Travel : The Art of Non-Conformity

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Travel

Travel and Social Privilege

Pat from the UK writes in on the growing discussion about “Why You Should Quit Your Job and Travel Around the World”. To say the least, the concept of investing in expanding your worldview as opposed to investing in a career draws a range of perspectives. I thought it was a good comment, so I'm including it here with his permission.

This is a fascinating idea but such traveling can only exist because most other people cannot do it. For example, that airplane you use to travel is built by non-traveling factory workers who earn low incomes and have families to support. It's flown by pilots, staffed by stewards who work full-time. When you land, you are staying in a hotel or hostel ran and maintained by non-traveling staff. The taxis you use, the buses you use, all staffed by non-traveling people. I can go on about restaurants, etc. If the whole world decided to live like this, it would be an unsustainable way of life.

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Travel

How to Use Frequent Flyer Miles for Low-Cost, High-Value Trips

As regular readers know, I use Frequent Flyer miles to go all over the world several times a year. I've written before about how to earn miles without flying, and how you can become your own travel ninja through mass mileage accrual. Once you earn miles, however, you need to make a plan for using them. One of the saddest facts in the Frequent Flyer world is that every year, millions of miles go to waste. Help stamp out mileage expiration! Use your miles ... but use them wisely. Here's how.

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Travel

Visit to Tiger Kingdom

Thanks to some fun travel hacking that led to a better-than-free side trip to Thailand, I took a couple days off at the end of my Belarus-to-Algeria adventure.

I've been to Thailand a dozen times, but never to Chiang Mai, the mountainous city in the north, far away from the hustle of Bangkok. The highlight of the excursion was a day trip to Tiger Kingdom, a cat reserve twenty minutes out of the city where tourists can play a fun game of “pet the tigers while the staff watches warily with sticks.”

Travel

Belarus Strikes Back

This week in the “wow, really?” department, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Belarus has provided detailed comments on my recent experience attempting to get a visa for their country. You can read the official government response here in Russian, or over here in a fun translation provided by The Google.

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Travel

Getting to Algiers

This one came down to the wire. I left PDX a week ago, not knowing where I'd be seven days later. All bets were on Algeria—I had a confirmed hotel reservation and a non-refundable plane ticket. What I didn't have, unfortunately, was a visa.

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Travel

Destination Unknown

By the time I got to the check-in counter at PDX airport this morning, I knew I'd go through with the plan. PDX-DEN-FRA to start with... but then what? I wasn't sure.

“Will you be traveling on from Frankfurt?” the United agent asked.

This is a polite way of saying, “When will you be leaving the European Union?” – to ensure I don't decide to take up residence in Germany.

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Travel

Free Trip to Thailand: Travel Hacking Case Study

When I haven't been contemplating the puzzle of how to do everything, I've been planning my final international trip of the year. Yes, it's only July, but come September, I hit the road to meet readers in 63 cities for the Unconventional Book Tour. Therefore, next month's trip is my final chance to get in a couple of new countries before putting my Frequent Flyer cards back in the drawer for a long four months.

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Travel

Beginner’s Guide to Travel Hacking

Greetings from Ouagoudougou, winner of the “most awesome city name” contest and also my current stop on the week-long West Africa tour. I came in via Lufthansa, Royal Air Maroc, and Ethiopian Airlines... but more on that in a moment. I wanted to write a lengthy post outlining a few principles of what I call travel hacking. In short, travel hacking is all about ~~seeing~~ experiencing the world on a limited budget. I've been able to visit so many countries over the past decade not by being independently wealthy, but by learning to be creative.

Travel

On the Road Again: Next Stop, Ouagadougou

Of all the 192 countries in the world, Burkina Faso gets my vote for "most awesome capital city name."

If you're ever on Jeopardy! or otherwise need to know, the answer is "What is Ouagadougou?" Hopefully you won't have to spell it for the final round.

Tomorrow I'm headed out on the early-early flight to Denver, over to Frankfurt in the afternoon (just a short transit in both cities), and finally down to West Africa via Morocco over the weekend.

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Travel

The Final Fifty

Greetings from Terminal 1 in Singapore's Changi Airport—or perhaps HKG, or NRT, or en route to LAX depending on when you read this. I'm on the way home from my latest global adventure. A long time ago—five years, to be precise—I had an idea to visit every country in the world. I like travel, I like big goals. Smash the two together and you get: 192 official countries, plus a bunch of other places. Read More

Travel

Defeated by Belarus Again + Early Retirement

Twice in the past two months I've tried to make it to Belarus, and twice I've failed. The first time I was volcanoed, stuck in Vancouver and unable to fly to Europe. This time, I was stuck in Zurich, shut out by a Kafkaesque visa system that denied me entry one day before I was supposed to arrive ...

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Travel

Equatorial Guinea on $508 a Day

A few people asked me to say more about the high cost of visiting Equatorial Guinea. Yes, a basic hotel room really does cost $400-500 a night, and sometimes much more. There are no hostels with merry young backpackers hanging out at the beer garden, and no home exchange vacationers looking to trade housing from an offshore oil center with an apartment in a hipster neighborhood in Portland, Oregon ...

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Travel

High Points, Low Points, and the Perfect Trip

Greetings from the open road. I'm in what I call real Africa all week, having fun exploring two new countries.

Condé Nast Traveler publishes a feature called “The Perfect Trip Every Time.” It's a good headline, but I wonder about the subtext: is it really possible to have a perfect trip where nothing goes wrong? I take at least twelve overseas trips a year, and none of them are ever perfect ...

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Travel

On the Road Again: Next Stop, Cameroon

Greetings, friends and readers. Today I'm back in Vancouver, Canada—en route to Frankfurt and beyond for my next monster trip. I tried to head out on part of this trip a few weeks ago, but got "volcanoed" along with so many other travelers around the world. The word on the street is that the volcano is still doing its thing from time to time, but all systems are go for now. Today I'll fly to Europe, and this weekend I head south to the equator for a week in Central Africa ...

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Travel

The Latest In Travel Hacking, “Volcanic Ash Karma” Edition

I lived in Seattle from 2006-2008 without a car, which worked well about 80% of the time. The other 20% of the time, I spent a lot of time waiting on street corners for the bus to arrive. It was frequently late, but once in a while, I'd get to the bus stop right when the bus was pulling up. My friends and I called this “good bus karma” which we ascribed to previous 40-minute waits when we had just missed it.

Last month during the British Airways strike, I walked around a deserted Heathrow airport terminal with departure signs reading CANCELLED. Meanwhile, my flight went out as planned, albeit on a chartered “EuroAtlantic” flight where the meal consisted of a paper bag filled with bananas (seriously) and half a bottle of one-euro red wine. I was grateful for the bananas, but mostly for the flight.

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