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Revolution Apparel intro video
Sometimes it can feel like you’re torn in different directions. You’d like to start a business, make an positive impact on the world, and more. Is it possible to fold all your passions into one project? The fine women travelers of {r}evolution apparel are aiming to do just that.
An excerpt from their website:
We headed to Central America with no direction, no career path, and not much money. But we had an idea: a fashionable, minimalist clothing line for female travelers.
We were determined to do it right – we wanted to create a business that preserved the environment, cut down on pesticide and chemical use, and said “no” to the exploitative labor that keeps our clothing cheap in the Western world.
The star of their collection is The Versalette. Living up to the name, it’s a single article of clothing that can be worn in 15 different ways–including as a handbag! Check out the photos on the {r}evolution apparel website to see it in action. Quite a reversal from most fashion lines, which load up a collection with many kinds of clothing.
Have you worked on a social enterprise before? Have you used your clothes in more ways than the manufacturer intended? Please share your experiences in the comments.
“The question remains: does travel writing have a future? The tales of Marco Polo, or the explorations of “Bokhara Burnes” may have contained valuable empirical information impossible to harvest elsewhere, but is there really any point to the genre in the age of the internet, when you can instantly gather reliable knowledge about anywhere in the globe? Certainly, the sort of attitudes to “abroad” that characterized the writers of the 1930s, and which had a strange afterlife in the curmudgeonly prose of Theroux and his imitators, now appears dated and racist. Indeed, the globalized world has now become so complex that notions of national character and particularity — the essence of so many 20th-century travelogues — is becoming increasingly untenable, and even distasteful. So has the concept of the western observer coolly assessing eastern cultures with the detachment of a Victorian butterfly collector, dispassionately pinning his captives to the pages of his album. In an age when east to west migrations are so much more common than those from west to east, the “funny foreigners” who were once regarded as such amusing material by travel writers are now writing some of the best travel pieces themselves. Even just to take a few of those with roots in India — Vidia Naipaul, Pico Iyer, Amitav Ghosh, Vikram Seth and Pankaj Mishra — is to list many of the most highly regarded writers currently at work.”
–William Dalrymple, “Home truths on abroad,” The Guardian, September 18, 2009
“Authenticity was a buzzword in travel, but what exactly did it mean? At its purest form you could make the argument that the only really authentic places were ones that had never seen contact with the outside world at all. There were still a few of those left — in the Amazon, perhaps in Indonesian New Guinea. But they were hardly representative; they were freakish vestiges of a changed world, and authenticity was simply everywhere; it was all authentic in one way or another. But if you were on a train with a lot of backpackers, it got too easy not to meet locals, not to get lonely, not to feel scared, and I wanted all of those things.”
–Carl Hoffman, The Lunatic Express
If you have ever contemplated taking a round the world trip, there are tons of things you need to take into consideration – where to go, how much to budget, how to save the money to actually do it, travel insurance, what to do with all your stuff – all are just a small portion of what goes into planning a trip around the world.
Once you do decide to take that leap of faith and commit to going on a RTW trip, your biggest expense is going to be airfare. There’s no way around it – you’re going to have to pay to circumnavigate the globe. Once you start researching, your head will no doubt start spinning and you’ll be asking yourself all types of questions:
I know what you’re going through. When my wife and I were planning our RTW trip back in 2007-2008, we were just as confused. When researching RTW tickets from the alliances, we were bogged down by all the rules – no backtracking, you can only travel in one direction, there are mileage limits, there are continent limits – the rules go on and on and on and on. It’s dizzying. There are other companies who sell RTW tickets as well, but what is the difference? How do you choose?
With all this in mind, we at BootsnAll decided enough was enough. Long term travelers need a resource that summarizes all the options in one place. You need a way to determine which option is the best for you. So back in November, we got to work. We decided to do all the leg work for you. We researched all the options in depth. We made sense of all those terms and conditions. We interviewed travelers who bought RTW tickets. And best of all, we decided to price many of the options available for travelers looking for RTW plane tickets.
We posed as travelers and completed a secret shopping project for 8 different companies who sell RTW plane tickets. We came up with three different routes to search – from a simple, 4 leg, major hub city RTW trip to an ultra-complicated, 18 leg (13 flights, 5 overland) trip. We searched each route leaving from 3 different cities around the world – New York, London, and Sydney.
There is going to be a lot of content coming out in the coming weeks and months, and most will be hosted on BootsnAll’s sister site Round the World Ticket. We will also be offering a free ebook and authoritative report with our findings, and we will update prices and findings 4 times a year. So this will be an ongoing project that allows us to stay on top of changes in the industry. We started by publishing reviews of each company we shopped, and several of them are live right now:
The reviews will continue next week with the following companies:
The coolest thing about this project is that we want to get you involved. At the bottom of each article, we give customers the chance to weigh in and rate each company. So if you or anyone you know has used any of the above companies for a RTW plane ticket, we want to hear from you. Also, if you know of other companies selling RTW plane tickets and want them to be included in our research, just let us know. So spread the word, like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, and sign up for our newsletter to keep up to date with all the new content we’ll be publishing having to do with this project.
Photo credit: 1
Video: Vlogger Natalie Tran on how to cook in a hotel room
I’ve mentioned vlogger Natalie Tran in a previous post. In the video above, she shows you uses everyday hotel items as cooking utensils. Definitely not as the manufacturers intended.
From seeing that, it’s understandable why some backpackers rate hostels with kitchens more highly. If you’re in an expensive city or country, cooking on your own can save quite a bit of cash. Besides, no one can cook something exactly how you want it, unless you do it.
Watching that clip brought to mind those times when I’ve had to “MacGyver” a solution to a problem. Basic things like washing your clothes in a sink, inventing new culinary creations from leftovers in the refrigerator, and things like that. No matter how well you plan in advance, chances are you forgot to pack something. Or a hostel doesn’t have quite the facilities you expected. That’s when resourcefulness kicks in, and you build your own solution to a problem.
Have ever been in a “MacGyver” situation? What did you do? Please share your stories in the comments.
Just for fun, I’ve included a scene from MacGyver below.
“Solitude, I reflected, is the one deep necessity of the human spirit to which adequate recognition is never given in our codes. It is looked upon as a discipline or penance, but hardly ever as the indispensable, pleasant ingredient it is to ordinary life, and from this want of recognition come half of our domestic troubles. The fear of an unbroken tête-à-tête for the rest of his life should, you would think, prevent any man from getting married.”
–Freya Stark, The Valleys of the Assassins: and Other Persian Travels
“I beg young people to travel. If you don’t have a passport, get one. Take a summer, get a backpack and go to Delhi, go to Saigon, go to Bangkok, go to Kenya. Have your mind blown. Eat interesting food. Dig some interesting people. Have an adventure. Be careful. Come back and you’re going to see your country differently, you’re going to see your president differently, no matter who it is. Music, culture, food, water. Your showers will become shorter. You’re going to get a sense of what globalization looks like. It’s not what Tom Friedman writes about; I’m sorry. You’re going to see that global climate change is very real. And that for some people, their day consists of walking 12 miles for four buckets of water. And so there are lessons that you can’t get out of a book that are waiting for you at the other end of that flight. A lot of people—Americans and Europeans—come back and go, Ohhhhh. And the light bulb goes on.”
–Henry Rollins, “Punk Rock World Traveler,” World Hum, November 2, 2011
Backpacker taking a photo in sunset. Photo: Jhong Dizon / Flickr
The New York Times had a commentary article that argued in favor of students taking a gap year before college. In response, their inbox got flooded with comments from readers.
Naturally, many of the letters were from parents worried about the cost of travel. One example:
Great advice in theory, but for some families, like ours, the financial aid consequences can be prohibitive. Our younger son probably would have benefited from a gap year, but when we ran the financial aid calculators, we discovered that it would end up reducing his older brother’s financial aid by about $20,000 and reduce his own financial aid in a few years by about $25,000.
The letter reveals the perverse incentives on debt in the United States. If it’s true, it’s like young people get punished for wanting to travel. Some scholarships and financial aid programs have conditions that dictate students should enroll in college right after high school. By deferring college, you may lose your chances of getting financial aid.
Gap years often involve working abroad to help defray the cost. However, due to America’s immigration policies, many countries have reciprocal policies that prevent U.S. students from easily getting working holiday visas. This sharply reduces the chances of students paying for their gap year by getting jobs overseas.
I realize this is particular to American students. I would love to hear from our readers outside the U.S. on how their countries treat the gap year. In some places, it’s much more encouraged and a normal rite of passage. Friends from England have told me that their student loan repayment schedules are based on income level, not on time. In other words, they don’t have to start paying off their loans until their salaries reach a certain level. This grants more flexibility than how some U.S. student loans are structured, where the repayment starts within months after graduation.
Have you done a gap year? How did you pay for it? Was it a worthwhile experience? Please share your stories in the comments.
“Taking someone’s picture doesn’t cost them anything, not in any Western commercial sense, yet the picture has value. The picture has no value for the ‘primitive’, yet the tourist pays for the right to take pictures. The primitive receives something for nothing, and benefits beyond this. Doesn’t the fame of certain primitives, and even respect for them, actually increase when the tourist carries their pictures back to the West? It seems to be the most perfect realization so far of the capitalist economists’ dream of everyone getting richer together.”
–Dean MacCannell, Empty Meeting Grounds: The Tourist Papers
Age: 26
Hometown: Chicago, IL
Quote: “If you have considered or even dreamed about taking a long-term trip, start making changes in your life NOW to get you toward that goal.”
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