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Here’s a story: a university student posts up funny videos of her random observations on life. She builds up a huge audience with a million subscribers on YouTube. Now she’s a popular vlogger. She’s about to graduate and unsure of what to do next. So she calls up Lonely Planet and asks if they would sponsor her on an around-the-world trip. The deal is that she keeps making videos along the way.
Sound too good to be true? It happened for Australian vlogger Natalie Tran. Her YouTube channel, “communitychannel,” has clocked over 400 million views. That’s serious exposure any business would be interested in tapping into.
You can watch her adventures on a dedicated Lonely Planet page: Natalie Tran’s travel videos.
Are you a vlogger? What equipment do you use? Have you shot travel videos and shared them on YouTube? Please share your experiences in the comments.
Age: 30
Hometown: Campton, New Hampshire, USA
Quote: “Every day is completely new & different. You have absolutely no idea what will happen to you. I love that feeling.”
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A top goal if you’re living abroad as an expat is to pick up a new foreign language. Benny Lewis from Fluentin3Months.com came on an interview with the Expert Enough podcast show. He explained his rapid-fire approach to learning new languages.
Lewis makes the point that you should avoid being too “academic” when studying. He stresses the importance of getting out on the street, conversing with locals, and finding out how natives really use the language. This makes a lot of sense, as foreign language textbooks can sometimes be outdated by the time they’re published.
Do you think dating a local would boost your language skills? I’ve heard a lot of people arguing for and against. For example, I’ve met lots of newly-arrived expats in Taiwan who say things like, “I’ll just learn Chinese off my girlfriend.” A year later, the girl’s English is a lot better, while his Mandarin is still nonexistent. More than any magic method, your attitude will be the most decisive factor. If you really apply yourself, I think you can’t go too far wrong.
What was interesting was that a lot of the barriers (excuses?) that people make for not studying new tongues can apply to other new year’s resolutions that fall by the wayside. Things like being too busy, not having enough money, etc. Lewis demolishes these arguments and challenges viewers to really unleash their true potential.
I couldn’t help but noticing that he hasn’t picked up any Asian languages yet. Would Mandarin Chinese or Japanese be similarly compatible with his methods?
What do you think? Have you become fluent in a foreign language? How long did it take? What techniques did you use? Please share your experiences in the comments.
“There is nothing exclusive about tourism. Quite the contrary: it is primarily inclusive. It is an industry determined to embrace you. It wants you to check in to the right hotels; it wants you to spend as much as you can on fatuous souvenirs; it wants you to do Machu Picchu or the Taj Mahal; it wants you to have the Rainforest experience or the Mysterious East experience or the Rose Red City Half as Old as Time experience and it doesn’t terribly mind if you also have the fleeced-by-muggers-on-Copacabana-Beach experience. And when your fifteen days are up it wants you to bugger off, taking with you no local currency and maybe the odd disgusting parasite or two.”
–James Hamilton-Paterson, “The End of Travel,” Granta #94 (2006)
“When a person says, in a foreign place, “I feel right at home here,” he is making a statement about the nature of travel, not in the texture of the place he’s in. …I don’t belittle this sort of travel, which I regard as Traveling As A Version Of Being At Home; but it is wrong to mistake it as the sort of travel that allows a person to make discoveries. Many people travel in order to feel at home, or to have an idealized experience of home: Spain is Home-plus-Sunshine; India is Home-plus-Servants; Africa is Home-plus-Elephants-and-Lions; Ecuador is Home-plus-Volcanoes. It is not possible for people to travel in large numbers and have it any other way. In order to process and package travelers in great numbers, a system has to be arrived at. This system, in an orderly way, defeats the traditional methods of travel and has made true travel almost obsolete. In order for large numbers of Americans to visit Bangkok, Bangkok must become somewhat like America. The change in China, since the arrival of foreign travelers, has been enormous; and the result has been some very un-Chinese-looking hotels, food, buses, and so forth. It seemed to me in China that these holiday-makers would, in the end, bring about a different sort of cultural revolution.”
–Paul Theroux, Sunrise with Seamonsters
Every vagabonder travels for different reasons. Some like to visit the most famous museums the world has to offer. Some want to hike the tallest mountains and deepest canyons. Others hope to experience cultures completely different than their own. Then there are the foodies hoping to taste that next bite of Heaven, the gap-year students looking to party and have a good time, and the quarter-life crisis travelers hitting the open road instead of settling down.
There are countless different types of travelers out there. Even though everyone has different priorities when it comes to travel, one thing usually remains constant for any vagabonder. We are all part of a unique community. Anyone who puts a priority on indie travel can easily reach out – through blogs, forums, facebook, and twitter – and find an entire community of like-minded people looking to share, help, and simply talk about what we love – traveling.
This feeling of camaraderie is one of the biggest reasons I sought out a job in the field of travel. I love the people I meet on the road. I love interacting with bloggers. I love seeing what’s going on with my travel friends around the world on Facebook and Twitter. I was fortunate enough to jump on board with BootsnAll, where one of our core values as a company to is make meaningful connections, which is what I think travel is all about. Sure the sites and the food and the beautiful scenery are all great, but the connections I have made because of travel are what I love most about it.
And now I get to do it on a daily basis as my job. When researching a recent article about round the world travel budgets, I was ecstatic that so many people came forward to help. Complete strangers were willing to share personal, financial details with me and the rest of the interwebs. When the story published, more people came forward to offer their opinion in the comments. And even though the comments were conflicting, having a nice, healthy debate and hearing other’s perspectives is part of what travel is all about. We know that we all travel differently, and experiences like these help drive that point home. The great thing is that we all get the opportunity to share our experiences with one another. I plan on writing a follow-up to the budget article, so if you have traveled long-term before and want to help out, leave a comment below, and I will get in touch.
Another feature we are rolling out soon are traveler profiles. The purpose behind this project is to feature other travelers – who they are, where they are from, what type of trips they have taken and would like to take. The goal is to build a database of travelers who are hoping to talk, share, and help each other out. Most travel lovers can’t get enough travel talk, and this is just another way to connect with each other, so if any of you Vagabonding readers want to join in, just leave a comment below.
The travel community is mostly comprised of open-minded, outgoing individuals who have a zest for life that may be a bit different than others. Many of us have different life priorities, and hooking up with others who have similar interests and goals is always a positive.
What is your favorite part of the travel community? Do you make an effort to join in? Comment below to share your thoughts.
Making friends. Photo: Slava / Flickr
Seems like the ideal setup: you’re about to visit a country that one of your friends has already been to. Naturally, you ask your pal for advice on where to go and what to do. What could go wrong?
Plenty, as it turns out. The Tnooz tech travel blog had an article called Why the social travel model will never truly work. When you entrust your trip to someone who has no other qualifications besides your relationship, things can go south very quickly.
In the article, a guy named Jack describes a recent vacation to Hawaii with a buddy of his. Both were single guys. They followed the advice of a female friend who’d gone the year before. While the pair enjoyed the excitement and fun of Waikiki, they were thoroughly bored by another section of their trip. The reason: two single guys might not necessarily want the same travel experience as a married woman. This passage summed up the problem:
Your friends, no matter how well meaning, are not travel experts. They’re not going to ask you the right questions or make the right assumptions about what turns you on.
They’re just going to tell you what they like, which may be miles from anything you’d enjoy.
I can relate a similar anecdote. When I was at a hostel in Malaysia, I became friends with a group of English backpackers. In a lucky coincidence, they had just come in from Yogyakarta, Indonesia. That was to be my next destination. I asked for their recommendation of a good, inexpensive hotel. Not only did they name the hotel, they even gave me the business card! I thought I was set.
Turns out I was wrong. The hotel was a rathole, with a weak shower and a dirty bed. My mistake was not considering the travel style of the person giving me the advice. When I said “good” hotel, I should have been more specific by what I meant. As in clean and comfortable, not just cheap.
I do like staying in hostels and cheap places, but I’m willing to spend a little more for the nicest one I can find. Those English backpackers were hard-core budget types. Neither is better than the other, but things can go wrong when you follow advice from someone with a drastically different travel style than yours. At the other extreme, an investment banker might have recommended a four-star hotel beyond my price range.
Here’s a checklist of the right friend to give you destination advice:
1) They’ve actually been to the place.
2) They’re someone you know and trust.
3) They have a similar style of travel–as in budget, trip length, interests, etc.
It’s factor number 3 that I forget sometimes, especially if it’s a good friend that I like a lot. How do you solicit travel tips from friends? Please share your experiences in the comments.
“For many habitual travelers, hating America is a given. Not just America at home, but the detritus of America abroad. The States are the font of all ignorant interference, all destabilizing of delicate cultures and economies. America is the cause and the symptom of what’s going wrong. Of course the people on whose behalf travel writers feel this righteous ire adore America. They may not care for its alternately tentative and strident foreign policy, its splashing about in the rest of the world like an excited toddler — but they love its baggage. Its films, its music, its clothes, the cigarettes and soft drinks: its sheer profligacy. If you’re poor, the most joyous thing in the world is waste. Well, it would be, wouldn’t it? When it comes to America, I’m with the poor. I just love it.”
–A.A. Gill, AA Gill is Away
Age:
Hometown: Asheville, NC
Quote: “I enjoy trying to ‘get by’ in new countries, to navigate everyday tasks without local knowledge or local language.”
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“When some tourists accuse those other tourists of not being good enough tourists, not open enough, not interested in adventures and new challenges, they fall back on the normative ideal developed from the days of the Grand Tour and onwards. They forget that behind the tourist label there are very different kinds of explorers. Some are out to discover exotic worlds or meet new people, for others a vacation is a chance to explore the body, their senses, or sexuality or just develop the difficult art of doing nothing.”
–Orvar Lofgren, On Holiday: A History of Vacationing
