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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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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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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I made it back from my recent trip to Asia and the South Pacific. Next up, the two remaining countries in Latin America—Guatemala and Nicaragua—then over to the Ukraine and Cyprus. After that, a big trip to Africa… and so on. I’ve always said that I’m not a real travel writer – see Rolf Potts…
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Last fall I wrote about a special promotion where you could earn an enormous Frequent Flyer bonus by buying a large quantity of useless stickers.
True story, as odd as it sounds. It was one of the best travel hacking opportunities I've been a part of yet.
As I result of the promotion, I woke up yesterday to an influx of new miles in my US Air account. How many? Well, I had already earned about 280,000 a few months ago ... but this morning the new deposit read: 808,185 miles.
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As I finished up last year's Annual Review, it became clear that 2010 was going to be even more of a monster year than 2009. I've got a ton of things going on, which is great, but I also need to keep working on my quest to visit every country in the world.
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Greetings from Auckland, New Zealand, where I'm in transit to the South Pacific island of Samoa – via Vancouver on one side and Nuku'alofa, Tonga on the other. (If you're coming from North America, it takes a while to get settled in this part of the world.) I've been to New Zealand, the Cook Islands, and Hawaii before, but this is effectively my first trip to the inner South Pacific. On the way home next week I hope to visit Fiji as well.
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Greetings, friends and readers. I've been traveling in the Caucasus this month, and over the weekend I took advantage of the opportunity to go from Azerbaijan to Georgia on a 15-hour overnight train. Here are a few notes and several videos from the trip ...
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Hi everyone. I’m high on life and writing in from the Cathay Pacific LAX-HKG flight. I’m fading fast, but with 13 hours to go until arrival, there should be plenty of time to a) sleep and b) write this note to you.
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Greetings from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I've arrived on the final leg of my Monster Trip of 2009. I've wanted to share some of the details behind my visit to Saudi Arabia for a while, but as you read this article, you'll probably see why I had to wait before writing about it publicly. Also, fair warning that this will not be a short story.
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Greetings from the Persian Gulf. The most obvious observation to make about this place is probably, “Wow! It's hot here!”
I hope you'll forgive me for being banal. I've been in the Emirates, Oman, and Qatar before, but not usually in July. I'd say I'm hardcore and have been going for 10-mile runs in the heat, but that would be exaggerating by at least 6 miles.
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Last year at about this time, I took what I called the Monster Trip of 2008.
It involved four continents, driving through Italy in the middle of the night, visiting Iraqi Kurdistan, roaming by train and bus across the Baltics and Moldova, and finally coming home through Asia – where I mistakenly double-booked myself on two non-refundable tickets home from Japan.
What fun that was. Now it's time to repeat the process, although with a completely different itinerary, and hopefully without getting stranded on a faraway continent three days before I'm supposed to come home.
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I returned to Portland late last night after a great visit to the great New York City.
I've needed to go to New York for a few months now - I wanted to meet my book editor and a few other people, but I kept putting it off. Since I travel so much internationally, I try to keep my domestic trips to a minimum.
However, when I received an invitation a couple of weeks ago to visit with Seth Godin and his remarkable Alternative MBA students, I knew it was time to break out the calendar and book a ticket.
The lesson is, when you get an opportunity like this, don't hesitate. Do whatever you need to do to get wherever you need to be.
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Let's be clear: there's no real secret. I subscribe to the 10,000 hours theory. When I wrote about it six months before Outliers came out, I called it the 14,600 hours to virtuosity.
Then Gladwell's great book arrived, everyone started talking about 10k hours, and I thought, “Awesome. Now we can all save 4,600 hours!”
Anyway, the secret connection between art and money involves working hard on the same thing for a long time.
There you go! Get to work. By the time evening rolls around, only 9,992 hours will remain.
HOWEVER...
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If you read last week's post, you pretty much know how this trip came out of nowhere the week prior. Air New Zealand phoned me up, offered me a trip, and since it sounded fun, I said yes.
Was it worth it? What happened? Details here, in 1300 words + photos.
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