Travel is all about meeting people: locals, fellow wanderers, enthusiastic tour guides, con men and perhaps even your soul mate. You might set out as a solo traveler, but it’s impossible to stay alone for long.

Of course, the problem is that sometimes you might prefer to go it alone. That’s when you meet one of those dreaded travelers.

They linger in hostel common rooms, they strike up conversations on buses, they corner you at famous landmarks, they try to exchange words in restaurants as you’re engulfed in your solo diner’s security blanket – a good book.

These travellers drive you nuts and they make you crave your solitude, but as much as they annoy you, travel just wouldn’t be the same without them.

TYPE ONE: The Penny-Pinching Hippie

The traveler vs. tourist debate rages on: tourists observe while travelers experience, but snobbish backpackers might do well to remember that ‘tourists’ also spend money when they travel – lots of it. When did travel become all about spending as little as possible?

Everyone’s met this type of traveler – a dreadlocked, barefooted meat-hater who likes to brag about their lack of luggage and how they managed to live in India for a month on $100. Wake up and smell the incense, hippies: sure, grass-roots travel is all about avoiding multi-nationals in favour of local businesses, but shelling out two or three dollars a day is worse than spending vast chunks of change in five-star hotels – at least that creates employment.

You want to scream at them that spending less than the locals does not make you one of them, nor does it make you a superior traveler. But as infuriating as the penny-pincher is, you’re glad of them when you need to vent after a stressful day of haggling with traders or arguing with deceitful tour guides. You have to have someone to take your travel angers out on, and challenging the miser on their cheap travel philosophy is better than screaming at the next local who approaches you to practice their English.

TYPE TWO: The Klingon

We’re not talking alien life forms here, nor Star Trek aficionados (although they might also make it onto this list). Think of those people you meet en route who travel alone but can’t bear to be alone. more>

Photo: Brandon Godfrey

It takes about 20 millions steps to walk around the world, several years commitment as well as determination, stamina, and a state of mind that few of us can imagine.

Strict rules, taking into account distance covered, and verification of continents crossed, govern entry into the elite club of those that have ‘officially’ walked around the world. While many successful foot circumnavigations of the globe have not achieved official recognition, they are still an epic demonstration of human endurance and courage.

1) Dave Kunst was the very first (verified) person to complete an entire circuit of the earth on  foot. more>

ADVENTURERS are flocking to experience 15 minutes in a Cage of Death, sharing a large glass tank with a 700kg crocodile at Crocosaurus Cove in downtown Darwin.

And a guidebook features a two-page photograph of a toothy-grinned croc under the caption “Pleased to eat you”.

But fear not!

The Cage of Death, holding two swimmers at a time, is designed to give you the thrill of your lifetime, not to end it.

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Would you be hopping into the cage of death?

Photo by rosietulips/ Written by Tom Gates

The Terimayo (Vancouver)

Japa Dog became a fast favorite with this year’s Olympic crowd, with lines routinely stretching around the block. Many have tried to infuse Japanese ingredients with dogs before but none have done it as successfully as this stand in downtown Vancouver.

Most people gravitate towards the Terimayo, a beef hot dog toped with seaweed, teriyaki sauce, Japanese mayonnaise and fried onion. Other Japa toppings include grated radish, green onion, okonomi sauce, fried cabbage and dried bonito flakes.

Photo by roboppy

The Pylsur (Iceland)

This hot dog is dressed with pylsusinnep, an Icelandic version of mustard that’s brown and sweet and looks like an infant’s diarrhea. Most often you’ll also be able to sauce things up with remoulade, a condiment made of mayonnaise mixed with capers, mustard, herbs, anchovies, and gherkins. The meat itself has a unique taste, owing to a mixture of pork, lamb and beef.

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By: Adam Seper

“Hostel.” How can one word evoke so many different
pictures in different people’s minds? Depending on how much traveling a person has done, what age that person is, and where their travels have taken them, their idea of a hostel could be drastically different from the next person’s.

The fact is that hostels differ not only from country to country and city to city, but within cities themselves. They’re all different, they’re all unique, and they all have varying degrees of comfort (or discomfort). In my opinion, that’s what makes hostels exciting. You know what you’re getting if you stay at any chain hotel around the world. Those hotels are all basically the same – but you never know what you’re going to get when you walk through the doors of a hostel.

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by Teresa Gotay

With tons of backpacking lists online giving you recommendations on what to bring, getting ready for your big trip can be overwhelming. You’re trying to pack light, but you also need convenient and helpful things you won’t want to purchase abroad There are plenty of typical items we need to bring such as clothes, toiletries, and entertainment items. But, there are plenty of odd things that might come to good use.

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If your dream is to take time off and travel around the world, there is more than one way of doing it. Typically, people think of taking airplanes from point-to-point, but as we’ve recently seen with National Geographic’s project to take buses from Washington DC to Antarctica, other transportation options are out there. Plus, those with small budgets or fear of flying shouldn’t be deterred from fulfilling their travel dreams.

So we’ve got a few idea on how to take the bus around the world, after the jump!

· Go North-South, versus East-West:
For obvious reasons (like the existence of oceans), you won’t be able to do a pure lateral journey on buses. Instead, why not go longitudinal as Andrew Evans did for Bus2Antarctica? We say pick two north-south routes like Calgary to Ushuaia and Sapporo to Wellington. That way, you can do one before the other and not take off as much time from work. Obviously the Sapporo to Wellington route will involve some ferries, but it’ll also have you on some of Japan’s very nice buses, maybe some in South Korea, and then we suggest hopping over to China for some of their double-decker sleeper routes. See the list of resource sites below for more information.

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It’s been voted the World’s Third Most Livable City and is as diverse with its sub-cultures as it is with different drinking establishments. With the competition between watering holes being so high, you’ll find it difficult to find a place in Melbourne that you disagree with, or find without having to venture down alleyways and corridors.

Cookie

The whiff of subtle (yet pleasant) Thai dishes engulfs your right nostril and the banter of the crowd hijacks your left ear. The Cookie’s cocktail list is elaborate, the top-range beer is book-sized, and the presentation is even more impressive.

Even on busy nights, bartenders will create lavish cocktails without breaking a sweat or aimlessly look for an abstract liqueur up the ladder.

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Together we studied the Humanure Compost Toilet Manual. It read, “There are two types of people in this world. Those that sh*t in their drinking water and those that don’t.”

We were about to experience how the other half lived.

The toilet was a yellow bucket with sawdust, placed under a wooden toilet seat frame. For 10 days we followed a routine of eat-excrete-sawdust-repeat. We bonded each time we had to collect another wheelbarrow load of sawdust or shovel the contents of the toilet bucket onto the humanure compost heap.

As a city girl travelling with my farm girl friend, the compost toilet was the source of many discussions as we sat around in our mobile home after a day’s work. And while no television, mobile coverage or WiFi will do that to a girl, the compost toilet was the first of many opportunities WWOOFing in Ireland provided to learn about healthy, sustainable living.

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By: Tristan Cano

Okay, so strictly speaking, Japan’s wartime aim was control of the Pacific and not world domination.

However, if by some freak accident they had ended up inheriting the human race, things may not have been that bad.

Here’s why: more>

There are many things you’ll want to take as souvenirs from your time exploring the world – tie-dye clothing that looked cool in India, paintings created by talented elephants, novelty booze that tasted good in the right setting, or exquisite carvings that seemed like a bargain until you worked out the exchange rate. But sometimes you’re looking for a more permanent, more impressive and altogether more useful souvenir from your travels – a boyfriend you picked up along the way.

Hooking up on the road isn’t that different to trying to score back home and can often be even easier as people are in ‘anything goes’ holiday mode. At home or away, bagging the guy you have your eye on is pretty easy as long as you take care of the three Bs – boobs, beer, and ball games of some description. But the game you choose to chat about could just be the clincher, depending on the nationality of the traveller you’ve set your sights on.

Naturally there are all kinds of guys from every country on earth, but just to get you started along the right path here’s a whimsical guide to impressing guys from the main backpacking nations around the world and to keeping hold of them, just in case you’re in the market for a more permanent souvenir…

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So, I’m the Director of SWAP and I have been for almost 30 years so I hope you don’t find it odd that we have a youth program here being run by some old fart. When such criticism arises, I fall back on my standard response which notes that you don’t have to be dead to be an undertaker. But as I am the Director, and as we do have a blog site, and as I have always fancied myself as some sort of literary lion… well pussycat of some sort… the inevitable has occurred and I am wading into this with a true, gripping yarn about back-packing in ancient times without the benefit of Facebook and cell phones. Yes, there were such times and although life was tough then, we did manage to get out and see bits and pieces of the planet. 

Back in ‘69, when even I was a youth, I decided it was time for high adventure and Europe beckoned. There was no Travel CUTS (at least not in Halifax, Nova Scotia) so I walked directly into the Air Canada ticket office and on the advice of a friend, asked for a return ticket to Lisbon. Of course, there were no direct flights between Halifax and Lisbon but there was one flight per week to London. As the crow flies, Halifax is actually marginally closer to Lisbon than it is to London and because of international airline rules in those days, the London-Lisbon return legs were absolutely free. They couldn’t charge you to double back a ways towards your originating city. It was wonderful, at least for those of us flying out of Halifax and I should add that the whole thing came to the grand total of $156CAD, all taxes included. Oh, the London-Lisbon legs as well as the return from LHR to Halifax were open-dated and no fee was charged whenever one wanted a date change! Did I mention $156CAD?!

After a couple of days in London I connected with three friends from Halifax and decided that the Highlands of Scotland were calling to us. So we rented a Vauxhall (that’s an English car) and after two hours of chaos sorting out driving on the wrong side of the road and then British roundabouts, finally found ourselves on the M1 Motorway in the correct lanes hurtling to The North. We arrived initially in Glasgow and checked out an address of some friends of a friend which proved to be in a condemned building. This was in the middle of the Gorbles, the notorious slums of Glasgow, now thankfully gone. We spent a few hours in this wee hell-hole watching a number of Glaswegian hippies consuming copious amounts of alcohol as well as a prestigious amount of contraband materials and as they had all passed out by midnight, we jumped back into the Vauxhall and drove to Edinburgh.  

Apart from a late night run-in with Incarnate Evil, we all agreed that Edinburgh was the nicer of the two cities and we stayed there for several days.  Upon arrival, we decided to sleep in the car for what was left of the night and did so in the parking lot of a large factory. It wasn’t long before we all had noticed an apparition in one of the factory’s massive and barred windows which looked very much like a 20 foot high robed figure intent at getting out at us. The tension in the Vauxhall was palatable until one of the girls pointed out that it was only a large curtain blowing around in the wind and that we should really try to sleep. Calm was restored and the Vauxhall was, for a short while, a sea of peace and tranquility.

Ever vigilant, two thoughts occurred to me that I felt I had to share with the others. Firstly, I noted that it was unlikely that the South East Scottish Coal Board (or whatever ) was into “window treatment” and that artfully arranged sheer curtains were certainly not commonplace in heavy industry. Secondly, I wondered aloud just why there would be a strong wind inside the building when it was perfectly calm outside. No one slept for what was left of the night. By dawn, it was evident that there certainly were no curtains at all in that window. Someone proposed breakfast and we all agreed.

We never did make it into the Highlands largely because the Vauxhall fell apart one morning near the battlefield of Bannockburn where King Robert the Bruce avenged the death of Mel Gibson. So we retreated back to London and after a number of adventures which would be inappropriate to recount, I decided to take that flight to Lisbon and see what it was like. Apart from being a police state at that point in time, I rather liked Portugal.

Myself and another Canadian I met in Lisbon decided that Morocco was our ultimate destination and found ourselves on a 15 hour bus ride from Lisbon to Seville in Spain which was also a police state at the time. (They have since invented motorways and democracy in that neck of the woods!) I have only two memories about that visit to Seville. One was the tomb of Columbus (well, one of them as some years later I saw the other one in Santo Domingo, capital of the Dominican Republic.) The other was the constant search for toilet paper but we won’t go there. The next day had us on a bus heading to Algeciras and the ferry to Tangiers.

As the ferry slipped pass the great rock of Gibraltar, we had a political science  lesson. A huge aircraft carrier was just putting out to sea from that bastion of the British Empire and the Royal Navy. We were whistling “Rule Britiannia, Britannia rules the waves” , a very stirring little patriotic ditty when we noticed that the carrier was actually the USS John F Kennedy! Well… Britannia used to rule the waves!

Excitedly, we stepped on to the continent of Africa and the culture shock experienced by North Americans in Western Europe went up by several notches. It was my first time in the “developing world” and we could not believe the street scenes. The hustling was beyond imagination. As we trooped around the Casbah looking for cheap digs, we had a following of what seemed to be thousands of people, most of whom had something to sell. But apart from the maddened crowds, Tangiers was magical for us. We had, for all intent, stepped into another century. This was particularly evident at night as the long-robed and hooded population seemed to drift by us in an almost spectral fashion.

After a couple of days in Tangiers and an overnight in Casablanca which proved to be far less romantic than the film, we made it to Marrakesh naturally encouraged by the latest Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young ditty of the day, the Marrakesh Express. We spent several weeks living there and prided ourselves on the fact that we could manage very nicely on about $2.00USD per day. This naturally excluded the big weekly treat which was a full breakfast at the local Holiday Inn! I remember the first morning and I volunteered to go out and buy  something for breakfast and soon found a vendor walking along with a huge wicker basket filled with oranges. I quickly established a price of 3 Dirhams, about 60 cents and I assumed that would give me a dozen of them. However, once I paid out the money, the gentleman smiled, passed me the entire basket and went his merry way! We were both thrilled…. He had likely double-charged me but we had a weeks supply of oranges! 

After an interminable time in Marrakesh, my Canadian friend and I bought a train ticket back to Tangiers. Third class was the cheapest way to go if you didn’t mind the odd chicken landing in your lap. We discovered that one could keep buying tickets from the conductor so we pushed on towards the Algerian border with the intention of crossing that country into Tunisia and then taking the ferry from Tunis to Palermo in Sicily. Nobody mentioned Oujda to us until we got there.

Oujda is the last town in Morocco before the Algerian border. You don’t change trains there as there is no other train to change over to. This was the fatal flaw in our travel planning. It seems that the Moroccans and Algerians had such unbridled love for one another that they tore up the tracks for a few miles on both sides of the border so they couldn’t invade one another too easily. So after a night at the Oujda Youth Hostel, we had to take a taxi to the Algerian border which cost us 15 Dirham. After successfully exiting Moroccan Immigration, we quickly established that there was no way to change Moroccan Dirhams for Algerian Dinars. In retrospect, this should have been no big thing as we were living on about $2CAD per day at the time. But, a Moroccan soldier directed us to a robed gentleman squatting behind their guardhouse who was a veritable Thomas Cook.

We excepted his most unattractive rate of 10 Moroccan Dirhams for 5 Algerian Dinars  and proceeded across No-Mans-Land to the Algerian guard post where we were greeted with the sight of a French traveller being caught with hashish and dragged off by Algerian police to some unpleasant fate. I reached into my little passport pouch (sewn by my dear old mother) to bring out my documents and realised that there were certain traces, mere traces, of a well-known Moroccan agricultural product in evidence in the pouch. While I was considering the quality and quantity of toilet paper available to Canadians in Algerian prisons, I heard the official ask to see our Algerian visas. My friend was ready to argue about the need for a visa to pass through their be-knighted country. I, on the other hand, was a model of cooperation and understanding and more than prepared to return to Morocco to secure a Transit Visa.

So to my great relief, we left the Algerian post and marched quickly and sharply back to hospitable Morocco, stopping by of course for a quick transaction with the Thomas Cook or if you prefer, Algerian Express, agent squatting behind the shack. Having little choice, and no Dirhams, we accepted his exchange rate of 10 Algerian Dinars for 5 Morrocan Dirhams. The cab driver was awaiting us on the Moroccan side with a wide smile and charged us 30 Dirhams for the ride back to Oujda where he took us directly to the Algerian consulate although we hadn’t indicated that as a destination. Did these guys see us coming or what?!!! 

Try to imagine spending five days in Oujda, Morocco. There was not a great deal to do as it really was the middle of nowhere. We met three American guys with a windowless van who were heading to Tunis and offered us a lift. By the second day into Algeria, I was running a very high fever and my  coughing, which had been persistent for some time, was getting quite nasty. I should add that this was December so even North Africa was not what you would call “a day at the beach” at that time of the year. I was semi-delirious by the time we hit the Tunisian border and the guard there really didn’t like the look of me and was refusing to admit me into the country. Luckily, one of the Americans was a natural born salesman and convinced the guy that I was merely suffering from a hang-over and we drove on to the city of Tunis.

After checking us into a seedy hotel, the boys went off in search of the Canadian  Embassy and they arrived back at the hotel with the Second Secretary in tow who pronounced that they had to get me to a clinic and quick. Within an hour, I was admitted to the Hopital Charles Nicoll with pneumonia where I was to spend the next several weeks. I am told that my friends had to be quite insistent that fresh sheets be put on my bed as some poor chap had the misfortune of dying in it an hour earlier. It all meant nothing to me as I was past caring about much. By the next day, I was still in rough shape but capable of rational thought. It was an improvement. My friends came by to visit and in the case of our American friends, to say good-bye as they were heading to Palermo the next day. I convinced my Canadian friend ( we had met in Lisbon) to go with them as there was little he could do for me and the Embassy knew where I was. After some argument, he concurred and I haven’t laid eyes on any of them ever since. 

I spent six weeks in this public hospital which had over 40 beds in my ward. Meals were served by two women with blue facial tattoos and this was far from haute cuisine. They always had two huge, steaming canisters on a trolley, one filled with what I called pig swill and the other looked so bad I couldn’t even name it. I lived on lettuce, oranges and yogurt for the entire time. Once a week, the Second Secretary would come by with some books and treats and we became quite friendly over time. I spoke no Arabic but my high school French helped considerably in chatting with the other patients.

There proved to be one other “English patient” in the establishment and he was from Ghana. He was in a special room with a permanent police escort as he had just been arrested living at the Tunis Hilton with a stolen American Express Card. He claimed it was all a mistake, of course. So from time to time, once I was sufficiently mobile, I would wander down to his room for a chat. My visits became less frequent as all he wanted to do was read to me his poetry about “Africa, the Awakening Giant”.

To cut to the chase here, after six weeks the Second Secretary decided that the hospital was probably killing me and demanded my release. He was probably right! And it was quite neat being the focus of a potential “international incident”. The head doctor had kindly put my passport in his safe at home but had gone to Paris for two weeks. So stuck, I stayed with the Second Secretary and his pregnant wife in their home for the two weeks and convalesced quite nicely. And the “Royal Bank of Mom and Dad” back home arranged for a return ticket to Halifax via Paris and Montreal and I arrived home at midnight one night demanding a peanut butter sandwich!! Hey, a guy has his priorities!

Twenty years later I received a letter from a young woman at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario which caused me something of a jolt. It started: “Dear Mr Smith, we sort of met 20 years ago when you stayed with my folks in Tunis. I say “sort of” because I was an embryo at the time.”  She was writing to me looking for a summer job and one of the SWAP staff was heading that way the next day for a promotional talk. She interviewed the student who ended up working for us in Toronto for two summers. That summer, her dad (the Second Secretary) had just returned from Bangladesh where he had been the Canadian High Commissioner (Ambassador) and this allowed me to finally thank him by sending up a nice bottle of single malt scotch for his 50th birthday. 

Prologue: It’s true that I never again did run into the Americans who drove us across Algeria and I would never remember their names anyway. I started this tale off by noting that these were ancient times before “information technology” even as a concept had a name. So it is also true that I never ran into my Canadian buddy ever again either even though we were both from Halifax. So, I shall take advantage of this “information technology” stuff and ask if anyone foolish enough to have read this story might have a father/uncle/grandfather named Terry Irwin who went to Dalhousie University in the late 1960’s. If you know him, ask him to email me care of swapinfo@swap.ca . I’m sure we would both like to know what ever happened to one another! And so I will be sure that it’s him, he should mention the name of the one mutual friend that we had in Halifax even though we had not known one another there.

David Smith

Face it. All backpackers are likely to encounter situations that can really test you. They can send your plans into a whirlwind, cause arguments with other travelers or end your trip completely. In the face of adversity, it’s always best to take a deep breath, relax and understand that others probably go through what you are experiencing.

You’ve come so far along to plan this trip, why let these petty situations ruin it? Luckily, if you are human and you have traveled, you might be able to recognize some of these scenarios most Backpackers face.

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Photo above by ndanger

Hard won and filled with spending potential, your rupees – dollars – Euros – pounds – dinars are an essential part of any trip.

But that overloaded wallet you are carrying – with phone numbers, business cards, and photographs – is a rather insecure basket to store your cash. A few carefully stashed bills can be the insurance policy that gets you that train ticket, that hospital bed stay, that bottle of red wine, or that emergency call home.

Here are ten places you can stash some cash… more>

Solo travel has so many bonuses – you can go where you want, when you want without worrying about asking or even informing anyone else. But it can also be hellishly lonely and while the transient travel companions you meet on tours and in hostels can be a lot of fun, sometimes it’s nice to have someone a little more permanent around to share your adventures with.

Of course, travelling with your partner can be trying. We’re talking the most intensive experience a relationship could face – 24 hours a day of travel’s awesome highs and hideous lows. Nothing will bond you more than taking your first surfing lesson together, flying over Everest, or clutching each other as you glimpse your first wild elephant. But things can get a little trying when you’re stranded without a bed for the night after a 30-hour train ride from hell or making your fifteenth trip to the bathroom thanks to a questionable plate of street meat.

There’s always a chance your trip will wear holes in your relationship, but if all goes to plan, there’s no better way to get to know your partner – and travelling will provide you with something to talk about for the rest of your lives. To help ensure you end up on the latter path, here are a few tried and tested tips* for travelling with a loved one – and making sure you still love them when you head home!

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Saint Patrick’s Day, the 17^th March, is a date etched upon all Irishmen’s hearts. Originally a Catholic festival celebrating Ireland’s patron saint, it’s now a bank holiday in both Ireland and Northern Ireland and is the one day a year where all things Irish are celebrated long into the night from fiddle playing and folk music to outlandish leprechaun costumes, four-leafed clovers and the Pogues greatest hits on repeat on the pub juke box.

Of course its also an excuse for a jolly good knees up, and no party Irish style would be complete without a pint or two of the Emerald Isle’s most famous beverage- Guinness.

With thousands of people expected to descend upon Dublin to celebrate Paddy’s Day at the home of St James’ Gate- the Guinness capital of the world- two Dublin hostels are offering guests a free pint for every night booked over the holiday period on selected accommodation.

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• 1. Grosvenor Hotel, Blackpool, United Kingdom
• 2. Villaggio Club Porto Ainu, Budoni, Italy
• 3. Park Hotel, London, United Kingdom
• 4. Boston Court Hotel, London, United Kingdom
• 5. Cromwell Crown, London, United Kingdom
• 6. Dam Hotel, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
• 7. Corbigoe Hotel, London, United Kingdom
• 8. Earls Court Gardens Hotel, London, United Kingdom
• 9. Blair Victoria & Tudor Inn Hotel, London, United Kingdom
• 10. Minster Hotel, York, United Kingdom

Looks like the UK dominated this list! So have you stayed at any of these dirty hostels?