As I’ve made final preparations for my backpacking trip the past few months, I’ve come to realize there was one thing I completely underestimated: The act of telling people of my plans and dealing with their reactions is much more time-consuming and emotionally exhausting than expected. Even more surprising was that this happened in different...

Planning a round-the-world trip can seem as complicated as a space shuttle launch. There a million things to think about: plane tickets, visas, money, etc. The hard part is that everything seems important. Where to begin? Alex MacCaw wrote a helpful, in-depth post titled, " How to travel around the world for a year ."...

Rickshawallas on parade, ready to strike!! “This is the place where the bodies are burnt. Women cannot access because a few times some of them have jumped over their husbands’ pyres and died. If you see a white cloth, is a man. If you see a red sari, is a woman. I work here as...

Globe-trotting with your dog is totally possible! With appropriate paperwork, a microchip, and some forethought, taking your animal traveling can help break down cultural barriers and spark conversations. My border collie, Trinity, ushered me into far more conversations in Paris than I ever would have attempted with my meager French vocabulary. There are a few...

Seems like the ideal setup: you're about to visit a country that one of your friends has already been to. Naturally, you ask your pal for advice on where to go and what to do. What could go wrong? Plenty, as it turns out. The Tnooz tech travel blog had an article called Why the...

Slow and steady wins the race, but sometimes it's the hare that gets the best travel deals. The great productivity website Lifehacker had this article on the virtues of being late: How to plan an awesome, last-minute vacation on the cheap . The article covers everything from choosing the destination to booking a flight to...

Many Vagablogging readers are familiar with Matt Kepnes, or Nomadic Matt . Kepnes’s website is packed full of information on travel deals, travel tips, travel guides, and loads of interesting travel tales suited to any genre. Now Kepnes has taken the next step and has published his own Ebook. Kepnes’s book is a smooth read....

Nigel Marsh, the author of Fat, Forty and Fired , gave a great talk at the TED Sydney conference that addresses something many long term travelers deal with -- how do you balance your life and the need to work and earn money? As Marsh notes, "I found it quite easy to balance work and...

More and more of our data is digital. It's valuable, and we should be as careful with our information as we are with our wallet or purse. Since these possessions are virtual, however, it can be easy to neglect them. The New York Times had a great piece titled Threats to Traveling Data . While...

There's a lot of you-go-grrl-empowerment articles on the web and in travel magazines about women traveling on their own, toting their own backpacks and having exciting adventures. The general themes of these articles usually has to do with being brave and feeling safe walking the streets at night, making friends with locals, avoiding singles supplements...

SIM cards and top-up cards. Photo: Karl Baron /Flickr Creative Commons The situation: you're out and about in an exotic land. You meet some cool travelers, open-minded and fun. You all fervently promise to meet up later that night. What happens? You show up on time, but your new friends are nowhere to be found....

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,...

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...

This month marks the release of Ayun Halliday 's Zinester's Guide to NYC , a travelers' guidebook to the quirkier corners of New York City. As I note in my back-cover blurb of the book, it's the travel equivalent of an old-school mix-tape -- useful and full of surprises for vagabonders. The book also boasts...

It's a traveler's biggest letdown -- scaffolding covering the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, giant construction cranes obscuring the skyline of the Pyramids or children in remote villages wearing Brittany Spears t-shirts. We've all had moments like that, moments where we felt somehow cheated, like our experience was not "authentic" enough. But in fact, those...

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 ....

Is the day and age when anyone with the means can set out into the world and explore to their heart's content coming to end? Perhaps the more better question is: does cheap long term travel have a future? Wade Shepard, the author of Vagabond Journey , who has been perpetually traveling for over 11...

In researching how to prepare for an around the world trip, one will surely find any number of useful checklists that mention everything from booking air travel and lodging to what to pack, registering your trip with the state department, and setting up a Skype account so that you can call home cheaply. Two of...

For those of us who don't have a permanent physical disability, it can sometimes be difficult to imagine what the world is like for those who do. Buildings that are pretty easy to navigate with two working legs become impossible in a wheelchair: my university, which prides itself on being wheelchair friendly and accessible, once...

Sometimes as a solo traveler you need a bit more amusement; you don't have someone to tell you offensive jokes or about their first sexual experience, and you're tired of staring out the train windows at scenery or communicating by hand gestures and large grins at local small children. So then it's fun to set...