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How’s this for an inspirational story? It can be hard enough to find the gumption and resources to travel the world. But how about giving it all up to personally fight poverty in Bangladesh?
That’s what 27-year-old Torontonian, Shawn, did when he started The Uncultured Project. He was originally inspired in 2006 at Notre Dame, where he heard a lecture by Dr. Jeffrey Sachs (author of “The End of Poverty”). What Sachs stressed and what Shawn took away was the importance of creating change with small, simple steps.
So Shawn withdrew from grad school, liquidated his savings, and took off for Bangladesh, to roll up his sleeves and do as much as one person can to help end extreme poverty. It’s amazing what he’s been able to accomplish so far: he has handed out disaster relief and school supplies, reconstructed homes, helped to prevent malaria, provided scholarships, and created jobs. With the help of YouTube videos, he shares stories from this journey with us.
It’s definitely not the easy path to take. Others might’ve stayed on at Notre Dame, where he was pursuing a Masters & PhD degree in Sociology. Others might’ve run away after witnessing suffering and death, or after finding out that they face organ failure because of water contamination; or after getting the 3rd degree from relatives who don’t quite understand their motivations.
Shawn has essentially given everything he has for this project—tapping into his entire savings, and now tapping into his parents’ savings. The donations that he collects goes directly to the people he’s helping. If you’d like to give your support, you can contribute via PayPal. Let’s hope that he can keep it up for a long time.
It used to be that the Sunday edition of most newspapers was a gold mine of travel information. The internet largely killed the need for the Sunday Travel section, but there are still some notable newspaper travel desks that continued to publish insightful and helpful articles on destinations around the world.
Once of my personal favorites has long been the San Francisco Chronicle’s travel section, which, admittedly, I mainly read on the web. While the Chronicle’s Travel section doesn’t appear to going anywhere (thankfully) its long-time editor and noted travel writer John Flinn has stepped down.
If you’re a fan of travel writing and have ever searched the web for great travel writing, you’ve no doubt come across Flinn’s stories. He’s something of a rarity among newspaper travel editors, eschewing the Top Ten ______ to do _____ stories in favor of more in-depth writing, often about obscure locales than most papers fail to recognize.
Tomorrow is Flinn’s last day at the helm of the Chronicle’s travel section, though in an interview with World Hum, Flinn says he plans to continue writing, mainly for magazines.
However, while you’ll probably be able to still find your fix of Flinn’s writing (albeit perhaps not on a weekly basis), he offers World Hum a bleak outlook for the future of travel writing.
In a few years, do you think newspaper travel sections will look like they do today?
I don’t think so. I think the longer narratives that were the foundation of most newspaper travel sections are starting to fade away. Papers want more “top ten beaches”-style content, and lots of “charticles.” That’s not always a bad thing—there’s a lot of information that can be better conveyed in a list or a graphic than in a narrative. But I think there’s a growing assumption that readers don’t have the attention spans to wade through an 1,800-word travel narrative, no matter how well it’s written.
Personally I find the Top Ten-anything approach to travel writing nearly worthless — I’d much rather hear about someone’s actual experience than a simple list which is based on little more than aggregated opinion (or, if you’re more cynical and consult a list of recently opened resorts, you’ll find top ten lists are often suspiciously well-aligned with adverts and brochures).
I also know from first-hand experience that, despite what newspaper editors might think, there are plenty of readers out there who also prefer longer, more narrative writing. Thankfully, while it might be disappearing from the Sunday Travel section, there’s plenty of it to be found on the web.
[Photo courtesy of World Hum]
When you are planning a long trip, cross continent, you can never have enough information. I remember a friend in Spain would make me see him for coffee for a year before he actually left for his RTW trip. He just wanted reassurance, support, chat, my guidebooks, website links, anything, because taking that final step is not the easiest thing to do, especially when you are leaving behind a full-time job and family.
So on that note, here’s another website that will certainly encourage those wanting to take the plunge, or who have taken the plunge: How-to-travel-the-world.com. It’s got a good amount of basic information and support, and more importantly, the content has input from various long term travelers (although it is not clear who they are), and is edited by Matthew Kepnes of webiste Nomadic Matt. I had a few issues loading the site pages, but that could be an issue with the local servers here in Dubai.
Since I’ve just quit my vagabonding stint and am still in the transition slump, I went straight to the “Coming Home” section, which does not often exist on travel websites. I liked what I read, so here’s an excerpt:
“Coming home from traveling around the world is the hard. There’s a mixture of emotions: excitement, anxiety, fear, joy, and nervousness. After the honeymoon is over and reality sets in, people are left feeling a little lost. You spent a long time preparing for the road, a long time on the road, and then suddenly, it’s over. Just like that. It’s as though someone slammed on the brakes to your life and, for many people, that can be kind of depressing. Coming home is more about coping mentally than doing anything.
Coming home is about adjusting back into the world you left and focusing on taking what you learned and applying it to your daily life. Many long term travelers end up leaving, afflicted by a virus that will never be cured. Others stay home because their trip taught them they missed the most was what they left behind. Either way, we all come home eventually and we’ll need to know how to cope with that experience.”
Yup. That’d be true. Check them out when you have a minute, especially if you’re planning a trip.
Everyone needs to pack, no matter where you’re going. And if you’re anything like me, you use lots of scraps of paper, or maybe one page of your journal, criss-crossed with scribblings, and then you forget something anyway. On my last trip out of the country, I forgot earplugs; “No big deal,” I thought. “I can sleep through loud tribal drumming, people shouting, and street festivals…I’ll be fine.” I forgot about people who snore. Two of the girls in our dorm decided to hold Snoreapalooza 2008 and, while it may have been audible from the street, Party Central was my room.
So here are some ways to make your packing easier:
“As a host community adapts to tourism, its facilitation to tourists’ needs, attitude, and values, the host community must become more like the tourists’ culture. That is what tourists in search of the exotic and ‘natural’ vacation setting mean when they say a place has been ‘spoiled’ by tourism, i.e., those who got there before them and required the amenities of home. Anthropologists are often in the forefront of those who deplore the dilution and adulteration of traditional culture. However, the alteration of one culture by another has always been a fact of existence. Some societies have remained in relative isolation from others for long periods of time, but in this century virtually no community is immune from outside contact, and the tourist is more ubiquitous than any other kind of representative of other cultures.”
–Theron Nunez, in Valene L. Smith’s Hosts and Guests: The Anthropology of Tourism (1977)
Budget Travel magazine ran an article recently called The Ultimate Guide to Free Travel. While standby flights and couch surfing are well-known, this piece had some more interesting ideas.
The key thing is to be responsible, though. You’ll still pay for traveling, but just not with money. A lot of these free travel options operate on trust. Definitely show gratitude and respect to your hosts for their generosity. By being a good guest, you’ll be making it easier for other travelers to score free trips as well.
Christmas only comes around once a year, but North Pole, Alaska celebrates it year-round. Located only 10 miles from Alaska’s second-largest city of Fairbanks, North Pole is in the Christmas spirit 365 days a year. Which is a good thing, because the lowest recorded winter temperature in North Pole was -78 Farenheit! Temperatures like that make a summer wonderland sound a little more impressive.
For those hearty souls willing to brave the winter weather (Christmas day forecast: only -10!), North Pole is celebrating Christmas in Ice until the end of December. This ice sculpture festival features incredible ice art, a children’s play area with equipment crafted solely from ice and snow, an outdoor family play area, and other festivities to get visitors in the holiday spirit.
The Christmas in Ice photo and video gallery shows every step of the ice sculpture process, from harvesting the ice for carving to the ice artists at work to the impressive finished creations.
If you happen to be spending the day in interior Alaska, admission is free on Christmas. The ice park will be open through the end of December, with special events on some days.
If a trip to Alaska is not on the agenda for the next week, stateside travelers can check out these fantastic light displays within the continental United States and the Travel Channel’s “Most Christmasy Places in America”.
If venturing out is not an option for Christmas this year, Yuletide revelers can enjoy these home light displays set to music from the Trans-Siberian Orchestra.
Merry Christmas and happy vagabonding!
Yes, I can say that I’ve seen better movies than “Yes Man.”
It may be a ho-hum movie, but what lasts for me is a moment of spontaneity: at one point Jim Carrey’s character arrives at the airport, steps up to the ticket desk, and asks for the next flight out of town. Will it be Tuvalu or will it be Nebraska? Hold onto your britches—he ends up in Lincoln, Nebraska. After an initial shock of disappointment, he runs with it and finds himself perusing an old phone museum, wandering backcountry roads, and cheering for the home team at a football game—proving that anywhere can be interesting, if you have the same sense of wonder that you’d bring to Tuvalu.
Abha has blogged a bit about the topic. And it reminds me of Lonely Planet’s Guide to Experimental Travel a few years back (which includes instructions for Trip Poker: four people role the dice—the winner chooses the destination, and the loser pays for the trip).
I can’t say that I’ve made any spontaneous bookings like that—just arrived at the airport and picked my destination on a whim—but I’m thinking that it has to go on my rolling New Year’s Resolution list, for sometime in my lifetime. But I’m wondering: has anybody here done that? Or maybe it was a spur-of-the-moment choice on your Eurail Pass? Where did your spin of trip roulette take you?
Everyone knows there are some gestures that are essentially cultural idioms; they’ve got regionally, culturally, or ethnically specific meanings that might be VERY DIFFERENT than what you’re used to.
“Reproduction and mere survival have never been good enough for humankind. We torture one another, we torture ourselves, we torture the universe with our questioning, our endless strife, the tedious struggle against death. Even a simple hike up Whitney, even the mild walk and scramble to the apex of Sierra Blanco in Colorado, involves that element of risk and effort which compensates for the usual banality of our lives. We love the taste of freedom. We enjoy the taste of freedom. We take pleasure in the consummation of mental, spiritual, and physical effort; it is the achievement of the summit that brings the three together, stamps them with the harmony and unity of a point. Of a meaning. Trite solution to our problem, but there is no better: Men and women climb mountains — whether in the Rockies or the Himalayas — for the same reason that they blast off in rockets to the moon, launch poems and prayers at the stars, send symphonies of thought, music, mathematics and fiction into the highest and deepest reaches of the human soul. Because…it’s something to do. Because, there’s nothing better to do. Because of all our terrors, none is more terrible than boredom, the nothingness of a static existence, the infantile paralysis of Saturday night in Page, Arizona. Anything, anything — death in a drunk tank! — rather than that.”
–Edward Abbey, The Journey Home (1977)
@Backpack Foodie & Kim:...
