Photo of the Moment: Lost Desert Artifacts, Africa © Vagabondish.

Photo of the Moment: Lost in the Arizona Boneyard, Avra Valley © Vagabondish.

Photo of the Moment: New Year Dawn on Sunshine Coast, Queensland © Vagabondish.

Photo of the Moment: Fire of the Setting Sun, Thailand © Vagabondish.

You can check out the whole video at Brian’s store. Trust me, it’s worth every penny of the $15 price tag.

Hilarious Take on Flying, Air Travel and Other Ridiculous Airline “Stuff” [Video] © Vagabondish.

Going out into the world means unplugging from your normal social life. It means leaving the tribe. Man is a social creature, and we fear nothing more than isolation. In the olden days, traveller’s were forced to ‘go native’ and adapt to the local culture in order to socialize and remain sane. Now, thanks to the Internet, it’s possible to travel around the globe without disconnecting from friends and family.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to chat with the folks back home, but there IS a dangerous temptation to overdue it. I’ve lost count of the kids I’ve seen in hostels, spending whole days staring at their laptops in isolated corners rather than socializing or exploring. The Internet makes it easier than ever to blot out the real world.

To gain the full value of the travelling experience, you must go out and be social. Here are a few tips for travellers looking for ways to connect with the local culture.

#1: A Crowded Bus Is Your Friend

See crowded buses and other forms of public transportation as a blessing, not a curse. Being crammed like sardines into a tiny seat may be uncomfortable, but it’s also an excuse to talk. Strike up a conversation with your neighbor. Some folks may be reticent at first. Don’t take offense, they’re probably just worried you’re a crazy street person or an axe murderer.

Television crime dramas and mystery novels have us trained to suspect our neighbors of all manner of horrific intentions. Part of becoming a world citizen is getting over the pervasive paranoia that divides us from our fellow man. Sure, some people are dangerous psychopaths, but they make up a small minority (and can usually be bludgeoned into unconsciousness with a laptop case or spare ball-peen hammer … I mean … if you have to).

If you make a habit of introducing yourself to all manner of people, a few of them are bound to rebuff your attempts at conversation. Don’t push the matter, but don’t let it sour you on future tries. I’ve met some fascinating people standing at bus stops or taking shelter under an overhang in the driving rain. If you can’t think of a good opening line the phrase, “I’m bored. What’s going on in this town?” works more often than you’d think.

Shenzen Night Scene, China © Robert Scoble

#2: Tours Force Travelers to Socialize (and Most Tours Are Dirt Cheap)

If the place you’re visiting happens to be a tourist hotspot with some real history behind it, you’ll be able to do one or two tours a day for weeks on end without running out of options. Cities like Dublin, Madrid, France and Rome have no shortage of sights to see and organized groups to see them with. Tour groups force you to interact with people from all around the world.

The best thing they do is take the worry of planning out of your hands. When I’m out exploring on my own, I’m limited by how far away from my base I think I can safely navigate. With a tour, you’ve got locals guiding you from place to place. That makes it safe for you to drink, socialize, and wander more than you might do otherwise.

#3: Make Some Friends Before You Visit

Thanks to the Internet, you can get to know people who live worlds away before you ever fly there. Before setting out on any overseas trip, do a Google search for forums of interesting local groups. Whether it’s re-enactment groups or artists communities or filthy pagan hippies, chances are you can find interesting locals talking on the Internet. Join up, tell them when you’ll be travelling and ask for advice.

If you don’t speak the local lingo, try searching for expatriate communities in the area. There are loads of great expat blog and forums, all of which are full of people you can contact and (maybe) even meet up with.

Check out:

• Ex-Pat Blog.com. Great site filled with friendly, informative people.
• Easy Expat.com. Filled with good info, requires a registration.
• Expat Women. Good general info site for women looking to live overseas. Great links to local expat groups.
• Inter-Expat. Links a lot of expatriate bloggers together.

Getting into contact with ex-pats gives you an experienced outsiders look at whatever country you’re visiting. Foreigners living in foreign countries tend to know the safe places to visit, how NOT to get ripped off, and easy, safe ways to connect with local color.

Bar Friends in Chicago, Illinois © glennharper

#4: Don’t Underestimate The Value Of The Mundane

One of the best ways to get perspective on the world is to visit a foreign LAN center. Gaming is something people do all over the world. It doesn’t matter if you’re in Mexico, Canada, Denmark or China, you’ll find LAN centers filled with kids playing a lot of the same titles.

You’ll learn more about real life in Sydney listening to people bitch about their jobs in a bar than you will touring the Opera House.

If you’re visiting a country with widespread Internet access, you’ll probably find at least one gaming center. Go in, find a game you’re familiar with, and soak in a little bit of local color while you play. If gaming isn’t your thing, you can find much the same experience by chatting up folks at a local comic shop, going to the movies, or even doing your laundry at a laundromat. Watching foreigners go about their daily lives gives us insight into our own.

Visiting monuments and taking tours of parks and world heritage sites is all well and good, but it doesn’t always inundate you with the local culture. There’s something to be said for the simple joy of people watching. You’ll learn more about real life in Sydney listening to people bitch about their jobs in a bar than you will touring the Opera House. There’s a certain candid truth in the slurred words of a drunk that even the best tour guides can’t quite fake.

4 Ways to Beat Traveler’s Loneliness (and Truly Connect with Local Culture) © Vagabondish.

Photo of the Moment: Seeing the Light on a Rainy Day, Santo Domingo © Vagabondish.

Photo of the Moment: Into the Blue in Chelsea, NYC © Vagabondish.

But don’t fret! What follows here is no invitation to the pity party, nor some ill-disguised plea to drop what you’re doing right this instant and send more stuff. Quite the contrary, in fact, considering the cardboard boxes scattered around my room, dusty remnants of a different me.

That sounds dramatic. But it’s the truth, laid bare, and the kind of realization that couldn’t have clicked until someone broke into my house and decided to fling stuff all over the floor. My stuff. Mountains of it, far more than anyone could ever plausibly need, but it was my property, people, and some of it was missing.

There, wading deep into the mess of my room, it hit me: holy hell, I have a lot of crap.

The knee-jerk reaction was anger. The later, more measured response was a blind rage, an itching to shout and stomp that didn’t fade until I sucked in a big breath and stopped to survey the damage. And there, wading deep into the mess of my room, it hit me: holy hell, I have a lot of crap.

I almost laughed. Not the normal reaction, sure, but there’s the kicker, the wake-up call shining like the (not stolen!) lamp toppled over at my feet. Ready for it?

I got robbed, yeah. And I’ll tell you why it was one of the best things that could have ever happened to me.

Alone © elward-photography

Cue the Introspection!

Think about it. Seasoned travelers, well-accustomed to long stretches on the road, often go about their business with little weight attached: the contents of a backpack, ideally, plus whatever knickknacks pop up along the way. Does this make for comfortable living? Nah. But this no-frills existence invites an entirely different approach to life, one that puts emphasis on places and people over things.

For days on end we live with a smile, building incredible adventures with little beyond what we can shove in our pack. And then we check back into society, stepping off that return flight and right back into the familiar culture of home. We come back to houses and apartments and mortgages and debts, walls and shelves sagging under the weight of the useless crap we accumulate during our regular, normal routine.

Put simply, we come home to stuff. And frankly, we need to cut this out. Don’t believe me? Take a count of the many innocent little items cluttering your desk. Add to that the number of boxes stuffed in your closet, and top that off with how many DVDs in your collection that you haven’t watched in months.

Got your number? Good. There’s no trick to this, really: whatever that magic number is, it’s probably way too high.

You dump most of it when you go traveling, don’t you? So why do you need it now?

$100K Junk Pile in Birmingham, Alabama © Southernpixel

We’re All Guilty

The first sign, I think, was that brand-spankin’ new computer monitor dropped in a hurry by the front door. The second sign? The realization that a tornado had come crashing through my room in the few hours I’d been gone, spilling all my precious stuff to the floor. That’s a hard sight to come home to, for all the obvious reasons, but what followed managed to be even less thrilling: the arrival of the cops, nervous glances at the door, and reluctant calls to my roommates to describe in detail everything they’d lost.

Fun times, that. But what stuck in my mind long after that night was a single line given to the man with the badge: “Me? I just lost a monitor and some games. Got lucky, I guess.”

Lucky. Right. Looking at the colorful chaos in my room, the realization that I’d have to spend the better part of two weeks trying to put the pieces back together seemed like everything but a thumbs-up from the powers that be. How much time had I wasted already trying to keep everything tidy? Why did I have so much stuff in the first place? When had I managed to fill every inch of my closet and shelves with stacks of papers and boxes and clothes and … things?

That’s life, it seems – an endless parade of acquisition, the steady yearning to buy, buy, buy until the walls surrounding you burst at the seams. It’s a difficult cycle to ignore, even for those who’d rather spend every living moment on the road, but that little fact might make the change more important than ever.

Small Steps

Those dusty boxes now stacked in my room? Signs of progress, if you’ll believe it, visible proof of the push to free myself from the culture of stuff. The process hasn’t been easy – selling is way harder than buying – but the clutter is vanishing, slowly, fading like the memories of a room so cluttered I couldn’t see the carpet.

Cathartic? Definitely. Time spent organizing the endless mess is now time spent living, a change so simple and wonderful that the next step fell in line almost immediately: stop buying. That sounds a little extreme, I’ll admit, but putting it in practice warrants just a few tweaks – think renting versus purchasing, borrowing versus owning, and so forth.

You’ll need food, sure. And you’ll need clothing, transportation, and entertainment – and that’s fine. You don’t ask for much more than those basic necessities whenever you travel, so adopting a similarly lean lifestyle at home is half the battle. The other part requires a little digging, a few solid minutes of meditation on one of the most important questions you can ever ask yourself: what do you need to live?

Not much, I promise.

Here’s the obvious hint: you don’t need stuff. You need friends and family, memories and experiences, and a firm kick in the rear to realize that all of those are closer than you think. We might firmly associate each of them with travel. But even that attitude warrants readjustment, a reshaping to include a simple truth: the most amazing times of your life are waiting at home, too, if you’d just put down the stuff for one second and take a look around.

It’s easier than you think. Sure, it took a robbery for yours truly to realize it, but there’s no sense waiting for a stroke of bad luck to take your life into your own hands. Dump the stuff. Kick the crap to the curb, take a deep breath, and start focusing on what counts: three-hundred and sixty-five chances each year to live life to its fullest. The friendships and memories that naturally follow will endure far longer than anything you could find on a store shelf.

How Getting Robbed Saved Me from the ‘Culture of Stuff’ © Vagabondish.

Photo of the Moment: Morning Bromo, Indonesia © Vagabondish.