I found out about this cool service from the Journeywoman newsletter, which is also worth subscribing to for their cool tips and occasional nuggets of usefulness for the permanent traveler (although it’s geared more towards vacation travelers).

HelpX describes themselves as “an online listing of host organic farms, non-organic farms, farmstays, homestays, ranches, lodges, B&Bs, backpackers hostels and even sailing boats who invite volunteer helpers to stay with them short-term in exchange for food and accommodation.”  Basically, it’s sort of like Servas for volunteers — you sign up on the website as a volunteer or a host.  If you’re a host, you list where you are, and what you need done — say you need help in your garden, or getting your crops in.  The volunteers post profiles as well (or, with an upgrade of 20 Euros for 2 years to the Premier account, can contact hosts directly), and the hosts may choose from the lists of available volunteers who they’d like to come stay with them.  Volunteers are expected to put in a certain number of hours per week, and there is not necessarily any time limit for stays.

HelpX can be found in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and Europe, including England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, Finland, Bulgaria and many other European countries.

“Saint Augustine declared that “the world is a book, and those who have not traveled have read only one page.” Only firsthand experience can validate or challenge our intuitions, giving us confidence about risky political decisions in a complex world of instant feedback loops and unintended consequences. During travel, perception and thought merge; a contradiction can emerge as a truth to be revealed, not some exception to be disproved. Such ambiguity is the corollary of complexity, after all. Reality is famously resistant to theories that measure the world according to what it should be rather than how it really is. Instead, exploring the patterns of the second world aesthetically, honoring the value of purely sensory judgments — this exposes characteristics that are common to the entire second world; differences are revealed to be more relative than absolute.”
–Parag Khanna, The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order (2008)

Kelsey Timmerman, author of Where Am I Wearing? fame is giving away an iPod.

To enter to win, simply make up a “funny, clever, witty, insulting answer” describing what song Kelsey is dancing to in the photo pictured here. Then, go to the contest webpage, leave a comment, e-mail your friends about the contest (and CC Kelsey) by 11:59 p.m. EST on Tuesday. Complete rules (and a complete list of prizes – including autographed book copies, t-shirts, and “writerly advice”) are available on the contest webpage.

Good news for student vagabonders hoping to make that leap abroad. This Matador pulse article, 1% of American students study abroad, introduces the Senator Paul Simon Study Abroad Foundation Act.  If it gets signed into law, it could enable more students to take that first step overseas. Here’s the official website.

Some of the biggest obstacles are getting financial aid and the bureaucratic nightmare of making sure your classes taken abroad will count toward your degree back home. One shortcut is to find out if your university has a “sister school” that it cooperates with.  That could cut through a lot of the hassle.

In a previous post here at Vagablogging, I wrote about what tools you can use to self-study a language. While your choice of tools will determine the success of your program, your approach to studying can make the learning process easier and more enriching. Here are some things you should keep in mind while you’re studying on your own:

Learn everyday. You don’t necessarily have to take on a full-blown lesson each day, but by spending just a few minutes learning something new, you’ll spend less time reviewing in the future. If considerable time passes between lessons, you can’t learn as fast and whatever you learn will be easy to forget.

Acquiring a new language isn’t just word substitution. You can’t expect to just grab a foreign language dictionary and literally translate English phrases. The syntax, usage, and conjugations among languages vary greatly. There are unique rules for different classes of languages, and you need to know those rules before you can do accurate translations.

Know why you’re learning the language. In my experience, just ticking off a language from a list isn’t motivation enough. Do you want to learn Russian because you’re obsessed about Dostoevsky’s work? Are you interested in speaking Italian because your grandparents came from Umbria? Having a deep motivation can work wonders, since you’ll be inspired to go through even the toughest lessons.

Find a partner. If you can, find someone who wants to learn the same language as you do
Also, you should look for a native speaker to practice with. This shouldn’t be too hard given the web sites, chat rooms, and online communities at your disposal.

Have quantifiable goals. How do you measure your fluency? Will you take a language test? For my self-study program in Spanish, my goal was to have a 10-minute conversation with a native speaker and to translate at least 5 of Pablo Neruda’s poems. Make sure your goals are measurable so that you be certain whether you’ve achieved them or not.

Learning a new language by yourself is never an easy task. It requires constant patience and discipline. But if you keep the above tips in mind, your lessons will feel like steps towards personal fulfillment, rather than a chore you have to check off from your to-do list.

Have you ever self-studied a foreign language? What advice would you give those who are trying it for the first time?

With factories belching and spewing pollution, benzene plants exploding and contaminating rivers, J. Maarten Troost presents a vivid description of the environmental peril in modern day China in Lost on Planet China: One Man’s Attempt to Understand the World’s Most Mystifying Nation. Of course, Troost (author of The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific and Getting Stoned with Savages: A Trip Through the Islands of Fiji and Vanuatu) is known for his humorous approach to travel, so the journey through China is by no means all environmental gloom and doom.

Troost writes about the hordes of women offering “massagees”, bargaining as a laowai, reactions from fellow travelers towards his vocal Republican friend, and how he intentionally paralyzed his bowels so as to avoid the putrid horror that was the available train toilet. Exploring many different regions and cities within China (even coming perilously close to North Korea when his boat engine failed), Lost on Planet China offers constant entertainment. This book is hard to put down, which is good because it is nearly 400 pages long (according to the acknowledgments section his editor worked on trimming this massive tome while she was in the throes of labor and childbirth).

The culinary experience that is China is of course part of this tale. Troost tries diligently to avoid eating dog meat while deciphering restaurant menus to find such delicacies as “cattle penis with garlic”.

Every traveler has a stomach-churning tale of dining abroad. Share yours for a chance to receive one of the three copies of Lost on Planet China that we are giving out. Simply share a story about a unique (or terrifying) dining experience on the road in the comments section by midnight Pacific Standard Time on Sunday June 28 (please also email the story to kristenelisepope[at]hotmail.com so that we can get a mailing address from you if you are one of the winners). Three winners will be randomly chosen to receive a copy.

UPDATE: Congratulations to Silvia, Nora, and Brenda, the winners of the Lost on Planet China book giveaway!

As if the basic idea of being in a thin, metal tube 35,000 feet above the earth wasn’t enough, the airlines seem to have gone out of their way to make flying about as miserable as possible.

To add insult to injury, flying these days means your wallet suffers a slow death by paper cuts — seemingly everything in, on and around an airplane has a fee attached.

I have to get on a plane tomorrow and I was curious how much things have changed in the year or so since I last flew anywhere — do I have to buy my meals? What about a pillow or blanket? And what if I want to make a last minute change to my return flight, will that require the blood of my first born?

In trying to answer such questions I stumbled across this handy chart of various airline fees over at the USAToday (I know, I know, but this is useful, trust me). Regrettably the chart only lists domestic US carriers, but it’s a lot of info in one place (regular readers may recall a similar, though less thorough chart, over at Sidestep.com).

Turns out Frontier, Southwest and Spirit don’t even offer pillows or blankets anymore and Allegiant (never heard of it) will actually charge you $7 for a pillow and $15 for a blanket. Seriously.

Continental and Delta’s international flights are the only place you can expect a meal for free, and that fabled wifi in the skies you’ve heard so much about? That’ll set you back around $13 (except for JetBlue which, shockingly, gives it away for free).

The short story of the various fee charts is that flying has turned into a way for the airline companies to pilfer your pockets at nearly every turn.

Hopefully the USA Today will keep the chart thing up-to-date since new fees seem to appear every few days, but if not, you can always check your airline’s website.

And if anyone knows of a similar list for international airlines, let us know about it in the comments.

[photo credit, Laurel Fan, Flickr]

If you’re an artistic person and would like to participate in an art experiment long distance, consider answering Seattle gallery Ouch My Eye’s “Call for Artists”.  They’re seeking art by mail, between July 4 and July 18, 2009 — absolutely anything you send will be displayed.  What a perfect art project for the vagabonding lifestyle!  Be part of an art opening without having to carry a delicate painting across the country!  It doesn’t say on their website whether the work will be returned, however, so better perhaps to mail some conceptual art rather than the only copy of your handmade lithograph.

An LA-based reader named Jon recently emailed me with a question about access to money on the road. “I plan to vagabond around the world for an undetermined length of time,” he wrote. “I want to avoid ATM fees, charges on currency exchanges, and inflated exchange rates. Are there institutions that offer sensible banking solutions for the vagabonder? Where would I look for the cheapest ways to access my income?”

This is what I told him:

I’d go with the ATM to access local cash overseas — but check into ATM fees, since some banks (like Wells Fargo and Bank of America) charge as much as $5 per transaction, and others (like Capital One, as of this writing) charge no fee at all. Check with your own bank to see what ATM policies are. I’ve found that ATM fees vary more than exchange rates. Whatever the fee, try to avoid hitting the ATM again and again; try to estimate the cash you’ll need, and take out an accurate amount. That’s better than getting hit with a bunch of fees for small transactions.

Travelers checks, exchange kiosks, and credit card advances are all lousy ways to get money, with bad rates and high fees.

But again, call your bank and see what their policies are, given your situation. You might also want to visit bankrate.com and check out their bank comparisons on foreign transactions.

There are typically two schools of thought when it comes to taking long trips – either people save up enough money to just go and do the kind of trip they want and home when the money runs out, or people plan to work along the way to support an even longer trip than they could have afforded by savings alone. There’s not really a right or wrong answer to the question of which one each person should choose for themselves, but there are definitely major decisions you’ll need to make for either choice.

BootsnAll member Gee-Man and his girlfriend are about to set out on a 15-month journey, and the question of whether they can find easy work along the way will determine whether they’re able to leave a few months earlier than the original plan.

Has anyone experiences of picking up work in exchange for a bed in a hostel? We need work permits for US, Canada, Australasia and S.America so I guess that would just leave Europe (unless you can still work without one for a few hours here and there in the other continents??)

This will affect our decision on when to leave also as we want to set off at the end of this year if there is a strong possibility of finding some work whether in hostels or fruit picking etc which is 3 months earlier than the original planned date.

The answer to this question won’t change whether or not Gee-Man and his girlfriend go on their trip – they’re going, one way or the other. But if they can find work easily it means they can leave a few months before their target date. And when you’re planning an epic trip like this, the sooner you can get going the better it is!

So, what’s your experience with working while you’re traveling? Do you have any advice to share with Gee-Man? If you do, we’d love to have you stop by this thread on the BootsnAll message boards and share it with him.