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Back in November, I recommended Brook Silva-Braga’s travel documentary, A Map for Saturday, as the perfect holiday gift for the independent traveler. I wrote:
Brook was an Emmy-winning producer with HBO’s Inside the NFL, when he quit his job to take a trip around the world. Carrying nothing on his back but five pounds of clothes and 30 pounds of camera equipment, Brook created one of the best documentaries about round-the-world travel that’s ever been produced.
The film presents perfectly what traveling is all about– intense friendships that end much too quickly, the invigorating experience of near-constant movement around the globe, interacting with people from dozens of countries, learning what you’re made of, trying to figure out what the world is all about.
For those who still haven’t seen the outstanding documentary, this is your lucky day. Brook recently informed me that MTV will be airing A Map for Saturday tomorrow (March 1) night at 10 pm EST.
Be sure to check it out then, or keep an eye out for the inevitable “encore presentations” that are sure to follow.
The experience of living in the middle of a national power crisis in South Africa has prompted me to think about what one needs in a travel survival kit for the modern vagabond – or at least the modern vagabond who travels with a laptop and works on the road.
Currently my husband and I have the following in our survival kit:
That’s it…not much of a survival kit I know, so I’m looking to upgrade. Here’s what I think modern vagabonds need, in addition to the above:
And I’ve been told that we really should have a roll of duct tape but I really and truly can’t see how and where I’d use it – I’ve had no need for one so far but perhaps I’m missing something. Anyone?
In December I came across a blog called Reid On Travel, documenting Lonely Planet author Robert Reid’s guidebook-writing travels. I started following it because I was interested in learning more about the on-the-ground realities of researching and writing travel guides, but there’s a lot more to Reid’s blog than just insider info on the writing business, and you don’t have to be an aspiring travel writer to enjoy it.
In 2007, Reid passed up an assignment updating Lonely Planet’s Vietnam guide and decided to go out there on his own instead to create a free online guidebook. The older posts on his blog date from that summer of research in Vietnam. Then, late in 2007, he hooked up with Lonely Planet again and headed out to update the Lonely Planet guide to Myanmar, and a new batch of blog posts followed. Both are full of great characters, funny anecdotes, and cool photos – I found the Burmese posts especially interesting, since I know so little about the reclusive military-ruled country.
I’ve been a Robert Reid fan for awhile – I first encountered him in May 2005. He was updating a couple of Russia guidebooks for Lonely Planet, and keeping a way-better-than-average travel blog as he went – featuring complex moustache tallies (there were graphs), anecdotes of every Oleg and Tatiana encountered en route, and even a search for Ronnie James Dio in the vast wastes of Siberia. That blog got me through a brutal summer office job, and I’ve kept an eye out for new stuff ever since.
Robert Reid’s Reid on Travel blog is here. Also check out his Vietnam guide, and if you want to see those moustache graphs for yourself, look on his personal website under ‘Moustaches’.
Yet more proof that our tastes are all a bit different (or fundamentally the same?)—there’s now a social networking map.
Gadling introduces us to the map that was first published by the French newspaper Le Monde. There we see the number of hours per month (in the millions) that users spend on the most popular social networks per region, and the top sites in selected countries.
No surprise that MySpace is tops in the US, right? We Americans must be on really good terms with the Aussies, Italians, and Venezuelans, because that’s where MySpace is also most popular. I suppose if you knew that you’d be spending a good amount of time in Brazil or India, you might want to brush up on your Orkut. Or hi5 in Mongolia. And it’s interesting to see that one of the first networks, Friendster, is still going strong in some of the Asia-Pacific countries.
I just have to wonder what the map will look like in another year…
A recent entry on Lonely Planet’s Thorn Tree struck me. The post (“The return home after 13 months of travel…”) begged the age-old question “but what do I do at the end of it all, when I return home?”
It may hit some of us harder than others—and when asked prematurely it may keep someone from going abroad in the first place. I know that I’ve been lucky to return to a safe haven after a long trip, where I was able to take some temp jobs while stalling for time, before changing to a new field of work. But don’t mistake my quick summary for an easy transition—those were confusing months.
The first response on the Thorn Tree popped up: take your time.
Sage advice, but it was the analogy of the next post that I liked. The idea of life as as a series of pages or chapters turned isn’t new, but the blogger puts it well:
“I use the analogy of a book to think about life. I’m about to begin chapter 62 and when you get that far into your book (life) you start to gain some bigger perspectives on things. What in chapter 25 (or wherever you are now) might seem like a major point in your life may well (and probably will) become a far less signifigant point by the time you get to chapter 60. If it hasn’t become less signifigant by then, life must have been very dull ever since.
My point is simply this, don’t make a bigger deal of it than it is. Decide what you want to do now (the next chapter at least) and get on with it. This is probably not the crux of your life.”
Well, if you put it that way: you’re not to going to fail miserably if you stall for a bit, or if you take a short trip down the wrong path. This wide-angle-lens approach isn’t meant to discount the trip that you just took. Actually, the things that you trusted and honed on the road—your instincts and flexibility—are exactly what will serve you well on your return. But the dose of perspective is good to keep close as you move ahead in your own way—knowing that other fantastic things lie ahead.
I took a career break for 6-months in 2006; I’m still on it.
I often refer to job-quitting in my posts and always encourage it because I know (from personal experience) it sounds great but how DIFFICULT it is to do. The comfort bubble that your “career” allows you to bop in, often becomes too convenient to want to burst. Many people don’t — from fear, laziness, or their reluctance to shake comfort levels that come with complacency.
If you have the desire to take a halt from your “proper” life and explore your dreams, I find that you need to be consistently reminded that this is totally possible, without affecting your future career prospects. We seldom realize how such a step can in fact give us incomparable personal growth that will only enhance your future career / life prospects.
So, every time I find an article that encourages this frame of thought and gives you ample avenues and resources to explore, I feel it my responsibility to share it here on Vagablogging.
Here’s my latest find from The Independent on career breaks — devour it!
Monday already? You know what that means: resource updates! If you have no idea what I’m talking about, let me give you a quick recap:
A few weeks ago I announced that Rolf’s book, Vagabonding, will be going into a second edition within the year, complete with a fully updated resources section. We put a call out for you to help us update that resource section for the second edition, and this is the second week in a 10-week-long series asking for those website links, books, and other resources that fit into the various categories found in the book.
This week we’ll be working on chapter 6:
* Cross-cultural resources
* Resources for female travelers
To see what resources were included in the first edition of the book, click the category above. Do you know of any website links, books, or other resources that need to be included in the second edition of Vagabonding? Tell us in the comment section of this post.
Just when I thought there can’t be any more innovative use of maps, I stumbled upon Hitotoki (such a cute name!). Japanese for “a moment”, the site describes itself as a narrative map; a literary project connecting individual stories to specific locations around the world; “cityscape gymnastics from finely groomed humans” (– this last sentence I don’t get either).
This is how it works: people write literary pieces on experiences they have had in particular places around the world, the places are narrowed down to, for example, a pub in Canning Town, or the New York Public Library. You find these places on the respective city’s map and if there is a personal piece written about it, it is marked differently.
The reason this site caught my attention was its originality and attempt to bring to people very detailed and specific experiences related to very specific places. Other than the odd personal magazine column, this is something that you are unlikely to stumble upon in any guidebook. I thought it was a pretty neat way to integrate maps, travel, literature and personal experiences.
Right now, it only has maps and stories on Tokyo, New York, DC and London, but is open should you want to start a page on your own city; they are also open for story submissions.
Over at Vagabondish, Amanda Kendle has an interesting article about the advantages of walking around one’s travel destination, rather than taking a bus or taxi or metro. Not only does walking facilitate more personal experiences of a city, she writes, it’s also great exercise and will yield better photographs of your trip. She also addresses the nay-sayers:
“The most common counter-argument I hear is that you don’t have time to do this on your precious few vacation days. I’d argue that you don’t have time not to. Remember that travel is not about collecting entry tickets, it’s about experiences, and I guarantee that you’ll have a more memorable experience if you travel really slowly. Try it and see.”
As it says in the article, and as I often hear, the conventional wisdom is that traveling slowly causes people to miss out on too many worthwhile destinations. Why spend six months in Colombia when there are so many great things in South America to see? Why walk around a city when you could take a taxi and see five times as much?
It’s a difficult question, and one that most travelers eventually wrestle with. But I tend to think that what those who travel slowly lack in breadth of travels they make up for in depth. Better to know a couple small places well than to skim along the surface of everywhere you go.
Read Amanda’s full article over at Vagabondish here.
It’s one of the things most travelers strive for – that feeling of being “local”.
And yet most of us realise that we’re unlikely to ever be true ‘locals’ and are always destined to be somewhat of a tourist or visitor in many of the places we visit.
But is this always a bad thing?
I’ve come to think not. As a visitor, one often has certain expectations of a place, perhaps even wearing rose-tinted spectacles and romanticising the view you have of it.
Under the covers however, it’s often very interesting what you’ll find; and a great way to get under the covers is to read the local newspapers – both broadsheets and tabloid.
In South Africa currently, if one were to believe everything one read in the daily papers you’d get the impression that the country is falling apart, ravaged by a power crisis and increasing violence and not fit for visitors, yet alone as the host nation for the 2010 Football (soccer) World Cup.
We’re having a lovely, peaceful time here – being careful yes, but no more so than in any other big city around the world. Just a scan of the local newspapers can paint a very different portrait from the one you’ll get as a visiting tourist.
If you are determined to get under the covers of any place you visit, remember this…
Be prepared for your romanticised notions of the place to be torn to shreds; be prepared to view that destination in a warts-and-all fashion; and be prepared to uncover a very different place to the one you thought you were in.
@Backpack Foodie & Kim:...
