I enjoy traveling alone. One of the biggest reasons is that I like meeting people – especially the type of people that find themselves wandering around solo like me. When you are on your own, you tend not just to meet folks, but end up traveling together and having an opportunity to get to know each other.  

The group pictured above is a perfect example of the fun folks one tends to run into traveling alone. From left to right:

Aaron and I met in Chefchaouen, a beautiful little town in the Rif Mountains. I proposed a hike up in the mountains, and he was the only person daft enough to want to spend a day climbing a mountain when then temperature was well over 35C. We got along well and decided to stick together as we travelled south through Fes and down to Marrakesh.

AnneLise was staying at the hostel where I found myself on my first night in Morocco. She was working at a local charity for a month, and so we swapped contact info to meet up when I came back to Marrakesh in a week.

Aziz was had an extra room in his apartment, which AnneLise had rented out for a month shortly after I met her. As the local guy, he knew where to rent motorbikes, and was able to point us in the right direction for a fun day out from Marrakesh.

If it weren’t for the US presidential election, UN summit, and global financial melt-down, the media would likely be paying a good deal of attention to a hostage situation in Southern Egypt. Kidnappers have taken 11 tourists and 8 Egyptians and are demanding €6m ransom.

I hope that the hostages are well, and that this situation sorts itself out peacefully. I also hope that future adventurers aren’t scared away from Gilf al-Kebir, where this incident is taking place, because it sounds like a very interesting place, as BBC described today:

At the southern end of the plateau is the mountain range of Jebel Uweinat, effectively an area of no-man’s land between the Sudanese, Libyan and Egyptian borders.

Here, the jurisdiction of national authorities blurs, and is ill defined.

The Lonely Planet guidebook to Egypt barely mentions the region. One of the book’s authors described the area to the BBC simply as “damned remote”.

Not to knock the pyramids and the rest of the standard Egyptian tourist route, but Gilf al-Kebir sounds like my kind of place. As such I imagine the hostages there aren’t too different from me, so my thoughts are with them.

Somehow today was declared global Millennium Development Goal (MDG) blogging day. The MDG’s are the world’s answer to extreme poverty, a massive effort by all countries to drastically curtail the scourge of extreme poverty and global disease by 2015.

If you’ve ever travelled the developing world, you know just how crucial it is that we come together and end this massive injustice that shames our sense of humanity. If you haven’t travelled to the developing world, make that your next trip and take a friend.

Photo credit: me, from Sapa, Vietnam.

ProTraveller has a post up today about some unusual hotels in Asia. They list out our some pretty cool places, but they are all a bit too obvious for my taste.

I like my crazy hotels to be places that aren’t putting forth an outright effort to be ridiculous, but are crazy just by virtue of what or where they are. For example, when I was in Osaka, my friend and I stayed in the Nagai Youth Hostel, which – much to our surprise since we booked it over the phone – is located inside of Nagai Stadium, the 50,000-seat home of Cerzo Osaka.

The hostel wasn’t trying to be outrageous, and it certainly wasn’t an overpriced tourist trap. But, it was a cool and funky place to stay, and the picture of the hostel certainly rivals the gaudy places ProTraveller lists: