A buddy of mine has been on an epic trip across Eurasia, and adventure he calls Off Silk Roadin’. His blog is a fairly long form recounting of his tales, but I recommend checking it out mixed in with browsing through his pictures on Flickr. He’s done some in depth touring in places that are often forgotten by travellers, and without saying it, gives a powerful recommendation for going to the Asian Steppes.

One of his best talents is starting conversations with strangers and thereby making friends and getting a much better place for where he is visiting. One quick tale for example:

I popped into a Photo studio for some visa pictures. The three guys who ran the shop were Armenian and eagerly recounted the histry of their families, which lived in what is now northeastern Turkey (where we had just come from) before the “Armenian Genocide” (something I have to learn more about having heard so many conflicting accounts. They sat around, solved crosswords, drank coffee, brewed us a tasty batch, and when they got wind of our journey, pulled out an old Soviet Atlas, pointed at things and recounted stories of their service in the Soviet Army that took them places where we were going to go. A sailor came in and introduced himself as a “semen” (seaman) and when I took a picture of him, suggested I not post it since he travels to the US frequently, and doesn’t want to be listed in the rolodex of the CIA (to which I was presumably contributing.) We encountered this kind of Soviet relic paranoia in several instances, particularly Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan so far.

And tales like that with some of these pictures, and I get that itch on my feet and can hear the open road whispering in my ear.

With a price tag of $10k I’m not the target audience for this adventure, but I’ve very tempted to make my own Global Scavenger Hunt. In their game, you are given a travel itinerary and a set of tasks to complete in each location. I imagine that for a couple in their 40s-50s who are looking for a brief taste of backpacker style adventure it is just about right.

The basic idea of a scavenger hunt is great, I think it’s just the way they play that isn’t right. How about this for a set of rules:

1. There are 100 different tasks with a variable number of points for perceived difficulty (ie: visit the highest and lowest points on a continent within 72 hours – 50 points, sail across an ocean – 75 points, visit as many countries as possible in 24 hours – 1 point per country)
2. No flights longer than 1 hour.
3. You have 365 days to gather as many points as possible at meet back at the starting point.
4. Each team has $10,000 per member starting money, but you can spend any other money that you earn during the year.
5. Teams can have any number of members, but all members must be present for every activity for points to count.

If you ask me, that would make for a hell of a year of adventure. I bet you could even make a pretty wicked show out of it, which might help pay for prizes for the winning team. And it would certainly be a better way to spend $10k traveling if you ask me.

There are scores of companies that are willing to give away something fairly valuable in exchange for giving them your email address and touch of demographic information. I’m not really a gambling mad, but I’m willing to hand out my email address (my spam address of course) in exchange for a slight chance to win a trip. If you’re of the same mindset and have an hour to burn, you might want to enter all of these:

• Cafe Direct to Peru
• Outside Magazine climb Mt. Rainier
• J.Crew shopping spree in New York City
• Honey Bunched of Oats escape to the Caribbean
• Travel Channel to Charlton, SC (really Travel Channel? That’s the best you’ve got? REALLY?)
• Viv Magazine to Fiji
• Johnson’s Body Care to U.S. Virgin Islands
• Ultimate Thailand Explorers competition (like the Taiwan explorers contest)
• Marriott tweet and facebook your way to Hawaii
• Hell’s Kitchen to Whistler, Canada
• Schick make your own adventure
• Grand Marnier to Las Vegas
• Islands magazine has 7 contests at the moment, none of which are to Bouvet Island
• Starwood hotels sweepstakes for enough hotel points to stay anywhere and a rental car to get there
• Good Hair (the movie) for a cruise
• Virginia tourism commission to Virginia
• Couples Retreat (another movie) to Tahiti
• PADI honeymoon diving trip to Roatan
• Rainy Day Records to the Grammy Awards
• National Geographic to see the Tarra Cotta Warriors in China

I’m sure there are other travel sweepstakes out there, so if you know of any, please post them in the comments. And less cross our fingers that someone in the Questing for Adventure communty scores one of these trips!

CBS’s David Price is on an interesting seven day adventure across America with only $50 and an arsenal of hand-held technology to connect to every form of social media which he’ll use to find rides and lodging as he goes. I should make for an interesting week, and of course because mainstream media loves social media – hours of television.

Call me old fashioned though, but it seems like it would be a much cooler challenge to do that trip without the social media help and the notoriety of being on TV. Just hitching and couchsurfing your way across the country. Not that the social media way of doing it isn’t cool, It’d be a great trip and a cool way to involve other people in the journey. But perhaps a bit selfishly, I think it would a cooler trip just talking to folks along the way and seeing how far you can get.

To follow along with David’s trip, you can check out his page on CBS, Twitter, or Qik.

Today if the first day of the 2009 Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta. It’s the biggest gathering of hot air balloons in the world and the most photographed event in the world. If there’s anything that makes me a little bit homesick for the place I grew up (other than friends and family of course), the Balloon Fiesta is it.

I can’t recommend the Balloon Fiesta highly enough. You spend your mornings checking out the Balloons and then in the afternoons have time to kick around the town and surrounding mountains. If I were to plan a long weekend for Balloon Fiesta, my itinerary would look something like this:

Day 1: 5 AM – 9 AM watch the first mass assertion, 600 balloons taking off as quickly as possible, from the Balloon Fiesta grounds. Then take the Sandia Peak Tram to the top of the Sandia Mountains and see the Balloons from above as they continue to drift around and start to land. Then take a good long hike along the crest trail and eat a leisurely lunch at High Finance overlooking Albuquerque. Take the tram back down and wander your way back to the Balloon Fiesta for the balloon glow and fireworks.

Day 2: 4:30 AM arrive early to crew for a balloon – registration is closed for this year, but as you’re planning your trip check back and sign up. You’ll then spend the morning helping getting a balloon in the air and then back to ground and packed up. With any luck you’ll also have a chance to take a ride in the balloon too (I did when i crewed). Then spend the day in Albuquerque, maybe having some delicious New Mexican food with your crew mates or checking out Old Town Albuquerque. In the evening drive up to into the foot hills and see if you can spot any balloons over the city.

Day 3:If there are any events like the special shapes rodeo (imagine giant balloons in the shapes of cows, dinosaurs, motorcycles, etc – it’s cool) then head back for one last early morning. Otherwise head up to Santa Fe for the day, and back to Albuquerque for an evening flight home. Don’t forget to grab a last taste of New Mexico at La Hacienda Express in the airport.

If you have more time, of course you should crew multiple days so that you can try out chase crew – following the balloon form the ground so you can be there when they land. You could also give yourself a little more time to explore the mountains around Albuquerque, the Sandias and Manzanos offer some beautiful short camping trips. But even with s few short days I promise you that you’ll have a great time.

Photo: Coolgates

His trip is almost up, but I just learned about Terminal Man, a fella named Brendan who was sponsored by Wired to fly just about everywhere JetBlue goes in a one month. It sounds like a pretty wild ride. He’s getting a bit of a raw deal though in that he has to stay in the airports, but if you took the basic trip idea – flying an airline’s route map – and give yourself a bit of time to see the sights it could make for an great adventure

At first I thought that JetBlue was a perfect candidate for this type of trip. Since they fly all over the US it seems like you could just hop around anywhere. After clicking through their route map though, it looks like everything has you bouncing through Boston, JFK, and Orlando. If you’re going to end up going to the same places, why not extend your scope a little bit and fly the Emirates route map or fly around the US on Southwest that doesn’t require you to keep skipping back through hubs. They may not offer JetBlue’s all you can fly pass, but I’m sure that if you if you talked to them about it as an advertising opportunity then you could work something out.

I got a taste of my first ever film festival this week in Toronto in the Form of TIFF, the Toronto International Film Festival with the film Life During Wartime. It started off feeling a bit like an inconvenient and over-priced film. We had to wait in line outside, paid $21, and had to sit in the second row. But once the film started there was a sense of community in the theatre that I’ve only felt at big midnight releases like Lord of the Rings and Star Wars. People cheered, laughed, gasped together. It was great. Then, at the very end of the credits, three of the main actors and the two producers came out for a 20 minute question and answer session. A brilliant end to a good movie.

The great thing about the festival is that it last a solid week, which would make for a a great short holiday. You could book tickets ahead, see a couple of films each day, and explore and enjoy the city with the rest of your time. Sounds like a pretty perfect and relaxing getaway after the little taste that I had.

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?

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.

If the idea of a burger pilgrimage sent you of scheming up an itinerary, then Travel and Leisure has some lists to help you out. Check out their run downs of the best burger restaurants in American (though the list doesn’t include the two I put in my pilgrimage outline) and best fast food restaurants around the world. It’s hard to see planning a trip solely around burgers unless you are an absolute devotee, but if you’re in the neighborhood of any of these places, they’re probably worth checking out.

Photo: Marshall Astor – Food Pornographer under creative commons.