Travels in the Riel World

You have the time. You have the money. And you want to do something different: take a trip that will transform your life. Or at least give you the sense that you’ve had a life-changing adventure. Travel & Leisure and MSNBC recently published a story about what they called midlife crisis trips, but the journeys they outlined were really all about “challenging yourself with something new.”

Jane Goldstein, a Boston corporate attorney, was turning 40 when she decided she needed to scale Kilimanjaro. Climbing for eight days with a cast of characters that included a recent widower, her best friend, and four Texans, Goldstein grew fond of the Kilimanjaro-trekker’s mantra of pole-pole, Swahili for “slowly.” It was, she says, “a wonderful pace of life.” Closing in on the summit, she realized the purpose of her trip: it made her feel like she could do anything.

Goldstein’s tale is hardly unusual—midlife restlessness is so common it seems like a cliché. But psychologists say it’s real: a period of discontent that can produce feelings of boredom, doubt, anger, and unease. Traveling has always been a remedy, but more people are forgoing cars and tattoos these days in favor of real-world exploration.

Other than climbing Kilimanjaro, though, what sort of journeys are we talking about? Here is a sample:

Photographing the Tibetan Plateau, Tibet: Environmentalists say the Tibetan plateau, an elevated landmass that spans Tibet, China, and India, is in imminent danger of melting. Learning-based workshops lead caravan tours throughout some of the more remote regions of the diminishing plateau—home to the highest percentage of Tibetans anywhere in Tibet, and a place where Tibetan culture is at its best preserved—with hands-on instruction on bringing home the sort of photos that’ll undoubtedly top the neighbors’ snaps of the Grand Canyon.

Biking through Umbria, Italy: Pedaling through expansive vineyards, olive groves, and medieval hill towns is visually rewarding in itself, but at the end of a good, long haul, what’s better than a celebratory glass of Orvieto? Group cycling trips through the Italian countryside expose travelers to new friends and make accessible foreign ground not typically covered, while good food and wine minimize the boot-camp feel. The best part? Seeing Italy without concern for calories.

Check out the full story for other ideas, everything from surfing in Fiji to teaching English in Cambodia to spending some time at the Esalen Institute in California.

Maybe you’ve seen the movie Julie and Julia, or have even actually tried Mastering the Art of French Cooking. But have you ever considered moving to France in order to learn how to cook French cuisine? Lynda Balslev did just that one day, in search of adventure and on an unexplainable whim. And so began what she calls her ”French Culinary Love Affair,” in a recent article for NPR’s Kitchen Window. An excerpt:

Each day, I walked across the city from my apartment in the 18th arrondissement to school in the 15th arrondissement. I traversed neighborhoods and crossed boulevards and the river Seine on my way to class. For breakfast, I stopped in cafes along the way and ordered a tartine, a crusty baguette slathered with butter and preserves, and cafe au lait. I passed open-air markets, where I purchased baguettes, fresh fruit and runny cheese for my lunch. I continued on, passing restaurants and bistros, pausing to read menus posted outside their doors, window shopping for dinner just as I would for shoes.

At school, I learned to make sauces, stocks and reductions, how to clean fish and poultry, sharpen and use my knives. I learned the basics of pastry and how to cook an egg. I was instructed on how to cut vegetables, roast salmon, prepare coq au vin. I shared my food from class with the dishwasher, who tirelessly worked in our kitchen, cleaning our pots and pans. I was eager to return home from school without leftovers; I had other plans for dinner. My love affair had started. I had a rendezvous with a French bistro for dinner.

I discovered the neighborhood bistro early on. Accessible, convivial and unfussy, the bistros beckoned to me when I returned home from school each day, tired and hungry with no interest in more cooking. Their entrances were warmly lit and festively decorated. Sounds of conversation, laughter and the wafting aroma of delicious food coaxed me into their cozy environments. I would slip into a seat at a small table in the middle of the bustle, sitting elbow to elbow with my fellow diners. I was alone yet in good company, sharing in the enjoyment of eating.

Travel and food always makes a great combination for both experiences and storytelling. Read more of the rest of the author’s French cooking experiences in the full story, which includes recipes for beef bourguignon, potato gratin, and more.

Traveling with children. It’s a nightmare scenario for some people, but for many others it’s a not-to-be-missed family activity and an indispensable tool for teaching children about life in the world. Rachel Denning just wrote a great article for Boots ‘n All about this topic.

It’s long been thought of as an activity that can’t be done with a family, especially small children; it was a choice you had to make – travel, or start a family, but not both.

However, there is a rise in the number of families who are making travel a reality, with infants and older, and they’re doing it deliberately as a way to educate, expand, and inform their children in ways that are not possible by staying at home.

Are these parents crazy? Although they’ve been asked this question many times, the reality is that they simply realize the tremendous benefits of personal growth and character development, not to mention adventure and fun, available from family travel.

She includes five tips for using travel as a way of developing character in your children (and even in yourself). Here is one of her suggestions:

Get Uncomfortable

Although difficult for most people to do for themselves, let alone to purposefully inflict on their children, being uncomfortable actually means that you are experiencing growth.

Instead of planning the usual, touristy trip, try something new, and well… a little uncomfortable. Think about visiting someplace you might not have considered before, a location that is a bit out of your comfort zone – South America instead of Europe, Dominica instead of Disneyland.

The first time I ever traveled outside of the United States was when I was in my early twenties. My family had taken a vacation to San Diego, and we spent a day visiting Tijuana, Mexico.

During the initial half hour of our visit, I felt literally sick to my stomach. I hated it, I just wanted to run away. I had no real-life concept of the kinds of conditions that others lived in throughout the world, and when I came face to face to it, I was extremely uneasy.

Yet that trip has stayed with me. It planted a seed that has grown more with each journey, and has given me a huge heart for humanitarian work, and a desire to relieve suffering worldwide.

Check out her entire story for other such tips, including extending the stay, getting grateful, starting them young, and giving back.

I love to wander through local markets in different countries. I enjoy the colors and smells and sounds, but most of all the window they provide into a different culture. The foods people eat, the products they shop for, the clothing they wear, the way they haggle (or don’t haggle) over prices. So I loved stumbling across this recent article on Brilliant Tips about interesting markets around the world. A few favorites:

Pushkar Camel Fair (India) - Each November before the full moon, thousands of people go to the banks of the Pushkar Lake in the holy city of Pushkar in the state of Rajastan, India to be a part of the amazing Pushkar Camel Fair. During the full moon days, a tented city is created adjacent to Pushkar Lake where people from around the globe cover the sand dunes to enjoy the festivities, trade livestock and handicrafts, participate in camel races and experience music, dance and drama. The colors, music and festivities of the annual Pushkar Camel Fair make for a magical experience that visitors are sure to never forget.

Tsukiji Fish Market (Tokyo, Japan) - The Tsukiji Fish Market is a wholesale market that handles the distribution of fish, fruit, vegetables, meat and flowers for metropolitan Tokyo. The market is the largest fish and seafood wholesale market in the world handling over 3,000 tons of 450 different types of seafood each day. The vibrant atmosphere of buyers and sellers running around, scooters buzzing by and forklifts loading trucks attracts tourists from around the world and has turned the Tsukiji Fish Market into a major tourist attraction.

San Telmo Antiques Fair(Buenos Aires, Argentina) - Known for its bohemian charm and historic appeal, the quaint and funky Buenos Aires barrio of San Telmo is full of energy every day. However, on Sundays, it truly comes to life. Every Sunday from 10 am to 5 pm, the Plaza Dorrego is home to the San Telmo Antiques Fair. To call this an antiques fair, or market, really doesn’t speak to what this event is. As you walk along the cobblestone streets among the antique sales, tango dancers perform and provide entertainment for the crowd and, once night falls, the fair evolves into a milonga (a street side dance party).

Check out the entire story for more unique international markets, including links to longer stories about each one.

Are you a fan of the American travel writer Paul Theroux? Do you like road trips? Then you may appreciate this article from Smithsonian Magazine, written by Theroux and titled “Taking the Great American Road Trip.” Theroux writes about taking a cross-country road trip recently for the first time in his life, which is somewhat surprising for a person who has journeyed across Africa and taken long train journeys through Asia and the Americas. But perhaps because of this travel background, Theroux brings an unusual perspective to his newest trip, that of an individual who has seen the world and is now discovering more of his home country.

Here, he introduces his journey:

The mixed blessing of America is that anyone with a car can go anywhere. The visible expression of our freedom is that we are a country without roadblocks. And a driver’s license is our identity. My dream, from way back—from high school, when I first heard the name Kerouac—was of driving across the United States. The cross-country trip is the supreme example of the journey as the destination.

Travel is mostly about dreams—dreaming of landscapes or cities, imagining yourself in them, murmuring the bewitching place names, and then finding a way to make the dream come true. The dream can also be one that involves hardship, slogging through a forest, paddling down a river, confronting suspicious people, living in a hostile place, testing your adaptability, hoping for some sort of revelation. All my traveling life, 40 years of peregrinating Africa, Asia, South America and Oceania, I have thought constantly of home—and especially of the America I had never seen. “I discovered I did not know my own country,” Steinbeck wrote in Travels with Charley, explaining why he hit the road at age 58.

And, later on, contemplates some of the similarities between the U.S. and some other parts of the world that he has visited:

In my life, I had sought out other parts of the world—Patagonia, Assam, the Yangtze; I had not realized that the dramatic desert I had imagined Patagonia to be was visible on my way from Sedona to Santa Fe, that the rolling hills of West Virginia were reminiscent of Assam and that my sight of the Mississippi recalled other great rivers. I’m glad I saw the rest of the world before I drove across America. I have traveled so often in other countries and am so accustomed to other landscapes, I sometimes felt on my trip that I was seeing America, coast to coast, with the eyes of a foreigner, feeling overwhelmed, humbled and grateful.

The whole article may be long for the web, but it’s a good magazine piece and an interesting look at America from a celebrated travel writer.

Audrey Scott and Daniel Noll have been on the road for quite a while now. It’s been well over two years since they left their jobs to travel the world, take photographs and write about their experiences, which they do very well on their blog Uncornered Market. It stands to reason that they would have learned a thing or two during these many months on the road and, in fact, they just published an interesting post that shares some of the lessons they’ve gained along the way. It’s called The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Travelers. Here is a brief excerpt:

Seek First to Adapt, Then to Complain (a.k.a., Adaptability) – Living outside your comfort zone becomes the norm on the road. New environments provide different challenges; what worked in the last country may not work in the next. All that stuff you became accustomed to just last week? Forget about it. Independent travel forces you to continually size up each situation and adapt accordingly. Your resulting experience depends on it. Sometimes your life may, too.

We’re reminded of: When we (two American non-Muslims) were presented with a steaming bowl of goat bits at a feast to break the Ramadan fast in Kyrgyzstan, we joined in by reluctantly chewing on a jaw bone.

Plan With Multiple Outcomes in Mind (a.k.a, Planning) – Determine which variables are most important to you (e.g., comfort, cost, risk, time), do your planning, and optimize accordingly. In doing so, you create not only Plans A and B, but also Plans C and D, too. In the end, circumstances force you to a hastily crafted Plan E, which you later realize may have been the best plan all along.

We’re reminded of: When a Chinese train station attendant informs us that the train no longer runs to our next destination, we don’t force it. We find another one…and stumble upon a Tibetan opera festival.

You should check out the entire post for all of their lessons, and then I’d recommend wandering around the website to read about their adventures and see some of the many wonderful photographs they’ve taken.

Most of us don’t need to be reminded of the challenges of traveling with children, but how often do we stop to consider the benefits that we also get from taking a trip with our sons and daughters? Karen Banes has an interesting take on this topic in an article she recently published for BootsnAll. It’s a nice perspective to hear. Following are three of her reasons for why children can help to enrich your travel experiences:

You get to see the world through their eyes - Kids see things differently. They have a whole different angle on things, and it’s not just because they’re shorter and therefore closer to the ground, although that can help sometimes too. Kids see the wonder in a new place, new activities, new animals and new food…As an adult it can be hard to feel the true sense of wonder you probably should at seeing your first real live kangaroo, orangutan, or giant bird-eating spider, and you might miss that giant earth worm or strange looking lizard completely because you’re just too high up. Kids will draw your attention to all that and more…Traveling with kids means you get involved in activities you might have missed out on. Would you have taken that miniature train ride, visited that wildlife rescue center or talked to that snake charmer if your kids hadn’t insisted on it. Maybe not, and often your travel experience is richer for having done these things.

You have the pleasure of seeing your kids grow and learn in a way that just isn’t possible back home - Traveling is an education. An altogether different, more challenging and more pleasurable education than your kids will ever get in school. You’ll get to see your kids learning a few words of a foreign language, how to make and break camp, how to hike through wilderness areas without impacting the natural environment, and how to read a map. You’ll see them gaining a knowledge and understanding of other cultures, and witness the sense of connection they feel as world geography and history starts to make sense to them, based on their own experiences and observations.

You become closer as a family - In a world where many families don’t even have time to eat dinner together on a regular basis, imagine a few weeks, months or even years spent traveling together, eating, sleeping, learning and adventuring together. Imagine building a foundation of shared experience and memories to draw on as your kids grow up and away and start families of their own. Traveling together gives family members one of the few things money can’t buy – the time and opportunity to grow closer as a family. Doesn’t every kid, and parent, deserve that chance?

What do you think, does she make a case for some of the wonders of traveling with children? Check out the entire story to see some of her other reasons.

On Monday I wrote about an online interview with me in which I talked about my view of sabbaticals and some of the reasons that my wife and I had decided to take a career break in order to travel. Well, here is a nice follow-up to that post: an article by Sherry Ott that details 10 good reasons for taking a career break. Here are two of them:

Retirement Doesn’t Always Reward You with the Time or Ability to Travel - Have you ever really thought about the person you will be when you are 65? What will your health be like, what will your sense of adventure be like, and most importantly, will your health be able to support your sense of adventure?

What activities are you saving for your retirement - bungy jumping in New Zealand, climbing mountains in Nepal, hiking the Great Wall of China, or horseback riding in Mongolia? Will these things really be possible at retirement age? We spend all of our life waiting, waiting, waiting…until we are free from the shackles of work. However what if when we are unshackled, we can’t do it? Consider taking a mini-retirement now, while you know you can trek the Inca Trail.  If people can have a mid-life crisis, then why can’t you have a mid-life retirement?

Cure your Hurry Sickness and Return to Simplicity - Many Americans are plagued by ‘Hurry Sickness’.  The more we speed up, the less we can slow down. Not only do we multi-task at work but we multi-task our leisure time as well - watching TV and surfing the web, or working out on the elliptical and reading a magazine. We are no longer capable of simply doing one thing and being happy about it.

This has also made us a very impatient society – some may even say rude. How many times have you pressed the “door close” on the elevator, even though someone else is trying to get on? And how often do you catch yourself tapping your foot and huffing away while standing in line for something? We always seem to be in a rush to get nowhere fast.

A traveling career break will force you to slow down and learn to be patient again. As you immerse yourself into other cultures you will observe simplicity and patience that Americans have somehow lost. Sure it can be a frustrating experience letting go of how you expect things to get done, but it will open up your eyes to how the rest of the world operates. In the process you will actually have time to take it all in and appreciate a new, simpler way of doing things.

See the entire article for eight more reasons to consider a sabbatical.

If you’re interested in knowing more about my travel experiences or my book, you might want to check out an online interview with me that was just published by Andy Hayes, who is a traveler, writer and photographer himself and who publishes the excellent Sharing Experiences blog. Here are my answers to two of his questions, dealing with our decision to take time off to travel and my view of life sabbaticals:

You started your world-wide travels with (and I quote) “deciding to take a chance in life”. Could you give us a little background into that decision-making process?

Well, my wife and I were both over 30-years-old and entrenched in our work lives when we decided to take our first round-the-world trip. Frankly, we weren’t sure we were ready to stop everything in order to do this and then re-start our lives when the trip was over. We also had to get over the normal doubts over how others would perceive our decision. In the end, though, we also didn’t want to go through life knowing we had passed up an opportunity to have an adventure together and to do some long-term travel.

The way we dealt with it was for my wife to ask for a leave of absence from work. Her employer was gracious in granting her the leave and keeping her job open. Since I was already making a transition to being self-employed, it was easier for me to manage the time off. Of course, by not stopping work completely we didn’t have as much time available to travel as we could have had by simply quitting altogether. Our trips were measured in months, rather than years. I have to say, if Twitter had been around a few years earlier and I’d been introduced to all of these other amazing people who were managing long-term travel between jobs, then our outlook might have been different.

Still, it was a good compromise given where we were in our lives. And it did have an unseen benefit, in that we began looking at our travels in a particular way – not as an open-ended adventure, but rather as a sabbatical that would be limited in time but that would have a lasting influence on our lives.

You also refer to the term “life sabbatical.” What does that phrase mean to you?

As I mentioned earlier, the fact that our trips were not open-ended encouraged us to view the experience as a sabbatical. Academic sabbaticals stem from the notion that there is value in taking time away from the everyday rigors of a job in order to rest, reflect or conduct research. The goal is to return to work with renewed energy and ideas. And the word sabbatical derives from the word Sabbath, with every seventh day meant to be devoted to family time and contemplation.

So I took to calling our trip a “life sabbatical” because it seemed to imbue it with more meaning than if I simply looked at it as a travel adventure. It helped us to view our journey as a way to learn about ourselves and the world, while also recharging our energies for the next phase of our lives. I actually think it would be a great thing if more people were able to schedule these “mini-retirements” periodically through life. Not only can we not bank on being able to fulfill all of our travel dreams during the traditional retirement years, but this time away from work really does give us an opportunity to recharge and even re-evaluate where we are in our lives and careers.

See the entire interview for my answers to a number of other questions. While you’re there you should also browse through his collection of interviews with other travelers and writers.

Don George, to say the least, has done his share of traveling and writing. He has worked as a Travel Editor for the San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle, Salon.com, and Lonely Planet Publications. Along the way, he’s traveled to more than 65 countries. Recently, when his daughter and son graduated from college and high school, respectively, he had the idea to write his own version of a commencement address and to put down on paper some of what he’s learned through his life journeys. The result was recently published in the online magazine Recce. Some of his observations:

1. Pursue your passion - If I have one mantra that I’ve followed throughout my life, it’s this one. It started with that impetuous decision to live abroad for a year, and it continued at the end of that year, when I had to decide whether to go to graduate school in creative writing or comparative literature. After a sleepless Athenian night, I chose the path of my passion: writing. And it is no overstatement to say that everything that has happened to me professionally since then — the fulfilling, fortuitous life I have made as a travelling scribe for the past three decades — is a result of that fateful choice. So, my number one precept would be pursue your passion, and keep your mind open to the opportunities that pursuit provides.

2. Listen to your gut- Early in that Parisian summer, after a frazzling week trying to find an apartment, I was faced with two final choices. One was located in a fashionable tree-lined neighborhood and was sparkling clean and modern; in comparison, the other seemed dingy, threadbare and old-fashioned. But the latter building had towering wooden entrance-doors that opened off the rue de Rivoli, and a creaky filigreed elevator that rose ever-so-slowly to the third floor, and the apartment had airy French windows that opened right onto the Tuileries. Somehow it just felt right. I took it and the neighborhood quickly became my home away from home, where the local café-keeper automatically brought my café creme and the six-table sawdust bistro always soothed with perfect biftek-frites, and the soul-soaring Ile de la Cite was only a dusk-lit walk away. And when I came home each night, I felt like I was walking into the heart — threadbare, dingy, old-fashioned — of the city I loved.

When in doubt, silence the world around you and listen to your heart. Since then, whenever I have been traveling and trying to decide if I should follow Path A or Path B, I have heeded the still voice inside me. It’s never wrong. And it’s the same with the big decisions about Life-Path A or B too. Deep inside, we know which way we should go. The challenge is to cut through the din of our fears and imposed preconceptions and the roar of others’ expectations to hear the deep core.

All of George’s insights are well worth reading. Check them out.

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know that I’m a fan of taking life sabbaticals, or career breaks. So it’s always nice to read about the positive experiences that other individuals have had in taking time off from their career, whether to travel or engage in some other worthwhile activity.

Michael Bontempi just wrote about his own career break and travel experiences for the Briefcase to Backpack site. Like pretty much everyone I know who has ever attempted this, he had an incredible experience, time to reflect on his life, and no problem finding a new job and resuming a career when he was back home. Here is an excerpt of what he had to say:

My career break gave me the opportunity to reflect on my previous 14 years of experience and helped me to reevaluate my career path and evaluate if I was on the right track. Ironically, putting our 9-month plan together started me on the decision path for my next role. It came very natural to me to orchestrate all the moving parts that would be required to enable me to enjoy my career break and ensure that our life back home was in order at the same time.

So as I started my career search at the beginning of 2008, the one frequent question that was on everyone’s mind was “how I would be able to explain my career break to a new employer?” To be honest, this was not something I was overly concerned about. I had decided that when asked, I would tell my story as it happened. To hide the truth or try to spin this time into something it wasn’t would be foolish. Surprisingly, most of the negative reaction to my career break decision came from the recruiters I worked with, and very little concern from the potential new employer. In today’s competitive market, some could view a career break as a handicap, while most see it as a differentiator…

For anyone that is considering a career break with hopes of returning to a career, you will inevitably have many doubts, concerns and questions. But at the end of the day, the choice to take a career break is not just about the travel - it’s about you. It’s about trying to reflect on all that you have accomplished and what you haven’t and determining if the current path you’re on will eventually put more in that “accomplished” category.

Check out his entire story, and the rest of the Briefcase to Backpack site.

Ask any traveler that question and you’ll get an interesting litany of answers. Or perhaps no good answer at all, other than the recognition that, well, yes, travel really is addictive. But I just came across an interesting essay by Leigh Haugseth on her blog, Fresh New Life, in which she comes up with some pretty good answers to that question. Here is an excerpt:

We get a chemical high. When you take a risk, your brain produces the feel good chemical dopamine which gives you a short high.  The more risks you take, the more highs you experience.  Studies have shown that dare devils, such as those that climb outrageously high mountains or do extreme sports, have lower levels of dopamine inhibitors. This means when they take a risk, they get an even higher shot of dopamine than the rest of us, producing a more addictive high.

We feel like we’re actually doing something productive with our lives. Being on the road can get tedious at times, but overall, it’s constant newness and wonder. Something we don’t experience in our daily humdrum lives.  We’re constantly learning and experiencing life.  Being on the road and interacting with different people is more productive than sitting in the same meetings, with the same people, in the same office every day. 

It makes us feel adventurous.  When we set off on a new adventure, no matter how afraid we may be, feelings of boldness and bravery take over and we  feel ready to take on the world.   Anything can happen that day, anything is possible.  This is what we dream about when we’re whiling away in our cubicle.  These feelings are real and very addictive.

These are just three of the seven interesting answers that she produced. Check out her entire post, and then start dreaming again about hitting the road.

Paul Theroux has, over the years, provided us with some wonderful literary accounts of his global travels. His latest venture, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, actually retraces a trip from Europe to Asia that he wrote about in his 1975 book, The Great Railway Bazaar. He talked about these journeys and other topics recently in an interview that he did with National Geographic Traveler. An excerpt:

In your latest book, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, you retraced your 1973 Great Railway Bazaar journey. What changed between trips?

“Even a rickshaw wallah has a cell phone,” an Indian said to me. In 1973 I tried to make two phone calls in four and a half months—one, from Japan, succeeded, the other, from India, failed. Cheap watches and blue jeans were almost unknown in the wider world in 1973, but everyone has them now, in Americanized cultures. In 1973, China was undergoing the Cultural Revolution—the whole of China disrupted with mass hysteria—and now, of course, the Chinese manufacture most of our goods.

What’s stayed the same?

Undoubtedly village life in rural India—the pattern of harvest, or drought, debt, hunger, and the pieties of Hinduism. This in great contrast to parallel developments in information technology.

What surprised you?

The forgiveness in Vietnam. After we dropped over seven million tons of bombs, 13 million gallons of Agent Orange, and killed millions of their people, Americans are greeted politely, welcomed, urged to have some noodles. It’s a great lesson to anyone familiar with other wars and atrocities.

If you could retreat from the life you live now, what would you do—and where?

I have spent my whole life searching for the best place to live. I spend the summer on Cape Cod, where I spent my happiest childhood days. I spend the winter in happy Hawaii, bathed in marine sunlight. I make forays to the coast of Maine. These are sun-kissed days. Why retreat?

Anyone who enjoys good travel writing has doubt become acquainted with the words of Pico Iyer. He’s written some wonderful books and essays about his journeys around the planet. And now he has penned a piece of travel advice for the website Real Simple. It is, appropriately enough, a simple and elegant listing of 10 things that every traveler should do in a new destination. An excerpt:

Savor every moment of your first few hours. First impressions really are worth a thousand others. I often scribble a hundred pages of notes when I visit somewhere new. But then, when I get home, it’s always the first page or two?the taxi ride in from the airport, my first foray out onto the streets?that captures something vivid and essential before my ideas and prejudices begin to harden. So stay away from e-mail, CNN, and anything that reminds you of home and just soak the place in.

Embrace the prospect of being a tourist. Some snooty types will tell you that they’re “travelers,” not tourists. But if being a tourist means wanting to see all the attractions that make a town unique, then what’s so bad about that? Take the three-hour city tour on your first day in Atlanta so you know where things are and what you wish to return to. When traveling abroad, visit the shops recommended by tour guides, if only to see what’s available from people who speak English. Don’t be shy about asking a local stranger how to find the national museum; she may just offer you a guided tour along the way.

Check out a bookstore.It’s a great way to learn about the interests of the locals. On almost any street in New Delhi, for example, a bookshop is bulging with works on palaces, textiles, spirituality, and the Kama Sutra; in Salt Lake City, the offerings are somewhat different. And in a store like the independent-minded Elliott Bay Book Company, a local institution in Seattle, you’ll find a universe so compendious that it seems to be an anthology of the city’s distinctive grace notes. Poking into even the smallest of these places not only opens a new door to a city but also offers the promise of a good read to keep you company at night.

All good advice. See the entire article for his seven other tips.

Impossible you say? You need income, you need a home? Actually, there are a surprising number of people who live without the anchor of homes or jobs. They’ve found a way to essentially live on the road. Yes, to be a permanent tourist. Christopher Elliott, in his MSNBC travel column, recently profiled some of these individuals and provided a few tips on how anyone could become “a modern-day nomad.”

If the thought of living on the road seems appealing, you’ve got company. Who wouldn’t want to spend a few weeks in an exotic place, discovering a new culture, seeing the sights, living like a native, and then moving on to the next destination? …

So what’s the secret to becoming a modern-day nomad? I asked people who were already doing it, and here’s what they said:

1.  Find a reason. Most transients have a portable career that allows them to travel freely. They’re consultants, freelancers or teachers, for example. But there are other ways to make money when you’re nomadic. In 2006, Tiffany Owens and her husband became full-time property caretakers. Both had been frustrated with their former careers — she was a magazine editor and he was a cable installer — and needed a break. “Now, I garden instead of sitting in boardroom meetings,” she says. “I couldn’t be happier.” Check out the newsletter Caretaker Gazettefor caretaking opportunities.

2. Travel extra light.That’s the advice of Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia.org. He became what he calls “unstuck” about two years ago, spending a month in Tokyo, San Francisco, New York, and Buenos Aires. “Pack less, and become unattached to possessions,” he says. “And then … pack less.” You’ll be living out of a suitcase for months — literally.

There are a total of nine tips in Elliott’s article. Read the whole thing for the full scoop on being a world nomad.

That’s the goal, at least, that Chris Guillebeau has set for himself. So far he’s up to 107 countries and he’s 30-years-old. He was profiled yesterday by the NY Times.

I had my first international travel experience when I was 6 years old. My mom took me to the Philippines, and I wound up living there for two years. Then, when I was 22, I went to Africa as an aid worker for an international charity group. I was traveling a lot between Africa and Europe. I remember being on a train and having this mad thought that I should visit 100 countries before I was 30 years old.

I did the math. And according to my calculations, it would cost about the same as buying a new sport utility vehicle, about $30,000. A lot of my friends were buying S.U.V.’s, but it just didn’t appeal to me. I wanted to spend my money learning about new cultures in places like Burma, Sri Lanka, Uganda, Lesotho and the Balkans, places I never thought I would see.

I began my 100-country countdown in 2006, and finished it in 2008. But a strange thing happened. At about country No. 50, I had another eureka moment: “Why stop at 100?” I’m 30 years old now, and my new goal is to visit each country on this planet before I’m 35 years old. Some of my friends think I’m nuts.

One of the problems is that I am running out of places with easy access. It’s not like every country is an Italy or a Mexico. Soon, I’m going to have to start making arrangements to get to Chad, the South Pacific and central Asia.

Read the whole article for insight on some of his travel tips and experiences. You can also check out Chris’ website. artofnonconformity.com, where he not only keeps track of his travels but also pens some fun articles of his own. Some of his pieces include:

- A short collection of unconventional ideas

- Will success follow if you do what you love?

- 9 overrated tourist destinations (and 9 great alternatives)

It’s fun to read and he provides some nice perspectives on life and travel.

It appears that couchsurfing is continuing to grow in popularity. The website that became a trendy mode of travel is now going mainstream. Couchsurfing.com has passed the one million member milestone. Of course, as the Frugal Traveler points out, this growing popularity brings with it the danger that newcomers may not always be in it for the same goals of cross-cultural interaction that attracted many of the original members.

A member since May 2006, I’ve used CouchSurfing from Montenegro and Bucharest to Indiana and Kyrgyzstan, sometimes staying in a plush, private bedroom, sometimes on big, soft sofas and sometimes just meeting up for drinks and hanging out with fellow members. These CouchSurfers have rarely been backpacker types: Vlatko, in Perast, Montenegro, was an ebullient restaurateur who loved playing the jew’s-harp. Gabriela, in Oporto, Portugal, ran a high-end furniture factory. And in Columbus, Ind., there was the Signorino family. Few have welcomed me into their homes and their families with as much sweetness and warmth as did Michele, Andrea and their three whip-smart kids, Renzo, Vincent and Lucia…

With so many people finally “getting” CouchSurfing, it may finally shake its fringe reputation. But with mainstreaming comes the danger that newcomers may see it simply as a way to get a free room and ignore the site’s more important goal: “meeting new people and discovering new cultures from the inside;” as Mr. Fried put it.

For true believers, the free bed is not an end unto itself but a first step toward cross-cultural connection and the idea that, as Mannie Pierre, a 36-year-old social worker, said, “There’s more to love out there than to fear.”

I’ve written about Pico Iyer a couple of times previously and he is one of the world’s more thoughtful and interesting travel writers. He recently gave an intriguing interview to Gadling that is worth reading. An excerpt:

One quality I’ve always admired about your writing is your ability to tap into the personality of a country. What advice do you have about tapping into the essence of a place?

Places are like people, with personalities just as distinct, and a travel writer, of course, is someone who aims to create not just a photograph of a place but a portrait. My advice would be to walk and walk and walk, as soon as you arrive, when the place is still new to you and every perception is fresh–the mind has not yet begun to settle into prejudices or arguments.

Take down everything and remember that anything (an Internet cafe, a Golden Arches, a shop selling TVs) is interesting, and revealing of the society around it. And try, wherever possible, to remember that you’ve come all this way–even if it’s only to another state–to enter a foreign state of mind, a different sensibility. The joy of travel is not being reminded of your assumptions, or being confirmed in your beliefs, but in being led out of them, to something utterly other and, perhaps, unfathomable.

As much as traveling can create the sense that one is connected to the world, it can also create the feeling of being unsettled. What do you do to stay grounded and keep track of yourself in the process?

I tend to be too settled, so I seek out being unsettled–at the very least, that can test the ground I have. Everywhere man is settled, as Emerson says, and only insofar as he unsettled is there any hope for him. I hope I have solid ground within me–I do after all spend two months a year in a monastery, and eight months in a monastic life in Japan (a two-room apartment without cellphone or printer or World Wide Web or car or bicycle), and I have been living in these simple cells now for more than 16 years, so I feel that I am rooted, as much as I need to be, in what is real and stable.

But to stay too long in these places that I know as well as my heartbeat would be to risk complacency, blindness and inertia. So I try to force myself out of my grooves, feeling that groundedness is what I have, unsettledness what I need.

Is there a piece of travel wisdom someone told you that you took to heart? What was it?

The Dalai Lama always suggests that there’s no virtue in looking backward–the future is what we can change–and I suppose that is what has guided me in my traveling life. Most of the travelers I love and learned from are in some ways journeying back into the past, to explain the present; I, by making most of my central travels to places like Los Angeles Airport or the state of jet lag (or even to the monastery) have always pointed myself towards the future. My interest is not in what the world has been but what we can make of it, especially those 21st century citizens who are, to some degree, children of possibility (alarming or pretentious as that phrase might sound to some).

There is much more from Iyer in the full interview. Check it out.