Australia’s gigantic festival season is coming up, with Big Day Out preparing to suck in thousands of youngsters willing to pay $165 for a ticket and stand pressed elbow-to-sternum in 45 degree (Celsius) heat, while paying $8 for a bottle of water.  Sounds like fun, right?

If you still think so, and you don’t want to make your own, you can go to most music festivals pretty much everywhere for free by offering … Read more »

Fleur Britten’s “On The Couch” is the first travel memoir about couchsurfing I’ve seen; this doesn’t mean there aren’t any others, naturally, but it does mean that I picked it off the library shelf with a surge of excitement.  “Ooh!” I thought to myself.  “This is gonna be good!”

I was, unfortunately, wrong.

Couchsurfing is a practice that … Read more »

We all have so many little gadgets that travel with us every day.  We have mobile phones, which may or may not have internet enabled on them.  Maybe we also have mp3 players to throw in our bags as well.  Perhaps there’s a personal organizer or diary of somekind too…if you haven’t been able to afford a gadget that has one already embedded (can anyone say “iPhone”?).  Wanna Skype your friends and family?  A webcam … Read more »

Unless you’ve been living in a place where popular media does not go (like with my mother), you might have noticed that Elizabeth Gilbert’s surprise hit memoir “Eat, Pray, Love” has been made into a movie starring Julia Roberts…and it’s getting released, on slightly different days, around this time in lots of different countries.

The book 9and presumably the film) divides Gilbert’s life-changing journey into three segments: robust Italy (the “eat” section, where Gilbert reports … Read more »

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 left a classmate with cerebral palsy stranded on the fourth floor of a building when they decided to service the … Read more »

The cheerfully indomitable Marsha’s blog, Single Occupancy, is well-written, humorous, and packed with links and resources.  She calls it her “love letter” to solo travel — and a bit of a diatribe against those double occupancy rooms and rates.

In a world where people look at women traveling alone, even for a week or two, as completely insane, it’s nice to see more and more texts — blogs, books, magazine articles — written by … Read more »

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 yourself little art projects.

The easiest one to do is a photo scavenger hunt.  Most travelers carry cameras these days, … Read more »

As you may have noticed, Rolf is currently in the midst of traveling around the world with only what he can carry in his pockets.  He’s got a toothbrush, a change of underpants, and an iPod Touch to do his blog posting from, as well as some presumably bulging cargo pants pockets.  I did see one blog post on his round-the-world-as-a-lightweight diary, pointing out that replicating the experience for women would be majorly worth a … Read more »

When I was a child, my mother thought I’d join a nudist colony; I was always taking off my little toddler dresses and running around in the backyard with nothing on.  As an adult, I’ve managed to parlay comfort with my body into an easily portable financial application: nude figure modeling.

There are two genres of nude modeling (it’s always “nude”, by the way; if you say “naked”, it’s not art): photography and life drawing.  … Read more »

Traveling alone can be a rush. You don’t have that cocoon of familiarity if you travel with friends, which can insulate you from the experience. You’re free to come and go as you please. Want to spend the whole day sightseeing?  Want to spend the whole day at a coffee shop reading a book? You can! There’s no one to argue with you.

That being said, traveling alone can be . . . lonely. Luckily, … Read more »