“When I was very young a big financier once asked me what I would like to do, and I said, ‘To travel.’ ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘it is very expensive; one must have a lot of money to do that.’ He was wrong. For there are two kinds of travelers; the Comfortable Voyager, round whom a cloud of voracious expenses hums all the time, and the man who shifts for himself and enjoys little discomforts as a change from life’s routine. Both kinds may enjoy themselves equally, but the latter probably sees much more of the country and its people, and has the added pleasure of going where lack of comfort excludes the former.”

–Ralph Bagnold, Libyan Sands (1935)

Five minutes to use the Internet in a café abroad — so much to do! Bills to pay, bank balances to check, the obligatory “I’m still alive” e-mails to send home. A weary and hurried traveler sits down after paying only to be faced with an utterly unfamiliar keyboard. Hunting and pecking at mysterious figures, trying to crack the familiar passwords from back home, hoping that loved ones will be able to decipher the code and know that their favorite traveler is alive and well, not desperately pleading for help.

The joy of traveling lies in the unfamiliar, but sometimes a familiar old keyboard makes things so much easier when time is short and patience is low.

Thankfully, there is Gate2Home’s Virtual Keyboard. This free on-screen keyboard emulator lets travelers type in their native language on a familiar keyboard.

With dozens of languages to choose from, Gate2Home will display the chosen keyboard on the screen, while allowing the user to type regularly on their keyboard.

This is a great tool when Internet café owners are unwilling or unable to let a traveler modify the computer’s language.

Shoestring-budget travelers are always looking for a cheap way to see the sights around a city. Sometimes entrance fees, tour prices, or other activities can be a little deep for our pockets (especially when you’re trying to find food and a bed for under $25 a day). It can be difficult to find city sights that don’t cost much – or have really long lines. But as I discovered in Australia and New Zealand, most major cities have botanical gardens – which are not only beautiful places to stroll around, but most often are free to the public.

Taking a day from your busy travel agenda to walk around the grounds of a botanical garden is not only a fabulous way to relax, but you can also learn about the native plants, flowers, and trees of that region. Some gardens, like the San Francisco Botanical Garden and Capetown’s Kirstenbosch National Garden offer free guided walking tours.

You might be surprised at the kind of things you can find wandering around gardens. At Malaysia’s Penang Botanic Gardens (or “Monkey Park”) you’ll see lots of rhesus monkeys as well as plants, and at Buenos Aires’ Botanical Gardens don’t be surprised by to see whiskers among the flowers, since cats have long made the gardens their home. At Sydney’s Royal Botanic and Domain, you might stumble upon the historical “Speaker’s Corner” – I did and found myself suddenly in the midst of soap-box speeches and spoken word poetry.

To check out all these different kinds of gardens, head over to Virtualtourist.com where you can browse a whole array of photos and comments about specific botanical gardens (or botanic gardens).

Killing any excuse for having nothing to do this weekend, Web site sixnewthings.com sifts through all the latest restaurant, museum and what-have-you openings to bring you the best of what’s new in North America. All hail the information age.

Each month, 6NT reports on (you guessed it) six new things of interest to curious travelers in each of the 70 cities they cover. If you’re traveling to one of those cities, 6NT is a good thing to browse before you go. But check their listings for your own city, too. According to the site’s FAQ, 6NT’s founders’ various connections feed them with tips – especially restaurants and exhibitions – that sometimes don’t turn up even in local papers.

Also worth a look is 6NT’s best-of list, “2007′s 12 most intruiging new things“. Among them: the sure-to-be-controversial Creation Museum in Ohio, the re-development of, like, half of downtown Kansas City and that skywalk in the Grand Canyon you’ve probably been hearing about. Journey-worthy stuff, all.

Clicking through the pages for just the first two cities that came to mind (Chicago and New Orleans), I found plenty more to covet. Chicago’s world-class Field Museum just opened a new exhibition, “The Ancient Americas”, that tells the story of native Americans from the first hunter gatherers to the Incan and Aztec empires, for instance. And New Orleaners can thank the people of France for their gift of the exhibit “Four Hundred Years of French Presence in Louisiana” to the Historic New Orleans Collection.

To access most of 6NT’s content, you’ll need to register. Don’t worry, it’s free.

Lois on the Loose, by Lois Pryce

Reviewed by Diana Moxon

Lois Pryce’s debut travelogue, Lois on the Loose, details her solo motorcycle journey from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego’s town of Ushuaia. Bored to distraction by office life in London, Lois decides she needs to find adventure before she is consumed by the banality of memos, polystyrene cups, and regimented plastic ferns — before she becomes the sort of person who brings her own coffee mug into work. “I wanted every day to be different,” she writes. “I craved the novelty of sleeping in a different place each night, waking up to familiar smells, sounds and languages. Most of all I wanted to be moving along, to always be going somewhere.”

Starting with a vague notion of taking a lengthy journey, Lois researches her options, finds out there are no motorcycle travel books written by women, spends hours looking at world maps and finally decides on South America based on the fact that “it’s got to be somewhere hot, and I’d like to see those big cacti with the sticking-out arms.” But a timely piece of advice from a world-traveling friend defines her final journey: “Make it a mission. Don’t just meander here and there. State your goal before you leave, whether it be to motorcycle around the world, or from A to B, or whatever. But this sense of purpose, even though it’s self imposed, is very important in keeping you focused.” And thus is her journey established.

Dispensing with biking wisdom, she plumps for a 225cc trail bike, a Yamaha XT225 Serow for her 16,000 mile journey across the Americas. Armed with a Spanish phrase book, one set of clothes, two pairs of socks, three pairs of panties, a bottle of nail varnish and the belief that, in the words of Robert Louis Stevenson “it’s better to travel hopefully than to arrive”, Lois and her bike fly to Alaska and begin a 10-month odyssey.

The ensuing tale is a gripping read. With the skill of a seasoned thriller writer, Lois has a page-turning event on nearly every page — and while the tone can sometimes veer towards the chick-lit that it really isn’t, Pryce’s talent is to make you feel every jolt and frustration as well as every sunset and vista. From her tangles with a pedantic Canadian Mountie and a well-executed escape from police wannabes on a remote stretch of road in Nicaragua, to her liaisons with border “fixers” and the gruesome crash of fellow Serow motorcyclist Amalia in Bolivia, it is impossible not to feel engaged with her journey, willing her on to that final destination.

I’m far from the ballsy adventurer that Pryce espouses, but having spent 6-months doing a solo-drive around the US, searching for the essence of Middle America through the small towns of the Midwest, Pryce’s sentiments of traveling hopefully have a resonance which I can well appreciate and while I agree it’s good to have a mission, sometimes you’ve just got to ride where the road takes you.

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The first Matador Travel Writing and Photography contest is currently underway, with a prize of $500 for the winning entry. The deadline for articles (1,000-2,000 words; must be accompanied by at least three photographs) is May 15.

Matador, an emerging online travel community, aspires to be the “Craigslist for Travelers.” The SmallWorld Travel Classified section allows users to post or search over 60 cities worldwide for almost anything travel related, including couch-surfing opportunities, professional eco wildlife outfitters, and paid employment in the travel industry.

The site says, “Matador is a real community. It has a heartbeat. It features real people, traveling to real places, doing amazing things.”

The site also features articles, user blogs, and a virtual version of the traditional traveler world map speckled with push-pins of places one has been or aspires to go. The virtual push-pins include dots for traveler locations, featured articles, and the locations of travel blogs.

Matador also sells a variety of original and artistic t-shirts to support the site. And, aiming to be a socially and ecologically responsible travel community, Matador donates 1% for the planet, contributing to the Surfrider Foundation .

Soon after Scotty and Fiddy graduated from college, they decided to hitchhike across the country, visiting all 50 state capitals in 50 days. Yes, 50, that includes Alaska and Hawaii. The intrepid duo formed Hitch 50

Their definition of hitchhiking includes any transportation that benevolent strangers donated, so it is not limited to flagging down cars on the road- getting a free plane ride to Hawaii was still fair game. That’s just how Hitch 50 reached Hawaii. A Los Angeles bar organized a fundraiser, which collected enough money to send them to Hawaii the next morning, finishing the round of 50 states.

Vagablogging recently interviewed Fiddy about their journey.

Did you do a lot of hitchhiking before Hitch 50?

Scotty was a master- he’s hitched across Australia and all over western Canada. But me, I’d never hitched in my whole life. It didn’t take much for me to figure it out though.

Did you ever doubt that you could complete the goal of 50 state capitals in 50 days?

No, we never doubted it for a second. That’s because we would look like a bunch of losers in front of our friends and family if we spent all that time and effort trying to do it and then failed. We were willing to do what it took to make it happen.

What is the longest you had to wait for a ride? Did you turn down any rides?

The longest we had to wait was in beautiful Branson, MO. The people there just weren’t into picking us up. It’s like a poor-man’s religious version of Reno, NV. Apparently that means that being free spirited hitchhikers in white tuxedos is frowned upon. We were there for almost 24 hours. We only turned down rides that weren’t going very far or in the wrong direction…never because we didn’t trust the people.

How did people react to you along the way?

The only people we met were very supportive. If they weren’t then they wouldn’t have pulled over to help us out. Lots of people thought it was a great idea and really got behind what we were doing. Some people just plain didn’t get it….but what can you do; there isn’t any simpler way to explain it then “we’re hitchhiking to 50 states in 50 days”.

Where did you sleep during the 50 days?

Lots of people let us stay in their houses. If we had to we’d stay in a motel. If it was summer we would have been keen to stay outside but it was pretty cold some places and we needed Internet to update our site and get in touch with our next potential ride.

How did you reach Hawaii?

A band, Fermata, who are based out of Los Angeles heard about our trip and held a little bit of a benefit concert for us. We hyped it up on the site and managed to raise enough money to get some flights to Hawaii. It wasn’t a “hitch” technically but it met our three rules:
1. We can’t pay for any transportation
2. We had to get to all 50 state capital buildings in 50 days
3. We had to get a picture of us in front of each building

Who won the “Golden Ticket”? (Everyone who gave Scotty and Fiddy a ride was entered into a drawing for a free trip out to their final destination: Hawaii.)

Two girls who drove us through North Carolina named Kim and Mary-Racheal. They were a lot of fun when they were driving us and they were even more fun in Hawaii. It worked out that they could get time off work and they had never been there before so that was pretty cool.

Why this trip? Why now?

We were fresh out of college and we figured we had to go for it. We thought it could be done with a little hard work and who knows what could come out if it. Scotty’s older brother Kyle dared us to do it. Once we had been dared we knew we had to do it.

What are you planning for the future?

Scotty just changed his name and I just got back from a two month trip to Laos, Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia. But right now the future is wide open for both of us. Except of course for the fact that we are both pretty broke.

Good news for America-bound vagabonders: New discount bus line Megabus is now offering one-way fares on routes between major cities in the Midwest for as little as $1. Jack Kerouac, eat your heart out.

Megabus works like the discount bus and air lines in Europe. Tickets are only bookable online, and are cheaper the earlier you buy them. I clicked through a quick fare search on Megabus’s Web site and turned up a $1 ticket (Chicago to Kansas City) towards the end of the available booking period (early May) on the first try. But even the priciest Megabus fares are cheaper than the best deals on other carriers, says a Megabus spokesman.

It’s hard to argue with that, but if you’ve flown Ryanair you know that with discount transport, what you save in price you often sacrifice in comfort. So how is a ride on a Megabus? In an AP story, Megabus customers say they’re satisfied:

On a recent day at the Megabus stop in Chicago, two University of Minnesota students, Sean Klontz, 21, and Emily Garber, 20, were returning to Minneapolis after participating in a Chicago-area bicycle race. Klontz said he paid $30 for the same round trip several months ago, but only $20 for this one, since he booked well in advance.

Garber said it was her first Megabus trip, and it was comparable to Greyhound — only cheaper. Both said the seats were narrow, and there was little leg room, but Garber added, “I’ll sacrifice the leg room for more money in my wallet.”

Spoken like a true traveler. A transportation analyst also quoted in the story predicts intensified competition in the low-fares bus game in the future; if he’s right, new routes and carriers are bound to spring up. Keep an eye out.

Brother One Cell, by Cullen Thomas

Reviewed by Brian Hartenstein

In the early 1990′s, Cullen Thomas was a middle-class American 23 year-old living the post-collegiate dream of international travel: pick-up basketball games inside Beijing’s Forbidden City; fever-stricken hikes up the Rif Mountains in Morocco; riding the rails across Russia on the Trans-Siberian Express; teaching English in the booming economy of South Korea.

What set these adventures apart was one extraordinary mistake: In 1994, while vacationing in the Philippines, he naively mailed himself a package of hashish. When he tried to claim this package on his return to Seoul, his life devolved into a series of grueling interrogations, a hasty and surreal trial, and a three-and-a-half year Korean jail sentence, with no hope of appeal. Brother One Cell, published this month by Viking, is his memoir of that time.

Though incarceration in a foreign jail is any traveler’s worst nightmare, it is only the beginning of Thomas’s story: Devastated, he accepts his punishment as if he were drowning, unsure if he will survive physically or mentally. One of only a handful of foreign inmates, Thomas must confront mob bosses, emotionless guards, human traffickers, jewel smugglers, murderers, and thieves – all along knowing that his family and loved ones are unable to obtain accurate information about his condition or whereabouts. Yet this is not shades of Midnight Express: Thomas is about to be reborn in an unexpected way.

Indeed, Thomas doesn’t spend his time languishing or attempting to escape. Instead he forges lasting friendships with the other inmates, including the engaging Peruvian Jose Luis, who travels the world in business-suits, stealing briefcases from hotels and airports; or the tragic Big Green, a fellow American doing time for murdering his own children. Thomas eventually manages to make personal connections with the guards — learning in a complex way the intricacies of Confucian culture and social mores — and even teaches them English. As he bides his time, awaiting release, he ultimately comes away with invaluable life lessons — paying his debt to that society, and more importantly to himself – en route to becoming a wiser and more grounded adult.

Part travelogue, history lesson, prison commentary, and cautionary tale, Brother One Cell reminds us that travel is often an interior pursuit at heart, one of reflection and personal discovery — and that cultural authenticity can be found in the strangest of places.

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Although I’ve assembled plenty of advice for aspiring travel writers on my websites over the years, I still get a steady stream of queries – often from college students – asking about how to land a travel writing gig. A recent inquiry comes from Maggie in Minnesota:

I am an aspiring travel journalist and freshman in college. I have decided to pursue travel journalism as my career. I am only 19 years old, but I have already been on numerous international travels. I have found that one of the great loves of my life is traveling and writing about those experiences. One of the greatest thrills of my life is interacting with people of other cultures, hearing their stories, living their way of life, etc.

Mr. Potts, what I am trying to get at is that I am very passionate about travel and writing. I know many people my age dream of being a travel journalist, and I know many of them may be better writers than I. What can I do to make my writing stand apart from all others? How can I be a successful travel journalist? What do magazines look for when they hire a travel journalist? What can I be doing now to prepare me for my future as a travel journalist?

This is what I told Maggie:

My best advice for you is to find an area of expertise. An area of expertise might be a physical area, such as Southeast Asia or Scandinavia, or the Rocky Mountains; or it may be a travel specialty, such as extreme sports, or golf, or low-budget travel, or spa travel. Keep in mind it will take you a long time to accumulate expertise — but you’ll have fun doing it. With enough expertise, you may be able to write for (or create your own) guidebooks, and you can do lots of freelancing on the side.

Interestingly, getting “hired” by a magazine or newspaper as a travel journalist is a mixed bag. It makes for a stable job, but ironically you won’t be able to travel much in a free-spirited manner — since publications rely on freelancers for their actual travel features, and they themselves often stick to travel news that can be reported from an office. And, even more ironically, those staffers who do get to travel usually earn this privilege not by accumulating experience as travelers, but by accumulating experience as normal, office-bound writers and editors. So if you really want a staff job, aim for magazine/newspaper internships while you’re still in school.

I didn’t do this: I took the freelance route, which is more fun, but a lot less stable and remunerative. I traveled, taught English, traveled some more, worked odd jobs, and traveled some more. I didn’t sell a travel article for money until I was 28 — and, while I am a full-time travel writer now with books under my belt, I still don’t make much money as a freelancer. Few people do.

So only get into travel journalism if you really love to travel and write. If you think it’s a good pretext for getting to travel, think again: you can travel just as much by saving up money from another, better-paying job, and just taking off to go vagabonding. So only pursue travel writing because you love to write as well. If that admonition hasn’t scared you off, I’ll advise you to write as much as possible, work on your narrative voice (because a vivid or funny voice can make all the difference), do some publication internships, get out there and work on your travel expertise, and — most of all — have fun! Even if your travels don’t lead to a full-time career, they are a reward in and of themselves.