Playing a game of "65." Photo: Bev Sykes / Flickr Creative Commons Travel teaches you many things, some pleasant, others not so pleasant. The number of friendly, helpful people far outnumber the scammers, but they do exist. The BBC Travel website featured an article titled Buyer Beware: 10 Common Travel Scams . The locations vary,...

Maaloula, Syria If passing through the Syrian town of Maaloula , particularly if you are passing by the slightly expensive restaurant some 100 meters shy of the entrance to Mar Thecla Convent , you might notice a young man with Aramaic writing tattooed on his arms. Curious, you might then walk over and ask, “Excuse...

After my first Christmas here in Australia (and my friend and fellow Vagablogger Colleen's first Christmas in Korea), I started reflecting on what makes someone a longterm traveler vs an expat: when have you stopped traveling somewhere and started living there? I know for me, what I enjoy the most about going to another place...

Backpackers at a party in Thailand. Photo: Jessica Rabbit / Flickr Creative Commons Did "The Beach" launch backpacker culture, or instead capture it in words like no other book had before? For better or worse, Alex Garland's seminal 1996 novel about young travelers finding and losing paradise in Thailand became a touchstone in the backpacker...

(on the road to) Weyto, Ethiopia It's Christmastime, which means the TV-version of Dr. Seuss's How the Grinch Stole Christmas! , published in 1957, has been in a few of our living rooms. Among other things it's a nice little travel story, showing the positive effect that sliding off our perch and encountering our neighbors...

As you may know, Vagablogging's ringleader Rolf Potts recently took a quick trip around the world traveling with no luggage whatsoever in the No Baggage Challenge . The trip took the idea of traveling light to an extreme, yes, but it was designed to demonstrate that what we carry with us isn't nearly as meaningful...

Twitter stands out. Photo: Rosaura Ochoa / Flickr Creative Commons A while back, Twitter re-designed their user interface. What escaped most attention was how they also beefed up their search capability. The social media blog Mashable.com did a brief write-up about this function: How to use Twitter's advanced search . More importantly, they produced a...

Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Tennessee/North Carolina About a year ago I was sitting in a church and during the service a friend of mine, Adam, stood up to read a passage from the Gospel of Luke, in which John the Baptist begins his work preaching and baptizing in the Jordan Valley. There is a...

Time flies, whether you're having fun or not. But just because you've gotten older, settled into a good job, and started a family doesn't mean your long-term travel days are behind you. Sure, you might have already taken a RTW trip 10+ years ago, and the idea of bunking in 10-bed dorm rooms might not...

Security officers x-ray luggage at Chitose airport in Hokkaido, Japan. Photo: Miki Yoshihito / Flickr Creative Commons In this age of increased security, sometimes airport officials will pounce on innocent items that look dangerous in an x-ray scanner. The list of restricted or banned items just gets longer and longer. Sometimes, it seems like things...

It’s easy to get caught up in current events and how they impact us, especially when those events have something to do with the money we have, or more likely, don’t have. But what happens when those events take a toll on your travel dreams? We’ve all had to put off traveling, cancel an already-planned...

A flower vending machine in Takayama, Japan. Photo: Kat Klay / Flickr Creative Commons With Black Friday upon us, shoppers are lining up in force to take advantage of discounts. What do you buy for a traveler, though? The New York Times came out with a shopping guide called, Holiday Gifts for a Globetrotter ....

Jordan Valley, Israel/Palestine It’s not everyday that you stand on the side of a highway, a car pulls over, you get in, and moments later the driver says you’re an answer to prayer. Up until this car stopped, the day had been full of disappointments. I had left Jerusalem that morning and gone to Jericho...

As we noted in this month's post about the RTW ticket deals for November , one aspect of planning for a RTW trip that people often forget about is planning for the re-entry - in other words, preparing yourself for a return to life at home after your trip is done. This month's RTW Ticket...

"You'll be entitled to take a sabbatical abroad at company expense." That would be music to the ears of any vagabonder looking for work. One of the big factors holding people back from travel is the worry about finding employment upon their return. However, it would be nice to have the security of returning to...

Dead Sea, Israel There's something to be said about sitting at 3:00 o'clock in the morning on a rocky beach 1385 feet below sea level, gazing up at the Milky Way as your mineral-slimed body smells of the Dead Sea , that famous body of water from which you've just pulled your own not-quite-so-famous body...

Obviously the most fun part of going on a RTW trip is the travel - but for many people, the planning stages hold their own appeal. Unfortunately, the vast majority of planning energy goes toward planning the trip itself, which leaves many people unprepared to handle the pressures of returning home again after the trip...

One of the thrills of travel is the chance to escape from your current life and create a new one. Sometimes, this is temporary and we return to our normal lives. Other times, you might want to make a permanent disappearance. Lifehacker had an article called How to Ditch Big Brother and Disappear Forever ....

Nowadays, it's hard to imagine travel without digital cameras, Facebook, and iPods. The New York Times was lucky to interview one of the original Frugral Travelers, John Wilcock: A budget travel pioneer on a time when $5 a day was real (frugal) money Wilcock has credentials that would make any aspiring writer mad with envy:...

Istanbul, Turkey I'm typing this post from a coffee shop in Jerusalem, and I'm resonating with an opening line of -- and I'm a little embarrassed to say this -- a soap opera I used to watch during a summer break or two in my elementary school years: "Like sands through the hourglass, so are...