 |
|
“Schedule a day of rest every now and then. Contrary to what you might read, sudden insights seldom happen at the summit of a mountain, at the moment the whale is sighted, or in the face of some overwhelming bit of landscape. You haven’t yet assimilated the experience. Look for epiphanies on those days when you’re lying on your back, watching the ceiling fan push dust motes through a shaft of light falling through a grimy window. Exhaustion seldom engenders insight.”
–Tim Cahill, Hold the Enlightenment (2002)
(Previously posted in 2003, but oh-so worth another look.)
Sharp-eyed readers might have noticed that a Vagablogging contributor recently landed a book on the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller lists. And here’s a hint: It wasn’t me. Rather, Vagablogging’s newest author is Tim Ferriss, who writes language-learning advice for this blog.
Tim’s book is called The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich. And if you think this concept has a lot in common with Vagabonding, you’re right — Vagabonding is why Tim first contacted me, and my book is included among the “Fundamental Four” lifestyle-design books he recommends at the end of his own book.
At heart, The 4-Hour Workweek is slanted toward a business audience — entrepreneurs and employees who are looking to spend less time senselessly working and more time mindfully living. I think this is great, since high-earning office-dwellers tend to be the most “time-poor” members of American society, in spite of their big paychecks.
Ferriss’s advice? Learn how to take control of your time, since time-ownership is more important than piles of money when it comes to living a rewarding lifestyle. “Money is multiplied in practical value depending on the number of W’s you control in your life,” Ferriss writes, “what you do, when you do it, where you do it, and with whom you do it.” Lifestyle improvement, he says, begins by reinventing your approach to the office — thus, you should limit your tasks and tighten your deadlines. Eliminate unnecessary time-wasters (like checking email 30 times a day), stop accumulating needless possessions, and make your work-life so efficient that you can work from a “remote office” (which might well be located in someplace like Rio or Bangkok or Barcelona). Says Ferriss:
One cannot be free from the stresses of a speed- and size-obsessed culture until you are free from the materialistic addictions, time-famine mindset, and comparative impulses that created it in the first place.
The 4-Hour Workweek, which includes specific strategies for entrepreneurs and employees looking to take control of their time, is for sale at Amazon here. Tim also maintains a tie-in website.
For additional information, check out my Yahoo! News interview with Ferriss from earlier this year.
Speaking of Rick Steves…
Rick is back on the job in Europe, and you can follow along on his blog, Blog Gone Europe, as he researches his consistently excellent series of Europe guidebooks.
If you’re a fan of his books, you’ll especially appreciate the behind-the-scenes looks at how he puts them together (see in particular the August 2 entry from his 2006 blog). But that’s not the only reason to read Blog Gone Europe. Rick blogs like he guides; candidly and expertly, sharing loads of helpful travel tips and cultural insights. Plus, his blogged Europe vignettes stoke as much wanderlust as his television series, Rick Steves’ Europe.
On Rick’s itinerary this year are Italy, Spain, France, Croatia, Denmark, Germany, Switzerland, Czech Republic, Vienna and Istanbul, with stops in Morocco and, to his apparent dismay, Andorra (that entry’s title: “Andorra: I go there so you won’t have to”).
Rick only blogs while he travels – just 100 days this go around - so drop in on him while he’s still on the road. Got a travel question for him? Go ahead, ask him. Looks like he’s fielding a few these days.
Late last year, Harvard student Melanie Tortoroli interviewed me for a paper she was writing about travel writing and American identity. Here is our exchange:
Where were you born?
Wichita, Kansas.
What were your parents’ nationalities?
Both of them are American.
In what place have you spent the majority of your life (or the most time)?
I spent all of my youth in the United States, mostly in Kansas, Oregon, Washington, and California. Since age 26, I’ve spent probably 80% of my time overseas, most of that being in Asia.
What made you make the initial move abroad?
I was 26 and low on money, so I moved to Korea to teach English. I had some friends who were already there, so they arranged the work for me.
Did you originally plan to stay for as long as you did? What has motivated your career as a world “”vagabond”?
I really didn’t know what to expect when I moved overseas, so indeed I did not expect to stay so long. I thought maybe I would stay a year or two, teach and make money, then return to the United States.
My initial motivation for travel was a simple curiosity in the world, combined with the fact that I knew I didn’t want to postpone world-travel until I was old. Eventually, I fell in love with travel, and with the adventure of living overseas. It was easier and cheaper and more rewarding than I had imagined.
What has motivated you to write about your travels?
I was a writer (or at least I considered myself such) before I was much of a traveler, so writing about my travels was an extension of my writing life. Before I started writing about travel, I hadn’t actually read much about travel; I mostly just read general fiction and nonfiction. But I think travel is a very inspiring and educational process, and it lends itself well to narrative. A journey can be a metaphor for so many things in life.
Do you consider yourself an American? What does your nationality mean to you?
I definitely consider myself American. Nationality can be an abstraction of membership in theory, but it’s usually much more culture-based. I am a product of America; I grew up there, and living overseas didn’t change that much. Moreover, I think that Americans who move overseas and presume to be “less American” or more a part of their host culture are fooling themselves. Even those Americans who presume to reject American culture do it in a very American way. Culture is stronger than you think – more visceral than intellectual – and you can’t just will it away when you move overseas.
Describe your writing. Do you consciously set out to touch certain themes, or is writing a natural process with minimal research or perceptions?
The government of Singapore is an ambitious one, hoping to increase the population to 6.5 million, up from the current 4.5 million. They welcome immigrants, especially professional educated individuals, as well as encouraging the nation’s citizenry to breed, baby, breed. They’ve also just revealed a forward-thinking option to encourage visiting foreigners to get jobs and stay in the country for six months.
From “Work-on-holiday plan to draw foreign talent” by Li Xueying in the 19 May 2007 edition of The Straits Times (electronic version locked behind a subscription wall):
Manpower Minister Ng Eng Hen yesterday announced the scheme, called the “Work Holiday Programme” (WHP), which will begin from Dec 1.
It is open to undergraduates and graduates between the ages of 17 and 30 from universities in eight economies — Australia, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, New Zealand, United Kingdom and the United States.
The programme essentially allows any of these young people on holiday here to look for a job and stay on for six months.
[...]
“A positive experience of living and working in Singapore would encourage some of them to work here when they graduate, or at a later stage of their careers.”
Speaking at a ceremony for new doctors, Dr Ng said that in the global race for talent, there is a need to “poitively shape international opinion of Singapore and raise our profile.”
The WHP pass will not restrict its holder to any specific type of work or a minimum salary requirement.
This is in contrast to, say, the Employment Pass (EP) which requires a foreigner to have a fixed monthly salary of at least S$2,500 and an acceptable degree, professional qualification or specialist skills.
WHP holders must, however, be able to support themselves during their stay here and show proof of exit after six months.
Part of the Vagabonding ethic is being able to take off a large chunk of time for travel, and a good way to support yourself in-country is by working there. This could take the form of waiting tables, or construction work, or teaching English, but with a six-month window, the possibilities expand dramatically. (Plus, Singapore is an ideal jumping-off point for travel to Malaysia, Thailand, Hong Kong, China, India, Australia, Indonesia, and the many other countries in the region.)
This is also a very progressive move, in that there’s no immediate pay-off. The government is banking on the fact that foreign visitors will be so wowed by Singapore’s allure during their time here that they’ll want to come back sometime later; I know I was, and did. It’s a very long-tail approach to foreign recruitment, and I’m interested to see in the years ahead how successful it will be.
More information about the Work Holiday Programme can be found at Singapore’s Ministry of Manpower website.
A Kiwi Family is preparing to embark on a round-the-world journey, with eight kids in tow. How does one prepare to bring eight children around the world? How does one even begin to compile a packing list? Vagablogging interviewed Rachael, the matriarch of the Kiwi Family, to find out.
The family has eight children (four boys and four girls), ranging in age from 11 months to 12 years. The details are still being worked out, but the journey could begin as early as January of 2008. They plan on traveling to Malaysia (visiting family and volunteering), China, Mongolia (living in a ger, volunteering with a prison project), Tanzania (volunteering), Great Britain (meeting up with Grandpa), and Poland. Rob, father of the Kiwi Family, is in the process of lining up jobs in China and Poland.
The family’s Pilgrims’ Progress blog is not yet live, however Rachael’s blog Intricate Simplicity covers some of the travel preparations and will inform readers when Pilgrims’ Progress is live.
How do you prepare and organize to move 10 people around the world?
When it was just two of us, we had two packs, a tent and a thumb to hitch a ride! It’s not quite so easy with eight kids in tow. But that just means a bigger adventure! When the two of us travelled the world, we made a few lists. Now we make whole spreadsheets!
This week children are playing with nothing but the toys they are thinking of taking – two tennis balls, paper-n-pens-n-watercolours, a pack of cards, a set of travel games, some letter dice, a compass and a penknife.
Having to carry everything makes you think twice about what you want to take. We have a 39-piece wardrobe list. The clothes for the children will be made like in the olden days - with seams to be let out and down so that they grow with them rather than having to buy a complete set of new clothes each year.
One hurdle was money. We have spent the last fourteen years working our butts off, sticking to a strict budget, going without, buying second-hand, if at all. We have paid off the mortgage on our house and if we are lucky, while we’re away the rent from it will cover insurances, taxes, rates, maintenance, and other miscellaneous expenses we cannot imagine.
Have your children done much traveling before?
No! Three of them have travelled to Malaysia, one has been to Christchurch on a plane, three have driven to Wellington and back, and we’ve all been camping. Travelling for us so far has mainly meant driving to a friend’s holiday home for a weekend at the beach! But we live life fully, wherever we are, so in that sense we are prepared. We walk a lot, we visit museums and art galleries, we go for bush wanders, we climb (little) mountains, we draw and write and blog about what we see and do. This style of living can continue on the road and even give a degree of security, because it’s a lifestyle they are used to.
What about schooling on the road? Will they be enrolled in local schools or home school?
Here in NZ they “learn from life”; none of them have ever been to school and we can’t see ourselves changing that. This seems to be more of an issue for other people we come across than it is for us! We don’t follow a set curriculum so the children won’t ever be “behind or ahead”.
The children are maintaining a blog and each child will keep an illustrated journal. We embrace learning wherever we are. We love history; we can’t wait to tread the paths our heroes have trodden, climb turrets of castles and sing a hymn at the graves of our favourite hymnwriters. We can live out the object lesson of aliens in a foreign land, pilgrims and ambassadors!
Why this trip? Why now?
Instilling gratitude in our children is one of the jobs we have so far been quite successful at. All the same, we think they could benefit from understanding a little more fully exactly how rich they are. In New Zealand access to running water, education and medical care are taken for granted. If you don’t have a roof over your head and food in your tummy the state gives it to you.
Although we talk about the conditions most people live in today, our children do not understand “hunger” or “orphan” or “naked” or “homeless” or “war”. We want to open their eyes. We want to bring to our kids’ attention the needs of the world. Of course we don’t need to look past our own street to find people we can serve, and our children do engage with us in meeting the needs we come across. But there is also a bigger picture. And while you can see some of that bigger picture on a television screen, there is something about smelling the smells, seeing the sights, hearing the noises and actually interacting with real people that we hope will plant seeds in their lives that grow with them and help lead them to a life-purpose outside of themselves.
There is great freedom in only having one backpack’s worth of gear to look after! We want the kids to experience this freedom by physically taking away the “stuff” of our materialistic, consumeristic, individualistic, disposable society and living another way. Actually, it is easier to do on the road, than to be constantly swimming upstream when settled in that societal sea.
Plus, we were born with travelling adventure in our blood. This is something, which is hard to articulate – it’s just there. It’s not entirely rational or logical or explainable. It just is. We have come to realise that not everybody is like this – it is a gift we have been given and we want to use this gift to influence our children. Not everyone wants to love others in the global village – we do and we want to go and firsthand discover effective ways to do this.
I suspect no time is ever ideal. For us, there is a tension with Rob leaving a perfectly good job, which is full of good things, noble causes and needy people (not to mention a pay packet each week!) – in some ways it seems selfish to leave the people he is serving, but there’s nothing to stop him going back to it later. And in the meantime we get the advantage of Dadda being more intricately involved in his children’s lives. There are worlds in which we can live together instead of being apart for the bulk of the day, so we are choosing those paths for now. The work-world will wait, but the kids don’t stop growing.
Last week, I blogged about Moleskine’s new City Notebooks, and took a look at the Prague notebook. Moleskine has also announced a Travel Journal Contest to celebrate the release of the City Notebooks in Asia:
Moleskine is thrilled to announce its first collaboration with Air France to mobilize the creative input of the travellers’ community.
You love traveling? You always keep a Moleskine in your pocket? Come and join this fabulous contest that may allow you to win a round trip ticket to Paris.
The most nomadic Moleskine challenge of the year: An invitation to all travelers in Asia to design their ultimate travel journal.
For more information and register, please visit http://www.moleskineasia.com/voyage.
[...]
ENTRANTS
The application process is open to anybody regardless of age, nationality or sex. Entrants should reside in Asia.ENTRY PERIOD
Entrants should fill the online registration form and send back their completed travel notebook between March 1st, 2007 and June 30th, 2007.FEE
There is no application fee. However, the applicant will have to purchase the Moleskine notebook used for this contest and bear the costs for creating the artworks and postage costs for sending the notebook to our office.
First Prize is one Air France economy class ticket to Paris; Second Prize is the full collection of 16 Moleskine European and American city notebooks; and Third through Fiftieth Prize is one set of three Moleskine notebooks. The best 50 travel notebooks will also be exhibited in a nomadic exhibition around Asia in August and September 2007.
Any artistic discipline is welcome: writing, drawing, painting, illustration, graphic, collage, etc. Be aware that you will not get your travel journal back, so make sure you can part with your creation after you have put so much hard work into it.
Congratulations to our friends over at worldhum.com, “the best darn travel Web site, period” (–the South Florida Sun-Sentinel). They’ve just teamed up with the Travel Channel; meaning more opportunities for them, and more of their already outstanding content for us.
For those (likely few) of you who haven’t heard of the site, World Hum is and has been for years the Web’s best travel magazine, publishing travel narratives, an excellent travel blog and a sort of travelers’ Dear Abby with some guy named Rolf. Naturally, World Hum is a hub of the travel writing community. But it’s a must-read for all other travelers, too.
Now that the formerly-independent World Hum is on board with one of the giants of travel media, though, what’s next for them? By way of breaking the good news yesterday, editors Michael Yessis and Jim Benning posted this:
As for us, we’re not going anywhere. Thanks to the Travel Channel’s commitment, we’ll edit the site full-time, publishing the kinds of stories you’ve come to expect from World Hum. In fact, we’re going to publish more of them. You’ll see some changes to the site in the months to come. We’re going to experiment with audio, video and other ways to tell travel stories.
No complaints here (though I hope they watched “Wayne’s World” before they signed…). For more on the change, see Michael’s interview with Budget Travel Online here, or the Travel Channel’s press release here. Congratulations again, World Hum. I don’t think I’m speaking for just myself when I say we’re looking forward to reading World Hum 2.0.
This past weekend, I was the subject of an hour-long interview on Rick Steves’ radio show on NPR. Though Rick is primarily known as a guru for independent vacations in Europe, his expertise comes from a vagabonding background, and he has deep travel experience in other parts of the world. And, considering that he had obviously read my book very carefully, I’d have to say that this was the most interesting and relevant interview I’ve done since the debut of Vagabonding four years ago.
If you missed the interview on NPR, you can still listen to it through the Rick Steves website — either as a podcast, or as streaming audio.
My July Paris writing workshop is currently sold out for the summer, and time is running out to apply for my travel writing classes at SLS in Russia next month, but it’s still possible to catch me this summer at the 16th annual Book Passage Travel Writers & Photographers Conference, from August 16-19 in Corte Madera, California (just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco).
As usual, travel-writing guru Don George will be hosting the conference, and the 2007 faculty includes Isabel Allende, Tim Cahill, Jamaica Kincaid, John Flinn, Jeff Greenwald, Larry Habegger, and Linda Watanabe McFerrin. Jen Leo will be joining me on the travel-blogging panel. For more information, visit the Book Passage website here.
