It's the dream of many backpackers: to express our creativity through stories and photos on our travel blogs, and make enough money to keep traveling. Nomadic Matt is one of the more notable examples of people who have achieved this goal. In a recent post, he reveals the details: How I make money and afford...

Travel is as much an internal journey as an external one. As we move through countries and accumulate stamps in our passports, we're logging miles. However, a more subtle odometer is ticking away in our minds. Our attitudes and personalities evolve as we see more places, meet more people. Dave, a vagabonder who writes "The...

If you're considering taking a RTW trip, you could go the conventional way. Hitting the most popular destinations in the world and building your trip around seeing iconic sites around the globe is a popular strategy. While that strategy is fantastic, have you considered other options? A few recent articles on BootsnAll offered a few...

Businesspeople often tout their insane work schedules as a badge of honor, e.g. "We stayed up all night to close that deal!" So it was rare to see this blog post saying that people should travel more instead. Mark Suster is a tech entrepreneur-turned-venture capitalist. His blog, Both Sides of the Table , is one...

Today is my last post on Vagablogging. After nearly two years of being a freelance writer, I’ve gotten to a place where my plate is overfull—and I have to make room. Thanks to you all for your comments and feedback over the past 22 months. Thanks also go to Rolf, Scott and the Vagablogging contributors...

Cairo, Egypt “Spirit,” wrote the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber , “is not in the I but between I and you.” He wrote this in a 1923 essay translated into English as I and Thou . Here’s another line from the essay: “Egos appear by setting themselves apart from other egos. Persons appear by entering into...

Many of my best travel experiences have come about through recommendations from friends. The Taiwanese guy who took me to a stylish lounge bar in Taipei with the hidden entrance; the Australian expat who showed me his favorite ramen restaurant in Tokyo; and the list goes on. Thanks to the Internet , old-fashioned word-of-mouth is...

While packing for my next trip, I came across the ticket stubs from my last trip. It’s not an uncommon occurrence, but this small discovery caused all the memories from that trip to come flooding back as if it had been just yesterday—and not five weeks ago. I don’t know if the gray sky today...

It may be hard to imagine in this techno-heavy world we live in, but people once traveled without the benefit of electronic gadgetry. No mobile phones, no netbooks, no iPads - not even a calling card to use at a payphone. In some cases, people travel nowadays to escape the sort of technology that makes...

A few nights ago, I sat in the audience at the Book Passage Travel and Food Writing & Photography Conference , listening to Andrew McCarthy talk about his transition from actor to travel writer. One of his comments about travel stood out in particular: “I love that feeling of going, it makes me feel a...

Since I've written quite a bit about how electronic technology is transforming travel , I enjoyed reading " GPS and the End of the Road ," Ari N. Schulman's essay in the Spring 2011 issue of The New Atlantis . In the essay, Schulman posits that GPS devices, along with "location awareness" apps like HearPlanet...

Generally when RTW and other long-term travelers begin mapping out an itinerary for their trips, one of the first considerations is cost. Sure, it'd be great to hop from London to Paris to Rome and spend several weeks in each one, but those are incredibly expensive cities. Start crunching the numbers and you'll see that...

Pop quiz, hotshot: what are the best travel tips you can share? I'm more comfortable writing stories about other travelers. This time, I was on the other side. Jessica Spiegel, a fellow vagablogger, put me in the hot seat in Budget Traveler Interview: Marcus Sortijas . The piece was displayed on the website CheapTicketLinks ,...

Social networks have made a dramatic impact on travel. During my first backpacking trip in 2004, I relied on e-mail addresses to stay in touch with the new friends I was making. I once met a girl in Paris. Later into my trip, I was shocked to run into her at my hostel in Edinburgh....

Working as a writer abroad is like tackling two dreams at once: writing and travel. Tough to pull off, though especially if you want to earn a living. Graham Holliday, an experienced journalist, laid out his strategies for success in this Slideshare presentation: Frontline Club - solo foreign correspondent . My favorite advice was in...

One of the major questions many travelers ask as they're dreaming and planning for a RTW trip or any kind of long-term travel is, "How much money will I need?" For many, that is answered in terms of how much money the traveler needs to save before setting off on a trip, during which they...

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a slideshow is worth a novel. Nomadz.nu, a partnership of two Belgian women, created this excellent presentation: Don't be rich, live rich - one year on the road - the good and the bad . This would work well as an "orientation" film for new vagabonders...

Let's face it: most archaeology work can be quite boring, compared to the Indiana Jones fantasy. You're more likely to be dusting off pottery than exploring lost cities. However, sometimes reality can trump fiction. The New York Times had this incredible news: Beneath a Temple in Southern India, a Treasure Trove of Staggering Riches ....

As we've mentioned in the past, the RTW ticket deals we post each month here at Vagablogging are rarely literal round-the-world trips. We call them "multi-stop trips" around the office, but that's not really a common enough term for people to know what we mean immediately, so we default back to "RTW tickets" just to...

In the United States, the self-help business is a multi-billion-dollar industry. People throw down lots of cash to lose weight, gain confidence, and find happiness. But whenever I see that stuff, this thought springs to mind: "Travel solves all of those problems, and a whole lot more." Lonely Planet author Robert Reid laid out the...