Sampling Thai street food.

I love those little moments of living abroad where you feel like you’ve gotten deeper into the local scene: finding that bus that goes directly to your favorite restaurant, discovering a street stall with great food, visiting a local friend’s home to meet their family. Those are the moments I treasure the most.

Matador Abroad has a fun article titled Escaping the Expat Trap: How to Live Like a Local When You’re Abroad.

One of the best ways I’ve found to do this is to work for a local company and be surrounded by native co-workers all the time.  You end up having to face the same pressures, hear them speak the language a lot and go out to lunch with them at their favorite cheap joints. That’s as local as it gets.

You also get to experience some of the more negative aspects of their culture that are hidden from tourists. Work cultures in other countries are usually very different from those in the West.  Foreign countries can have wildly differing views on time, for example.  There are countries where being an hour late is normal, while being 5 minutes late would be a grave offense in other places. Going to work becomes like a free class in local culture.

In a recent article in Brave New Traveler entitled “When Does Budget Travel Become Exploitation?”, writer Ernesto Machado raises some interesting points about what happens when the “budget” mindset goes too far. In an example he gave, a foreign couple argued with the owner of a hostel, since they wanted to pay $10 less than the total.

The travelers lost the argument and almost missed their bus out of town. They left cursing at the owner, as if a great fortune (and, perhaps most importantly, a sense of victory) had escaped their grasp.

Still, it’s hard for me to imagine that those five dollars would have had a catastrophic effect on their long-term finances. On the other hand, multiply that amount times many travelers, and the effect on the local economy is huge.

Source: “When Does Budget Travel Become Exploitation” by Ernesto Machado, Brave New Traveler

The article also tackled other issues including hitchhiking and working in your destination. The latter poses a problem to the local economy, Machado writes, because it introduces unnecessary competition between local workers and foreign visitors. Also, some countries have strict rules when it comes to working without the proper permits – there’s a risk that you’ll be deported.

Personally, I see myself as a frugal, budget-conscious traveler. I stick to low cost accommodations so that I can stay longer, and I take advantage of free transportation if it’s available. Nevertheless, I don’t see my behavior as exploitative. I look for bargains whenever I can, but I respect the set prices unless it’s in a culture and area where it’s appropriate, and even expected, to haggle.

Do you think it’s possible that budget travel can become exploitative? Please share your ideas and experiences with other Vagablogging readers via the comments.

Lonely Planet is currently polling readers about their favorite travel blogs and websites. The nominations closed out last week and voting has already started — there are a variety of categories and anyone can vote.

Curiously, most of the nominees are not sites that I had heard of before. If you’ve been living under a rock like me, there a quite a few sites in the list that are worth checking out.

One in particular caught my eye. Spotted by Locals (which is nominated under Best Group Authored Blog) offers some nice insider tips from locals living in popular destinations.

The idea is that writers with a passion for their hometowns offer various insights for visitors — restaurant tips, street celebrations, bars, clubs and other info about out-of-the-way places that the guidebooks miss.

Much of what’s on Spotted by Locals could probably be discovered by combing through dozens of separate blogs, but Spotted By Locals offers a nice, all-in-one-spot overview.

The only downside is that the site is limited to large European destinations. Of course in some cases that might be the very sort of place where local tips are even more valuable since they can help you avoid the tourist hordes.

Naturally if you’re aware of similar sites for other areas of the world share them with your fellow vagablogging readers in the comments. (And if you feel like helping Spotted by Locals, you can contact them and see if they’ll add you to the list of authors.)

What a great way to put social media to the test.

In just a few days, Paul Smith will travel the world with little more than a computer, a Twitter account, and the goodwill of 5,000 people. All he knows is that he’ll leave his home in Newcastle upon Tyne (UK) on March 1st, find out who has offered him travel and accommodation, and see where that takes him over the next 30 days. As a modern-day hitchhiker of sorts, he goes by the name “Twitchhiker.”

Maybe you can relate as someone who has needed hospitality before? Why not follow him on Twitter and see if you can help him out? As he puts it “this will be the start of a beautiful relationship because frankly I can’t do this without you.” Twitter is all about building community, and it’s fascinating to see him build his—now more than 4,300 people strong.

So, what will his trip look like? Even he doesn’t know (and that’s half the fun, actually), but his five (self-imposed) rules are:
1. He can only accept offers of travel and accommodation on Twitter, from users who are following @twitchhiker
2. He can’t make any plans further than three days in advance

3. He can only spend money on food, drink and anything that might fit in his suitcase

4. If there’s more than one offer on the table, he gets to choose which he takes. If there’s only one, he has to take it within 48 hours.
5. If he’s unable to find a way to move on from a location within 48 hours, the challenge is over and he goes home.


Beyond helping him with travel, you can also support him with money—but it’s not for him, it’s for Charity:Water, a non-profit that brings clean drinking water to people in developing nations. So far, he’s raised about half of his £3,000 goal.

You can already find his posts on Twitter—counting down the days to his departure, detailing the side effects of immunization shots, and admitting to a case of the nerves. You can also find him on his own website and track his progress on Google Latitude.

I’ll definitely be curious to see where he ends up. He’s living proof that you can survive (and thrive) in the unknown of the journey.

Travel affords us a chance to see things many will only encounter in books, a chance to learn about ourselves and the world around us, but there’s another thing I’ve started to think is equally important — travel gives us a chance to be alone.

Not only are we yanked out of our familiar culture and thrust into something new, many of us do so by ourselves. Sure we meet people on the road, make friends, but for even the most outgoing travelers there are moments alone. Moments where there is nothing but us and the world.

Of course that’s rapidly becoming untrue. First television brought snatches of western culture to the rest of the world, and now the internet has percolated its way into the the farthest recesses of the globe. With tools like Facebook, Twitter and instant messaging available at every cybercafe on every corner of the world, it’s harder and harder to get away from it all.

The endgame is that very soon you won’t be able to physically get away from it all. Cell phone reception will be global, perhaps wifi as well. The internet, all your friends and all your distractions will only ever be but a mouse click away.

I’m not a Luddite, far from it. I love Twitter, I love Facebook and some of my best friends are people I met traveling and have kept in touch with via various websites. I like those connections, tenuous and frail though they may be.

But I also like to believe in the notion that I can escape them as well. Physically escape them. While I like the idea of a totally connected world and recognize its inevitability, I think there is also value in having a few dark spots on the map. Even if I’m not there, I think the psychological impact of knowing such places exist is valuable.

The problem is no one wants to live in those dark spots. Wishing there was no cybercafe inside that hut in Tanzania? Maybe you do, but villagers there don’t. They want, they need it. I don’t know about you, but I’m not volunteering my block as a dark spot.

So I find myself seeking out increasingly isolated destinations — Little Corn Island, Nicaragua, villages in the remote hills of Laos and so on — wondering all the while if what I’m really trying to get away from myself, my own habits.

Writer Rob Long went so far as to book passage on a freighter just so he could isolate himself enough to finish a script he was working on.

Why is it so hard to let go of home? The culture, the friends, the web?

Neil Swidey has an interesting piece about the need to be alone and difficulty of doing so in the Boston Globe that’s worth a read.

But here’s the real point: It is dulling our very capacity to ever be alone, or alone in our thoughts. The late British pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott popularized the phrase “the capacity to be alone” in the 1950s, to describe a pivotal stage of emotional development… Yet today we’re seeing this capacity weakened, whether we’re in public places known for contemplation, like churches and libraries, or whether we’re just sitting by ourselves at home, losing the fight to resist answering our BlackBerries (just ask our new president) or checking our laptops for Facebook updates.

“We’ve gone from an American ethic that championed the lone guy on a horseback to an ethic of managing multiple data streams,” says Dalton Conley, a sociology professor at New York University and author of the new book Elsewhere, U.S.A.: How We Got From the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms, and Economic Anxiety. “It’s very hard for people to unplug and be alone — and be with the one data stream of their mind.”

It is hard, though I haven’t figured out why. I’m old enough to remember the time before the web. In fact the majority of my life happened before the web, but those days seem increasingly vague, more like something I read about in a book than something I actually experienced.

And even though I know that to truly get away takes me changing my own behaviors and habits, I can’t help scanning maps of the world looking for some sort of blank spot. There are still a few, but they’re rapidly disappearing and I’m sure how I’ll feed when the fiber optic cables finally reach the last dark point on the map. It’ll be a few years yet, but it will happen. And then what?

[Photo Credits jiazi, Flickr and René Ehrhardt, Flickr]

I don’t know about you, but I always find the most irritating thing is finding some good radio stations to listen to when I’m traveling.  If you’re in a place with a good wireless connection and you have a laptop, you can hook in to one of the numerous radio stations that offer web-listening.

My absolute, hands-down favorite is CBC Radio 3, the Canadian web-and-Sirius-satellite-radio-only station that offers indy rock to the world.  They have great artists, comprehensive music lists, and regular podcasts that you can download to your .mp3 player and take away with you.  The DJs (can you still say DJ?) are also actually funny most of the time, so you don’t have to deal with irritatingly contrived conversations.  Also, if you’re somewhere warm, you can laugh at their descriptions of Canadian winters.  Radio 3 streams from a media player embedded in their website.

A-Net streams from the sub-Antarctic, and has some great folk/rock stuff.  It downloads itself as a .m3u file, or a streaming media playlist — if you have iTunes, iTunes will play it automatically.  RealAudio works if you don’t have iTunes.  It has no commercials or advertising, which I like *a lot*, and features mostly indy artists as well.  No big labels.  plus is streams from the Antarctic.  How cool is that?

There are also websites with listings of web radio stations by country, music style, call letters, and so on.  You can check this out easily at Web-Radio Directory.

A Chicago-based reader named Ron recently emailed me with a question about a first-time journey. “I am at the beginning stages of planning my long-term travel,” he wrote. “It’s very exciting. The only problem is, there are just to many places to choose from. Can you recommend a list of places to travel for first-time vagabonders?

This is what I told him:

Congratulations on your upcoming travels! No doubt this is an exciting time, as you ponder all the amazing options the world has to offer.

You might start by thinking of places close to home. Not for your long-term journey, necessarily, but for a “warm up.” Road trip to some places near Chicago, or hit some national parks in the West or some cities in the East.

For the big journey, however, I’ll recommend a few places that will make great starting places. I’ll organize them by region:

• Europe: Europe is a natural destination for American travelers, but these days it’s pretty expensive. I’d recommend going to some other part of the world, as you’ll get more for your money.
• South America: Peru or Ecuador make good starting points. Cusco in Peru is especially interesting, as it’s close to places like Machu Picchu, and it’s a great little colonial tourist town where you can study Spanish or see sights or just mix in with other travelers before you hit further flung places. From here you can go overland to Bolivia or Chile or wherever — just remember to go slow and enjoy yourself!
• Middle East: This part of the world is cheap, and has a friendly atmosphere that belies its reputation. Start in Egypt — a tourist-friendly country that can keep you busy for months. From there you can easily go overland to Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, etc.
  Turkey, actually, is another great place to start in exploring the Middle East. Israel is an amazing place, but you might need to save it for last, since countries like Syria won’t let you enter if you have an Israeli stamp in your passport.
• Southeast Asia: Start in Thailand — a place I recommend for most anyone, since it has a good combination of inexpensiveness, friendliness, and ease of travel. It’s a great place for vagabonders to start, and after a few weeks or a month you’ll be ready to begin exploring Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, Burma, China, India, and many other cheap places nearby. If you were to choose just one starting point, I’d recommend Thailand, since it’s a great place to begin a classic Asia journey.
• Australia: This place is more expensive, but very travel friendly and of course everyone speaks English (though language hasn’t been a problem for me in other places). Can be coupled with a trip to New Zealand or the South Pacific.

Those ideas should get you started. You’ll want to follow up with some online and/or library research — but whichever place you choose, you can’t really lose, because they are all amazing places.

For some people, the research they do before a trip is part of the fun of travel. Poring over piles of guidebooks, asking question after question on message boards, whiling away the hours reading travel blogs… There’s no end to the places where you can find information, and no end to the time you can spend researching your trip.

But is there such a thing as too much travel research?

BootsnAll member Angelinneveah recently asked this very question on the BootsnAll message boards, and although she’s afraid of getting overwhelmed by information, she’s also afraid that without enough research she’ll miss something important.

I bought a general Europe guidebook, and realized that there are so many things to do in each country that I got overwhelmed. (I get overwhelmed VERY easily). So I decided to do one country at a time. That seems to be much less stressful. So my question is…is there such a thing as too much research? I know some more or less pack up and board the plane, but I guess I’m afraid of missing something.

Angelinneveah wants to know – how do you do your travel research? How do you organize the information you gather? What research tips do you have for this traveler? Chime in on the BootsnAll boards!

The sad thing about job hunting abroad is that there’s no one website where you can find jobs for anywhere in the world. Usually, you have to go to local websites run by expats to get more up-to-date job listings.  Before, you had to be in-country to hear about these websites from fellow travelers.

The Traveler’s Notebook had an article about the Top 10 Online Resources for Finding a Job in Asia.  It’s a big shortcut to the websites that expats in those countries use for job leads.  Here are a few more websites I’d like to add:

Dave’s ESL Cafe — the starting point for anyone looking to teach English abroad.

New China Career — for leads in the Middle Kingdom.

Tealit — not well-designed, but good for English-teaching jobs and apartments in Taiwan.

The New Hanoian — want to get into the scene in Hanoi, Vietnam? Check out this site.

Khmer 440 — if you’re planning to stick around Cambodia after seeing Angkor Wat.

Brook Silva-Braga, the award-winning filmmaker of A Map for Saturday fame recently completed his second documentary, One Day in Africa. This engaging film chronicles the lives of six people from throughout the continent, following each person for a day. Brook took the time to discuss his new film with Vagablogging.

What were some of the challenges you faced while filming in Africa?

I was in Africa for about five months and it was my first trip there. I had visited all the other continents (except Antarctica) while shooting A Map for Saturday so I really wanted to get to Africa.

It was a challenging place to shoot for a lot of reasons. Since most people don’t speak English–especially in West Africa–I usually had to find a translator before I could shoot. In more remote places there was no electricity so battery life was an issue. If something breaks or is lost (like a hard drive or an important cable) it can be hard or impossible to find a replacement. The screen on my laptop actually broke and getting it fixed would have meant waiting six weeks in Dar es Salaam while it was shipped to Paris so I just dealt with the broken screen.

How did you find and select the six individuals that you portray in One Day in Africa? What was filming like?

How I found people varied greatly but the goal was always to focus on “normal” people rather than seeking out “the guy with AIDS”. In Kenya I was trying to rent a car when I met a really interesting guy at the rental car place so I decided to follow him.

In contrast I spent a lot of time setting up my shoot in Niger where I ended up driving five hours into the middle of nowhere to profile a woman in a very small and remote village. But first I had to visit the regional chief to get his consent and directions to the village. Even when I got there I didn’t know whom I’d profile, I just walked around for a day and tried to find someone eager to talk.

The idea was to follow each person for just one day so it was usually best for it to be the first full day I spent with them, that way when they explained themselves to me the camera would be rolling.

What did you find most surprising about your travels in Africa and the individuals that you met?

The first major surprise was how safe it was. So much of what we hear about Africa is negative so I went there with a vague fear and after a while that seemed kind of silly.

What do you believe that Westerners can learn from Africa?

That’s a good and interesting question and one that more westerners should seriously consider, even if their answer is, ‘Not much.’ The vast majority of westerners go to Africa to teach rather than to learn and many end up doing neither.

Was it difficult to remain an “observer”?

I found it easy to remain an observer because frankly I became very skeptical of the interventions I saw westerners make throughout the continent. What permeates most of the western efforts in Africa is an attempt to make “them” more like “us” and that doesn’t seem to be working.

It was striking that pretty much every westerner I met who had spent a long time in Africa could give a cold-eyed dissection of how ineffective western programs are even as they gave massive amounts of their own energy to whatever cause they were involved in and hoped would help.

What was it like to witness the childbirth in the film?

It was my first childbirth and it was pretty intense but well worth the month of logistical hoops I jumped through to find a hospital willing to let me in.

What do you think are some of the biggest challenges that modern-day Africa faces?

Having their challenges defined by people who have spent a few weeks or months there and pretend they have answers.

What’s next for you?

I’ll start bringing One Day in Africa to film festivals in March and then begin shooting my next project this summer. I’m still figuring out exactly what it will be but I think for the first time it will have a major American component while still giving me an excuse to make a big trip to somewhere very far away.

The full festival schedule will be available at the One Day in Africa website on March 1. But for now, you can see the trailer here.