Questing for Adventure

In about a week I’m going to start travelling a bunch for work. I’ll in a bunch of different cities over the next couple months and I need to figure out something fun and funky to do in each place to commemorate the trip. I’m thinking something along the lines of the famous “Where the Hell is Matt?” dance video above. I’ve got a couple of ideas, but I want to see if I can gather some ideas from everyone else out there to see if there are any cool thoughts as to what I should do. So lay the ideas on me. What should I do?

A friend pointed me in the direction of an interesting new site social recommendations travel site - Rolling Globe. It’s an interesting site, Trav Buddy, but with more of a focus on reviews and recommendations and less on social networking for globetrotters. If you need a little incentive to check it out, then it’s worth knowing that they are running a contest for a free trip to Munich for Oktoberfest if you sign up right now.

What I found most interesting about the site was the introduction post, essentially introducing the site as a place to recount the places you went as an American student studying abroad:

Sure, we opened a book or two (don’t get us wrong, we’re all for education), but what we really studied was the pulse and culture of the city in which we lived. We are firm believers that every city has the potential to be the best in the world. What determines that for each of us are the experiences and people we come across during the time we spend there.

So that’s where you come in. We’ve taken it upon ourselves to compile an insider’s guide to the world’s top destinations. Now we’ve got a good start, but we can’t do it alone… We need your advice, your memories, your good times and your bad… and a couple of uploaded photos wouldn’t hurt either… so that we really can create the ultimate travel guide from the world’s most reliable source: fellow travelers.

Other than the objection that a study abroad student’s view is hardly “insider”, I wish I could take more issue with this introduction. But the fact of the matter is that study abroad was the best travelling I’ve done in my life. If I have any advice to give on travel, the bulk of it certainly comes from the time while I was studying abroad. So I suppose I’ll take a look at what other people longing to re-live their story abroad glory have to say about places, and follow their advice as to what I should be doing. I hope they find mine useful as well.

I’ve got a lot of love for designers right now, especially those who are improving the lives of travellers and tourists. Latest hero of this ilk is Emil Jacob, who designed the airline seat/bed layout you see above. I’m sure any airline that installs a layout like this will charge a premium for them, but it ever becomes a standard layout, it seems as though the tickets should only cost half again as much as a regular coach ticket to cover the cost of the lost seat.

slide show for some other seat designs. There are some interesting ideas in there that might cost a bit extra, but would certainly make log distance flying that much more comfortable.

There were a couple of articles that I ran into over the weekend about various adventures and misadventures that I thought were worth sharing.

1. The 10 Coolest Places to Swim - a great list with pictures and videos of some places that would be amazing to explore, and most of them are in places that would be fantastic to explore beyond the cool swimming holes.
2. Tourist clings to Australia train - a teenager travelling through Australia made it back to the train station late and leapt onto the train, but he didn’t make it inside. So he clung to the outside of the train for a couple of hours, until he was finally spotted, save, and brought inside.
3. HOW TO: Plan a Vacation Using Social Media - a rundown of web tools that can help you connect with your destination and then share your experiences with friends, family, and other web denizens.

I’ve been watching South Pacific on BBC, and all the gorgeous images of tiny islands and endless ocean have got me wondering just what it would take to go explore the South Pacific. I’ve come up with a couple of options:

• Find an expedition - There are variety of organisations that run scientific or cultural expeditions. Attaching yourself to one of these is a sure ticket to a unique experience, and learn a good deal as well.
• Get a job - With some fairly basic searching, I found that there are reasonably well paying jobs, like this one, scattered around the South Pacific. Rather than taking a gap year, why not take a job in an exotic destination and use your new home as a base of exploration.

  It’s worth noting that I’m not the first person to think of this. In The Sex Lives of Cannibals The author moves with his wife as she takes a job for an NGO in Kiribati. Suffice to say that it wasn’t the paradise that he’d hoped for. But in the end the adventure won them both over. After the returned to the States, they promptly decided to head back to the South Pacific.

• On a boat - It isn’t as expensive as you might think to charter a boat to cruise around the South Pacific. Of course you need a team of at least four, and a couple of you are going to need to know how to sail.

Photo: Flickr user apdurruti under Creative Commons.

World in Focus, the biggest and best photo context of the year, is into full swing. The drawback is that it costs $12 to enter the contest, but the prizes include trips to Tanzania and St. Lucia, so I think it’s worth a shot. Also, I think winning the competition is anyone’s game, as I was very surprised by last year’s winner.

You can enter the contest here.

Photo: one that I’m thinking of submitting. It’s one of a couple of different pictures from Morocco that I like, but I’m indecisive when it comes to choices like this.

While the trend in Europe is towards disappearing boarders (yay Schengun!) the US and Mexico went the opposite direction on the first of this month:

Beginning June 1, 2009
U.S. citizens entering the United States at sea or land ports of entry are required to have documents that comply with the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative (WHTI), most commonly a U.S. passport, a passport card, a trusted traveler card such as NEXUS, SENTRI or FAST, or an enhanced driver’s license. See the complete list of WHTI-compliant documents.

On the upside hopefully that means more Americans will be getting passports and will then be encouraged to travel further afield. On the downside, it bet it means that fewer Americans will visit Mexico, and when there is less cultural interaction, everyone loses. Too bad.

Applications are open today for a new travel competition - Taiwan’s “Best Trip in the World” contest. It’s not dissimilar from Queensland’s recent contest, save one major drawback: it costs a lot to win. You have to pay for your own flights to Taiwan for the final round of the competition. Still, not a bad deal since you can win over USD 20,000 30,000 to travel around Taiwan for a month.

Photo by Jaako under Creative Commons.

Designer Dustin Curtis rightly points out that American Airline’s website sucks. The functionality you want is buried amongst all sorts of other content, and even then the search isn’t that great. And American Airlines isn’t the online airline with an annoying web page. In fact, I can’t find one I like, just ones that I don’t like, with Ryanair’s page topping the list of worst sites - it advertises flights from distant airports and the search doesn’t let you search all airports for a city.

Mr. Curtis proposes a redesign that reminds me a good deal of Kayak.com - my favourite site to search for flights. His looks like this:

The American Airline’s unofficial response to Mr. Curtis is simply depressing and reveals why airline pages sucks so hard. Quite simply: internal politics. Everyone has some vested interest in putting something on the website, and rather than focus on the other all user experience, everyone tosses something up there to make one big mess. I won’t hold my breath for a good airline site to come along, thankfully we don’t have to deal with them that much thanks to the joy of Kayak.

I think I have a different definition of the downsides of travel than lots of people. Check out of the new Titanic Awards blog, listing out some of the worst parts of travel. While agree that many of them suck - squat toilets, turbulent flights, and baggage handlers trashing luggage - there are fair number that are the type of thing I actually seek out while travelling.

For example, the video above is nominated as the world’s worst road. It looks nerve racking, but probably also good fun. Similarly, the worst commute is something I sought out while I was in Tokyo. I ended up a bit disappointed that even at rush hour in Shinjuku station in Tokyo I didn’t have a truely packed train. I guess that one person’s headache is another’s adventure.