Hostel Sex: A Practical Guide
Posted by admin on March 7, 2010
Source: bravenewtraveler.com
The Brave New Traveler Guide To Hostel Sex will get you out of the dorms and into sweaty, awkward bliss faster than you can say “light my fire”.
What do you get when you drop a few dozen backpackers into a hostel, soak with beer and mix in a healthy dose of liberation from social norms?
A tidal wave of hormones…and one major problem: where to go to get it on?
Unless you’re a flamboyant exhibitionist, nothing puts a damper on romantic relations like company. Dorms are almost never empty, and even when they are, the likelihood of someone barging in makes anything more than surreptitious groping an impossibility.
If you’re hankering to slide the key into the ignition and get your motor firing on all cylinders, you need to get creative, and get out of the dorms.
Unless you’re a flamboyant exhibitionist, nothing puts a damper on romantic relations like company.
First of all, let’s consider the options in and around the hostel.
Every hostel has hidden nooks and crannies that offer enough space and privacy for at least a hasty knee-trembler. You can be sure the hostel staff know about these spots, but unless you’re hooking up with one of them, asking for directions is bad form.
The trick is to know where to look, and to scout locations in advance if you’re feeling lucky. Here are some possibilities:
Lower airfares — how to get them
Posted by admin on March 5, 2010
Source: http://www.cnn.com/2009/TRAVEL/07/21/get.lower.airfares/index.html
Written by: Brad Tuttle Topic: Budget Travel
Looking for cheap airfares for your big trip abroad but suffering from search fatigue? When all else fails, try one of these tested strategies.
Strategy No.1: Start your search at Kayak.com
We find that meta-search site Kayak is the all-time best place for scoring the cheapest plane tickets. Our biggest beef with Kayak’s competitors is that, when you click to book a fare, you’re typically directed to a new page. Sometimes it’s only then that you find out your actual departure time. Or worse, you’re forced to plug in your dates and departure cities all over again, only to discover more-expensive fares.
Kayak stands apart. Once you’ve found a good flight, click on the price and you’ll be sent directly to the airline’s Web site, where the exact price for the exact flight you selected unfailingly appears.
Strategy No. 2: Use fare-history charts
It’s the classic dilemma: Should you buy the best fare you see today or wait because the price might go down? Here’s how to come up with an educated guess. Use Kayak to fetch fares for your itinerary and then click on “Show chart of fare history,” which is a link near the top left-hand corner of the search results. If the chart says that the average fare for your route is much higher than the fare you’re seeing today, then you should probably book the ticket because it’s cheap relative to historic prices.
5 Travel Lessons You Can Use at Home
Posted by admin on March 4, 2010
Source: http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2010/02/25/rolf-potts-vagabonding-travel/
Written by Tim Ferriss Topics: Mini-retirements, Travel
Rolf Potts is one of my favorite writers, and his book Vagabonding was one of only four books I recommended as “fundamental” in The 4-Hour Workweek. It was also one of two books, the other being Walden; Or, Life in the Woods, that I took with me during my 15+-month mini-retirement that began in 2004.
The following is a guest post from Rolf on the art and lessons of travel, all of which you can apply at home.
Enter Rolf:
Last fall I spoke at the excellent DO Lectures, which brings innovative thinkers from around the world for a series of talks in rural Wales (Tim was a speaker in 2008). My talk, which is available in full via the video link above encourages people to make themselves rich in time and to become active in making their travel dreams happen.
The talk itself contains essential advice and inspiration regarding travel — but what struck me on re-watching it was an improvised moment at the beginning of the talk, when I pointed out how “these aren’t really travel-specific challenges — these are things that can apply to life in general. Think of travel as a metaphor for how you live your life at home.”
Indeed, travel has a way of slowing you down, of waking you up, of pulling you up out of your daily routines and seeing life in a new way. This new way of looking at the world need not end when you resume your life at home.
Here are 5 key ways in which the lessons you learn on the road can be used to enrich the life you lead when you return home…
With Record Tourism Numbers in 2009,
The Secret’s Out on Uruguay
Posted by admin on March 2, 2010
Posted by Christina on 2/20/10
Source: http://www.olauruguay.com/2010/02/20/with-record-tourism-numbers-in-2009-the-secret-is-out-on-uruguay
It’s carnival season in many countries around the world. Though now an almost entirely secular event, historically speaking, countries with a Roman Catholic heritage would put on related celebrations and parades just prior to the observance of Lent. This past weekend, Uruguayans across the country celebrated Carnaval. Dressed in costumes and dancing to drum beats, people, from the southerly capital of Montevideo to the Northern city of Artigas, delighted in the festivities. The celebration also wrapped up the bulk of the 2010 summer season. Though the numbers from this year are still to be seen, the data is in from 2009 and it’s telling a happy tale: Uruguay had a record tourism industry year in 2009. According to MercoPress, 2.1 million visitors came to Uruguay during the year and spent almost 1.5 billion U.S. dollars.
19 Tips for Better Travel Photos
Posted by admin on November 17, 2009
Source: Ed Hewitt, The Independent Traveler
http://www.independenttraveler.com/resources/article.cfm?AID=995&category=13&page=2
It wasn’t that long ago that many travel photos were taken, developed and then dumped into boxes, rarely to be seen again — unless a basement flood forced someone to throw them all away. These days, things aren’t so different except that now the photos get dumped onto external hard drives, perhaps to await a hard drive crash instead of the proverbial basement flood.
But in most collections of vacation and travel photos, a precious few of the very best shots are often spared this fate — those photos that are somehow more enduring or more interesting, or (I think most importantly) that best capture the spirit and sensation of the trip. What is it that keeps these photos from the dustbin of our traveling history? Often they are simply better photographs. That is, the “keeper” photo isn’t of a favorite person, place or activity — it is better composed, better lit and thus simply more visually interesting than the run-of-the-mill vacation snapshot.
There are plenty of resources out there for folks with thousands of dollars of photographic equipment, but what about the rest of us — those of us with a point-and-shoot digital camera or even simply a smartphone? What can we do to get better, more lasting images from our travels? Following is a collection of low- and no-tech tips to help you improve your keeper count on your next trip.
Think “people, places, things.”
This old definition of the use of a noun is a handy guide to a great vacation photo: the best travel photos will often be about all three of these. To illustrate, let’s say you want to take a photo of the Tower of London, and it’s a rainy day in England. If you pull up your photo and snap the Tower in the gray light, you could get a decent photo. But if you put your kids in the photo (your favorite people) with the Tower glimpsed over their shoulders (the place of interest), visible just under the rim of an umbrella (a very specific thing that evokes the conditions), you have a great shot.
Get closer.
As Robert Capa famously said, “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” Taken literally, the closer you get to your subject, the more detail and interest you can capture.
There are a couple of ways to do this, both equally valid and effective. One is to use the telephoto features found on most cameras to zoom in on your subject. Before anyone cries cop-out, this can be a very effective photographic technique, and has resulted in countless compelling images in this age of big lenses.
The other is simply to walk closer to your subject. Not everyone is comfortable doing this, but the person viewing the photo will appreciate it; despite how close a zoom lens makes things appear, when viewing a photo the human eye can still sense the distance, and appreciates when an image has truly been taken up close.
Be in the thick of it.
A less literal read of Capa’s statement, and probably the one closer to his intent, suggests that Capa likes photos in which the photographer himself or herself seems to be part of what is going on, and not standing apart from the action. Capa’s solution to get more intimate, engaged photos is simply to be more intimately involved in the photo yourself.
Read more
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