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When I’m choosing what book to take along on a trip, the destination always dictates what I’m inspired to read. The Moviegoer went with me on my first trip to New Orleans. Eduardo Galeano’s Memory of Fire trilogy has accompanied me throughout a handful of trips in Latin America. The Popul Vuh was in my bag as I visited Mayan ruins in Honduras. Somehow, reading something set in the place I’m visiting (whether fiction or non-fiction) makes the journey complete.
Joel Carillet addressed this a bit recently, with his “Reading books on the road” post. But it’s made me wonder: How much does your destination inspire what people choose as reading material? If you’re on an extended trip and picking over paperbacks in a hostel library, do you just grab what sounds interesting, or do you hone in on something that has to do with where your body is at the moment?
I’m headed back to Colombia soon, and sitting next to my suitcase is The Vintage Book of Latin American Stories. I may not have much time to read, but just having it along gets my brain in the right place.
For the last year and a half that I have been living in Asia it has been a constant expensive struggle to maintain regular use of vitamins and supplements. It is a bit difficult to find bottles of vitamins here in Korea. If they are found it is little more than a basic multi-vitamin and they come at a ridiculous price. And it isn’t just supplements that are hard to find. If you’re looking for anything from the artillery of natural living remedies, you will likely come up short for these as well.
Sure I could just forgo taking supplements, but why compromise my health and energy? There is a vast difference between my mood, health, and energy level when I do not maintain a regular regiment of certain supplements.
Someone recently pointed me in the direction of the great website iHerb.com. iHerb is an “online store, supplying a vast selection of brand name natural products”. Customers can go online and choose from countless supplements, brand names, natural beauty, and natural living products. Product details and reviews are listed right there on the website.
The entire website is available in English, Spanish, Korean, Chinese, and Japanese and the company ships world wide. The best thing about iHerb is that shipping is always a standard $10 fee. If you are planning to make large orders of $80 or more, they offer a reduced shipping deal.
If you are living abroad and having a hard time finding your typical range of vitamins or other natural living supplements, iHerb could be exactly what you’re looking for.
http://www.destination-world.net
Age: 33
Hometown: Rybnik, Poland. Now living in Sydney, Australia
Quote: “I never expected every single location to be breathtaking and exciting. This meant that I never really felt disappointed, I just liked some places more than others.”
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Ba Chuc, Vietnam
Ba Chuc, a Vietnamese community in the Mekong Delta, sits just across the border from Cambodia. In April 1978, Khmer Rouge soldiers entered the village from Cambodia and massacred 3,157 men, women, and children—almost the entire population. Today the skulls of the victims are on display in an outdoor memorial.
Statistics, when referring to numbers of dead, fall flat in their attempts to convey the humanity of what has been lost. This is because emotions are connected to people, not numbers. Try, for example, to process this excerpt from Chris Hedges’ book War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning (2002):
Look just at the 1990s: 2 million dead in Afghanistan; 1.5 million dead in the Sudan; some 800,000 butchered in ninety days in Rwanda; a half-million dead in Angola; a quarter of a million dead in Bosnia; 200,000 dead in Guatemala; 150,000 dead in Liberia; a quarter of a million dead in Burundi; 75,000 dead in Algeria; and untold tens of thousands lost in the border conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea,….
Travel helps make real the abstract. In Ba Chuc, I spent a good amount of time before these skulls, imagining the life that had once animated the now hollow bones. I heard the laughter, the conversations, the sneezes, the crying, and then the sudden ending of it all. The victims in this photo were almost all females in their late teens—girls in the process of becoming women—and more than a few of them died only after being horrifically raped (an adjacent room offered the most nauseating pictures of sexual violence I had ever seen). And in standing on this ground and looking into these skulls, I felt neither the sterility of statistics nor a mere twinge of sadness; I felt a palpable, riveting absence.
“Old travelers grumpily complain that travel is now dead and that the world is a suburb. They are quite wrong. Lulled by familiar resemblances between all the unimportant things, they meet the brute differences in everything of importance.”
–Jonathan Raban, quoted in the introduction to The Best Travel Writing 2010
Girl on beach reading Lonely Planet guidebook for Greece. Photo: Jay Bergesen / Flickr Creative Commons
If you like to travel and have your own blog, you may have entertained the idea of being a travel writer. Imagine getting paid to go and do the same fun stuff you’re already doing, going all over the world. The reality can be quite different, however. Lonely Planet guidebook writer Leif Pettersen wrote this brutally honest post on his Killing Batteries blog: So you want to be a Lonely Planet author – Redux.
Travel can seem so glamorous that it’s hard to imagine what a writer would complain about. Pettersen makes a strong case that in the end, travel-writing work is still work. Ever thought about the gazillion listings for all those hostels, hotels, and restaurants? Often one writer had to visit all those places on their own, in the least amount of time possible.
There is also the creative challenge about writing about the same famous landmarks in an original way. What more can be written about Angkor Wat or Machu Picchu?
What Pettersen finds maddening is that many travelers think they can do that job better than a pro can. Here’s a quote:
Nearly every research trip I take involves an encounter with a smug backpacker, sometimes holding a beer at noon, who’s under the impression that they’re doing exactly what I’m doing, except I’m getting paid.
Guidebook work is done as freelance contract work, which means no benefits and no steady salary. They usually get paid one lump sum, and all their expenses come out of that. If you think that some guidebooks can feel hastily-written and rushed, it’s probably because the writer was racing to finish the job and preserve as much of his budget as possible.
For a broader overview, here’s a New York Times article that appeared in 2006: A job with travel but no vacation. There was a sobering quote near the end: “Nobody is going to feel sorry for you getting six weeks of free travel in Europe.”
Despite the complaints, travel writing is a job with one huge benefit: getting to see the world. Have you ever done paid travel writing? What was your experience like? Please share your thoughts in the comment.
Until I visited Colombia, I thought that my favorite hot chocolate was from Mexico. The dose of cinnamon (and sometimes, chile) has caused me to squirrel away a box of Ibarra or Abuelita for those moments when I crave it.
But then, in Bogotá, I found something that was even better.
Chocolate Santafereño is, at first, a cup of rich hot chocolate. But then there’s the cheese. Cubes of salty queso blanco are added to the steaming chocolate, and as you’re drinking, they melt into the perfect consistency to slurp along with the sweet treat. For those who are fans of both sweet and salty, it’s hard to go back to plain old hot chocolate.
I know, it may sound weird at first. It did to me. But cheese has a way of getting my attention, so I tried it one rainy morning in Colombia, and I was hooked. Now, I keep a supply of queso blanco in my refrigerator at home to go along with my hot chocolate.
Have you tried it? What’s your verdict?
After living and working abroad for a significant time one will have to face the annoying task of moving not only all of their belongings but also moving all of their finances. It can be a puzzle to figure out the best way to move one’s entire savings from one country to the next. Which way is ultimately the best? How can one do this without losing a depressing sum in conversion or banking fees? Is it best to wire the money directly to the home account? Some banks will write a certified check for the entire sum of the account that can be deposited into an overseas account once you make the move.
No one wants to take a gamble with their savings, or lose a large sum in the transfer and later find out there is a better, cheaper way. Knowing that I will eventually have to address this concern myself, I thought I would put it to you readers to share your experiences. How did you go about moving your finances internationally? Share your experience in the comments.
http://www.smallworldpursuits.com
Age: 30
Hometown: Nocona, Texas
Quote: “At the beginning of my trip, I was definitely much more of a planner. As my travels progressed, I started going more with the flow and less with plans. I quickly learned that too much planning = stress but not enough planning can also be challenging, I had to find balance.”
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“There’s no point in traveling to another country if all you do when you get there is sit in your hotel room and stare at the television. At the same time, I’m a fierce proponent of sampling a smidgen of TV wherever you go. I assure you the locals are watching the tube, and it’s worth it to check out what exactly is getting beamed into their living rooms each night. Treat it as a sociological study, and an intimate glimpse into a culture.”
–Seth Stevenson, Grounded: A Down to Earth Journey Around the World
