Cost/day: $15

What’s the strangest thing you’ve seen lately?

It’s really hard to imagine a sight much stranger than the one of dinosaur foot prints standing right next to your own feet but that’s what you get in a lot of places in Bolivia. When we visited the incredible but often overlooked Torotoro national park, we had heard that there were some old prints that you could get close to but we never expected to … Read more »

A young friend of mine is posting elated pictures from Amsterdam, and two days later, from Dubai. She’s just graduated from Berklee School of Music in Boston, no slouch accomplishment, and she’s treating herself to a couple of weeks of travel. The joy in her journey is palpable in the photos she’s posting. Of course she’s meeting people who are on a three month … Read more »

Argentina recently enacted new visa rules, according to this post on The Flight Deal. U.S. citizens must pay a “Reciprocity Fee” of $160. More importantly, this must be paid before entry. If you don’t do this, you’ll be denied entry on arrival. The reciprocity refers to how if Country A charges Country B’s citizens a visa fee, then Country B will do the same to Country … Read more »

The person you are matters more than the place to which you go. For that reason we should not make the mind a bondsman to any one place. Live in this belief: ‘I am not born for any one corner of the universe; this whole world is my country.’ If you saw this fact clearly, you would not be surprised at getting no benefit from the fresh scenes to which you roam each time through … Read more »

Vagabond – a person, usually without a permanent home, who wanders from place to place; nomad.

While vagabonders may not have a permanent home, they do still need a way to get around. Most of us vagabonders who decide to take off, whether it’s for a couple months, a year, or permanently, utilize some combination of flights, buses, trains, and any other number of ways to get from point A to point B.

If you’ve … Read more »

Vagabonding should be about slipping into the cracks, reaching low, widening our perspectives into the hosts’ societies to enlarge our own ideas of them. Great: it sounds pretty simple on a screen, but oh boy, how it is not. My own experiences of living long term in several host countries have taught me that, instead, to go deeper you have to earn trust. And this is something that does not happen out of … Read more »

Sean Keener, CEO of Boots-N-All is a friend of mine and one of the most passionate people I know when it comes to developing resources to empower and encourage independent travel. A few months ago he let me in on the Beta testing of the ace up his sleeve, and today I’m as excited as he is … Read more »

So – you’ve decided to take off for an extended tour. What now?

Most of us who have made the difficult decision to exchange what’s expected for a life on the road have visions of rainbows, gumdrops, and puppy dog tails. We may even expect grueling days, brutal weather, and everything going wrong. What we don’t expect to experience is culture shock.

Sure, if we travel internationally we expect a bit of culture shock as … Read more »