Most online activity amongst traveling youth is restricted to the US or Europe. It is not common to find vagabonding adventurers 1) who are Indian, 2) in India, 3) Indians in India. So when I found a really cool initiative born in India that involves traveling and making a difference, I was excited and had to share it.

The first thing you see in their promotional video is Che Guevara’s famous quote: “Let the world change you, and then you can change the world.” This road-trip across India for change seems to have been born from this idea.

Put together by a small group of Bits Pilani students based in India, under the banner of YoFa (short for Youth Factor), a program called “Grassroutes” has been launched. Under this program, YoFa is looking for 6 teams of 4-6 people (each) to travel for 10-days in India. On their travels, they are expected to try and understand the local problems in the area, find the grassroot level change-makers, and bring back their stories as inspiration that will spread awareness and help change. Best said on their blog: “We believe that a dose of inspiration combined with the energy of the youth can actually make a few dents in the universe. Grassroutes is just an effort to bring the two together.”

The route is pre-defined and team applications are now open. Unfortunately you have to apply in a team, and have to be under 25. Although India based, it does not say that you need to be a resident in India to apply. But I imagine if you are not, your commitment to their cause will have to be more than evident.

Applications have to be submitted by November 15, results will be announced by November 25. The trip will take place in December (2008). All trip expenses will be covered. You will be expected to take photos and video on the trip, which later, a production team will help you put together to get a message out.

For full details, check out their Q&A section here.

Living here in Madrid, I often feel left out when it comes to cool traveler/travel-writing events. If you want to be upclose-and-personal with those heavily in action in the travel industry, New York seems like the place to be.

So those of you living in NYC, interested in travel as well as travel-writing, here’s an event you might want to rock up to:
What: David Farley’s next Restless Legs reading session.
Restless Legs has teamed up with WorldHum for a literary travel evening where founding editors Jim Benning and Michael Yessis, along with WorldHum contributors Terry Ward and Eva Holland, will be around reading some of their work and for talks on travel.

When: Wednesday, October 15 at 7pm.

Where: Lolita Bar

Good opportunity to listen to some good travel stories and network with some of the best in the industry.

You can often land up wasting a lot of time in airports during layovers. Because I, as an Indian, need a visa to go practically anywhere (except Jamaica!), I get frustrated by the visa process and try my best not to have layovers where, if I don’t have a visa, I have to vegetate at the airport.

However, I have hosted many friends flying through Dubai and Madrid, with layovers for a day or two, and deciding the “best” things to do with them when they are visiting for such a short time, is definitley challenging.

Conde Nast Traveler held a contest over summer where readers wrote in to suggest cool layover activities in various cities. They received approximately 200 comments from which 6 winners were selected. Now, Conde Nast Traveler writer Michael Kinsley is on a round-the-world trip doing the activities suggested by those 6.

As written in The Perrin Post, his itinerary is: “Seattle-Los Angeles-Auckland-Singapore-Dubai-Zurich-Amsterdam-London-Reykjavik-Copenhagen-Seattle. In L.A. he’ll go to the beach, in Auckland he’ll take a segway tour of the city, in Dubai he’ll hit the Mall of the Emirates for shopping and skiing, in Amsterdam he’ll go to the Red Light District to smoke a joint, at Heathrow he’ll dine at The Fat Duck in nearby Bray, and in Reykjavik he’ll soak in the Blue Lagoon.”

He will be blogging the entire trip, which you can read here.

This trip has unique-value, no? What do you do on layovers?

Words “The Frugal Traveler” and “Matt Gross” have become synonyms. He is an adventurous traveler and great writer, currently blogging at the NY Times as he travels on a budget around Europe. You can read all his posts here. Rolf interviewed Matt at Rolf Potts.com, here are some highlights:

• “…my first real big solo trip was when I moved to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, in 1996, right after graduating from college. Didn’t really know anyone there or what I was doing, but it was the best experience of my life, and taught me that, yes, I can actually do adventurous things like that.”

• “My first job in journalism was writing film reviews and copyediting for the Viet Nam News, the state-owned, English-language daily paper in Vietnam. One of the best jobs I ever had: come in at 2pm, edit for a few hours, eat some fresh yogurt from the company fridge, and at the end of the day raise a glass of snake wine with my boss.”

• “It’s easy to have a great time while traveling, but when you know you’re going to write a story, you want it to run along a certain theme, to have experiences that mesh into a unified, easy-to-write whole. At the same time, you want to allow for spontaneity the essence of travel.”

• “There’s no way I could do this job if I weren’t married to a woman with a good, stable job. I’d be homeless. Seriously.”

• “Go into travel before you go into travel writing. You should know how to cross a land border, book plane tickets in a language you don’t speak and befriend the old lady who squints evilly from the second-story window at everyone who passes by. In other words, if you’re just after paid vacations, then you’re going to have a tough time. But if you’re willing to put aside your ego, embrace the unknown and endure crushing poverty, then you might have a shot.”

You can read the full interview here.

Also, incase you missed this, Matt wrote a great piece “surveying his global network of mistresses” — a very truthful, entertaining, and humorous travel article that appeared on Nerve.com. Worth a read, check it out here.

Today I stumbled upon Monty Python comedian Michael Palin’s travel website, and other than the sheer amount of travel (and travel shows) he has done, I was extremely impressed with its content as it dissects every one of his long trips around the world.

He did 7 big journeys (80 Days, Pole to Pole, Full Circle, Hemingway, Sahara, Himalaya, New Europe) and you can read the entire book of each journey as documented day by day, for free on his website.

You can also find his trip routes mapped out, details of where he stayed, stories about the people he met, videos, and tonnes of photos. Not only that, you can search his travels basis criteria such as where he ate, what he ate, what he drank, what sights he saw, what sports he played, and what activity he engaged in.

All in all a very interesting and inspiring website. It’s different and worth going to because it’s not full of celebrity fluff but full of ideas and details should you want to do something similar. Check it out here.

Last week I wrote about how it’s difficult to find the right person to travel with. I’m not a fan of online matchmaking websites, but for those people who need a travel-partner, both Buddies4Travel.com and ThelmaandLouise.com seem like a plausible option. However, they’re only for women.

Unfortunatley, Buddies4Travel works like a “find-the-love-of-your-life” website, but is clearly geared towards helping you find the right person to travel with. Two of their main audiences are girls planning a gap year, single mums and 50+ ladies wanting to travel. For a fee of £20, you can register and then for another £25 and they will find you one match. Pay more, and they will give you 2, 3 or 4 matches. Should you have second thoughts about the “match” you have selected, for £15, you can reselect. Not cheap, but perhaps worth it.

Thelma and Louise.com on the other hand has free registration and a much wider range of services such as: search for your travel-buddy basis location, interests, type of holiday, age, marital status, etc. They also have travel offers, travel stories/features, recommended travel products, packing ideas, etc.

Other than the fee, the main difference between the two is that Buddies4Travel finds you a partner, whereas on Thelma and Louise, you have to find your own partner. Both are worth a look at if you are a women not wanting to travel alone. (These sites are not necessarily lesbian match making sites.)

If you are not keen on going through such sites, there are a handful of good travel-networks you can connect to and try finding a travel buddy.

For those who have a desk job, the compulsion of being in a cubicle 9-5 often seems like an unproductive annoyance. You often wonder how you could be more productive working a few hours in the morning from home, and then having the rest of the day to do what you like.

If you can work from home, you can also do the same from Thailand or the Caribbean, but for now, home would be a great start!

Further to the 4-Hour Work Week analogy of freeing up your time to travel without quitting your job, here’s a great article in the Traveler’s Notebook that gives you some advice on how to convince your boss that you are capable working efficiently from home.

Books and articles as mentioned in this post just reinforce that it is totally possible to live your life the way you want to, you’ve just got to want it bad enough.

One of the questions that comes to every travelers mind pre-trip, is “how can I avoid losing money while exchanging currency”?

I’ve always asked myself this question, and the only answer has been to find a place with the best exchange rates and go with the best rate offered. Not a great solution, and often a tiring one.

The Guardian has tied up with The Money Saving Expert to give us eye-opening tips on how to make your foreign currency go further, and apparently the key is in the choice of debit and/or credit card you use. The article also gives you advice on how to make the most of your cash, travelers cheques, and currency cards. A useful read, check it out here.

I’ve been enjoying Planet Eye’s new Global Nomad blog that is written by Brendan Powell as he travels around the world with his girlfriend. He began writing in January 2008 from Costa Rica and has worked his way through Belize, Brazil, Uruguay and now he is in Argentina. His writing is revealing and fun, and he’s good with photos. A must check out!

Another column that hasn’t started yet, but is one of those you read about and just know you’d want to follow — that of Robin Esrock at Brave New Traveler. The lucky bugger managed to snag a TV show deal of him traveling across 26 countries over the next 12-months. He will be blogging from the road about travel, life on the road, and being behind the camera. More details on him and the show at Modern Gonzo.

This July at the RolfPotts.com Travel Writers page I interview novelist Gary Shteyngart, whose essays for Travel + Leisure were selected for the 2006 and 2007 editions of The Best American Travel Writing. Here are some of the highlights from our Q&A:

• “I’m primarily a novelist. That’s my main bread and butter. But the travel writing is very important to me, because it gets me out of the house. I still believe that writers need to see the world to understand their own place in it.”
• “I’ve been writing since I was a kid in Russia. My grandma paid me in little pieces of cheese for every page I wrote. That’s how you create a writer. By paying him or her with something edible.”
• “I like some of Paul Theroux’s writing and I find that fiction is often the most helpful. Aleksander Hemon, for example, who writes a lot about Yugoslavia is brilliant. Oh, and George Saunders’ piece about Dubai is the most hilarious thing ever written.”
• “Life is short and our planet is finite. What can be more important than seeing the totality of the human condition in this awful and wonderful world of ours?”

Full Gary Shteyngart interview online here.