One of the most vivid shocks for first-time travelers in the developing world is witnessing the human capacity to load vehicles with far more people or supplies than one would think is logistically possible. I still recall the amazement I felt when I first witnessed a family of five perched atop a single 100cc motorcycle in Vietnam, a truck piled with three stories of sugarcane in Peru, or a minivan stuffed with nearly two-dozen people in Egypt.

Recently, via BoingBoing, I discovered a website that pays homage to the remarkable human ability to creatively overload vehicles. Located at Ezprezzo.com, the Overloaded page can be found here.

Above: Korean condom packaging.

The above snapshot of a box of Korean condoms is a relic of Newley Purnell’s recent trip to Seoul. Newley’s brief commentary says it all:

There is so much to analyze on this box of Korean condoms that I don’t even know where to start. The copy on the box reads:

“Keep it real. Keep on faith. Keep on going. Piece! Stay real! WE are all brack people.”

Also, what’s up with the panther and the cat-woman?

More outtakes from Newley’s Korea trip here.

Travelers often obsess about change and modernization in the communities they visit (the phrase “it was so much better here 20 years ago” is a common refrain, even among travelers who weren’t around 20 years ago), but what they often overlook is the fact that their hosts have a stake in that change. Indeed, modernization brings benefits as well as problems, and the people who live in these host communities are naturally more qualified to comment on these changes than the travelers.

Recently, while visiting the island of Grenada, I bought a Caribbean children’s social studies book for my nephew Cedar. The book, which was about communities, touched on modernization in many forms — including how it has changed the way people travel. One picture in the book showed two different version of the same street — one in a village setting, with small shops and livestock, and another in a town setting, with cars, stoplights, and a Kentucky Fried Chicken. Students are encouraged to list the differences they see (one detail shows that the village street name is “Plantation Drive”; in the later picture, the name has been changed to “Mandela Street”) — not to judge one or the other as better, but to create discussion about identifying changes and how they affect the community.

I found this book an interesting insight into a how a place views itself, and I’ll have to keep an eye out for locally produced school materials as I travel in the future…

Here are a couple of bizarre signs I’ve discovered from online travelers in recent weeks.

First, from Newley and Mechum Purnell, here’s a Korean sign that makes me homesick for “Konglish”:

And, from BoingBoing, here’s a Chinese sign that makes me wonder just how “nutrious” it is to order that beef penis soup:

For a whole bunch of this kinda thing, check out Doug Lansky’s Signspotting book, recently published by Lonely Planet.

[Um, could you remind us again what we've been warned about?]

Rolf Gibbs’ Travels in India blog recently had an amusing entry called “Great Signs of India“, which included the image above. Another great shot (of a “joy-riding” camel) can be found by clicking here. Rolf’s full entry can be found here.

I last blogged about Rolf Gibbs when his farewell party in LA resulted in an unprecedented gathering of three Rolfs at once.

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I received the above 2-rupee bill in a Shimla, India coffeeshop a few years ago. In all my years of travel it was the most beat-up piece of legal currency that anyone ever tried to pass off on me with a straight face. I’ve turned down torn and tattered bills before (and I advise travelers to do the same, since these bills can be hard to pass on), but I was so impressed with the sad condition of this one that I had to keep it as a souvenir.

If anyone has ever been passed a worse bill than this in the course of their travels, I’d love to see it!

For more ruminations on the idiosyncrasies of money and travel, check out this blog essay from last year.

[Above: An empty liquor bag from Rekong Peo, India.]

Today I’m proud to start a new category on this blog, entitled Relics from the road. I was inspired to create this category when I was going through my old boxes of travel souvenirs, and I found a booze bag (pictured above) left over from a journey to India a few years ago. The concept behind it is simple: Instead of putting liquor into bottles, distillers in some parts of India put it into a small plastic bag that resembles a Ziplock (but without the actual zip-lock; to drink you just cut off a corner, tilt your head back, and enjoy).

I first encountered this curious form of alcoholic packaging in the Himalayan outpost town of Rekong Peo, where my travel pal Becca and I bought a couple bags to mix with Coke to help keep us warm during a particularly cold March back in 2001. I later saw similar liquor packaging in other parts of India. Whether Chivas Regal and Johnny Walker choose to walk down this same merchandising path remains to be seen.

In the interest of novelty, I will continue to post such curious items on this blog. If you run across anything similarly strange in your travels — weird food or drink, bizarre signs, unusual clothing, strange newspaper items — please photograph/scan them and send them along to me by email.