of our lives to another. At the airport, we seem to give ourselves permission to reflect on our past and ponder our future, without the distractions of daily routines. Here, we have a temporary reprieve from work, school, and family.

For those of us inclined to do so, reflection often leads us to ask why we are about to get on a plane to travel hundreds or thousands of miles away. Leaving family and friends is often a test. We are creatures of habit, are we not?

Photo by Hyougushi

We cling to the familiar – our comfy bed sheets, a favorite perfume on our significant other, or the ring tone we hear when our best friend calls.

Yet so much changes once we board the plane. New sights and sounds enter our world. We will make new friends; we will find a favorite new coffee shop; and there will be a new place to call home.

I’m at the airport and I know all of this from experience, but my stomach is still in knots; my insides clench, and I whisper, “Here we go.” Incredible experiences await: all I have to do is have faith in this first step, boarding the plane.

There they go. Passengers are starting to form a line at the gate. “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re now ready to start boarding British Airways Flight 208, non-stop service to London Heathrow.”

Here I go….

What are your thoughts on the metaphor of the airport? Share your thoughts in the comments!

Filmmaker Jason Silva

Jason Silva is not your average 26 year old.

The Venezuelan-American filmmaker is a prolific “gonzo journalist” and founding producer for Current TV, the groundbreaking network started by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore.

Jason also co-hosted the first ever Pangea Day in 2008.

But lately, Jason’s found a flaw in the human condition that has been troubling him. That flaw is death. He confesses he tried to find answers in a variety of religions and philosophies, until settling on science.

First, watch Jason’s short film “The Immortals”

I caught up with Jason to interview him on his short film, and to uncover the deeper issues on the end of death.

The Interview

BNT: What philosophies did you explore prior to science? What answers didn’t they provide?

JASON: I’ve always been an analytical thinker- trying to understand the human condition. Perhaps it comes from being a bit of a control freak- to understand something gives me the feeling of control.

One of my majors in university was philosophy- I loved existentialism and I loved a course titled “philosophy of space and time.” I was also an avid individualist and read a lot of Ayn Rand’s work.

I loved the idea of man as a heroic being- one that should never bow down before stifling religion or collectivist political tyranny. I was looking for an answer to the problem of existence- I suspected it had something to do with meaning but at the same settled I for mindless hedonism (fun, but ultimately unsatisfying).

Today, however, I know that’s not enough because it doesn’t solve the problem of finitude.

You mention that seeing old photographs and footage fills you with melancholy. How do you feel when looking at photos/videos from previous travels?

Watching old footage from previous travels usually enlivens me and reminds me of the sublime. I become filled with the “happy-sad” sensation- the bitter-sweet euphoria of seeing something inspiring while being aware that the moment is gone.

Old footage gives me a taste of immortality because I get to “return” to a moment, (usually one of revelatory ecstasy)… where I passionately bombarded the camera with exactly why this moment meant something to me- That’s the highest of highs.

What I really like to do is add a piece of music to the footage that elicits precisely the type of visceral feeling that I felt at the moment I recorded the footage.

That’s the point: It provides a forced reflection/examination of a moment that mattered! This prevents me from ever taking perfect moments for granted. The exquisite and the sublime are sacred.

You quote The Immortalist in your film – how did you come across it and why does it resonate with you?

After watching the brilliant film Vanilla Sky, I spent hours on the internet researching Cryonic Suspension.

This idea that we could preserve ourselves until the technology was there to repair the wear and tear of aging and eventual pathology.

Like the lucid dream that was presented in the film, if we removed finitude from the human condition, life could be transformed into an eternal now- no more existential anxiety.

I started reading about Ray Kurzweil and Aubrey de Grey, brilliant thinkers who professed that through scientific engineering we would someday conquer death.

The philosophical implications and motivations behind this, however, were best described by Alan Harrington’s masterpiece, “The Immortalist”- a manifesto of sorts that dared to challenge our cosmic inferiority complex and complacent attitude about our “inevitable” demise, and instead challenged us to engineer (with SCIENCE) an ageless and divine state of being.

This is where science would satisfy the yearnings of existential man, who for too long was suffering as a consequence of being aware of his mortality.

Photo by kangster.

“Eliminating death is playing God, but doing triple bypass surgery is just fine.” This is an excellent argument against the people who believe humans should not tinker with death. In what other ways do we already intervene against the natural biological processes?

I believe humans have always overcome their biological limitations. It is what has brought us out of the caves and onto the moon.

We have cured ourselves of diseases, we fly remarkable machines through the air at 500 miles per hour. We communicate instantly and wirelessly across the world.

Why is it such a stretch to imagine us re-programming our biochemistry (much like computer software) so that we may alleviate suffering, decay, and death?

You explore science’s answer to the “problem” of death. Why is death seen as a problem that needs to be fixed?

Death is a profound tragedy. Human consciousness is basically a profound (and valuable) pattern of information residing in a complex biological machine.

This machine can repair itself for a certain period, but over time it wears out and decays at a faster rate than it can fix itself. This is why we die.

Today, however, we are at the verge of correcting this. Death is the loss of everything that matters- It is our memories, our loves, the images and dreams that define us- the songs that moved us and the films that shaped us. Death takes this all away.

I argue that in the same way we feel compelled to preserve the works of Shakespeare and other great works of art, why shouldn’t we extend this into our physicality?

Besides, by labeling death a problem, it shifts our complacent attitude about death and turns it into an engineering problem, one that we can solve, much as we have solved impossible problems in the past.

You say “evolution can be cruel” since it does not allow for the variable of human consciousness. But many other spiritual teachers believe that human consciousness is the direct result of evolution. How do you reconcile these two views?

Evolution is a blind process which has peaked at human consciousness.

Suddenly we have a species that can reflect on the evolutionary process which has allowed it to emerge, and can make calculated and measured decisions about how to redirect this process to include and take into account “the meaning of individual life” as a variable in the design.

Blind evolution doesn’t care about how much I love my mother- It doesn’t care about my love of theater and learning and reading- evolution cares only about my progeny.

But I, as an arbiter of value and meaning, have decided that I do care about these things and I don’t want to surrender them just because “that’s the way things are.” I say change the way things are.

If the end goal is to “live forever,” what do you think life would be like if immorality is achieved?

Life would be an unending adventure, sculpted moment to moment, building on itself into an ever more sophisticated and complex symphony.

I think Nietzsche said something like this: “Man is walking on a tightrope between ape and Overman.”

Overman is the emergence from within us of something infinitely more sublime than us. It is our potential. It is a divine state of being, what we long for hopelessly in all our churches.

Photo by Guillaume Goyette.

U.S. General Omar N. Bradley once said, “Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.” To me this can also apply to the search for immortality.

While I agree humans should continue pushing the boundaries of science and technology, I wonder if we’re asking the right questions. Would immortality solve the world’s ills? Would it make us happier? Would it answer the fundamental search for meaning?

Ernest Becker’s masterpiece The Denial of Death presented death anxiety as the primary problem of man and also the root of all evil and anxiety.

He says man creates illusions under which to live in order to distract himself from the awareness of his mortality, which is unbearable.

I believe, along with many others, that eliminating death as a certain consequence of being born would eliminate all of our anxiety and aggressive impulses.

I imagine it would make us all into philosophers and scholars. Joseph Campbell-style heroes returning from the edge of death having become something far greater- an immortal hero.

It would satisfy the primal issue of importance– what Miguel de Unamuno wrote about in “Tragic Sense of Life”– mankind’s necessity for personal immortality.

“Do not go quietly into that good night, rage, rage against the dying of the light” – Dylan Thomas

What do you think about the end of death? Share your thoughts in the comments!

Feature photo by Sean Rainer / Photo above by Computer Science Geek

Some will tell you that you can find the divine in a church, a temple, a mosque or a pagoda. That might work for you. It never has for me. Instead, I have found the divine in darkness.

Carl Jung said, “As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being.”

Darkness isn’t just about switching off all the lights and disconnecting the phone.

It is about total immersion, the deep penetrating and all-embracing black stuff you only find in true isolation, when you step beyond the reassuring warmth of human civilization.

There is a long historical tradition of seeking the profound by escaping society and choosing the darkness.

There were the wilderness prophets of John the Baptist and Moses, as well as the Yogis who sought a deeper awareness of self in retreat. The Romantic poet, William Wordsworth found an overwhelming experience of being alive whilst wandering the hills and mountains.

Yet, in our congested modern world, it is increasingly difficult to find these places and harder still to find the time to absorb them. This is a universal experience, one that can be found at any time in history, on any continent, in any country.

For our generation, our isolation is found in the travel experience, one that is transitory and passing.

The Edge Of The World

I explored such a place for some months, whilst living in the New Zealand outback. The locals amusingly referred to this place as the wop-wops – a generic term for anywhere so remote, it doesn’t even warrant a name.

Jon standing before his trailer.

My home was a static caravan, on top of a hill, 12,000 long miles from home. Between me and civilization was a valley, a long and harrowing drive down a dirt track and a farm filled with demented Emus.

I wasn’t a hermit. I traveled and worked but I did spend many nights alone in this caravan, on this edge of the world.

Surrounding my home were mountain ranges and forests, birds and possums, but after a time, they too vanished under the setting sun.

This was the time that the world changed, when it disappeared, leaving nothing but mysterious sounds and the cold night, a smooth velvet darkness that enveloped me.

On one of many cold frosty nights, I shut my caravan door behind me and took a step out into the darkness. The Milky Way wrapped across the sky, the Moon was but a sliver and the sky sprinkled with stars.

I walked until all I could see was my little home, floating in the dark space, its windows awash with light. It looked like a satellite, lost and far away, suspended in the void.

I stood there awhile and tried not to let the cold get to me. I waited and then waited some more, just absorbing my surroundings, until the world wasn’t just a long way away. It was gone…

Cast Adrift

There was a jolt, like a silent earthquake that left no physical impression. There was no crack in the earth, but there had been a change nonetheless – profound and intoxicating.

I was disconnected, cast aside and lost. I felt strangely without form, small, without substance and insignificant.

My subconscious struggled desperately to find a cultural reference point to cling to. David Bowman cast adrift in the final moments of 2001: A Space Oddysey, calling out to Bowie’s Major Tom.

Trailer in the fading light.

Yet, though I was lost, a speck on a rock in the darkness, something else was there. Something intangible was filling that space and it pushed a tickle up my spine.

It didn’t speak, it didn’t have a voice and there was no kindly, bearded old man in white. What was it? Well that’s the question isn’t it? What is left, when all we have built is gone?

That’s the BIG question of life, the universe and everything, as Douglas Adams once put it.

It was the feeling of utter isolation, of removal not just from society, but from the world and then finally being removed from my own sense of self.

The Universal Connection

It might have been a horribly disturbing experience but for the equally profound sensation of being a part of everything.

Let me clarify, I felt connected to EVERYTHING – the earth, the air, the stars, all of it. Of course, it’s a paradox. How can you feel empty and yet complete? I don’t know.

This is what preacher’s talk of – this light in the darkness. Those inclined might attribute it to God, the cynic would say it was madness.

To read of this, is not to know it. Instead, I would implore my fellow travelers to go in search of the darkness yourself.

I leave the final words to a more accomplished explorer than myself, Benedict Allen:

“To me exploration isn’t about conquering natural obstacles, planting flags…it’s not about going where no one’s gone before in order to leave your mark, but about the opposite of that – about making yourself vulnerable, opening yourself up to whatever’s there and letting the place leave its mark on you.”

What do you think of finding the divine in the darkness? Share your thoughts in the comments!

Feature photo by Tierecke. Photo by Harsh1.0.

I’m on a bus in Israel leaving the airport. It’s very early in the morning. The day is already so hot you can see waves of heat shimmering off the highway.

I feel like I always do at the start of a great adventure: jet lagged, thirsty, excited. The buildings of Tel Aviv are getting smaller the further we drive. Our tour guide, his name is Eitan, is talking into a microphone.

“As we head out of the city you’ll see a lot of countryside,” he says, his blue eyes gazing fondly out the window at his adopted homeland (Eitan is American, you see, and he has “made aliyah,” or taken Israel as his homeland and chosen a Hebrew name).

“Israel is not all desert like you might have thought.” I pay attention now, because this is what I did in fact think. “Look at that field of sunflowers, for example.”

I look out the window to my left and see the tall yellow flowers. I’m thinking they are pretty and picturesque, then Eitan says, “Don’t they look like proud soldiers lined up ready for battle?”

It won’t occur to me until much later, when my ten-day tour around Israel is finished and I’m back in the safety of my predictable, air-conditioned American life, that this comment represents two things I’ve come to understand about Israel and its people.

• One: Israelis are determined to show the world their country is beautiful, not just bombs and problems.
• Two: They have an unwavering belief in their right to belong as a nation and their right to defend it.

Conclusion: Where Americans see sunflowers, Israelis see soldiers.

A Clean Slate

I’m on this whirlwind tour of the Holy Land courtesy of Birthright, a foundation that offers every American with Jewish heritage a free trip to Israel.

The only requirements are that you’re between the ages of 18 and 26 and you have at least one Jewish parent. That’s it.

Birthright gives you an all-expenses paid tour (I’m talking airfare, food, accommodation, everything) around Israel to learn about the country and its complicated past and precarious future.

Although my father is Jewish and I grew up going to Passover at my grandmother’s house, I consider myself more “Jew-ish” than Jewish (as one girl on my trip put it during one of many group conversations on Jewish identity).

At this point in my life I don’t follow Judaism or any religion for that matter. Culturally, I’m kinda whatever, celebrating Christmas and Groundhog Day and any other holiday that seems like fun.

I went into my trip to Israel a veritable clean slate, a sheltered girl from small-town Nevada with no strong political convictions. An agnostic in faith and in life. I didn’t know much about Israelis as a people, and knew hardly anything about the politics of the region.

I came out of my trip with dates and history and passionate speeches rattling around in my head, less sure than ever who should have rightful “ownership” of the land.

Photo by Man United.

The Jewish Experience

On day one we arrived in the Galilee, the northernmost region of Israel. As we drive past the rugged hills and occasional olive tree, Eitan mentions, “Someone famous performed most of his miracles here.”

You might have heard of that someone. His name is Jesus Christ.

The Son of God would be mentioned occasionally throughout the trip as a sort of background player. Like the keyboardist in a band. This surprises me, which makes me realize I’m more culturally Christian than I thought.

We drop off our luggage at the first of several hostels and head directly to hike Mt. Arbel. That night we watched the moon rise over the Sea of Galilee, drank cold Israeli beer, and talked about our backgrounds and what we hoped to learn on the trip.

Most days would be like that first one. Up at dawn for the first hike of the day, museums and synagogues, lectures by intense Zionists and Holocaust survivors, complex conversations in the evenings about the future of Israel.

We float down the Jordan River and hike up steep canyons. We go to a kibbutz in the Golan Heights called Misgav Am, where we have a regional view of Lebanon, Syria, and Hezbollah headquarters, as well as a passionate discourse on Israel’s right to fight by an expatriate American who has fought in four of Israel’s wars.

I especially enjoy the day we spend navigating the steep streets of Tzfat, built into a mountain and known for its artist colonies and as the birthplace of Kabballah.

Photo by E|NoStress|

Everyday Is Like 9/11

There is the salty air in the haunting ocean caves of Rosh Hanikra. There are the tears in the hallways of Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum.

We navigate the crowded stalls of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv’s markets, squeezing peaches and bargaining with our best version of todah, Hebrew for “thank you.”

We wake up at 3am to climb Masada and are rewarded with breathtaking views of the Dead Sea at sunrise. We then swim in the Dead Sea, and are rewarded with stinging eyes and mud splattered bathing suits.

We see Jaffa at sunset (where the human race has had a city since the beginning of time). We pretend to be comfortable sleeping in a Bedouin tent and rise at dawn for a camel ride.

I pick up white chalky stones in the riverbed where David fought Goliath (I later put them on my desk at home to remind me I can overcome any obstacle).

I touch the smooth pillars in a small, non-descript chapel in Jerusalem where the Last Supper took place. I peer down into a deep, dark canyon where babies were sacrificed in ancient times-the canyon that inspired the concept of Hell.

Most significantly: we travel with eight Israeli soldiers who are impossibly exotic in our eyes, though they look just like the Americans we grew up with.

They have the same discussions on dating and pop culture as we do, yet their lives have been punctuated by periods in which “every day is like 9/11.”

Devotional Envy

Like most tourists, we visited the Western Wall during our tour of the old city. But on our trip, we went twice. Once in the day and once at night.

During the night visit, I stood with my forehead touching The Wall, the ground beneath me finally cool after a day of scorching heat. The air around me was filled with the hushed chatter of a thousand worshipers.

I know I’m supposed to be praying or asking forgiveness or in the very least thinking profound thoughts, but instead I’m mesmerized by the women around me, young and old, their hands pressed together, some bobbing rhythmically to the verses in their heads.

Watching them, I feel both disturbed by and strangely envious of their devotion.

For the first time in my life, I felt seduced by the idea of belonging to a religion.

Of belonging to a nation where fighting for its defense is the rule rather than the exception. So many of us Americans create our own problems. Depression. Anxiety.

Maybe having a common enemy, a constant threat to safety, is the ironical path to happiness.

The Value Of Identity

Perhaps creature comforts and national security aren’t actually the ingredients of contentment.

Have we forgotten that humans like to be challenged, have something to fight for, to believe in? We thrive on these feelings because they give us an identity.

I reached out and touched The Wall. I slipped my folded note into the ancient crevices, and I pressed my palm flat against the stone.

In that moment I felt a rush, of hope, of sorrow, of belonging.

And then, all at the same time, I became aware of a Jewish woman to my left reciting verses in Hebrew, and the tall minaret by the Dome of the Rock singing the Muslim call to prayer.

And quite softly but distinct still, church bells ringing somewhere nearby.

Feature photo by bravenewtraveler. Photo above by Jeremy G.

Being fluent in English is like laying on an inflatable raft in the middle of an ocean.

It’s easy; it’s comfortable, and it gets you places. But I’m addicted to the process of looking at a symbol that means nothing and unlocking it until I lose access to that meaninglessness.

It’s a weird feeling, that transition.

Imagine that you are driving down the highway and have no idea that orange traffic cones mean construction. Can’t do it? You’ve crossed the semantic fence, where orange will never just be orange anymore.

I wish I knew what every symbol meant, every tattoo, every weaved garment whose stripes indicate tribe status, every letter of Hebrew and even every corporate logo.

Unlocking them is nothing like lying on a raft. It’s like treading water in a vast ocean, with lots of liquid in your ears.

Photo by el_monstrito.

Spanish

I first started learning Spanish for a relatively stupid reason. I got in a small but friendly fight with a girl from Guatemala in my seventh grade science class, and at the end of the day she slipped me a note on ripped paper.

It said, “Paz, hermana. Soy más linda que tú.” I looked at it for a long time, but the component parts didn’t mean much.

I got home and typed the phrase into Altavista’s Babelfish translator, and her message came up seamlessly (which rarely happens with internet translators, making this somewhat of a lightning bolt experience).

It read cruelly, bluntly, “Peace, sister. I am prettier than you.”

By looking up what this girl had written, I had dodged a formidable attempt by another person to both a) screw with a dumb American and b) become an ignorant player in a snotty girl’s game.

We still became friends after that, believe it or not.

I went through about four years of formal training in Spanish later on, and I realized there existed a realm of verb conjugations, object pronouns, and my favorite grammatical lair, the idea of mood.

In Spanish, talking about hypothetical or non-existent scenarios requires a whole new way of tweaking at words. For example, if you say, “I want you to make me dinner,” the verb “want” actually exists, but the “make dinner” only exists in the speaker’s mind, so it has to be conjugated differently.

All of these implicit complications of communication intrigued me. I began to go to bookstores to look at simple Lonely Planet phrase books, excited by how differently the process of ordering a beer was structured in another language.

Photo by juliadeb.

Portuguese

The next language I started learning was Portuguese. I read an article in “Rolling Stone” magazine about a Brazilian band called Bonde do Role.

Apparently their lyrics were unrivaled in their inappropriateness. I decided that I was going to attempt to translate them. I didn’t want to be a dumb American listening to dance music that was talking about gang rapes, bobbing my head along on the treadmill all the while.

Portuguese enchanted me in a way that Spanish never quite did. First of all, it was harder. The sounds in the words blended together; they were more lackadaisical and less easy to pick out.

Not every letter in Portuguese has a consistent sound, which made it more formidable and elusive, like English.

Photo by Soctech.

English

I think English speakers must have an implicit knowledge that ours is one of the most wacked-out languages on the planet, because for me, learning any language that has a lot of order and consistency renders me suspicious, as if the language weren’t real.

Our words are a mix of Germanic structures and Latin-derived structures, so some verbs we conjugate on the inside, like “sit/sat,” and some we just shove an “ed” at the end of, along with countless other oddities.

But what makes English so unique is that it accommodates foreign words and rarely assimilates them. We leave “tequila” as “tequila” instead of trying to phoneticize it into our own system as “tekeeluh.” (Notice that we don’t have such a system by how strange that looks.)

Taekwondo is left how it is, words like “laugh” are left with rules of pronunciation that could render almost any learner hopelessly exasperated.

Most other languages I’ve learned distort foreign words into their own system. For example, in Japanese, McDonald’s is called “Maku Donarudo.”

Photo by alexandralee.

Chinese

The language that I’m learning now is Chinese. It’s the language I’ve always wanted to learn, ever since I was about five and used to see Chinese symbols engraved on my mom’s bath soap.

I recently learned the symbol for the word “soap” and this odd sense of déjà vu took me over. Learning Chinese is like putting on a scuba mask and entering into an ocean on the other side of the world, where the water and all the coral reefs are different colors.

The meanings of Chinese words, because they are hinted at in their writing, are all the more vivid and immanent, and because they have fewer syllables in general, ideas like “dao” (As in, “The Dao of Pooh” anyone?) are constantly re-used in different scenarios, making its concepts more interrelated than any other language I’ve encountered.

The best moment in learning a foreign language is when you can feel yourself poke your head above the water, and suddenly you can look at say, a “French Vogue” and know what they’re talking about, or use a Chinese menu without peeking at the English.

It’s crossing a path of meaning that you once crossed when you stopped saying “goo goo gag a” and started saying “momma,” except this time you can remember it.

Are you addicted to languages? Or wish you could learn a few more? Share your thoughts in the comments!

Photo MillZero.com

I’m in Nicaragua, wearing a new swimsuit, paddling away from a deserted beach.

I graduated college with a hankering to travel. A contact in Nicaragua offered me free room and board to teach English, with a bonus of daily surf lessons.

For months, I made packing lists, contemplated footwear, compared backpack prices online, and dreamed of the person I would be on my adventure of a lifetime. I visited the local surf shop, perused the swimsuit section, and saw myself in the colorful posters lining the wall.

Toned women stood frozen emerging from perfect tubes, and I would be one of them.

Let me take a moment to count the ways in which my mind and body are not those of a surfer:

• I am a 6′1” female. I am almost the same size of a standard lady’s learner board. I have very long, uncoordinated legs.
• I have skinny, weak, long arms. Due to the length of my arms and their surpassing-normal weakness, I can do five full push-ups under the best of conditions, namely, on dry, unmoving land.
• In the vein of land unmoving, I am a runner. My coordination depends on a strong firm surface under my feet, rather than the rolling ocean.
• Big waves scare me. Drowning even more so.

Watch Out For Pastinaca!

Surfing has its own vocabulary, which eludes me in even my native language. Watch out for the pastinaca. It means stingray, and is a word indelibly seared in my memory.

Communication difficulties are more acute during surf lessons.

The moment a giant wave is crashing on you is not the time remember if mas atrás means to step forward or backwards, a tidbit of information which is the difference between nose-diving into the sand and staying above water.

I arrived in beautiful Nicaragua fully expecting to learn how to surf within my two-month stay.

We expect our travels to offer new opportunities for change and growth, so that the person who returns home is unrecognizable to the person who left. Perhaps this idea of reinventing one’s identity is why we travel.

However, the person we already are is a stubborn creature, more real and more durable than the glamorous fantasy person we hope our travels will grant us the chance to become.

“My mind and body were to prove temperamental accomplices in the mission of appreciating my destination,” says Alain de Button, in The Art of Travel.

Indeed, it is easy for us to forget ourselves-our mind and bodies-as we plan our escapades and anticipate a new self in a new place.

Endless Summer Dreams Deferred

Photo Pincheck

Weeks after my arrival in Nicarauga, I realized that learning how to surf was making me miserable.

There’s a fine line between the fear of giving-up and the fear of being an idiot. Travel should push us outside our comfort zone. We become brave through travel, and our most valuable experiences, those that change us, happen largely because of this bravado.

However, we should not forget ourselves in the excitement of travel.

We must remember who we are, what we want and what our minds and bodies are capable of achieving.

Here in Nicaragua, I am a single traveler confronting many other challenges apart from my aquatic adventures, namely being the sole and novice English teacher in a very small town.

Following My Own Path

For the moment, I have relinquished my grip on the surfboard and moved onto better pursuits, suited more to who I am and, more importantly, to the person I want to become.

When I finally evaluated the reasons I wanted to learn to surf, I saw that my motivation was a reaction to glamorous pictures and the expectation of what one should do on a beach in Nicaragua, rather than what I myself would find most enjoyable and fulfilling.

Colorful sunsets now find me running along my deserted beach rather than drowning in the ocean.

My creative energies are focused on teaching a challenging group of Nicaraguan students, a goal more congruent to the person I am and want to become.

Standing on a board in the water doesn’t seem so important anymore.

Have you found yourself struggling with experiences you believed were falsely valuable? Share in the comments!

Good quotes are markers on the path / Photo abkfenris

If you walk long enough in the countryside of the British Isles, from time to time you’ll spot piles of stones along the common way.

A tradition dating back centuries, they’re called cairns.

Cairns serve as markers for various reasons, practical or commemorative. Some are brilliantly constructed, some very simple – and some are just a pile of stones.

For travelers, they’re invaluable as landmarks.

In many ways, quotations serve the same purpose. They can inspire and enlighten, help point out hazards or meaningful history. Depending on what you’re looking for, they can keep you on your path or suggest a new one. They’re landmarks for paths of thought.

Quotes are best considered as guides rather than rules. Sometimes quotes contradict one another, which suggests a greater truth – a range of choice, existing between the markers.

It’s wise to keep in mind Nicholas Chamfort’s observation that those who study quotes “are like those who eat cherries… first picking the best ones and winding up by eating everything.”

The (Next) 50 Most Inspiring Travel Quotes Of All Time

Follow your heart / Photo robstephaustralia

50. Kilometers are shorter than miles. Save gas, take your next trip in kilometers.” – George Carlin

49. “Every perfect traveler always creates the country where he travels.” – Nikos Kazantzakis

48. “Our Nature lies in movement; complete calm is death.” – Blaise Pascal

47. “It is a strange thing to come home. While yet on the journey, you cannot at all realize how strange it will be.” – Selma Lagerlöf

46. “Remember that happiness is a way of travel – not a destination.” – Roy M. Goodman

45. “Clay lies still, but blood’s a rover / Breath’s aware that will not keep. / Up, lad: when the journey’s over there’ll be time enough to sleep.” – A. E. Housman

44. “As the traveler who has once been from home is wiser than he who has never left his own doorstep, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own.” – Margaret Mead

43. “Too often. . .I would hear men boast of the miles covered that day, rarely of what they had seen.” – Louis L’Amour

42. “Stop worrying about the potholes in the road and celebrate the journey.” – Fitzhugh Mullan

41. “One main factor in the upward trend of animal life has been the power of wandering.” – Alfred North Whitehead

40. “The open road is a beckoning, a strangeness, a place where a man can lose himself.” – William Least Heat Moon

39. “Travel only with thy equals or thy betters; if there are none, travel alone.” – The Dhammapada

38. “Our deeds still travel with us from afar, and what we have been makes us what we are.” – George Eliot

37. “Worth seeing, yes; but not worth going to see.” – Samuel Johnson, on the Giant’s Causeway

36. “An involuntary return to the point of departure is, without doubt, the most disturbing of all journeys.” – Iain Sinclair

35. “Traveling is like flirting with life. It’s like saying, ‘I would stay and love you, but I have to go; this is my station.’” – Lisa St. Aubin de Teran

34. “Once in a while it really hits people that they don’t have to experience the world in the way they have been told to.” – Alan Keightley

33. “Half the fun of the travel is the aesthetic of lostness.” – Ray Bradbury

32. “Bizarre travel plans are dancing lessons from God.” – Kurt Vonnegut

31. “We wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfillment.” – Hilaire Belloc

30. “I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.” – Susan Sontag

29. “I should like to spend the whole of my life in traveling abroad, if I could anywhere borrow another life to spend afterwards at home.” – William Hazlitt

27. “A child on a farm sees a plane fly overhead and dreams of a faraway place. A traveler on the plane sees the farmhouse… and thinks of home.” – Carl Burns.

28. “I love to travel, but hate to arrive.” – Albert Einstein

26. “Don’t tell me how educated you are, tell me how much you traveled.” – Mohammed

25. “One always begins to forgive a place as soon as it’s left behind.” – Charles Dickens

24. “When one realizes that his life is worthless he either commits suicide or travels.” – Edward Dahlberg

23. “Without new experiences, something inside of us sleeps. The sleeper must awaken.” – Frank Herbert

22. “Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did now know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.” – Italo Calvino

21. “He who has seen one cathedral ten times has seen something; he who has seen ten cathedrals once has seen but little; and he who has spent half an hour in each of a hundred cathedrals has seen nothing at all.” – Sinclair Lewis, on sightseeing.

20. “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a cash advance.” – Bumper sticker

19. “Travel at its truest is thus an ironic experience, and the best travelers… seem to be those able to hold two or three inconsistent ideas in their minds at the same time, or able to regard themselves as at once serious persons and clowns.” – Paul Fussell

18. “Most of my treasured memories of travel are recollections of sitting.” – Robert Thomas Allen

17. “I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.” – Mary Anne Radmacher Hershey

16. “Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere dust and hotels and baggage and chatter.” – John Muir

15. “When you’re traveling, ask the traveler for advice / not someone whose lameness keeps him in one place.” – Rumi

14. “There are only two emotions in a plane: boredom and terror.” – Orson Welles

13. “To be on a quest is nothing more or less than to become an asker of questions.” – Sam Keen

12. “The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.” – G. K. Chesterton

11. “When you are everywhere, you are nowhere / When you are somewhere, you are everywhere.” – Rumi

10. “When preparing to travel, lay out all your clothes and all your money. Then take half the clothes and twice the money.” – Susan Heller

9. “The autumn leaves are falling like rain / Although my neighbors are all barbarians / And you, you are a thousand miles away / There are always two cups at my table.” – T’ang dynasty poem

8. “It is not down in any map; true places never are.” – Herman Melville

7. “People don’t take trips – trips take people.” – John Steinbeck

6. “We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend.” – Robert Louis Stevenson

5. “It’s a battered old suitcase and a hotel someplace and a wound that will never heal.” – Tom Waits

4. “The map is not the territory.” – Alfred Korzybski

3. “It is solved by walking.” – Algerian proverb

2. “He who would travel happily must travel light.” – Antoine de Saint Exupéry

1. “What am I doing here?” – Arthur Rimbaud, writing home from Ethiopia

Any quotes we missed this second time around? Share your picks in the comments!

Two tombstones / Photo Rob Fromwell

Just as each creature occupies a particular stratum of the forest, from deer on the ground to squirrels in the branches to birds in the canopy, we travelers are specialists.

We investigate our distinct niche of the places we travel to.

The young hedonist explores the casual sex, drug, and drinking scene of the hostels and bars. The punkrock squatter scopes out rooftops, fields, underpasses, dumpsters. The solitary flaneur pays close attention to the subtle interplay between crowds, sunlight, and architecture.

My friend Aaron’s grandmother inquires about the flavor of tap water in a potential destination. Does it taste earthy, she’ll ask. Iron, fluoride, lead?

Then there are the nocturnal graveyard explorers. It’s a less gloomy undertaking than you might at first guess, rooted in the fact that every town, no matter how bland or constricting, has set aside significant amounts of unpaved space for bone storage.

In the concrete jungles that sprawl out endlessly with highways and parking lots, cemeteries are often the only wooded sanctuaries, and they give even the most undesirable of locations, suburbia, the potential for subversive shenanigans.

Exploring The Dead

My own impulse to explore cemeteries by moonlight began at a dive bar in Missoula, Montana when my friend Matt Kahler recounted his introduction to poetry over a couple beers.

As a teenager, Matt gathered trash in a local cemetery as community service for underage drinking. One day he brushed the fallen leaves from a headstone wedged between the roots of an old oak to find a peculiar engraving:

“Believe you and I sing tiny / and wise and could if we had to eat stone and go on.”

It was the epitaph of the poet Richard Hugo, and a decade later Matt found himself alongside me and our friend Lucas drunkenly trudging through a sea of snow and tombstones in search of Hugo’s tree.

Lucas recalls me answering a 2 am cellphone call after hopping the fence: “No, I’m not dead… Most of us here are though.”

In my inebriated state I likely wasn’t aware of the rich poetic history behind this sentiment, the contemplation of death as an affirmation of life.

Death: The Great Democratizer

A stone angel / Photo Lindamac

We’re all familiar with “Seize the day”, the ancient Roman lyric poet Horace’s call to jump headfirst into the world before time catches up.

Or perhaps “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die” from the bible, and “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may” from around Shakespeare’s day. Also the Latin phrase “Memento Mori” or “Remember you will die” (think Kenneth Branagh or Mel Gibson as Hamlet soliloquizing profoundly to a human skull).

Then there’s the Danse Macabre, an allegorical trend in the middle ages in which Death, the great democratizer, is depicted leading all walks of life, from virgins to vagrants, in the inevitable dance to the grave.

More recently, at the 1969 funeral of Jack Kerouac, fellow beat poet Gregory Corso plotted to lift Kerouac’s corpse from the open casket and lead him in a stiff tango, but with uncharacteristic caution vetoed this carpe diemist impulse at the last minute.

What To Pack

When exploring cemeteries come nightfall, each participant should arrive adequately prepared with roughly the following ingredients:

• 1 flashlight or headlamp
• 1 black outfit (to camouflage with shadows & avoid detection)
• 1 stick of charcoal & a spiral notebook (for gravestone rubbings)
• 1 bottle of wine (optional)
• 1 pair of tree-climbable sneakers
• 1 constellation chart
• 1 camera (capable of star-capturing long exposures)

Life With Each Breath

Me and Matt and Lucas never located Hugo’s grave.

Having split up to cover more ground, we scanned dim blue cellphone light over the start and end dates of countless nurses, mailmen, carpenters, secretaries, transients now gone and long forgotten, each time whispering to ourselves “You’re not Hugo… And you’re not Hugo either.”

Matt slipped on the ice twice and hit his head hard, and both times woke as if into a dream, disoriented and in awe of snow seemingly falling from the stars.

I crouched alongside an angel statue to avoid detection by the shouting train crew linking up cars for a predawn transport of raw materials toward Seattle or Fargo.

While the cemeteries of world cultural hubs like Rome or Paris are impressive in their own right, just as many people expire in the rarely-visited nooks and crannies of Anywheresville.

Also, graveyard exploration doesn’t require travel-funds, as there’s likely to be a graveyard a few miles from where you are right now. At the very least, graveyard exploration is more interesting than watching TV.

If one side-effect of our TV culture is a sort of death-amnesia, then graveyards are perhaps the remedy, the most urgent and accessible reminder to go out into the world while we, the breathing minority, still embody the limbs and torsos with which to do so.

What do you think of graveyard travel? Share your thoughts in the comments!

Photo by soundfromwayout

Have you ever noticed how some people come back from their travels full of tales of wonderful, serendipitous experiences?

Stories of how they were dragged off the street to an amazing wedding banquet, or swam with dolphins – for free, or ran into the Dalai Lama and had a brief chat about the meaning of life.

Are these people naturally lucky or are they doing something to attract all these amazing experiences?

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: “Shallow people believe in luck… strong people believe in cause and effect.”

I’ve studied the character traits of these individuals. If you want to get lucky on your travels, you might want to try the following suggestions.

Travel with the right attitude

Some people travel with a closed mind. They harbour fear, suspicion and a reluctance to really open up and live the culture they’re experiencing.

These people will turn down an invitation to attend a local family celebration. They’ll turn down an invitation from another traveler to accompany him on a mini adventure. They’ll turn down the opportunity to see new place because they’ve heard it might not be safe.

The “lucky” travelers, on the other hand, learn to be street wise, avoid scams and don’t fall victim of crime due to their own carelessness. They don’t use fear and suspicion as an excuse to avoid all risk when on the road.

A trusting, open-minded attitude is the key to making the most of chance encounters, interactions and invitations.

Be flexible

Don’t miss out on serendipity because you’re racing to catch the next train. We can’t all have the luxury of traveling without schedules, boundaries or commitments, but try and keep as much flexibility in your travel arrangements as you can.

There will be another train, bus or plane (or maybe a sail boat or camel ride) out of there but the Dalai Lama’s path may never cross yours again.

Stockpile some good Karma

No matter what your spiritual beliefs, it’s worth putting some good out there and seeing if it comes back. More often than not, goodness comes back.

Start small. Smile at someone. Offer a positive comment. Give or lend a local or fellow traveler something you possess that they need. Spend some time and effort helping someone.

Share your food, resources and information. Do some good and then sit back and wait for the universe to repay you. Even if it doesn’t, what have you lost?

Roll with the punches

Two travelers can share the same experiences and view them completely differently. Ask a “lucky” traveler if he anything bad has happened to him. Almost without exception he’ll have a few hard luck tales to tell – stories of missed connections, rude officials and (invariably) amoebic dysentery.

If you want to encounter good luck on your travels you’ll have to take a little bad luck too. The trick is to roll with the punches. Treat the bad luck as a passing stranger and focus on the good luck.

Take responsibility for the success of your trip. If you hit a problem, find a solution. If you miss a connection, find something neat to do in the place you’re stuck, even if it’s a no-horse town on the edge of nowhere.

Long trips are like long marriages. To have a great one, you sometimes have to develop a selective memory. Ride out the bad patches in order to get to the good stuff.

Be prepared

Good luck favors those who are prepared to receive it. Before your travels think about what preparations you need to make in order to take all the opportunities that could come your way.

Do you need at least a smattering of the local language? Don’t miss out on unique experience by lacking the ability to communicate with a potential new friend.

And what about your physical fitness? It would be a shame if you had the opportunity to hike into a remote and beautiful mountain range, but didn’t have the physical strength to make the climb.

What are you prepared to encounter on your travels?

Be willing to listen and learn

We all know opportunities for unique travel experiences can’t be found in a guide book.

The lucky chances we encounter when traveling are the result of taking other people’s advice. Often it’s not presented as advice. It’s traveler’s tales, casual suggestions, careless chit-chat around a camp fire or a hostel breakfast table.

We all hear these conversations. Some of us are willing to listen. The luck often comes from being willing to learn.

Keep your ears open, but more importantly keep your mind and heart open. When you hear of another traveler’s amazing experience don’t think in terms of “Wow, he’s so lucky that happened to him,” think “If I did that, maybe something amazing would happen to me.”

Remember that law of cause and effect. Be willing to see things in a new way, to take on a new idea, to jump on that lucky chance when it’s presented to you.

There’s no better way to get lucky.

Do you know these lucky travelers? Or maybe you’re one of them! Share your advice in the comments!

Photo by J-Christophe Cabut

It’s a slightly overcast morning, and another steady stream of glorious lefts peel off the point.

Magazine picture-perfect as they might be, their faces are empty for the moment-even though this point is in front of a town of 40,000 and just a few kilometers from a city of 700,000.

There is a good surfing population here and, as a surfer, I couldn’t help but wonder how so many waves like this could go un-ridden. But here things are little less complicated; it’s Peru, the water is cool, and people are poor.

It’s not the cold water that keeps the locals out of the water, but the poor and its gritty antipathy towards, among more important things, wetsuits and surfboards.

Of course, I have a wetsuit-a new one-and a surfboard: so I’m off to enjoy the swell, passing and greeting the same smiling faces as I go.

There is nothing overtly wrong in this situation; but, at the same time, it doesn’t feel entirely right for a gringo blithely passing local surfers unable to surf their own beautiful waves.

Searching For Gold

This traveling experience is not limited to just the wave seekers and their local counterparts. It is commonplace when traveling to poor places.

As travelers, we’re in the business of experience appropriation.

We are the conquistadors of the 21st century; but, instead of searching for a city of gold we are searching for experiences of gold: the most beautiful glaciers, the longest waves, the most incredible parties, the tastiest wine, the most delectable food, and so on.

We are in search of stories and photos and, hopefully a heightened sense of self-awareness.

We are collectors of geography, of the ability to turn the abstract lines of a map into the concrete contours of a face or bustling avenue or 2nd century temple. Upwards, onwards, conquering experiences that are often times out of reach of most of our hosts.

The obvious distinction to be drawn between the modern traveler and a Senor Pizarro is, well, obvious: I’ve yet to share a hostel dorm room with a slave driving, gold obsessed despot bent on conquering local populations.

Focus On Difference

The experiences we are conquering are, at least in theory, not scarce. There is nothing in our enjoying the view of Kilimanjaro and Iguaçu that precludes others from doing the same.

Photo by Daniel Jauregui

Actually, rather than bringing the capital out, we’re often the ones bringing capital in, with our gringo-dollars at times bankrolling entire communities.

But then, walking down to another day at this beautiful break, there’s something that still rubs wrong. Perhaps it’s an over analysis, or perhaps it reflects an aspect of my existence cum traveler. I think it boils down to the following:

One of the crutches of travelers is the instinctive nature to focus on differences. Often we’re traveling to escape from routine, to douse ourselves in newness. So we hone in on the way people are different: how they get on a bus, the food they eat, the way they dress.

But in doing so, the generally minor, culturally born differences are overemphasized at the expense of the underlying reality.

Because when you actually take the time to integrate yourself, when you become aware of people not as just doing strange things or acting out roles in some foreign language theater, you realize that (go figure) they’re just people.

People who want to spend time with friends and family, have sex, watch movies, go dancing, have a nice place to live, travel, surf and so on.

Human Awkwardness

This realization comes with a price: if by focusing on differences we effectively mitigate the awareness of inequality, here we are exposed to the arbitrariness of it all

There is no good reason that travelers like me are riding on our globe-trotting horses.

Our experience conquests are financed largely by chance, through a lottery of genes and parenting and political borders. We are forced to chew on the fact that most people in this world can’t even enjoy the best of their own countries, their own cities-much less far-flung continents.

Try looking for a comfortable, merit-based explanation for why we are in a position to do what we’re doing and you’ll feel pretty stupid. It’s awkward.

I hardly believe in moral imperatives, but I think one of the effects of genuine travel is the forcing of this ‘humane awkwardness’, and stimulating those who can’t help but respond to it- out of guilt, obligation or just plain goodness.

I guess I’m here with the first of these. I can’t help but absorb the inequity walking by far better surfers unable to surf because they can’t afford a wetsuit.

So I don’t know. Next time I guess I’ll leave the stickers at home, clean out the closet, and bring some extra neoprene.

What do you think of ‘human awkwardness’? Share your thoughts in the comments!

Travel is best when shared.

In the quest to give students the tools to secure a successful career, I believe our public schools forget about teaching them what happens once they achieve it.

My friend Maria, a political lobbyist, said it best: “I see students in school today who say that they want to make money. But I ask them: what are you going to do once you have that money?”

Many people are left stranded at a financially successful point in their lives, never having thought about what comes after the stable, robust paycheck.

Similarly, many experienced globetrotters don’t think thoroughly about what comes after their long-awaited journey. We spend a lot of time and money planning our trips, which can lead us to believe that the trip is the end in itself.

In reality, coming home is only the beginning. You’ve had a wonderful trip and learned so much, but what are you going to do with what you’ve learned?

Bigger Context

One of the most fulfilling ways to put your traveling experience into the context of a bigger, more meaningful picture is to share it with others.

Most of us come home with great tools for sharing our experience: gifts, stories, hundreds of photos.

The real connections are made from the thoughtful reflections on your experience. Recently one of my friends gave a slideshow presentation about her internship in Senegal to forty of her friends and family at home.

At the end, she summarized by stating several things she had learned: that poverty is not always obvious. That Africa is not hopeless. That you never know what people have been through. That we should share what we have.

These are small but profound lessons. It’s more than ego to tell our stories to others – it’s a responsibility. Education and travel are privileges not enjoyed by everyone. It presents us with an obligation to not let our knowledge rest inside us to wither and fade away.

Ideas for Sharing

Your trip may not have been long or exotic. But you inevitably grew from being in a new culture and place, and what you took is what you also have the power to give.

• Put together a thoughtful collection of your fifty best photos from your trip, and share those photos’ stories to any willing family or friends.
• Keep a trip blog, but use it to reflect on larger issues and themes as well as your everyday experiences.
• Reach a wider audience by writing articles and stories.
• Talk to high school teachers and youth group leaders, who are often thrilled to host young guest speakers who have an interesting story or lesson to share.

In Canada, the Canadian International Development Agency even has a Youth Speakers Program – you tell them that you are interested in speaking about your international experience, and they provide you with the resources and booking services.

Passing Knowledge

Ultimately the world is about something bigger than us.

It’s about constantly and actively seeking to make our communities, countries, and world a better place – righting injustices, caring for self, others, and the environment, and actively participating and cooperating in community life.

Traveling is a profound and powerful experience. But without passing on our knowledge, without sharing our new insights with those who cross our paths, it becomes emptier and its full meaning is lost.

We cannot underestimate the power of sharing these things that we learn.

So don’t just go back to your old life or keep your trip to yourself when you come home – use what you’ve learned to its full extent. Share what your travels have taught you, and you are making the world a better place.

How do you share your travels? Share your ideas in the comments!

Old woman laughing. Photo by phitar

Whether suffering from homesickness or culture shock, jet lag or entourage ennui, the traveler’s life is not always as happy as vacation photos might make it seem.

Hitting a few rough patches along the way is natural and to be expected as you globe trot.

Just because you’re having exciting adventures and visiting beautiful places doesn’t mean that every day will be exciting and memorable.

Here are a few unique suggestions that are guaranteed to make your travails a little happier.

1. Listen to Cheesy Music

I know you have it. I do. Put on your headphones, and experience the magical healing powers that Earth, Wind, and Fire, Huey Lewis and the News, and Phil Collins can have on a case of the grumpies.

While traveling, you rarely get the time to dance in their underwear to TLC’s “Creep” while getting ready for a night out, or belt out Queen lyrics in your singing-in-the-car voice. Well, it’s up to you to make the time.

So put on some Pete Townsend and let his music open the door to your heart and a better mood.

2. Stream Some Psychotherapy

The nascence of live streaming and podcasts on the Internet has revolutionized the way we can treat homesickness. These wonders of technology bring your home to you with the aid of an Internet connection.

Radio shows and news broadcasts not only permit the listener to enjoy a nice dose of refreshingly easy to understand English, but updates from the home front can also help you realize that your native land is still there and will be waiting for you when you get back.

Plus, there’s the instant mood boost that comes from catching the weather forecast predicting thunderstorms and humidity in your hometown as you’re basking in the blue skies and sunshine of somewhere exotic.

3. See A Hollywood Movie

I officially absolve you of all guilt associated with seeing a Hollywood blockbuster or checking out your fetish filmmaker’s newest film while you’re in a foreign land.

You are allowed to take a night off from sightseeing and sampling local flavor if you’re starting to get burnt out. Like podcasts, films can put you back into an English-speaking environment once again as well as give a window into your native culture.

Sometimes a cinematic experience is all it takes to revive your spirits and sense of adventure. Don’t deprive yourself of necessary respites along the way.

4. Enjoy The Silence

If you’re not staying in a bustling urban environment and don’t have access to technological audio-visual aids to distract yourself from your melancholy, you’ll have to be more creative about getting out of the doldrums.

On a hiking trip through the Alps one summer I experienced my fair share of grueling days. On the most physically and mentally exhausting ones, the only thing that helped me was simply shutting off my mind.

It’s true what Milton said, “The mind is its own place, and in itself, can make heaven of Hell, and a hell of Heaven.”

Don’t let your mind make things more hellish – instead, revel in the meditative moments that come when one is surrounded by wide-open spaces. Don’t think about the past or the present. Don’t think at all. Just be quiet.

5. Get Metaphysical

I learned this tactic in Italy as I was lost and trying to find my hostel before it was too late to check in.

In my clearly stressed-out state, I paused to check the address. Completely absorbed in my quest, I raised my head to see a man standing in front of me, offering a piece of Italian candy in an attempt to alleviate my agony.

Almost immediately, my frustration evaporated. I realized in that moment that the true treasures of travel are these moments, often unexpected, which can swing you through the tough times until you can grab onto the next one.

Lastly, remember that most negative experiences are the funniest stories you’ll tell when you get home. Think about what an entertaining party guest your tales will make you!

Crater Lake. Photo by Ed Ingram

Ask different travelers what their must-haves are on a trip and you’ll get an infinite number of varying answers.

I’ve met hardcore backpackers circling the globe with only a daypack stuffed with a couple pairs of underwear and a toothbrush tied to their belt loops.

Other travelers have an entourage of locals dragging their matching luggage from their private car to their swanky hotel. Preferred forms of transportation run the gamut from rickshaws to first class Emirate Airways cabins.

Meals are taken in meat-on-a-stick form or stacked delicately on expensive china. Some shun the comforts of home while others demand to be pampered.

I normally fall somewhere in between grimy backpacker and coddled travel connoisseur, but there is one luxury I can never do without: the luxury of time.

Every Travel Moment Is Precious

A two-week whirlwind vacation is a noble endeavor if that is all your circumstances allow. Every moment abroad exploring, discovering and developing is valuable.

Still, there is no substitute for the no-strings-attached, long-term travel that may only be feasible at certain times in our lives. Whether it’s the gap year, the extended honeymoon, or the I-quit-my-job-and-sold-all-my-earthly-possessions journey, long-term travel is a unique opportunity to be captured and enjoyed to its fullest.

This type of travel allows you to discard your itinerary and spend an entire day hiking in a direction simply because your camera loves the light.

You can wait in a village an extra week because you found upon arrival that an incredible festival will be occurring. You can shift directions because you met a fascinating travel companion who did you the great service of radically changing the way you look at the world.

Luxuries are not four-star hotels or air-conditioned buses or hot-water showers. The real luxury is knowing there is no rush and the world is yours to explore.

Time or Money?

I could spend $1000 in a month in Asia, but I can also rough it a little and make it last three times as long.

Vietnam. Photo by Dane Phillips

One of my favorite destinations has been Sapa in Northern Vietnam. I endured a rough train ride because I refused to pay the extortionist prices for a first class sleeper.

But the $40 I saved on my train ticket paid for 8 nights at a hotel overlooking the intricately terraced valley. I spent a total of 3 weeks in a town where most people go for weekend trips, but it meant that I didn’t have to worry that clouds enveloped the city for days at a time, blocking out the sun and the view.

I was able to stroll leisurely through the fog and watch the ornately dressed hill-tribe women slide through the mist instead of curse the weather and my luck as that amazing destination lay obscured by seemingly permanent cloud cover.

I tried several mornings to catch the perfect sunrise, and for several days the light and blankets of white refused to cooperate. But eventually they broke, and the images were unforgettable and have come to define my time in Vietnam.

Those extra days are incredible gifts to travelers and should not be traded away lightly.

Going With The Flow

How to find the extra time to travel? I like to have a fair amount of research done so I know what demands my attention at each destination. Some guidebooks suggest a day for a city, others say a week is absolutely necessary.

For example, Angkor Wat is now on almost everyone’s travel circuit through SE Asia, but how long you spend there is entirely dependent on your interests and passions. After studying Anthropology and Archaeology in college, I felt I wanted 4 days there, but many people are fine with an afternoon.

Maybe your time would be better spent in a local village or on a trek. You have to know what to expect, what you’re looking for, and what is most beneficial for you as a traveler.

I know that I need to see the people of a country to feel that I have experienced it. Of course, ruins and vistas are the necessary highlights, but what gives a place depth and transforms it from a two-dimensional backdrop for sightseeing into a living, breathing entity are its people.

Inviting Serendipity

A few extra days can give you time to wander the hillside and stumble upon a family having a picnic, or watch children at play, or go to a remote village to meet people unaccustomed to the endless parade of tourists.

This allows your experience to be fundamentally different from everyone else quickly scurrying along the guidebook path.

And let’s not forget all your fellow travelers have to offer. Having time to hang out at the hostel and interact with people from all over the world is all part of the experience. They offer insight into places not yet visited or an opportunity to reminisce about shared experiences.

You can read that novel you found at the book exchange that will introduce you to a new favorite author, or you can drag your pen across paper and write your own story.

We all remember those perfect moment’s we would have missed if we had arrived somewhere a day later or left a day early.

Realistically, wherever you end up has something to offer. But as travelers, we owe it to ourselves to seek out every opportunity, and to be altered by a destination.

The best way to make that happen is to give yourself the luxury of time.

What are your thoughts on taking the time for slower travel? Share your experiences in the comments!

Photo by Wazari

“Where is your Russian-ness, Katia?” an ex-boyfriend once accused me while visiting me in Amsterdam.

His remark was provoked by the fact that I didn’t offer him a whole cooked dinner – only a cup of tea with a cookie.

I wasn’t happy about his remark but I did start to think about my Russian-ness later, when I saw a program on Russia on the television.

The presenter of the program described Russian people as the nation of soul seekers, who dwell upon questions about existence even when there is no food in the house.

I was sad about the fact that some of my Russian roots seem to have gone to the wind, especially when the criticism came from a man with whom I used to have vivid fights about democracy in Russia.

“You don’t know the meaning of democracy in the Western world! And stop talking about my country in such a bad way,” I would shout at him, even ready to defend the image of my country in a physical way.

Keep On Keepin’ On

Nowadays, however, when someone asks me about the politics in Russia, I simply smile in an English elusive sweet way (I am in the UK now) and say something like: “Or you know, we always manage.”

There are a lot of articles about expats and research being done on those who leave their country in order to return afterwards. There are also a lot of articles and books about immigrants, those who leave their country for good.

But there seems to be little research on so-called ‘soul-seekers’ – those who leave their country with no precise idea as to where the journey will take them.

My friend from Italy is a perfect example of a ‘soul-seeker’. We met while studying in Belgium, she from Italy, me from Russia, and we both traveled to different countries afterwards. Margerita went to Russia, I went to the Netherlands.

For a while, Margerita stayed in the Netherlands, while I returned to Belgium, and I remember what she told me on one occasion: “I don’t know what is worse, to live in total misery or not knowing where you belong.”

No End In Sight

On a TV program in Russia, one man described how my people have always managed to live under extremely difficult conditions. He said:

“Here in Russia, we have life and daily survival. Life is about discovery, when you read, or write, or listen to music or just try to answer the questions about existence and the world around you. And daily survival is the job, the cleaning, metro, sleep. Here in Russia most people prefer to live.”

I would apply his description to the nation of soul-seekers, and all those who go for the discovery of wonder.

It happened to me. Never in my early life did I imagine I would leave Russia at the age of nineteen and change four countries of residence in eleven years.

I became a strange Russian-European hybrid. I have nostalgia for four different places and don’t feel one hundred percent happy in any of them, because I miss the other three.

I am simply between countries, cultures, friends, jobs and languages and am not sure whether I will ever settle in any of the places I visit. Travel is like an addiction.

I know that there are more and more people like me. They go to discover the world but realize at some point that they don’t know where they belong anymore.

Your own culture back at home may simply be not enough once you return. And so you travel again and again and again. Until you find your better half or reach retirement.

Frankly I am not sure what is more likely to happen, as I’m not married nor am I entitled to a retirement yet.

Do you ever feel like you don’t belong anywhere? Share your thoughts in the comments!

The dreaded homecoming hangover.

Every time I get settled into my seat for the long plane ride home after a trip, it hits me: the homecoming hangover.

Somewhere between sitting down and taxiing the runway, I find my mood uncontrollably oscillating between anger and sadness.

Heading back from my first trip to Europe, I wept like a child. The next time? I drank myself silly.

Nowadays, I usually just glare into space, or, if I’m feeling particularly constructive, I’ll journal a little. Coming home, it seems like there’s nothing to look forward to in the conceivable future.

I’m not alone in experiencing this phenomenon. Almost every traveler has had at least one pretty severe bout with what seems to be reverse culture shock.

If you don’t address the problem quickly after your return, the apathy or aggression you feel toward your home (and your life) can easily become a serious form of real depression that can last for months.

Before you call a shrink or decide to get on meds, let’s take a moment to think about this post-travel condition and what it really means.

Back to the Grind

After an extended stay in another country where you are constantly surrounded by the excitement of new and exotic things, it’s only natural to experience a let down when you hit the pavement back home.

This is home turf – you know how to get around, it may seem there aren’t many surprises left, and the fact that you understand the language and customs makes it that more difficult to tolerate social situations when people act rude or inconsiderate.

You have a routine that involves work or school, cooking and cleaning, and other, generally less-than-life-altering tasks requiring your immediate and often undivided attention.

Routine is sometimes boring and annoying. But it’s an unchanging facet of life, and we have to force ourselves to remember that it’s these day-to-day mundane activities that make travel so invigorating and exciting.

If you took a different trip every month, travel itself would become something of a chore, trading its luster and allure for the crinkled brow and glassy eyes you might associate with a three-hour board meeting.

In fact, if you traveled all the time, you would likely find yourself wishing for home on a much more regular basis.

Be Grateful!

While it’s difficult to remember when you’re fighting for your luggage in baggage claim, every chance you get to travel is special. Scratch that, it’s sacred.

Photo by Jynmeyer

Think about how many times you’ve had to defend your drive to travel against the more “traditional” desires of those around you, whether it’s parents, family, friends, or significant others.

Shouldn’t you pursue a more expensive car, buy a house, get married and have children? (Not that these things preclude travel, but they often don’t mix well, either.)

Remember, not many people manage to scrape together the gumption and cash to experience travel and appreciate foreign cultures.

In our politically-charged world, travel is becoming an even more important tool of mutual understanding. Throughout history, borders open and close subject to the will of leaders we can’t control. Don’t take your freedom to roam wherever you want for granted.

The Gift of Travel

Travel is a gift. So instead of dwelling on the fact that you can’t go as often as you like – and let’s face it, who can?-focus on how lucky you are to understand the value inherent in leaving your country for another one.

You may make the commitment to consider the perks of living in your home country, and resolve to learn more about your city in the downtime between your trips.

There are a million ways you can fill your time and avoid the homecoming hangover – scrapbooking, socializing, planning a new trip – but it may be better to work on changing your frame of mind altogether.

It’s unlikely you’ll ever feel as elated coming home as you do when your plane hits the runway in say, Barcelona, but you can channel that depressed feeling into renewed energy.

What’s your advice for appreciating home after a trip? Share your thoughts in the comments!

Photo by Pocket Aces

I play a lot of poker. Too much, actually, but that’s another story.

It was while playing poker at the Amsterdam casino that I met Greg. He was a friendly local, and upon hearing my travel tales, offered to show me around Amsterdam.

We had only known each other for about 5 minutes, but here I was, being offered an intimate tour.

I was a little disarmed by Greg’s exuberance and friendliness. Here was this guy, losing money to me, now suddenly eager to show me the city.

I had only been on the open road for a short time. My American cynicism was still strong. I recalled stories about locals ripping off travelers – and so, with Greg’s Euros sitting on the poker table in front of me, I graciously declined his invitation.

A few days later though, I saw Greg again and we talked. He said he ran a poker club and told me I could come by any time.

Start Of A Friendship

Greg was a regular at the casino and everyone there knew him. People assured me he wasn’t out to rip me off, and I should take him up on his offer of a tour. A few of them were going out later that night for drinks.

Sadly, I was leaving for Spain the next morning and had to rise early for my flight.

“I thought you were here for a while?” he said.

“I was. I was here for a week. That’s a long time in this city!” I replied. “I wish I could stay longer but I have a flight booked. I’ll be back sometime though.”

Greg wished me luck and gave me his card.

As it turned out, before I knew it, I felt the lure of the city call me. In Spain, all I could think about was Amsterdam, so I canceled my Spain plans and returned.

This time Greg and I became good friends during my extended stay. I saw him often in the poker room and he would always invite me back to his place for late night games.

It was through him that I met many locals and had a “Dutch experience” in Amsterdam. I was introduced to the local bars and restaurants, to Dutch food, and Dutch hangouts.

Greg took me around and showed me the city. I met another close friend through him. Greg opened the city to me and his kindness made my stay in Amsterdam worthwhile.

An Unexpected Turn

Photo by Jimmy Ok

Soon it was time to leave. I went to the casino to say goodbye. Greg hadn’t been answering his phone and I figured I’d find him in the poker room.

Sadly, he wasn’t in the casino that day, and I left without saying goodbye. I told my friends to tell him I’d be back and that “my money was coming back with me!”

Sadly, I wouldn’t get that chance. A few weeks after I left, three men entered Greg’s poker club and, as they robbed his house, shot him.

I only knew Greg for a month but in that time he changed my impressions of people. His friendliness and welcoming attitude were disarming.

On the road, you put your guard up to avoid bad situations, yet at the same time you want to be open and meet the locals. Interacting with locals is a constant struggle to find the right balance.

Open Your Eyes

Greg showed me that there was no reason to always be on your guard – that sometimes people are just being friendly. I take that lesson (and his card) with me wherever I go.

Greg epitomized the idea that travel is about who you meet, not where you go. I could have met him in any city in any country in any time, and he still would have treated me like he had known me for years.

When you meet others who fill your day with excitement and joy, nothing about the place really matters.

That was Greg. Greg was the local we all hope to meet. The person who has the key to the city’s door and is willing to open it and usher you inside.

I’ve met many people like Greg since that time in Amsterdam, and I see a little of Greg in all of them. But it was Greg who showed me it was OK to make that first, trusting step.

I’m not sure where Greg is now, but wherever he went, I know he left an impression on many people. He left one on me.

Have you met that special local who opened their city to you? Share your experiences in the comments!

Photo by greekgod

Panic washed over me. I tried telling myself that everything would be OK, but remained unconvinced.

Suddenly I leapt out of my seat and pleaded my way past the flight attendants. My progress was halted by security.

“I lost something in the waiting area. Can I go get it?” The security guard gave me a thousand yard stare.

“Please!” Amazing how far this word can get you.

He relented. “OK. Be quick because we’re about to close the gate.” I flew out and dived under the seats of the lounge, which caused a businessman to jump.

“What did you lose?” the security guard asked as I returned to the plane.

“My lucky coin. I can’t fly without it.”

“Lucky coin!” His colleague looked at me in disbelief.

The guy who let me out reproved him. “You can’t leave without a thing like that, man!” He was a believer in the power of lucky charms as well. Prior to this incident I had traveled with my coin unfailingly for five years and then intermittently for six years.

My lucky charm is a humble penny with a stretched image of Queen Mary. The panic I felt at its momentary loss alarmed me, but its also an inevitable travel truth that you will lose stuff.

The Power Of Superstition

The last few times I’ve traveled without it I’ve attributed any and all misfortune to its absence. Illogical, I know – but superstitions aren’t exactly rational.

Dictionary.com defines superstition as “a belief or notion not based on reason or knowledge.” I agree. Go ahead and think of as many superstitions as you can. Now try to find a rational reason for each one. Tricky, isn’t it?

There is a push-pull relationship with superstitions. You try to avoid succumbing to a superstition, but then at the last minute you decide to follow through, just for good measure. This is how some superstitions become traditions.

To think I may never see Rome again because of the Trevi fountain coin toss superstition. I went to Rome twice in one month. On my first visit I threw a coin into the Trevi fountain. On my second visit I forgot. I haven’t been back since.

In From Here to Eternity, Deborah Kerr’s character explains that if you throw a lei into the Pacific and it floats away from you, you’ll never come back to the Hawaiian Islands.

I’ve spent my summers in Honolulu since I was eight and this was news to me. I wonder – if you’re ignorant about a superstition, does the adage “no harm no foul” apply?

Unlucky 13

Many superstitions center on the significance of numbers, especially 13, the fear of which is called triskaidekaphobia. There is no definitive reason why 13 is so abhorred.

Photo by Jeff Yang

Some attribute triskaidekaphobia to the Vikings or to the Last Supper, but rest assured the fear is ancient. And it effects still affects us.

Recently, Brussels Airlines came under fire for employing 13 circles in their logo. The uproar caused them to paint one more circle onto all of their planes.

Have you ever noticed that some planes have no row 13? The entire Cathay Pacific and Continental fleets are missing it. Sensibly, British Airways has refused to succumb to the nonsense. Other airlines have reached a happy compromise and insert row 13 in their smaller aircrafts, thereby screwing the short-haul passengers.

There is an Italian superstition about the number seventeen because the roman numerals can be rearranged to spell vixi, which in Latin means ‘I have lived’.

Lufthansa’s entire fleet except for the Dash 8Q and ATR 72-500, the smaller planes, are missing row 17. In an exercise of cultural sensitivity some airlines like Delta skip row 13 and 17 in their 757-200s.

Next time you enter a high-rise hotel pay attention to how they’ve numbered the floors. You may suddenly go from the 12th floor to the 14th floor. In an article by Barbara De Lollis for USA TODAY, she quotes J.W. “Bill” Marriott Jr., who states “‘it was one of the first things I learned: Don’t go to 13.’” It’s a tradition to ignore the 13th floor.

Ever refuse to travel on certain days or wonder if there is a day that’s best to avoid? Don’t travel on a Friday! Besides the awful traffic and whatever else the world throws at you it’s been said journeys should not be started on this day.

Lord Byron sailed for Greece on a Friday and died. Embarking on Friday didn’t directly cause his death but it doesn’t matter. The outcome only added weight to the superstition.

All In The Mind?

Some superstitions are cultural (i.e. the number 13) and some are self-created. I know people who have to clean house before a trip. If the house is dirty the trip will be bad, and there’s nothing worse than coming back to a dirty house and a fridge full of moldy food.

I used to keep my old inspection stickers and tags on my suitcase until my dad scared me by suggesting a confused baggage handler may send my stuff to the wrong destination.

However, I’ve found that I’m not the only one with a fondness for tags. The sister of my American Social History professor keeps the tag as a good luck charm for another trip and then replaces it with the new one.

Many superstitions are also rituals. I used to always pack in the same manner, placing my beloved battered books by W. Somerset Maugham and F. Scott Fitzgerald on the bottom, but I’ve since broken this habit.

I broke some of my habits by asking a simple question – why am I doing this? Do I honestly believe if I carry a coin and pack my books ‘just so’ I can thwart my plane from crashing?

Eventually, the reason came out: If the prior trip was successful (meaning I got back more or less in one piece), I try to repeat the same conditions as closely as possible. So, if I hold unto the baggage tag, remember my lucky coin and pack my suitcase in the same way, then maybe I will have another good trip.

Then again, the times I left the coin at home, I’ve had unusually bad flights. Serious arguments cast a shadow over my last two trips, along with bad weather. I’ve been plagued with canceled ventures to South America.

In life and travel, fortune decides too many factors. Superstitions feed into this lack of control and the desire to gain it back.

Next time I think I’ll take my coin with me.

What travel superstitions do you have? Share your thoughts in the comments!

Photo by Lola Akinmade

I wasn’t sure I heard her right the first time.

“I said leave my store! I have many windows you can look in from!” she yelled, probably mistaking me for an impoverished immigrant she didn’t want in her shop.

Visibly stunned, I vowed never to return to culturally diverse Luxembourg. As I marched off, the words “Mademoiselle! Mademoiselle!” stopped me.

Another middle-aged woman was chasing me uphill with a bag of groceries. She finally reached me, panting to collect her breath. This perfect stranger had also been a customer in the store.

“Je suis désolée! I’m so sorry!” She apologized on behalf of the shopkeeper.

I could have stereotyped the shopkeeper as a rude Frenchwoman, but I chose not to do so – based on the actions of another French woman. Instead, the rude woman remained only a rude woman.

Practicing Tolerance

Just keep an open mind,” is a phrase that’s easier said than done. Even the most intrepid of travelers morph into creatures of habit, reverting back to their comfort zone when faced with challenges.

Keeping an open mind does not mandate that you ditch your core values and spiritual beliefs. On the contrary, it implores you to acknowledge that others have their own beliefs as well.

An open mind allows us to ask questions of other cultures and of ourselves, evaluating the possibilities that there might be answers different from ones we’ve always held.

Clifton Fadiman, a writer and critic, eloquently explains that “…when you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.”

Though years of immersion can draw you closer into the true belly of a culture, on many levels, you’ll always remain a foreigner.

Facing Rejection

Locals may reject your notions of what you think is important. While many Western cultures view time as money, a large portion of the world views time as something to be savored.

When dealing with “island” time or other cultural norms, constantly remember that you are the stranger. Locals are not required to adapt their lifestyles to accept you. If they do, you should consider their flexibility a privilege.

On the opposite end, being accepted too quickly might mean that locals are treating you differently as a foreigner, giving you false insight into their true culture.

The key to keeping an open mind is to evaluate if they’re giving you preferential treatment because of your physical attributes or what you represent, rather than you as an individual. Use keen observation to view how locals interact with each other to get a truer sense of their daily lives.

Assessing each situation independently

The key to organically experiencing a different culture is to assess each situation independently. One tends to fall back on widely known stereotypes and overvalue one’s culture when suddenly faced with unpleasant encounters.

Photo by Lola Akinmade

Maybe that Luxembourg shopkeeper was having a bad day or just had deep-seated prejudices. I’ll never know, but I’ll always remember the stranger who apologized. I’ve since been back to the Benelux area multiple times.

Stereotypes are born when we take the actions of an individual and apply them to an entire culture, race, or generation. It is important to understand that a culture, though vastly different from yours, is innately logical to locals.

For example: Swedes freeze sliced bread to preserve the freshness. For centuries, the Aztecs and Chinese have dealt with stress and anxiety through simple meditation and breathing techniques to more “controversial” methods like acupuncture.

Some cultures view sleep as that unnecessary period deterring us from getting work done, while others welcome sleep with open arms.

Observing how others handle similar issues can both teach and enrich us.

Dealing with more controversial practices

For altitude sickness in higher altitude locations such as Cuzco, Peru, you could spend time popping pills to combat altitude sickness – or you could do as the locals do: chew coca leaves or drink coca tea.

The indigenous cultures of the Andes and Altiplano have lived in the region for decades and know how to suppress symptoms naturally and very quickly. Taking coca leaves outside of South America is prohibited because, in very large quantities, coca is the underlying raw material used to manufacture cocaine.

Eating poppy-seed bagels does not equate to using opium, neither does eating grapes equate to drinking alcoholic wine. We usually evaluate alternate solutions when solving problems.

Solutions from within different cultures should not be automatically deemed nonviable because we don’t completely understand them.

There isn’t a clear line to cross when absorbing other cultures into your lifestyle. You draw the line where you want to cross based on your own personal convictions and beliefs.

Challenging yourself to try new things

You don’t have to bungee-jump off a bridge over Waikato River in New Zealand to prove open-mindedness if you know you’ll go into cardiac arrest.

Nor should you eat fried tarantulas in Cambodia if the sight alone invokes violent retching.

However, travel demands you step outside your comfort bubble. Challenging yourself to sample facets of a culture is the underlying purpose of travel. Whether it’s trying local cuisines or undertaking a new activity, the only way you can truly enrich your life through travel is to participate.

“If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay at home,” said the popular American Author, James Michener.

As you open up your mind, you will notice your heart expanding in parallel. You’ll find yourself more forgiving and your own prejudices slowly chipping away over time.

Have you had an experience on the road where you could have exercised open-mindedness? Leave a comment below!

Photo by Benjamin Orbach

As I waited for the monorail that would take me to my connecting gate at O’Hare Airport, the sun rose and painted red the lower edges of the Chicago sky.

It was the color of the elderly Sikh’s turban in Jaipur, the man who had sold me a bottle of water between handing out change to the pilgrims who passed his shop.

The red light reflected off of the station’s glass walls, steel-colored fixtures, and sparkling floor. For the first time in two and a half weeks, I was alone.

My backpacking vacation to India was a trip to a world filled with henna-dyed orange hair; freshly baked naan; maroon and gold bangles; 500-year old fishing nets; purple saris; green fields of tea plantations; and the “What is your name?” shouts of the 19 smiling kids who followed me through a Shekawati village.

My snapshots are colorful collages set to the clamor of chatter and traffic, but as I watched the sunrise in Chicago’s airport, it was the darkness of Mathura station and the scraping noise of the man who dragged himself along the platform that filled my thoughts.

Mathura Station

A week earlier, beneath the station’s dim lights, our train slowed to a stop and we jumped to the platform below.

My friend Fred and I jostled with other travelers so to climb the ramp and cross the bridge to platform 1 and the ticket window on the other side. At the ramp’s entrance, we streamed around the white-spotted cow like water flowing around a riverbed’s protruding stone.

It was 7:30 PM, Fred’s flight departed Delhi at 11:30, and we were a couple of hours away.

On the platform-bridge, wedged among bustling locals, I twisted away from the outstretched hands of older men who wore thick glasses and sidestepped between shoeless children in dirt-stained clothes who bobbed against the tide of the crowd’s momentum.

Shaking palms beckoned from the shadowy margins and little hands patted my legs.

Ten feet from the ramp’s end, a young man lay on his back. He clutched a black gym bag in his left hand and the sole of his right sneaker faced our approaching pack. His silver watch sparkled in the dim light; he wasn’t of the station’s inhabitants.

It had been a seizure, and an official in a tan uniform knelt at his side.

The crowd slowed, registered an unspoken acknowledgment to the randomness of the unexpected or perhaps the power of fate, and pressed on.

A Sudden Darkness

Photo by Benjamin Orbach

Fred and I searched for the ticket window, needing the express to Delhi. My navy shirt was tie-dyed with salty dried sweat. As Fred pointed to the ticket window, there was a collective gasp, and then black silence.

The station was engulfed in the darkness of rural India.

Before the lights went out, I had noticed the legless beggar on a wooden board. His curly hair reached for the ceiling and his hands were wrapped in rags that were once white. He had been dragging his way across the platform.

Adjusting to the black-on-black forms around me, I made out the beggar’s shape just a few feet away. Undeterred by the power outage, he continued along the platform. The scraping sound of his board against the concrete floor sliced through the thick air and rebounded off of the station’s walls.

Was he blind? I wondered. Did he realize that we were surrounded by darkness, or did it just not matter?

He maneuvered around still dark lumps – travelers huddled on bed-sheets for the night, their heads propped on baggage. Were we all just different shaped lumps?

Perhaps we had stopped existing to him, just as he had for us.

The Traveler’s Moment

Two minutes passed, a generator began to purr, and the lights flickered. India’s time-out for existential musings was over and the station’s traffic resumed its hurried pace.

As I tried to box-out locals so Fred could buy our tickets, I heard water hitting the ground. A few feet behind me, a large brown cow was going to the bathroom. Drops of urine splashed upwards, rising from the station floor.

Fred wiped some sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand, and asked with a smile, “How much can you take?”

We began to laugh and a teenager cut in front of us. It could have been a scene from a movie or an overheard conversation at a bar.

But it was mine: my traveler’s moment.

My India moment, my raw moment of life where all senses inhale and flail and reach an agitated state of awareness where time stops – if only for a moment of pause.

What do you pay for a moment like that, for sound to stop and for smell to be suspended? For the chance to pause, to see through your eyes but also to climb out of your body, to step outside of yourself, and to see the details carved before you?

To survey the scene from above: yourself, the people, and the platform. To pull the camera back, slowly, on to the station, the parking lot, the taxis, the bicycles, and all of the people. To keep widening the shot until you see the slums and the buildings and Mathura itself, covered in darkness.

And then, to zoom back in, rushing from the third person back to your own two eyes, to hear the ebbs of human motion begin again with a shriek, or in this case, the scrape of a board.

To feel the hot air on your neck and the vulnerability of being aware of all the shadows; what would you pay?

Returning To Life

Deep down, when we are packing our bag or buying the ticket online, that moment of unconsciously saying ‘wow’ out loud is what we hope for.

When it matters too much that the copy machine takes three minutes to warm up, that some guy’s shoulder on the subway is rubbing against you, and that Peyton Manning is on Monday night football, again.

That moment, where you recognize that you are in a far away place, and have discovered something so real that you never could have imagined existing just a few seconds before, is why we take time out from what we have, where we are, and what we are doing.

While every trip has the potential to include a traveler’s moment, it isn’t something that can be forced or expected.

With most trips, I’ve found, it just doesn’t happen. They can’t be bought; sadly, there are no travel moment sure things. There is no exact formula for state of mind and state of venue that will strip everything away.

For me, in this case, it was ironic that the moment came in shades of black in a place that broke the color wheel.

In a place of a billion shouts, it was an indifferent scrape of a square piece of wood against a concrete floor that slapped my face, stopped time, and made me pause.

***

Back in O’Hare airport, the monorail arrived and the doors opened. Inside, a lone man with gelled blonde hair, wearing a crisp white shirt listened to his ipod and watched the sun come up.

He glanced at me–my beard, my dirty pants, and my hair that also reached for the sky–and returned to the window and his day.

Have you experienced your traveler’s moment? Share your thoughts in the comments!

Photo by FreaksAnon

“You are a hobo,” declared my friend of a decade. I stared at her, perplexed, and racked my brains to figure out why she was calling me a bum.

Maybe it had something to do with the fact that I was planning a trip to Peru despite not having worked for several months.

She continued, “You know a picture of Charlie Chaplin shows up on my phone when you call me, right?”

I waited for her to go on, but she just looked at me sideway and said it again:

“You’re such a hobo.” For a moment I thought about making a sarcastic remark…but then a big grin broke out across my face.

“Really? Have you ever seen Chaplin’s movie The Kid? I love it.”

“That’s why you’re such a hobo.”

I corrected her, “Charlie Chaplin’s character was known as The Tramp, not The Hobo.”

She rolled her eyes at me and sighed.

Doing What’s Right

To be called a tramp in the tradition of Charlie Chaplin’s alter-ego is a compliment. The Tramp and the Kid are pure-hearted characters in downtrodden circumstances.

Yes, they may scam you and trick you but the mischief is always done with an honest spirit. Their dreams aren’t big and they live by doing what’s right.

The rub about these two characters that Chaplin created is that the Tramp and the Kid are lonely figures who somehow maintain their optimism.

Just about any journey that we undertake in life is done with a certain degree of loneliness, which is a nugget of wisdom that Chaplin intuitively understood. The Tramp and the Kid stand alone together.

The degree of aloofness that exists between strangers is slim when you think about it. Usually all it takes to cut that divide between two strangers is a “hello.” People on a train for twelve plus hours or tenants in a high-rise are intimate strangers.

We all stand alone yet together.

Through Thick And Thin

The world is beautiful and harsh in all its infinite possibilities. Whenever I travel, what I call “The Tramp and the Kid Doctrine” guides me.

They have taught me that life encompasses the good, the beautiful, the ugly, and the terrible, yet it’s the various journeys we undertake that purify and renew us again and again.

We travel many journeys, be it by plane, train, boat, or through our psyche. And, despite the mercurial nature of life, we march on.

We try to do what’s right, even if it’s sometimes lonely to do so. The spirits of the Tramp and the Kid are always with me, and I see their images everywhere.

On my first night in Florence I came across The Tramp and The Kid street performers. The Kid impersonator clung to the Tramp with a listless air while the Tramp looked harassed instead of charismatic.

They went through the motions of a sad routine, and though the mannerisms were perfect, the spirit just wasn’t there.

The Kid From Saigon

A year after the trip to Florence, I met a real-life Kid in Saigon.

Photo by Dlade

One drizzly humid night, Van, my Vietnamese-American friend, and I walked through the industrious crowds of downtown Saigon, taking in the smell of moto-exhaust and steaming bowls of noodle soup.

A couple of feet around a corner sat an old man selling handmade pop-up cards. We stopped to purchase a few.

A young scrawny kid sat down next to us and asked in rudimentary English if we wanted to buy gum. What amazed me was that he then began to ask the same question in several different languages: French, Russian, Korean, Japanese and Chinese.

The kid grinned and told us that the card-man was overcharging us. The card-man sighed, lowered the price and waved the boy away. He scooted about six inches to the left, flashed a smile, and continued to talk to us.

I turned to smile back at the kid for his boldness. The drizzle transformed into hard-pounding rain and we ran for cover under a store awning.

Under the stern gaze of the store employees we quietly conversed in English and Vietnamese. The rain began to dissipate just as the store employees’ patience ran out and the three of us looked at each other, planning our next move.

A Hard Knock Life

We took the Kid to dinner with us. He led us towards a restaurant that he said was popular with Chinese tourists.

I didn’t question his choice, thinking he must be craving the food from there. However, I had to admit that it was likely he received a kickback from the restaurant for bringing in tourists.

Van and I thought the Kid was ten years old. He was fourteen; the oldest of several children. During dinner he pointed out the violinist in the restaurant orchestra as someone very kind who sometimes gave him money.

As our guest of honor, he told us his life story.

The Kid had been working the tourists since he was a toddler with his mom, and on his own since he turned five. Years ago his family was well-off but that changed when his dad had a disfiguring accident.

The Kid recalled how his mom was once beaten by another street peddler over a territory dispute. They lived outside the capital and everyday the Kid paid someone for a ride into the city to make money.

Almost 40% to 50% of his profit, depending on how much gum he sold that day, was spent on getting a ride back and forth.

We offered to kidnap him to America. He declined, because he needed to take care of his parents. His ultimate goal was to learn enough of several foreign languages to work at a hotel.

Hope for the Soul

We stepped once more into the drizzly humidity and said goodbye.

He walked past us and we moved forward. I turned around to see him, in his too big t-shirt and baggy pants, tugging on the arm sleeve of a man, asking in French if he would like to buy some gum.

In the silhouette he looked, for the entire world, like the Tramp’s Kid.

As the distance between us grew I realized that I had met a genuine Kid. His is a hard-knock life but there’s strength in it. He may not have much but his soul is hopeful.

Have you encountered Kids who “work the tourists” and survive by their wits? Leave a comment below!

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.

Editor’s Introduction – Tim Patterson: I’m typing on the deck of a hostel in a little Uruguayan surf town called Punta del Diablo.

I hope you’ll find similar inspiration in these quotes. Without further ado…

The 50 Most Inspiring Travel Quotes Of All Time

1. “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” – Mark Twain

2. “The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.” – St. Augustine

3. “There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.” – Robert Louis Stevenson

4. “The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.” – Samuel Johnson

5. “All the pathos and irony of leaving one’s youth behind is thus implicit in every joyous moment of travel: one knows that the first joy can never be recovered, and the wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.” – Paul Fussell

6. “Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.” – Jack Kerouac

7. “He who does not travel does not know the value of men.” – Moorish proverb

8. “People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.” – Dagobert D. Runes

9. “A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.” – John Steinbeck

10. “No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.” – Lin Yutang

11. “Your true traveler finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty-his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.” – Aldous Huxley

12. “All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.” – Samuel Johnson

13. “For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” – Robert Louis Stevenson

14. “Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things – air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky – all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.” – Cesare Pavese

15. “One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” – Henry Miller

16″A traveler without observation is a bird without wings.” – Moslih Eddin Saadi

17. “When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego and when we escape like the squirrels in the cage of our personality and get into the forest again, we shall shiver with cold and fright. But things will happen to us so that we don’t know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in.” – D. H. Lawrence

18. “To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.” – Freya Stark

19. “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” – Mark Twain

20. “Travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.” – Miriam Beard

21. “All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.” – Martin Buber

22. “We live in a wonderful world that is full of beauty, charm and adventure. There is no end to the adventures we can have if only we seek them with our eyes open.” – Jawaharial Nehru

23. “Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going.” – Paul Theroux

24. “To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.” – Bill Bryson

25. “Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

26. “Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less traveled by.” – Robert Frost

27. “A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” – Lao Tzu

28. “There is no moment of delight in any pilgrimage like the beginning of it.” – Charles Dudley Warner

29. “A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.” – Lao Tzu

30. “If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay at home.” – James Michener

31. “The journey not the arrival matters.” – T. S. Eliot

32. “A journey is best measured in friends, rather than miles.” – Tim Cahill

33. “I have found out that there ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.” – Mark Twain

34. “Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quiestest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.” – Pat Conroy

35. “Not all those who wander are lost.” – J. R. R. Tolkien

36. “Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.” – Benjamin Disraeli

37. “Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.” – Maya Angelou

38. “Too often travel, instead of broadening the mind, merely lengthens the conversation.” – Elizabeth Drew

39. “Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe”……Anatole France

40. “Travel and change of place impart new vigor to the mind.” – Seneca

41. “What you’ve done becomes the judge of what you’re going to do – especially in other people’s minds. When you’re traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don’t have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.” – William Least Heat Moon

42. “I soon realized that no journey carries one far unless, as it extends into the world around us, it goes an equal distance into the world within.” – Lillian Smith

43. “To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.” – Aldous Huxley

44. “Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art.” – Freya Stark

45. “The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.” – Rudyard Kipling

46. “Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.” – Paul Theroux

47. “The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.” – G. K. Chesterton

48. “When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.” – Clifton Fadiman

49. “A wise traveler never despises his own country.” – Carlo Goldoni

50. “Adventure is a path. Real adventure – self-determined, self-motivated, often risky – forces you to have firsthand encounters with the world. The world the way it is, not the way you imagine it. Your body will collide with the earth and you will bear witness. In this way you will be compelled to grapple with the limitless kindness and bottomless cruelty of humankind – and perhaps realize that you yourself are capable of both. This will change you. Nothing will ever again be black-and-white.” – Mark Jenkins

What quotes did we miss? Which one was your favorite? Please leave a comment below!

I once worked with a man named Victor. We forged a friendship that was contingent upon a shared penchant for searing social criticism, ironic humor, and good food, (though not necessarily in that order).

The evening we decided to go out for dinner to indulge all three interests was a watershed moment for me.

As we waited outside for the handicap ramp to be slid over the restaurant’s steps, and as Victor rejected my offer for help, using his calloused, dusty hands to heave his wheelchair over the lip of the ramp, I thought about how much effort Victor had to exert every day just to move his paraplegic body from point A to point B.

Years later, I thought about Victor as I watched tourists with walkers and wheelchairs try to navigate the uneven cobbled streets and narrow sidewalks of my adopted hometown of Old San Juan, Puerto Rico, and I began to think about the accessibility of travel for people with disabilities.

How are the challenges of travel exacerbated by disability? How are the joys possibly tempered? I could only imagine how difficult travel must be for disabled people. But I was wrong.

Walt Balenovich and Dave Wilkins set me straight. These intrepid travelers and travel writers recently spoke with me about their experiences in the air and on the road. Both men are seasoned backpackers whose passports are well-inked with the evidence of their intercontinental journeys.

Here are the highlights of our exchange about traveling with disabilities.

Julie: What type of disability do you have?

Walt: I had polio when I was 12 weeks old and spent the first 5 years of my life in the hospital. I used to walk on crutches, but when I was 27 I moved into a…wheelchair full time. Far from confining, the increased mobility freed me up to travel.

Dave: I had a brain hemorrhage in ‘97 which has left me with no feeling on the left side….I have balance problems and can’t see anything coming from the left. I also suffer anxiety….My scrambled brain cannot cope with noise, large crowds, and rapidly changing situations.

Julie: How do you go about choosing your destinations? Do you look for places that are disability friendly in terms of transport, accommodations, and the like?

Walt: I just decide what continent to go to. Usually access doesn’t enter into it. I am backpacking the world alone, so I have to rely on help sometimes.

Dave: Where I go is certainly NOT disabled friendly! I chose Ecuador as my first destination as I knew the country and lacked the confidence to try somewhere totally new at that time. Then to SE Asia because it had always attracted me. In recent years I have concentrated on West Africa because I have been bitten by the Africa bug and can’t ignore the continent!

Julie: Do you tend to travel independently or as part of a tour or package?

Walt: I travel independently. I love doing my own thing. I like going when and where I want in my own time, so I usually avoid long tours, though I do go on boat tours often. Those are good because you can watch the sights float by!

Dave: I have never traveled with a group and would never consider it. I hate the idea of having to fit in with someone’s wishes…I need to concentrate on looking after myself.

Julie: What kinds of challenges have you encountered as a disabled traveler?

Walt: Mostly just stairs and washrooms… sometimes a place to sleep, but not often.

Dave: Have you got all day? My life is a never-ending challenge from getting up and having to get washed and dressed, to eating/drinking/moving about, to getting to bed at night.

Magnify these by adding the novelties of a foreign country, customs, language, and food, to finding a means of traveling to the next destination, fighting off crowds, suffering bouncing journeys, and hunting out a bed that isn’t too bug-ridden and with water for washing…. (Dave’s personal best for a long-haul vehicular journey is 52 hours in a 7 seat taxi with 13 passengers plus luggage).

Julie: Among the places you’ve visited, which ranks best for the disabled traveler?

Walt: Iguazu Falls in Argentina, on the Brazil border. The upper track of the National Park is fully wheelchair friendly and you are suspended over the gorge and surrounded by over 100 waterfalls in the beautiful tropical Amazon basin.

Dave: Laos is my favorite destination… however I fell in love with a dusty little village in Cameroon that doesn’t appear on any map. I return there are least once a year….By no means is this place disabled-friendly, but I love it.

(He loves it so much, in fact, that he’s started a charitable organization to promote women’s rights and children’s health in the extreme north of Cameroon).

The Verdict on Disabled Travel

Walt and Dave agreed that while it might be nice for more places to be accessible-especially with respect to transportation systems, they also insisted that people with disabilities need, in Walt’s words, to “get out there and be visible.”

Dave acknowledges that meeting the needs for diverse disabilities isn’t feasible in many cases-”the cost would be astronomical,” he says, “and it would adversely affect the beauty of such places.” Both men hope that by traveling without limits, they can inspire other people with disabilities to travel anywhere in the world.

Increasingly, it is becoming easier for people with disabilities to travel.

John Weaver, of the company Special Needs at Sea, explains that advocacy groups such as the Society for Accessible Travel and Hospitality have been instrumental in uniting disabled travelers and encouraging them to travel, as well as representing their interests and needs by working with local governments and private businesses to understand accessibility needs and improve practices.

SATH authored a Code of Conduct towards travelers with disabilities that was adopted by the World Tourism Organization in 1991.

Weaver also reports that certain segments of the tourism industry are improving accessibility significantly, noting that cruise ship companies are becoming increasingly accommodating of disabilities.

Many ships now have signs posted in Braille and in December, 2007 Royal Caribbean realized just how much of a boon disabled travelers can be for business when more than 3,800 deaf and hard of hearing passengers set sail together on a cruise that was specifically designed to meet their needs.

But for those adventure travelers with disabilities who aren’t willing to wait for the tourism industry to adapt to their needs, Walt and Dave say that the world is waiting for them.

Most people on their journeys around the world have been friendly and helpful, and both have learned that few places are totally inaccessible to them.

Visit their blogs to read more about their experiences, and check out Walt’s recently published book, Travels in a Blue Chair.

Julie Schwietert Collazo is a writer, editor, researcher, and translator who lives in New York, Mexico City, and San Juan. She has a BA in English and Women’s Studies, a Masters of Social Work, and is working on a PhD in Literature at the Centro de Estudios Avanzados de Puerto Rico y el Caribe.

Inspired by Walt and Dave’s courage? Got a story of your own to tell? Please join the conversation by leaving a comment below!

When I first arrived in Tokyo, I was sick, lost, and alone. I was also fifteen years old.

This was my first of many extended trips for work (I’m a model) and the decision to travel solo had been made at the last minute.

That evening, when I got off the bus in the wrong place after a severely delayed 13-hour flight, I had second thoughts, but ultimately traveling alone as a teenager turned out to be a seminal part of my youth.

Life in Tokyo was full of hurdles: navigating the subway, deciphering food labels and getting through the day without committing some grave faux pas. I was working, too, so rather than simply being a tourist, I actively participated in the society.

Working meant that on top of basic self-sufficiency I had to collaborate and communicate with Japanese colleagues. At an age when many can scarcely get to work at the Gap on time, I suddenly had to meet life’s challenges on my own.

Growing Up

Some travel skills I learned by trial and error, but overall I was surprised by my own competency. Travel quickly showed me just what, and how much, I was capable of doing by myself.

I became emotionally self-sufficient, too. A photographer once asked me if I missed my family, and when I replied that I did, he said “You love your family, but you need to learn to be at peace by yourself.”

At the time the comment bugged me – I didn’t want to be told how to feel. But later I realized that he was right. My homesickness never subsided, but I learned to accept that I missed my home and family, and move beyond that homesickness to become whole as an individual.

Open to Interpretation

At the same time, the vulnerability I felt being away from home for the first time made me hyper-aware of the fascinating new world around me.

I examined everything: objects, clothing, building, customs. The first thing I noticed was difference. Who knew there were so many ways to look at the same things?

I noticed that aesthetics are very important in Japan (everything from manhole covers to warning signs are made to be admired) and that almost no one wears hats.

Then I started to notice more subtle characteristics of the culture, like the avoidance of saying no: my Japanese acquaintances greatly preferred the term “maybe.” They also thanked people effusively for even the slightest favor.

I realized that everything from pace of life to social priorities to job preferences was open to interpretation.

A Global Classroom

I ran across few other Americans, but was surrounded by people from all other parts of the world, exposing me to even more alternative perspectives.

Conversations were speckled, if not centered on, comparisons of our home countries and native ways of doing things, be it sentence structure or the traditional age of marriage.

Not surprisingly, I learned a lot about the driver’s licenses, school systems, and age related legislation of various countries, and gained a whole new appreciation for the dominance of American entertainment, stores, and fads.

Following the promptings of my guidebook I frequently found myself in museums, and came to realize that I like art, in a way that has never resonated with me before. Away and alone, I strolled through the aisles, talking to no one and paying attention to nothing but the artwork. I settled into a quasi-meditative state of mind in which the artwork seemed to hit a raw nerve.

At the same time I was taking in large amounts of historical data. I absorbed the history of the Shoguns and became quite versed in the Meji Emperorship. I saw Kabuki performances, though I had no idea what the characters were saying, and visited countless shrines and temples.

Question Everything!

Unfamiliarity and solitude are a great incubator for thought. With my new exposure to such a wide variety of outlooks I had to think about and question many things which had previously seemed concrete.

I was struck by differences in public policy; how come some countries have universal health care while others do not? Why is college astronomically expensive in the U.S.? Why are bike riding and letting children walk to school alone considered so dangerous in my native New York, while both are commonplace in Tokyo?

Japanese people seemed, overall, to be high achievers, placing a heavy emphasis on academic and professional success. Life was faster here than in the States, and busier too.

Noticing such difference led me to ask myself important questions:

• What is important to me?
• How do I want to live?
• Where do I belong?

I benefited from my youthfulness in that traveling didn’t just make me think, “Wow, there are so many ways of life out there.” Instead, experiencing foreign cultures while perched at the beginning of adulthood, everything I saw was still possible for me to apply to my own life.

All too often I hear older adults lamenting time spent on dead-end tracks to supposed success; traveling in my adolescence has shown me from the start the full range of what life has to offer.

The exposure to foreign cultures that I gained early on preempted my cultural biases and “us and them” thinking, and liberated me from the notion that there is only one right way of doing things.

Discover The World…And Yourself

Traveling is about discovery and finding oneself, for people of any age. But when you travel as a young person, you’re raw material, constantly being shaped, and all that you see, hear, and do has a profound impact on the rest of your life.

At my age, people like to say, you’re naive, not yet disillusioned about the world, and think that “because it feels right” is a suitable reason for action.

Well, what better attitude to maintain as you explore the world? We teens see the world as a limitless opportunity. When you travel, that’s the way it truly is.

Are the teenage years a good time to travel? Share your experiences and opinions by leaving a comment below!

Celine Joiris writes and works as a fashion model in her native New York City. She has lived and worked in Tokyo, Paris, Sydney, London, Hamburg and Seattle between the ages of fifteen and her current eighteen, and juiced every moment of it.

I press my tongue against a tooth in the back of my mouth. It wiggles.

“That’s weird,” I think, feeling a little anxious. After all, I’m 25 years old. My baby teeth are all gone and I’m way too young to start thinking about dentures.

I reach into my mouth, grab the loose molar between two fingers and give it a slight, tentative tug.

Oh shit – it’s barely attached to my gum. Even worse, the tooth next to it is also loose. What on earth is going wrong with me?!

Suddenly, all of my teeth start falling out! The coppery taste of blood covers my tongue! In a panic I…wake up.

My heart is pounding, but my teeth are firmly in place. It was only a dream.

The Dream Of Travel

Travel can sometimes feel like a dream. When you’re jet-lagged and wandering the misty streets of a strange city at dawn, it can be hard to tell whether you’re actually awake. A good hard pinch is often the only way to know for sure.

A great deal has been written about the dreamlike state of travel. But what about real dreams? Do travelers dream differently when they’re on the road?

I think the answer is yes. Dreams are a way for our minds to process information, and the onslaught of new sensations we encounter while traveling means that our dreams become correspondingly more vivid and intense.

Here are five archetypal dreams that travelers may experience:

1. Loss Of Control

The dream I describe above about one’s teeth falling out is a classic “loss of control” dream. Without teeth we are as helpless as infants, powerless and dependent upon others.

Traveling in a foreign country can also make us feel helpless. Without speaking the language or understanding the culture, we are unable to communicate. The horrifying tooth dream is a reflection of this feeling of powerlessness.

Another “loss of control” dream that I’ve experienced while traveling is driving a car and suddenly realizing that the pedals are out of reach. (Anyone who has survived a moto-taxi ride in Phnom Penh can sympathize).

2. Home Sweet Home

You wake up in your own bed, go downstairs, make coffee and read the local paper at the kitchen table. Your parents are already up, eating their breakfast, and your dog comes over for a pat on the head.

Everything is blissful and happy…until you wake up and find yourself back in the ratty hostel in Uzbekistan. Crap. Home is a long, long way away.

Dreaming idealized visions of home is not uncommon when traveling, especially if you’re already feeling a bit homesick. This sort of dream is a symptom of culture shock, which afflicts all travelers from time to time.

Although waking up in a strange place after dreaming vividly of home can be a miserable feeling, it’s important to realize that homesickness is a natural part of travel.

Plus, although you’ll no doubt have countless mornings at home to look forward to, you probably won’t ever come back to Uzbekistan, so get outside and enjoy the day!

3. Speaking In Tongues

If you speak in a foreign language while dreaming, it’s a sure sign that you’re beginning to feel at home in your new environment and culture.

Dreams are perhaps the most intimate, personal and unguarded moments of our day to day lives, and if a foreign language enters into your dreams it means that a new place has penetrated to the depths of your sub-conscious.

This is good news for ex-pats and longterm travelers, because getting in tune with the local culture and speaking the local language is key to getting over culture shock and experiencing a genuine sense of place.

For travelers with limited time, however, dreaming in a foreign language might be a sign that it’s time to move on to the next destination!

4. I’m Flying!

You jump into the air, come back to earth and jump again – the ground is as springy as a trampoline. One more jump and suddenly you feel a resistance under your arms. Pushing off, you rise into the air. You’re flying, and the only thing you can think is why didn’t I learn how to do this earlier!

The flying dream is one of the most intensely pleasurable dreams a traveler can hope to experience. It signifies total freedom, self confidence and the opening of new horizons.

These are exactly the sensations that travelers hit the road to find, so if you’re lucky enough to enjoy a flying dream it’s a clear sign that your travels are sending you on the right path.

5. The Sex Dream

I’ll resist the temptation to go into descriptive detail about sex dreams. Suffice to say that travelers are not immune to the occasional embrace with tangled sheets and an unfortunate pillow.

For those unlucky enough to travel without their romantic partner by their side, travel can mean suffering through a significant dry-spell. In this case, a sex dream is a clear sign that it’s time to get home, before dreams grow into a temptation to stray in reality.

For single travelers, a sex dream is also a sign – to drop the pillow and get out and meet people already! Although some cultures may frown on pre-marital flings, a hook-up with a fellow traveler is always a potential option.

What dreams have you experienced while traveling? Leave a description below and BNT’s resident fortune teller and psycho-analyst Tim Patterson will give you an interpretation.

BNT contributing editor Tim Patterson travels with a sleeping bag and pup tent strapped to the back of his folding bicycle. His articles and travel guides have appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle, Get Lost Magazine, Tales Of Asia and Traverse Magazine. Check out his Matador profile.

The last 16 months of my life have been spent wandering.

After graduating from college, like many of my peers I had no real clue as to what to do with my life. I did what anyone with an insatiable travel bug would do and took off to an exotic destination to teach English.

The exotic destination quickly turned into a mundane daily rhythm that was full of obstacles, frustrations and existential questions. At the end of my contract, the travel-bug and existential questions were still there. I kept traveling.

I struggled to define myself. Was I a vagabond? An unemployed 20-something with no future?

Some people made me feel like I needed to define a goal for myself, so that all this traveling and wandering would lead to something concrete. In trying to quell their concerns, I realized that I really didn’t have an answer about my goals.

Three continents, several undeveloped rolls of film and one minor leg burn later, I’ve learned that what I was doing all of this time was defining myself as a human being; in finding my niche as a traveler I was learning how I wanted to live.

Now, as I try to establish a normal routine in my home country, I hold onto lessons from the road. They are my support system, reminding me of who I am and where I have been.

Here are 4 of the most important life lessons I learned while traveling.

1. Focus on the “now”

When the path ahead of us is unclear, it’s easy to question what we are doing with our lives. Western society teaches us that we should go to school and get on a career path.

But some of us want some time off in between school and careers. Yes, we all want great jobs where we feel good about the work we do, but some of us want to postpone, and in some cases escape, the 9-5 lifestyle.

For those of us destined to walk down this path, it’s inevitable that others will ask questions:

• “So what exactly are you doing on this trip?”
• “What do you expect to do when you get back?”
• “Don’t you have a five year plan?”

These are all questions that you do not need to have an answer to – remember that it’s OK to just travel for the sake of travel.

There is plenty of time in life to follow schedules and make five year plans, but traveling is about taking a breather from high intensity, stressful society and relearning how to focus on the present. This teaches you to deal with life on a day to day basis.

2. Embrace the ordinary

Being open to possibility is the only thing that allows us to move forward. Often we find that the reality of travel is very different from our dreams. Yet without those illusions about the traveling lifestyle, we may never have had the courage to hit the road in the first place.

Talk to anyone who has studied, traveled or worked abroad and they will tell you about the difference between glamorous expectations and normal everyday routines.

When we travel for extended periods of time we see that not everything is as exotic first thought. Television ads in a foreign country may seem weird as long as we hear them in that foreign language, but as soon as we get a sense of the language, the ads seem as absurd as anything at home.

Long-term travel is not about constantly seeking the extraordinary, but coming to terms with the ordinary itself. It’s about learning to appreciate the simpler moments that everyday life offers.

3. Push your comfort levels

Traveling is about breaking out of our own personal boundaries. No matter the length of time, be it one week or a whole year, just being in a new place forces us to push ourselves.

We are obliged to memorize a string of strange sounding words just to order a simple coffee, master new public transportation systems, learn how to use unfamiliar toilets and ask for directions by way of body language, pictures and the common language of laughter.

In new places we want to be able to handle the situation, and so we force ourselves to learn.

Returning home after a trip often seems boring compared to our recent experiences; because in a new place we are constantly succeeding in conquering new situations. Recreating that feeling is therefore a matter of finding situations that push us as human beings, be it with a job, seeking knowledge or in our personal relationships.

4. Stay flexible

If travel teaches us anything at all, it’s that an itinerary can change at the drop of a hat. Buses break down, hurricanes roll in and travelers get sick.

Being a good traveler means always having a backup plan or being ready to think of one. My difficulty with the five year plan was because I am always ready to do something different.

In our travels we can never predict the future, and the same holds true for our “regular” lives back at home. Staying flexible allows us to achieve what we truly believe in even if that means sailing off course.

It allows us to push our boundaries and move beyond what we, and others, think is possible.

What life lessons have you learned through travel? Please contribute to the discussion by leaving a comment below!

Anna Brones has a love of culture, foreign languages and good food. When she is not on an adventure she spends quality time in her native Pacific Northwest. Her writing has appeared in Transitions Abroad, A Woman’s World Again and Matador Travel. Her personal travel writing endeavors can be found at Intercrossings.

A wise Indian man once said to me, “Perfection is a rare and sporadic event.” For travelers especially, this rings true.

From a traveler’s perspective, every foreign country is a chance for something to go ridiculously, horribly amok.

For example, in Southwest China, where I began my career as a teacher, nothing seemed to work – not traffic, nor washing machines, bank machines, or even the rhythms of night or day.

Even at 3 in the morning someone was always putting up a building or knocking one down, accompanied by the rhythmic beat of karaoke tunes and firecrackers.

I felt like I might die of sleep deprivation, but the constant noise didn’t appear to ruffle the majority of celebratory, happy-go-lucky, ever-industrious Chinese folk.

In Thailand, no matter how dysfunctional things got – whether it be rampant sex tourism, a heat wave, a flood, or a staff of misbehaving English instructors, the general Thai reaction was always “mai pen rai”, or in English, simply, “don’t worry about it.”

As Murphy’s Law states, “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.” The Thais seemed to feel that the best way to deal with adversity was simply to shrug, smile and carry on.

Stop, Chat, Have Some Tea

Here in India, my biggest complaint is that by Western standards nothing seems to happen quickly. My oh my, how serene Asia seems to be, and how pent up and frustrated are the Westerners!

Indian time to Westerner seems to move at the pace of a clogged coffee machine, gurgling its way to the eventual finish line. Small tasks, such as picking up some fruit at the market or getting a shirt dry-cleaned, take what feels like ten light-years to accomplish.

One reason for this slow pace is the fact that absolutely everyone wants to talk to you: neighbors, friends, acquaintances, and curious locals alike. Talking, in this culture of relaxed extroverts, is an urgent and important matter.

People of all sorts stop you in the street and ask you about your day. They want to know what you are doing, where you are going, what you bought, and whether or not you want to come over for coffee, attend a wedding in Nepal, go ballroom dancing, or just sit in the sun.

As a recovering Type A personality and privacy-obsessed Westerner, for whom everything must be done with great efficiency and individual discretion, this is a difficult situation to accept.

Yet, in its loud, arthritic movements, India is teaching me to appreciate the divine. The divine, unlike perfection, is not so rare or sporadic.

Divinity In Humanity

Divinity is to be in the moment, to see the big picture, to lay back and feel the gloriousness of our daily interactions with people and nature, to ponder the connection of all things and find a place for one’s self within the mystery.

Divinity is simply love for one’s life, for another’s, or for the miraculousness in which the world works, in whatever haphazard way.

I appreciate Indian people in that they are able to more successfully balance “to do” lists with the nurturing of family, friends, and community, in a way that most Westerners can not.

While it is ridiculous to reinforce the cliché that “the East” is somehow inherently “calmer” and “more friendly” or “more spiritual” than the West, or that we are somehow very “different” from each other, certainly there are some variances in cultural values, social approaches and priorities.

When East meets West, the two cultures collide with the force of the Big Bang, and a new world is created. Indians like to know their neighbors, and Westerners like to put up fences. Part of this difference is due to simple demographics, but the overarching fact is that Asian people value relationships in a different way than people in my homeland.

The Purpose Of Life

Relationships within the community, in India, are close to the central purpose of life. In fact, they are the essence of existence, and thus, the essence of the divine.

Here, it is incomprehensible to ignore those around you. It would be like rejecting the possibility of a valued friendship or social connection.

Back home in Canada, we are slower to warm up to others. It’s not that we don’t like friends or neighbors, but that we wish to perform our social interactions on a more individualized level.

At the same time, we have also produced a culture of fear with respect to those we do not know, and our way of dealing with that fear is, unfortunately, contrary to our divine human nature. Fear can prevent us from building alliances of care and love.

If we live next door to a criminal, or someone who instills in us a sense of danger, that is seen as that person’s individual problem. At no point do we act as a community to help this person improve the quality of their life, and therefore, our own.

The offending person is seen as the responsibility of a psychiatrist, the government, or their friends or family, if they are lucky enough to have them.

It Takes A Village

In Asia, people and their problems are seen as things which can be worked through via the community. To be isolated from one’s friends and family is seen as a great tragedy, and a failure of our human potential to maintain important relationships.

I have noticed that even when things go wrong in Asia, problems are mostly taken in stride. People and relationships are not expected to be perfect, but they are expected to be amicable.

This is the lesson that “East” can teach the “West” if we are willing to listen. “The West” has made more progress in nurturing the individual psyche and bill of rights, but it has yet to integrate this respect for individuals within the undeniable whole.

I have now learned that if someone wants to stop us in the street to know our name (or even our personal business), then let them – it might slow us down, but in the long run, it will speed us up in creating the kind of world we want to live in.

Taking The Time To Foster Humanity

Knowing ourselves and our communities, and seeing them in unison, is the first step in fostering humanity, and thus, the divine world spirit.

While the world is full of disaster and grief, it is also full of beauty. Fear, isolation, and rigidity serve no one, and in the midst of chaos, two heads (or 8 billion) are better than one.

Why not allow our international world to simmer with the warmth of our combined strengths?

Instead of trying to convince ourselves that “East” and “West” are as far apart in ideology as they are in geography, we would do better to drop the cultural insecurity and embark on the journey of understanding together.

There is no divide between “East” and “West” except the one we create for ourselves. Our international world is not an excuse to promote ideas of perceived “cultural purity”, but rather an opportunity to know more and share the wonder of divinity together. For both hemispheres, this is a lesson to grow on.

With the goal of divinity, our world might never be perfect, but at least it will be united.

Your thoughts are welcome. Please leave a comment below!

Emily Hansen is a travel writer and teacher based in Shimla, India, where she is working on a book about her experiences as an expat. Her native land is Canada, and she has traveled to over 30 countries, and has lived in six, including Germany, China, Korea, Thailand, Taiwan, and now, India.

Travel produces a special feeling – one that can’t be replicated by any other means. When a person anticipates traveling or is en-route, a different mindset begins to take form.

Traveling isn’t the same as commuting to work or school; there’s a lot more involved in the psychology of getting from point A to point B.

However, when people try to experience it upon returning home, the “travel feeling” is as elusive as steam; we know it when we feel it, but it’s impossible to retain.

This quirk probably occurred even back when young men were told to go West; in fact, the human condition, satisfied with familiarity, has always viewed the unpredictability of travel as bordering between thrilling and unknown. Some may consider that feeling an engima:

enigma
mystery: something that baffles understanding and cannot be explained

Here are 7 other engimas of travel that cannot fully be explained:

Enigma #1 – You must stay away for a day

The first enigma is that, if a person packs a suitcase, travels as little as 50 miles, and spends even one night away from home, it’s considered more “traveling” than a day trip that’s 100 miles round-trip that takes 15 hours total.

It’s probably because we’ll be temporarily removed from our usual environment, which, as such, makes it more of an “adventure.”

Engima #2 – Fear is your motivation

The second enigma is that wanting to conquer travel fears may be the motivation for some people to travel further, more often, and for longer durations.

There’s a realization that fate can play a part in any travel plans. For some, this is exhilarating (”I may meet the person of my dreams”) while for others, it’s nerve-wracking (”What if the weather turns bad? What if my luggage gets lost?”)

Perhaps it’s the sense of not having control when traveling; regardless of technology, there are still numerous unknowns associated with picking up and going somewhere.

Enigma #3 – Travel teaches patience

Travel requires flexibility, and even the most well-planned itinerary will likely need to be changed. A portion of travelers view this as fun-they’re the ones who see the glass as half full instead of half empty.

However, the remaining travelers may eventually acquire that outlook after a number of unexpected situations. Enigma number three is that, even while providing excitement, travel has a way of teaching patience. It’s nothing if not humbling.

Enigma #4 – How much or little to pack

After travelers decide what to take with them, the first problem is how to pack it. The next is how to store it when they get to where they’re going, make sure it’s safe, and then bring it all back.

Many people give up on the theory of traveling light. They think, “If it will make my trip more pleasant, why not take it?” This is not to say that bringing enough to cover any emergency makes the trip better or worse.

Travel enigma number four is that there will always be a debate between how little to take to fill one’s needs, and what will increase the trip’s enjoyment. (Even cavemen traveling south for the winter probably thought twice about the number of animal skins they should lug with them.)

We’re forced to consider the possibility that we really don’t need as much as we think we do, even if we plan on buying more stuff at our destination…

Enigma #5 – Cheap plastic souvenirs

Which leads us to the fifth enigma: People spend a lot of travel time looking for souvenirs. Couldn’t the time spent searching for items to remember a trip be better spent in ways to make the trip even more memorable?

Buying souvenirs for friends or family makes this even more enigmatic, because recipients can’t possibly connect any memories with salt water taffy or T-shirt. Yet, just like sending postcards, this practice is a big part of many trips.

Enigma #6 – You Take Home With You

People want getaways, but they don’t want to get away from their unique forms of comfort-the sixth travel enigma.

One of the most interesting facts of travel is that, although people want new places and surroundings, they also want to bring “home” with them.

They prefer to sleep on the same side of the bed as back home. They like to arrange their toiletries just so, like in their own bathroom. They usually keep the same manner of dress, eating, and sleeping, give or take a little.

Enigma #7 – The value of the journey

The most intriguing travel enigma is that most people spend months anticipating and planning for a trip that lasts a week or less. That’s 1/52 of our lives.

Isn’t it funny how such a small amount time has the ability to bring focus, relief and even “meaning” to people? We must have an innate desire for a mental break from our normal situations, and travel’s rejuvenating properties offers just that.

It allows people to actually make some of their dreams come true, whether those dreams are based on luxury, roughing it, reconnection with family, or simply remembering what it’s like to be unencumbered by chores and work.

The seventh enigma is that, despite travel’s potential inconveniences, it’s always well worth it!

What do you think about the enigmas of travel? Any other traits you can’t explain?

Karen Amato Schwartz worked in corporate management and dance education before starting her freelance writing career. She has written for Agora Gallery, ARTisSpectrum Magazine, Blooming Boomer, Blue Diamond News, Worth Remembering and Keen Publications. She currently contributes to the World Learning Network, Revive Your Life, ARS Compendium and Article Authors from her home in Pittsburgh.

Kindle is Amazon’s new portable reading device; it’s smaller and lighter than a book and it holds over 200 titles.

Other companies have launched similar, relatively unsuccessful products in the past but Kindle’s connection to bookselling giant Amazon is making people wonder whether this could be the device that actually redefines how we read.

At work we’ve all been considering Kindle’s implications for publishing, but none of us can personally imagine this new gadget replacing the tactile delight of curling up in our favorite chairs with a good book.

It’s not just that I’m fond of bound and printed pages as physical objects. I’m also partial to reading books in the bath, where I can only imagine dropping Kindle in the water would be a much more traumatic experience than dropping, say, The Devil Wears Prada.

But it’s more than that; books are attached to my memories. When I look through my wooden bookcases, I remember where and when I read a particular book and a whole scene from my past rushes by in a photographic snap.

In Search Of The Perfect Backpacking Book

I was thinking about this relationship to books and where Kindle might fit into my world when I found myself remembering the two years I spent backpacking around three continents.

This was right before I took a 9-5 job and had to worry about things like the future of reading.

As I was preparing for this trip, the biggest packing dilemma I faced was figuring out which book to stuff into an already overflowing backpack that was no bigger than the luggage most people take for a weekend jaunt in the countryside.

In my own mind I was packing THE book, the only book I would be able to read in the coming months. Should I bring War and Peace? Or maybe Finnegans Wake? These were the only ones that might actually take me two years to finish.

Having just graduated with a B.A. in English, I was also intent on choosing a text that would accomplish the following goals:

• show all the eccentric expat intellectuals I was bound to meet on the road that I was smart and interesting
• entertain me after multiple readings
• and be light enough so that I wouldn’t need to see a chiropractor for the rest of my life when I returned home.

It was clear that War and Peace and Finnegans Wake were far too heavy (and I also had serious doubts that I would actually enjoy reading them) so I eventually settled on Gulliver’s Travels. It struck me as serious but enjoyable reading and definitely a fitting choice given the adventures I hoped to experience.

“Hey, Wanna Trade?”

Recalling the days I spent contemplating this decision made me think that maybe the mobile library of Kindle would have a place in my backpack – if I ever took off for an extended period of time again. But then I remembered my actual reading experiences abroad.

On my third night in a hostel in Ireland someone asked me if I wanted to trade Gulliver’s Travels for a water-logged copy of The Hill Bachelors. Its pages were swollen and soft and it looked dark and mysterious which is exactly how I was feeling about Galway at that very moment.

I had arrived alone and wet and had been wandering around the city for days now by myself. I was too unsure of my surroundings to either make friends or comfortably eat a meal alone.

My initial excitement was starting to give way to loneliness, so I was relieved when this stranger approached the bottom bunk where I was pretending to read Swift (but really contemplating going back home to a familiar bed and existence).

I needed to interact with someone. But trade?

I tentatively handed over my book. It felt wrong to let a boy whose name I didn’t even know walk away with my story – with what I had come to think of as the definitive book that would accompany me during my journey through the world.

But once I let go of it I felt liberated.

After the trade we started chatting about where we were from and what we were doing in Ireland and a few hours later I was having dinner and drinks with him and his friends.

A Global Community Of Readers

That night I discovered that in the world of backpacking the static rules of ownership no longer applied. This was only the beginning of many suspensions of the realities I lived by back home.

Texts were being traded at breakneck speed, moving from hand-to-dirty-hand as we devoured them on long bus rides through the Outback and cold nights in the Andes.

Hostels, backpacker friendly tour offices, and even restaurants had revolving bookshelves where you were encouraged to leave one or two of your books in exchange for one of theirs.

But this wasn’t where the real action was happening. It was all about book-swaps between travelers.

Here trading provided an easy segue-way into conversations and friendships. Books were a particular type of currency in the land of the transients – like a clean t-shirt or knowing which tour operators would rip you off.

Books were judged not only on content, but also on weight and popularity.

One Grisham title could get you two or three books in exchange in Australia, the same with Allende in South America. Michael Moore’s books were always floating around. Children’s books in Spanish were a hit in Argentina, where many of us struggled to learn the language.

I once got stuck with a Judy Blume book for three weeks (don’t get my wrong, I’m a huge Superfudge fan) until I ran into a middle-aged German man who shouted “Yudi Blume, Yudi Blume” and thrust a worn copy of something in his native language at me.

We backpackers created our own bestseller list and the competition was fierce. I read books I had always wanted to read and ones that I never knew existed.

The Traveling Life Of Books

On my last day in Sydney, I traded The Lovely Bones for Not Without My Daughter.

I opened my new used book’s first page. In it, someone had written “Auckland, New Zealand” and below that someone else had put “Milford, New Zealand.” The entries went on and on through New Zealand, Bali, and Australia, working their way down the first blank page and over onto the title page.

The whole geographic history of the book was there. It was like the text itself had transformed into a traveler.

Just then I couldn’t think of anything more depressing than putting it on a bookshelf and letting it sit there untouched year after year.

I read the book on the plane to JFK. Before I handed to it off to a harried-looking young woman extricating her massive backpack from the conveyor belt, I scribbled “New York City” in it. And then I sent it off into the world feeling like I had left some piece of myself in its pages.

Some part of me would travel to far-flung cities long after I was back in the routine of my settled life.

I realized that while I was traveling the whole dynamic of reading had changed for me-the book now owned a piece of me and not the other way around.

It was just one of many shifts in perspective.

So even while Kindle provides easy (and light) access to a wealth of books – I would have missed out on a whole serendipitous experience which was, for me at least, a big part of the adventure.

What do you think? Will digital reading eventually replace paper books? Share your thoughts in the comments!

Rachel Friedman’s travel writing has been published in Get Lost Magazine, The Arizona Republic, and Clever Magazine. She works in publishing and is currently writing a book about backpacking-a kind of Motorcycle Diaries meets Devil Wears Prada-minus all the expensive clothes.

She was my favorite professor, although you never knew when the light was on, off, or just catastrophically-flickering as in Poltergeist.

Full of prophecies which would make a Buddha cry, she managed to turn my reality upside down like milk in a butter-making jar, shaking me from solid form, into a frothing mixture of wild ideas, random plans of action, and, well, “mental diversity.”

I am forever grateful.

This is because with the help of Edward Soja, she divided the world into three parts: one of reality, another of imagination, and something else she simply called, “real-and-imagined life”, a sort of hybrid of the two.

Initially, I concluded that she was either on drugs, or completely barking mad, until the third class, when, finally, I got it. With her help, all of my travel experiences, particularly my last four years as an expat, have become real-and-imagined journeys of the mind.

My life has happily gone from black-and-white into complete Kodachrome chaos, with all of my thoughts, in all their diversity, blinking and flashing like Asian lights in one big mutating rainbow.

The Real World

Allow me to explain. Edward Soja, in rambling on about Los Angeles and Foucault in a completely convoluted book you never want to read, called Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-And Imagined Places, proposed the idea that what we think about our reality is just as important as how it’s seen in “the real world”, a space coded with (often unfair) social and political ideas.

As the products of this whirlwind, we exist in an inner-outer predicament, where our own thoughts are as crucial as the rules imposed upon us. We have the power to think, and make the required changes, like fashion designers with a pair of scissors and an idea for a great pair of pants.

In layman’s terms, any positive change in the world comes from realizing that there are some things you can alter, and some things you can’t. Pants will always be pants, like travel will always be travel – both are uplifting and oppressive at the same time.

As living, breathing, thinking people of this world, we are, however, in the grand position to reinvent a few things.

In 2003 I began my four years in Chongqing, China, where I was introduced to the vocation of English-selling, or in “real world” terms, English teaching. I spent a full twelve hours a day in crass amounts of pollution and construction dust on the brink of the Yangtze river demonstrating to Chinese children everywhere in the city, that my language and culture was a product to be sold.

Some people would call it colonization, or just global economics. What better product to sell to an upcoming global superpower? In fact, in every speech I had to make for the company during my unpaid after-hours appearances as an English peddler on TV stations and radio, I had to repeat the words, “China Superpower”.

I couldn’t help but ask myself, after five years in a social justice program at university, what the hell was I doing? Making money? Having a cultural experience? Or having an out-of-body medical experience?

From Punk to Police

My lungs were so filled with coal dust, I could hardly keep myself out of the hospital and off the antibiotics the nurses gave me time and time again, just to make sure that my immune system would never, ever return.

Looking back, I loved China. It’s hard to believe, but even in those moments of pulse-crushing, heavy, oppressiveness, I saw at least some value in what I was doing, for myself and for others.

During my time there, for example, I had the opportunity to explore the New Wave Metal punk scene, in which Chinese youth were dispersing the counter-culture spirit of an emerging generation while rejecting the gaze of communist eyes.

Even young women, layered angry voices on top of “The People’s Republic”, pounding out the sounds of punk-rock rebellion with second-hand drums in abandoned warehouses, in the city that never slept (or just slept with one eye open).

Young men took Nirvana’s grunge fury and made it their own, beer-belching their way to imagined stardom. If complacency was the image that the West (or the Chinese government itself) wanted to imagine for a fast-developing China, this reality did not fit the mold.

At work I met many people who were afraid to talk about Chinese politics. I did not even attempt to start a political conversation with them the whole time I was there, for fear that it would endanger one of my friends, coworkers, or acquaintances. Instead, I let them come to me if they had something to say.

At one point, the communist police searched our apartments on the premise of “maintaining safety”. We were interviewed on the spot about what websites we were accessing, why, and whether or not we were religious, and if so, to which group we belonged.

There was never any explanation given for this inquisition. Yet, beneath this curtain of regulation, there were plenty of unregulated moments.

People went on with their lives, making miracles in study, business, and family life. One of my Chinese coworkers, who wanted to become a UN representative, provided me with a thoughtful conversation about how as “women of the moon”, we have a special power to shake up the forces that be, not by bowing to them, but by nurturing the world.

Revolutionary Dreams

Thoughts like that, which seemed to jump out of nowhere, must have come from somewhere, lurking like revolutionary dreams in the underbelly of a repressed society.

And what better way to prepare yourself for a revolution, than to speak the language of your oppressors? Armed with Chinese and English, ambassadors for a New China, the willing adults, became empowered to more fully speak their minds.

I helped them, but they did most of the work.

One of the fastest pathways to change is to make oneself able to be heard. I hope that one day this happens full-circle, for those who wish to escape the gloom of any kind of slavery, whether in China, Canada, or elsewhere in the world. First, we must be able to understand each other.

Travel then, is about moving towards understanding, or at least it should be. We leave many gratuitous marks on the planet, wherever we may go, whether it is through our stubborn attitudes, the waste we make, or in the people we sometimes force our language and culture upon.

Travel can be good and travel bad, but I know that in my real-and-imagined life, my experiences attempt to interact with, and redirect, the rip tide of forces that govern us. In this sense, the spirit of people, and the spirit of travel, need not be lost on anyone.

Emily Hansen is a travel writer and teacher based in Shimla, India, where she is working on a book about her experiences as an expat. Her native land is Canada, and she has traveled to over 30 countries, and has lived in six, including Germany, China, Korea, Thailand, Taiwan, and now, India.

Christmas has always been about family, yet in the same context, Christmas has been about the spirit of giving-in many different ways.

When I say giving, I am referring to a scale of giving; from honest care to its’ opposite, or shall we say mass consumption and the hoards of consumers, entering shops and browsing online catalogs with as deep or as shallow of pockets permissible.

This holiday season I experienced both worlds, but fortunately, there was a choice, and on the family side of things we removed ourselves from ritualistic spending and nonsensical wasting of resources. Instead, we decided to give back, both with thought and action.

There is a way to find balance. With the Christmas spirit, it is to be thoughtful in all one gives and possibly volunteer for those less fortunate.

The Corporate Holiday

Spending the fall and winter seasons in the midst of corporate America did not elevate my excitement for the holidays. Whether it was the exhausting rush of Thanksgiving sales, the merciless orgy of Black Friday, to the final week before Christmas, I clocked my hours at Seattle’s REI Flagship store as a snow-sports specialist.

I sold snowboards, packaging the hard-goods with boots and bindings to push a 10% discount. I rearranged, organized and picked up after customers in the helmets and goggles department where plastic and cardboard boxes splayed across shelves. I answered phones, ordered unavailable products, put others on hold, and directed individuals to their desirous locales, pointing at signs clearly posted but apparently lost to the sights of shoppers too cluttered to notice.

The retail world roundabout the holiday season: I came, I went, and I shall never return.

Likewise, for a month straight I heard Christmas carols echoing from the wooden rafters. From Michael Bolton to Alvin & The Chipmunks and way back with Doctor Demento-they bounced off nuts and bolts, across metal air ducts and through vast open spaces.

My head spun with cheesy saxophones and piercing voices and jangling bells, along with the questions, services, projects, areas to tidy, customers to greet. Influenced by this madness, the idea of Christmas was appalling. And yet I still needed to shop.

Therefore, my hours were minimal. Having lived the false spirit of Christmas via retail with maddened shoppers who believe the higher the price, the more love received