Rolf’s book has inspired countless people to drop everything and pursue their dreams of seeing the world. But no vagabond had ever dropped by Rolf’s home in Kansas to thank him personally. Until now.

A week ago, former Seoul resident Wan Lee (who originally read Vagabonding in its Korean translation) passed through Kansas on his now-legendary journey around the USA aboard a 50cc Honda Ruckus bike. The journey has taken him from the Redwood forests of California to Texas and North Carolina and everywhere in between. After arriving in Missouri, Wan wanted to visit Rolf in Kansas to meet the author who inspired his trip, which Wan is calling “The Adventures of Wan - Rucking Across the US!”

For Wan to meet Rolf and his family for dinner, Wan and his small scooter, which goes an average of 30 mph, had to travel down a three-mile dirt road because, as Wan says, Rolf lives in a “totally secluded place.”

Wan took lots of pictures of his time with Rolf (see them here), and he got a signed English-edition of Vagabonding as well as a VGB sticker to put on his bike.

Need some inspiration for your own vagabonding trip? I think you’ve found it. Way to go, Wan!

Part 1 of Wan’s epic trip can be found here. A Youtube video of Part 1 is here.

[Above: Rolf and Wan take a break from cutting brush on Rolf's farm]

As I wrote last week, long term and permanent travel can sometimes take its toll; you can become de-sensitised to the excitement and new-ness of exotic locations and begin to crave the familiar.

Sometimes a healthy dose of extreme self-care is what’s called for and at other times, you may even crave ‘home’. Yet the notion of home for permanent travellers like my husband and I is a strange one - if you have no base to go to, what constitutes home?

As I write this I’m back at ‘home’ in the UK - after a hectic 10 days which has seen us travel from Thailand to HK, to Dubai, to London and finally back to our home town of Nottingham - there’s something comfortingly familiar about it and right now, after all that travel, it’s just what I need.

But I’m already starting to get that familiar craving for being in a foreign land…it’s fortunate then that I’m off to South Africa via Dubai today. Still, that feeling of familiarity is one we all crave at times, isn’t it?

I don’t mean this to sound insensitive, because an economic recession is serious business. But from where I sit north of the border, in Canada, the doomsday talk about the impact of the struggling US dollar on travel to Europe is getting a little old.

After all, Canadians and Australians (and pretty well every other nationality in the world) have been managing to travel to Europe despite our weaker currencies for years. For that matter, even travel to the United States meant giving up a pretty steep exchange rate for most of my life! And believe it or not, the sky did not fall just because a cappuccino cost me three times as much when I traveled as it did when I was at home.

So with all the talk about the dollar and the euro, I was thrilled to find this BootsnAll article: 27 Facts To Put This Exchange-Rate Craziness Into Perspective For American Travelers. It’s a collection of currency and exchange rate trivia that shows just how much some of the world’s other major currencies have fluctuated over the past few decades, and I think American travelers anxious about their next European trip might find it comforting.

Of course, no one likes to see costs increase dramatically. But - aside from keeping things in perspective - the best way to handle the changes is to do all the things we talk about here on Vagablogging all the time: slow down, break away from the main tourist trail, slow down, couch surf or self-cater to save on food and accommodation, oh, and slow down.

[Via Vagabondish]

The world’s eyes are on China these days. So it isn’t suprising to see the latest issue of Good Magazine dedictated to it. But what jumped out at me was the section “Strangers in a Strange Land,” which looks at expat life there.

I don’t know about you, but I’m always intrigued by the personal stories of backpackers and expats. Between differences in backgrounds and interests and motivations—nobody can say to have exactly the same travel experience as anyone else. And add China to the mix and you’re pretty much guaranteed hours of award-winning story-swapping.

The article (and its online tie-in) gives us a face, a name, a story to twelve expats—from a hip-hop MC to a youth pastor. Written as a Q&A, some topics strike a familiar chord for travelers everywhere, but I thought that the most interesting answers were as unique as China itself.

And if you haven’t already picked up a copy of Good Magazine yet, you might want to check it out. It’s a different type of magazine, with intentions that are—dare I say—good. Or in their own words: “media for people who give a damn.”

My brother arrived to Madrid from Texas the day before yesterday, and has been droopy and tired ever since. He traveled for 24 hours to get here, and is trying to get used to the 7-hour time difference. All the plans I had for him here have flopped because he’s just too tired and low on energy. Darn jet lag!

Yahoo! published an interesting article recently on how starving yourself for upto 16 hours my just do the trick: “Normally, the body’s natural circadian clock in the brain dictates when to wake, eat and sleep, all in response to light. But it seems a second clock takes over when food is scarce, and manipulating this clock might help travelers adjust to new time zones.”

Hmmm. I don’t really understand how this works and neither are the doctors who came up with this theory sure about its effectiveness on humans (they’ve experimented with mice), but if there are chances it will save you a week of suffering from jetlag, it’s probably worth a try. What do you think? Any other strategies to avoid jet lag?

Confession: I have always wanted to do a year long round the world trip (RWT), but just thinking about the number of visas I’d have to apply for (as an Indian passport holder), has stopped me from even trying to plan it out.

Some of the issues:
1) Indians need a visa to go EVERYWHERE (except Jamaica!). Some Asian countries like Thailand and Malaysia will give it to you on the spot — but most other places you need to sort it out in advance.
2) You can only apply for the visa from your country of residence.
3) You normally have to state when the exact number of days you are planning to stay in a particular place. I refuse to plan it like that for a year!
4) Visa requirements always ask for proof of where I’m going to stay AND to-fro flight tickets, which means I need to pre-book all hostels and flights. Again, for a year, I refuse to even try to sort that out.
5) Visa’s can take anything from a day to a month to come through.

In other words, I don’t think I’m ever going to do a round the world trip unless I manage to change my nationality. To do that, I have two options — 1) live in Spain for 10 more years and qualify for nationality, 2) get married to a Spaniard. Neither of those options are particularly appealing.

As far as I see it, living abroad and seeing the world bit by bit is my only bet to be able to travel for an extended period of time. I’m lucky to be a resident of India, UAE and Europe — but it still doesn’t aid an impulsive travel itch nor long term cross continent travel.

There are two things I’d like to put out there basis this post:
1) If you are a Westerner and not traveling the world, you are crazy not to take advantage of your passport. You can go anywhere, anytime, for upto three months!
2) Are there any Asian passport holders out there who have done a RWT? How did you manage it?

“The luxury traveler and his poorer cousin, the common tourist, are constantly encased in gleaming metals and other costly materials; preened mechanically by resentful lackeys; surfeited with overpriced, denutrified victuals; treated to vulgar and expensive entertainments; intentionally or unintentionally lied to; sneered at even by themselves; led like sheep through attractions that bore them? This is not travel; this is butchery of soul. This is how money, an artificial form of energy, distorts reality for its own ends. To travel cheaply, in any form at all, weakens the power of money to trick you into phony realities that profit only the Travel Industry.”
–Ed Buryn, Vagabonding in the USA (1980)

Unlike many of you, my globe-trotting comrades, I don’t have much talent for speaking foreign languages. Though I’ve spent a fair amount of time trying to learn Spanish (and French and Arabic and Russian and…), I simply can’t envision myself ever becoming fluent. But that doesn’t mean all that language-learning effort was entirely for naught. While my studies have taught me that fluency is probably out of the question, they’ve also taught me something else: I’m pretty good at learning just a little of lots of languages. And that’s good, because when you’re traveling, sometimes just a little is just enough.

It’s easy enough to study a phrasebook for an hour or two on the plane ride to your destination, but just a little more work will bear much more fruit. For example, learning foreign alphabets is one skill that comes a lot easier than it might seem, and is incredibly useful as well.

A long time ago, as I was looking at those strange-looking Cyrillic letters in Rocky IV (that’s the Dolph-Lundgren-as-Ivan-Drago classic), I never imagined that I could make heads or tails out of them. But years later, after studying the Cyrillic alphabet for several hours and comparing it with English, the letters started to look a lot more familiar. With some practice, I could eventually make out Russian cognate words like bar, president, airport, and Vladimir Putin.

Written Arabic had always looked like a maddening series of squiggles and dots, until I put in a couple hours for a few days, and tried to figure out what exactly the letters were and how they sounded. Before long, the squiggles turned into words, and though I could only recognize cognates and proper names, I impressed my friends when I told them I knew what this Arabic Burger King logo said (that’d be “Burger King”).

Admittedly, this isn’t much. It probably won’t help me converse with the locals, or bargain with the merchant for a lower, non-foreigner price. But it’s more than I thought I could do, and it’s a start. Put in a couple hours of work, and on your next trip you might be surprised as to how many bars, banks, and Burger Kings you can recognize.

In personal development circles there’s something known as ‘extreme self care’. For those of you not familiar with self development terminology, this basically means pampering.

I know that’s not typically something you’d associate with the image of a vagabond but hear me out!

Those of you who’ve been on the road for a while can probably relate to the feeling of road-weariness and travel fatigue when not even the most spectacular of sights can raise more than a wearied sigh of “oh cool” from you.

This can be especially draining if you’re travelling on a budget, counting the pennies and have a minor heart attack when a meal costs you more than £3 (or $6).

Sometimes however, splashing a bit of that cash is the perfect antidote to travel fatigue and there’s nothing better than a bit of extreme self care (whatever that means for you) to perk you up.

For me in HK last week, that meant a decent haircut at a proper salon and a meal that most definitely broke our budget!

What do you do for extreme self care on the road?

We’ve all heard about the latest travel woes in the news: fuel prices rising, the US dollar struggling, airlines racking up cancellations, delays and inconveniences almost as quickly as they rack up new fees and charges for their passengers, and of course, environmental concerns about the impact of flying and driving on the planet.

I heard an interesting report on the news though, here in my hometown of Ottawa. It was about the increase in gas prices, and everyone interviewed said they were extremely concerned - funnily enough, though, they all said they had no intention of changing their driving habits to reduce their consumption.

So how will your travel style change, this summer and into the future? Will you move more slowly, fly less, ride-share, or try to reduce your impact? Take the train? Purchase carbon offsets? Avoid the Euro zone, and visit South America instead? Or just carry on as planned?

I’m curious to know how everyone is planning to tackle these new travel challenges, both financial and environmental.