I’ve been enjoying Planet Eye’s new Global Nomad blog that is written by Brendan Powell as he travels around the world with his girlfriend. He began writing in January 2008 from Costa Rica and has worked his way through Belize, Brazil, Uruguay and now he is in Argentina. His writing is revealing and fun, and he’s good with photos. A must check out!

Another column that hasn’t started yet, but is one of those you read about and just know you’d want to follow — that of Robin Esrock at Brave New Traveler. The lucky bugger managed to snag a TV show deal of him traveling across 26 countries over the next 12-months. He will be blogging from the road about travel, life on the road, and being behind the camera. More details on him and the show at Modern Gonzo.

This July at the RolfPotts.com Travel Writers page I interview novelist Gary Shteyngart, whose essays for Travel + Leisure were selected for the 2006 and 2007 editions of The Best American Travel Writing. Here are some of the highlights from our Q&A:

• “I’m primarily a novelist. That’s my main bread and butter. But the travel writing is very important to me, because it gets me out of the house. I still believe that writers need to see the world to understand their own place in it.”
• “I’ve been writing since I was a kid in Russia. My grandma paid me in little pieces of cheese for every page I wrote. That’s how you create a writer. By paying him or her with something edible.”
• “I like some of Paul Theroux’s writing and I find that fiction is often the most helpful. Aleksander Hemon, for example, who writes a lot about Yugoslavia is brilliant. Oh, and George Saunders’ piece about Dubai is the most hilarious thing ever written.”
• “Life is short and our planet is finite. What can be more important than seeing the totality of the human condition in this awful and wonderful world of ours?”

Full Gary Shteyngart interview online here.

Over at the San Francisco Chronicle, John Flinn assembles a laundry list of reasons why you might think about canceling your travel plans. In this tongue-in-cheek article, “Always a good reason not to travel” Flinn exposes the rationalizations for staying home that almost all travelers make at one time or another. For example:

You could go camping in Yosemite Valley, but do you think there’s any hope of getting a campsite if you didn’t make a reservation six months ago?

You could take a cruise, but aren’t you sick of how they keep raising the price by slipping in extra fees - fuel surcharges, port fees, mandatory gratuities - on top of the advertised fare?

You could head south to Baja, but have you heard about the sharks? And the drug cartels?

You could go to Mount Rushmore, but did you know that it’s one of the five noisiest national parks in the United States?

As Flinn aptly points out, there’s always a reason to stay at home. Some of them, like rising gas prices and more expensive plane tickets, aren’t bad reasons. Money is finite and sometimes tough choices have to be made. But if we’re honest with ourselves, there’s almost always a way around our financial concerns. Sure, gas is more expensive. That just means we’ll have to cut back in other areas if we want to take our dream road trip.

Besides, aren’t there even better reasons not to stay at home? Says Flinn, “Your only option, then, will be to plop yourself down in your La-Z-Boy and let Rick Steves and Anthony Bourdain do your traveling for you. But if you take a break from viewing and make yourself a BLT, are you willing to risk getting salmonella from the tomatoes?”

If you spend any time online you’ve probably already heard of Twitter, right?

If not, it is what’s known as a ‘micro blogging’ service, letting you update your followers with all manner of tweets (there’s a whole new Twitter-based vocabularly you’ll get used to).

The real power of Twitter however is the conversation - or twitversation - that it enables.

For instance, I wanted recommendations for a route to take when I move on from the Garden Route to Cape Town next week. I asked my twitter buds on Twitter who duly obliged with a number of suggestions and ‘must sees’ en route. And that’s not all…you can get updates on the weather, queues at airports, organise tweet-ups on location and more from the Twitterverse.

The real benefit of Twitter therefore comes from its ability to help you connect with people all over the world which, when you think about it, is one powerful tool for vagabonds.

Here’s how you get started:

1 - Sign up for an account here.
2 - Start following people you already know (I’m here)
3 - Communicate and engage with your twitter buds using @ to tweet to individuals (e.g. if you want to say hi to me, you’d type — @leawoodward Hi there, Lea! –)

Is anyone else on Twitter?

Over a year ago, we first covered Dominic Gill’s Take a Seat expedition. His plan was to ride a tandem bicycle from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska to Ushuaia, Argentina- a distance of over 20,000 miles. The catch? He embarked on this journey solo, trying to find people along the way to help him pedal. The trip was about “Cycling the length of the Americas in search of company”.

In 2007, we interviewed him as he made he was across Guatemala on the bike built for two. Then a few months later, we updated his progress through Ecuador.

Now, he has continued through Latin America and is in the home stretch of his journey, last updating his blog on June 21 from Coyhaique, Chile. So far, he has traveled 17,260 miles on his tandem bike, 10,195 of which were solo miles.

The video gallery contains several new videos, including TV news stories about him in Spanish, and an English clip where he talks about how he sprayed a dog with bear spray, was nearly run over on the road, and how he desperately needs a shower.

He has almost reached his goal of raising 5,000 British pounds for Hope and Homes for Children, an organization that helps orphaned and abandoned children, including those who are suffering as a result of war, conflict, and diseases (including AIDS orphans).

Dominic is still looking for people to help him pedal. If you will be in Patagonia in the near future and would like to hitch a ride and offer some pedal power, there is still a little bit of time to get in touch with him and become part of this journey.

How many times has a movie destination started you dreaming about a new place to visit? (Dozens, or maybe hundreds of times?)

Some film locations just seem to have that effect. They might be blatantly featured, or they could lie in the background the whole time, discreetly showing more of themselves with every frame. But no matter—something about them has made such an impression that you’ve already traded your movie ticket for a plane ticket.

Film in Focus recently took a look at great portrayals of cities in film. To help, they asked Rolf and four other travel writers—Pico Iyer, Tony Wheeler, Heidi Julavits, and Ayun Halliday—for their favorites.

They’ve come up with an interesting mix of movies, and just as many reasons why these particular movies stand out as great caricatures of a city. Some choices intentionally venture to the less obvious locales (Isfahan in “Arabian Nights”). Others are appreciated for having a certain authenticity not typically shown in Hollywood (Omaha in “About Schmidt,” and Boston in “Mystic River”). Two flicks stood out enough to show up on several lists: “Lost in Translation” (Tokyo) and “Before Sunset” (Paris).

I’d personally second the motion for “Before Sunset” and “Buena Vista Social Club,” but might also throw in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.”

What about you—do you have a favorite portrayal of a city in a movie?

Friends at EuroCheapo.com have extended their budget travel services and launched a new site for youth-hostel booking in Europe — EuropeanHostels.com. A much needed feature these days if you want to be an authority in budget travel, but for that same reason, you are up against a good number of websites providing exactly the same services.

I must congratulate EuropeanHostels.com for getting all the core services right, before they plan to expand and enhance on their features. On their website you can search through 10,000 hostels across Europe and sort the results by a variety of unique factors including Editor’s picks, Distance to city center and Highest rating. They also have a feature where you can see hostel locations on a Google Maps, differentiated basis whether they cost over or under $50. Over and above, in this early phase, they have managed to give expert city guides to 38 destinations in Europe.

However, a few downsides: you can’t sort basis availability of the dates you want accommodation, a very important information criteria. When you request a search, it does say “searching for availability”, but it’s not clear whether it means the availability of hostels or the availability of rooms on the search dates. Also, they only have 10,000 hostels (others have over 15,000; Hostels.com has 23,000), and the site takes a little longer than the rest to load after making a search request.

Two of the most well-known websites for hostel-booking in Europe and worldwide are Hostels.com and Hostelworld.com; these are the only two websites I’ve always used to book my hostels and they are excellent. Other than being strongly user-based and providing all the right information quickly, they are full-fledge portals that provide all the possible information you may need on a city (Hostelworld.com does it in 22 languages!). Other than on Hostels.com, you can’t avoid a booking fee, but it’s always minimal, so I don’t consider that an issue.

In other words, competition is very high; at this stage, getting customers who have been using sites like Hostels.com or Hostelworld.com to switch to using EuropeanHostels.com is going to be a tough challenge for EuropeanHostels.com. Also, there are a dozen other sites that I have never used, but also look decent like: Gomio.com, Hostelseurope.com, BUGEurope.com, and the list goes on.

All that said, the one thing you can bank on is the commitment and reliability of the people behind this EuropeanHostels.com. The management is the same as that of EuroCheapo.com, undoubtedly one of the best sites for information on traveling Europe on a budget. So I have no doubt that as they develop, they will more than match their competitors. Worth a check out.

On a separate note…
While we are talking about hostels, San Francisco based company Hostelling International, is seeking short (150-250 words), personal stories from travelers about their experiences hostelling. Stories can be funny, serious, romantic, touching, as long as they’re true. You can get full details on this here.

(*phew, yes, long post!*)

I’m a huge fan of Matt from “Where The Hell Is Matt?”, I’ve watched all his videos of him dancing around the world numerous times. Such a simple idea that Matt makes special in two ways 1) the spots he chooses 2) his little dancy-jog is just awesome. Lucky bugger now even gets paid to do it.

This year, he is back with another dance session around the world, but this time he invited his fans to join him do his jig in most of the countries he visited, a MUST watch!

“Nowadays it costs more and takes greater ingenuity, imagination, and enterprise to fabricate travel risks than it once required to avoid them. Almost as much effort goes into designing the adventure as into surviving it. For this the tourist millions have not the time or the money. Travel adventure today thus inevitably acquires a factitious, make-believe, unreal quality. And only the dull travel experience seems genuine. Both for the few adventuring travelers who still exist and for the larger number of travelers-turned-tourists, voyaging becomes a pseudo-event.”
–Daniel Boorstin, The Image (1961)

Rolf has a new story in Forbes about his experience windsurfing in the Sea of Galilee, called “Windsurfing Where Jesus Walked.” In the piece, Rolf’s experience of the modern-day Middle East is greatly informed and influenced by the region’s rich, fascinating history. The essay opens:

Whenever I tell people how I learned to windsurf on Israel’s Sea of Galilee, I’m usually met with a bemused pause, as if a Bible-themed punchline should come next. Some zinger about Jesus walking on water, perhaps, admonishing me to drop my sail and become a windsurfer of men.

Though Rolf writes that splashing around in the Sea of Galilee didn’t feel that different from being in the waters off the coast of Oregon, his experiences with his instructor, Aryeh, and two female Israeli friends are thoroughly unique and hilarious. He writes:

Since Aryeh’s English was only slightly better than my Hebrew, I never learned much about the technical aspects of windsurfing. Mostly he coached me with inspirational plaudits like, “get up, and relax on the board,” or “no, up!” or “more relax!”

When I swam ashore for a break after the first hour, the girls complimented me on my windsurfing form (”you looked like you were trying really hard not to fall off the side of a building”)…

Check out the whole thing here.