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Photo : Flickr/vrog
Nothing like a spoonful of warm soup, or a plate of colorful variety pasta to invigorate the taste buds, especially if you cooked them yourself. Thanks to television shows and extensive newspaper articles, culinary travel, one where you satisfy your knowledge and your hunger for food while traveling, is a growing offshoot of cultural travel. Kathy Widing lists resources in The Best Guides to Learning a Culture Through its Cuisine.

Travel softens our worldviews, makes us sympathize with hardships faced by people we hardly know and enhances our understanding of cultures. Anthony Bourdain, the ‘no-reservations’ celebrity cook and television personality speaks of the way his travel around the globe brought changes to his personality in Chef Tempers Views after World Travel.

Backpacker Paul Neville finds solo travel immensely gratifying and empowering. Loneliness is part of the journey, but independent travel promotes life changing cultural immersion and valuable self-knowledge, he says in The Positives and Negatives of Solo Backpacking

Gone are the days when someone who traveled could claim sophistication and put on airs of superiority. With the plethora of information available on the Internet and guidebooks, traveling knowledgeably is no longer a reserve of the privileged few. Focusing on experiences and being less judgmental of fellow travelers makes for more pleasant journeys says John Flinn in I’m a tourist, you’re a tourist and let’s all be OK with that

Good manners sometimes means simply putting up with other people’s bad manners, says novelist Brown Jr. With increase in holiday travel, polite words and simple acts of kindness can greatly reduce the stresses of crowded airports and long check-in lines. The right attitude will let you travel without much getting on your nerves, says Marylynne Pitz in Travel manners on an airplane.

To wrap up, and to make you smile, Big Ben points out great Irish scenery while providing a crash course on Driving in Ireland

Photo: Flickr/Ced77vde
Small talk at work:
“I’m off to Mallorca for a week”, I say.
“Oh that’s lovely. It’s nice in September.”
“Overland. No plane.”

That gets their attention. “Wow. How long is that going to take?”
“Two days each way.”

Two days planned with precision, and a small, fat notebook to note my experiences. I text my father to tell him of my earth-saving strategy. “What about your boredom footprint?” he asks.

Trip notes:

17/09/2007 Dun Laoghaire – Holyhead

The ferry port is impressively silent. Check in lasts 5min, the doors are opened and we board a floating plethora of shops, bars, one-armed bandits and fruit machines. The sea is almost incidental. Seats fill up with passengers – many in their ‘golden years’.

When the ship pulls out, leaving the little red tower at the end of Dun Laoghaire pier behind, if feels different. Sadder, somehow, as if I am carrying the baggage of the many immigrants who left Ireland before me. I settle down with The Sorrows of Young Werther and do battle with seasickness. In Holyhead train station, the sense of immigrants’ anguish is reinforced as I walk across a 1970s brown, tiled extension to Platform 1 and the 2pm train to Euston. Unlike them, I will go home again. But that, sad, dusty building will never move on.
Holyhead – London Euston

The couple next to me is on the wrong train. They argue: accusations of ‘petty’, ‘smallminded’, ‘not paying attention’ fly back and forth as I continue with Werther. At Chester, I get talking to Dean, an architect. We fill out a newspaper personality test. I score high on Neuroticism and he on Conscientiousness. Another man sitting opposite is flipping through a booklet with several pictures of houses and design diagrams. I wonder if he too is an architect. Maybe the two of them could have a ‘house-off’.

The train arrives at Euston after four hours. Dean says goodbye and shakes my hand vigorously. The mysterious man looks at me, smiles, and sighs, “I thought he’d never shut up.”

Bruce (yes, he is Australian) is an architect. He is also solicitous, showing me how to use to Oyster tickets on the tube, even queuing with me when I buy one. He and I travel together as far as Bank station, where he leaves me. I admit to feeling a twinge of regret at his departure. But it’s a nice, mournful, literary sense of regret – worthy of the great travel writer Colin Thubron. Here I am making thoughtful observations about the human condition, saying goodbye to attractive people I will never see again.

18/09/2007 – 19/09/2007 London – Paris – Barcelona

At 3pm the following afternoon my Eurostar departs for Paris. I take my seat in an almost empty carriage. There is no sign of human life after the train leaves London, only vast crop fields; even the stopover on the other side, at Calais-Refrun, appears to have been dropped into the middle of deserted countryside. The effect is eerie.

At Paris there is barely time to see the sun set over the Seine before boarding the overnight train at Gare d’Austerlitz. I am booked into a cabin of four with two girls from Siberia and an older Frenchwoman. The seats become bunk beds with a sink folding out under the window; there is no spare space. We eat a late and expensive meal at 10 amid hilarity and red wine. Sleep that night on my upper bunk is fitful.

The following morning the train disgorges us all into Barcelona station. I have eight hours to kill before I catch the ferry and use up four getting thoroughly lost.

19/09/2007 Barcelona to Mallorca

My notes say, “very tired now”. On the fast ferry, I read Goodbye to All That, Robert Graves’s autobiography. He too was en route to Mallorca back then, and would have traveled on a ferry. Nice.

Trip notes: the journey back

24/09/2007 Palma – Barcelona

Unpromising start involving a missed ferry, the wrong car park, port authority police and a dented car. Let’s move on.

The later, slower ferry, allows me to go out on deck and watch Palma fade as the ship rounds the headland. After a serviceable meal, I go off and read Great Expectations. Divine Irony must have spotted my choice of title, because once I get to Barcelona He/She/It decides to frustrate them all.

25/09/2007 Barcelona – London Heathrow (ahem!)

What a disaster.

Attempt to take the train to Paris, only to be stopped from getting on by un vrai jobsworth from SNCF because I have no proper ticket.

And why not? Well, before traveling I tried to print out the ticket several times on the SNCF webpage, finally asking them if they would mind sending me the ticket by post. They refused. I tried the webpage again; it failed again. So, in spite of having made a reservation on my credit card for that night’s train, I am dumped in Barcelona at 9pm with nowhere to stay, and no chance of catching tomorrow’s Eurostar to London.

The first thing I do is to find an outrageously expensive hotel room: it’s that or the city park. Second, I book a flight with British Airways for 2pm the following day. The hell with climate change and Colin bloody Thubron. I’ve had enough.
The End

In the airport, glory of glories, my webpage printout is valid. The flight, turbulent and not cheap, is still only half the cost of my Barcelona hotel room.

My conclusion: it was worth doing as a far more sociable way of travel. But I need to stick to my principles more, and train companies need to work better. Journeys should be booked as packages, with flexible connections and cheaper prices. And no more dodgy webpages.

But there’s another obstacle: if we insist on believing we have a God-given right to fly and hang the consequences, then how can rail and sea travel even hope to compete?

About the Author :Susan Lanigan is a programmer and a writer who has had several short stories published. Interested in choral singing, walking and general eccentricity, she lives near in Bray Wicklow, Ireland and works in Dublin.

The TSM Fall Travel Writing Contest has been organized in association with On The Beach Holidays

Wanting to avoid the exorbitant salon prices at the posh hotel called the Meridien across the street, I thought I would try getting my hair cut in the nearby village of Ngor before the start of classes. My last haircut was of course in Holland, when my dear aunt coiffed me beautifully and even shared lovely milky coffee with me afterwards, and Stroopwafels – oh, the days of wine and roses!

So I entered the disreputable looking shack with a single chair and no running water or Barbicide anywhere in sight and felt misgivings immediately, but who can resist a four dollar haircut? So I sat obediently and explained that I just wanted a trim, and the man got to work with his electric shaver, going back and forth along the right side of my head until my scalp was shining through, glowing pinkly in the dark shack.

Thankfully the electricity was cut off all of a sudden (this happens frequently here, see previous column) and so we were interrupted before any further damage could be done. The barber walked me about a kilometer down the dirt road to the next barber’s hut – keep in mind that not only was I glaringly conspicuous in this village anyway because of my melanin deficiency, but that I looked like half a plucked chicken to boot!

Anyway, Barber No 2 got to work without pausing to ask what I wanted. I debated briefly as to whether or not I ought to be polite, decided the hell with it and finally just got out of the chair mid-cut before any further damage could be done. Thus it came to pass that the toubab (white) schoolteacher started classes in the first week looking awfully – well, strange. When enough hair grew back for me to finally go to the Meridien salon for a repair job, the very proper Frenchman who cut my hair ventured only to query politely whether perhaps Madame had cut her hair herself last time…?

“Almost,” replied Madame, red-faced.

The Madame/Mademoiselle distinction here is very important; everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, wants to know whether or not a single white woman is married or available. I have found elegant ways of dodging the question, frequently posed by complete strangers on the street, but most recently I was gobsmacked when a passing acquaintance (a seller of bananas at a local kiosk, to be precise) offered me free advice: if I let my hair grow, I could wear it in braids, like the locals, and by the way, I would look much better if only I would wear dangly earrings! I laughed and thanked him, telling him I very much doubted that anyone would mistake me for a local girl, even with a headful of braids, and forbearing to mention that given the lovely dusky blue of my US passport I could have been married several times over during my three month sojourn here, even without the additional inducement of earrings!

The Senegalese value female beauty, as do people all over the world, but it takes on a particularly important role in a polygamous culture where the woman lives with the certain knowledge that if she is no longer pleasing to her man, he can and will take a second wife and is moreover perfectly entitled to do so. Thus, the heads of girl babies are shaved when they are born so that their hair will grow in full and rich and luxuriant.

In certain villages, girls are still made to wear heavy necklaces and collars around their necks to elongate them, lending beauty and grace to their posture. (Carrying heavy loads, whether buckets of laundry, water or sea urchins on top of one’s head fulfills the same function, oddly enough, and Senegalese women also tend to have beautifully sculpted upper arms from securing these loads on their heads). Boy and girl babies alike are massaged with beurre de karite, or shea butter, to give them hydrated and gorgeous skin.

Around the age of 4 or 5 or so, girls are given little beaded elastics called bin bin to wear around their waists. These are said to give them shapely curves. (Disparaging remarks will often be made of a homely or shapeless woman, e.g. that she clearly was not made to wear bin bin as a child, hence the unfortunate result). Later on, these strings of beads take on a more overtly seductive function, as they are played with by the man during lovemaking; in addition, incense or thiouraye is burned to perfume the bedroom and special beaded loincloths called betios as well as sachets of spices may be worn by the woman as part of a couple’s bedroom ritual. (Since I have only been here for such a short time, let me hasten to reassure you that I do not know about any of these things firsthand. It is helpful in the extreme to have one’s older students fill one in on the customs of the country, however!)

About the Author : Tamara-Diana Braunstein brings us her stories from Senegal every week. She was born in Brooklyn, New York. She is a restless wanderer who earned an MA from the University of Freiburg and has worked in a youth hostel in the French Alps, a law firm in Montreal, the Metropolitan Museum of Art as well as in university press publishing. At the moment her home base is Dakar, Senegal, where she is supposed to be teaching but is doing far more learning, as you will see by reading her blog at www.senegalschoolmarm.blogspot.com

Photo:Flickr/milleniumpromise

Yesterday, Lia and I emerged from the bush of Africa. A.k.a Mbola, Tanzania. Our stay lasted 5 nights 6 days. With no one speaking English, we basically had to sink or swim in the language pool, and ended up floating. We can now complete the call-and-response greeting series in Swahili and the tribal language. The rolling hill landscape of Mbola is painted with brown dry crops; tall golden grasses glow in the sunshine, accented with a speckling of large bubbly green mango trees, all emphasized by a cobalt blue sky.

Right now is their short winter season which only includes the months of June and July. At day break we emerge from our tent after a ‘good’ night’s sleep on the hard mud floor. The mornings start cool, crisp, and refreshing. As time progresses, the sun intensifies the arid day. You find yourself seeking the shade of a mango tree. From there you can feel the soft breeze as it gently sweeps across the dry grasses of the terrain. The evening finally finds the balance between the chill of the morning and the warmth of the afternoon. The radiating sunset is the grand finale of the day, transforming the blue sky into a collage of reds, yellow, oranges, and purples. The best phrase I have heard thus far is “yep, another shitty sunset in Africa.”

The night sky, however, can rival even the greatest sunset. Countless stars and the Milky Way coat the black velvet night. The virgin stars have never once been touched light pollution; their only competition is low burning cooking fires that you can barely see across the hillside.

In Mbola, life is based on peace, simplicity, and community. It’s a place where time stands still. In fact, time as we know it ceases to exist. I never knew how connected to the clock I was until I entered a society where it barely exists and never has had priority. In Mbola, the word ‘rush’ is more foreign then the two white girls staying there. You do not travel from point A to point B. At least not when you can pop in to say hi to point F, check in on point T, and share a chai with point O. People are always around to talk to and welcome you into their home. Which coming from America is as foreign as the word ‘rush’ is to the people of Mbola. Here, if it doesn’t get done today there is always tomorrow.

Our living situation on paper seemed meager. We lived with a family in a mud hut compound with thatched roofs. There was no running water or electricity. No toilet except the hole in the ground. No furniture except for a mat to sit on, one table, and one bed for the family of 6 to share. Food was cooked over an open fire. Their wardrobe was limited to 1 to 2 outfits per person. With all that being said, those luxuries were the last thing you noticed as you were awestruck by the ins and outs of daily life. (Except maybe for sleeping on the ground with no padding- the bruises on your hips are kinda hard to ignore) But still, I felt privileged to be taught the knowledge on how to survive that has been handed down for generations.

The phrase ‘living off of the land’ has a totally new meaning now that I have actually seen it in action. The people were excited to take us under their wings and teach us how to live. The children were quick to laugh at our awkwardness, and how we struggled with such commonplace chores. We learned how to clean the mud huts, milk the cows, and slow down enough to enjoy life. In addition to all of this, the women also showed us how to make a tasty meal of vegetables and ugali (thick grits) from start to finish. And when I say ‘start’, I mean going to the field and collecting pumpkin leaves to boil. The meal served about 20 people, the men eating in a circle and the women and children eating in another circle. The only trash produced was scraps from the leaves that weren’t used.

The most exciting event of the week for me and the villagers were the nightly soccer matches. If being white was strange enough for them, being a white woman who wanted to play soccer was just out of this world. All of a sudden I went from a has-been high school soccer player to bigger than Pele!

My soccer debut in Mbola started with a drum circle and dance pep rally attended by most of the village followed by a parade to the soccer field. I strutted down the path to the field with sea of small children bouncing all around me, feeling like best soccer player in the world. Until I stepped on the field, and 22 fit men ages 20-25 stopped and stared at me. I could feel the eyes of every villager on me every time the ball came near me, and heard the gasps and giggles each time I touched the ball. In the end though, it was a great game and I was able to hold my own. (Not that they had much to compare me to) And at the end of the night we paraded back to the compound, bathed under the stars, crawled into our tent, and snuggled up with the mud floor for the night. This parade-game-parade series continued each night that we were there without the slightest diminishment in enthusiasm, curiosity, and/or attendance.

And so that’s how life went in the last place in the world I thought I would be.

About the Author : Lia and Arica Haro are two sisters now living in North Carolina and Washington, respectively. This past summer they set out to Africa to roam, in order to see more than their American home. They wandered for 3 months in pure amazement, writing home to shed a little light on the Dark Continent. They did not set out for fame or glory, only for the chance to tell a story. Lia is a student and Arica survives as a waitress, knowing each tip saved, paves the way for more adventures another day.

The TSM Fall Travel Writing Contest has been organized in association with On The Beach Holidays

Photo:Postiglione
It’s difficult to believe how much trouble a broken little toe gave me during the first few weeks of my study abroad experience in Brisbane. The trouble all started when I attempted to walk through my bed instead of around it. This was the day before school started and a week before a Green Day show to which I had held tickets for at least three months.

When I bought the tickets, it sounded like a great idea to buy standing room only; unfortunately, standing room now meant a chance for my already throbbing foot to get absolutely trampled. One saving grace was that the standing-room section was divided into a front and back section, and I had only procured a back ticket. This meant my section wouldn’t be nearly as crowded, but going was still taking a serious risk of mangling my toe much worse than the bed’s leg had done.

I didn’t want to just skip the show, since I had paid upwards of $60 for the ticket, so I had to find a way to protect my foot. Limping to the nearest pharmacy, I found the bandages section and was busying myself looking for something that would provide padding when a pharmacist walked up to me.

“Are you finding everything okay?” she asked.

“I’m not really sure.” I said, staring blankly at the array of bandages in front of me. “Do you have anything for protecting broken toes when you’re wearing shoes?”

She grimaced. “Well…do you really have to wear shoes? Why can’t you wear those thongs?” (She meant flip-flops. Somehow, I don’t believe that getting rid of my pantylines would help fix my problem.)

I explained my situation to her, and how it would be a terrible idea to wear thongs to the concert that night. She uh-hummed and looked very serious, informing me that there was no way to cover up my little toe as much as I needed. Treating the whole case in a very solemn manner, she asked, “Do you want to hear my honest, and very personal, opinion?”

I nodded, bracing for the talk I would certainly receive, telling me that it was a dumb idea and I was risking further injury for $60 and a band I’d seen play twice before. I’d heard it plenty of times from my mother already. Instead, she said, with a completely straight face, “I’d go out and get pissed before the show. If you’re flogged, you won’t be able to feel the pain, right?”

I was astounded—wouldn’t pharmacists in America get sued for saying something like that? She did, however, have a very valid point and had found the only real solution to the problem, no matter whether it made it worse the next day. I decided then and there that Australia really was the brilliant country I had built it up to be in my imagination and was the place that I really belonged. This was all while I was sharing a fit of the giggles with the honest pharmacist and everyone else in the pharmacy was wondering which of her drugs we’d gotten into.

After we’d calmed down and had a bit more of a chat, I went home and helped myself to a couple of the ice cold beers waiting in our fridge. Unfortunately, I couldn’t fully follow her advice by getting rip-roaring drunk, since I was attending the concert alone and somehow had to find my way back home in a city I’d only lived in for a matter of weeks.

I went to Green Day and thoroughly enjoyed their show, even if it was nearly line-for-line the exact same as the one they had put on in Houston months earlier. The show, while memorable and well worth the money, was still not the highlight of my night; that honor lay firmly with the pharmacist and the country that sees things in a slightly different light, with a twinkle in its eye and a beer in hand.

About the Author: Kristin Repsher is in her final semester of a B.S. in Computer Science at Rice University. When she isn’t buried knee-deep in Java code, she enjoys traveling as far as her student budget will let her. She has found her passion in writing about these trips on KristinsTravels.com.

The TSM Fall Travel Writing Contest has been organized in association with On The Beach Holidays

Photo:Flickr/SlipperySlap
National pride can be a blessing if it serves as motivation for being a force of change for the betterment of society …or not …if it is used for bragging rights, feeling superior or stereotyping different cultures as curiosities, so away from normal. Rick Steves narrates how travel shatters egocentricism and lets one empathize with human endeavors, irrespective of geographical boundaries, in Good Travel is Thoughtful Travel.

Fascinated by tales and the intrigue of foreign lands and love to experience the adventure of travel, but too afraid of getting it right? Amanda , a seasoned backpacker eases butterflies in the rookie traveler’s belly by sharing her experiences in Vagabondish’s Confessions of a Seasoned Backpacker: Overcoming Your Pre-Trip Fears

Millions around the world commonly use air travel. Concerns over carbon footprint, airport security and mechanical problems not withstanding, it is still the most popular way to get to other countries. Media headlines feeding on the public’s fears have caused many to stress over upcoming travel and Jack Keady of Armchair World analyzes the validity of these fears in Air Safety.

Have you been in an aircraft and had an unusual experience?
Share your story with our readers!

The excitement of journeying through antiquity has made archaeological and heritage tourism very popular. Uncovering legends and lost civilizations puts a perspective on societal intelligence centuries ago. Peru, known for one of the wonders of the world, Machu Picchu, is now in the news this week as being the site of the oldest (roughly 4000 years old) temple in the Americas, National Geographic reports.

From dining with Zulu royalty to cooling off in Irish pubs, a string of cultural faux pas made Mark McCrum wiser as he makes travelers aware of common blunders and misjudgments in diverse cultural settings in Global guide to etiquette: When in Rome… don’t say it with flowers

To wrap up, and to make you smile, here is how Indu Prasad found humor in a drive through deserted roads in the Himalayas.

They told us to come back with a story – they just didn’t tell us what type of story to come back with.

The countdown for New Years was on. Lief and I decided to head over to the full moon party in Koh Phangan by ourselves. The rest of the gang wanted to have a bit of a quieter night.

It started simple enough. We walked over to Hadrin Beach a bit late. Around 11:45pm. We found a nice isolated spot (as isolated as it gets among 30,000 people on a full-moon-party). The clock struck midnight and Lief and I celebrated with our drinks.

At 12:01 a couple of Thai men started setting up fireworks. As you do. But they were not your run-of-the-mill store-bought fireworks. They were the type of fireworks that fill the entire night with light.
One by one the fireworks started to go off - closer and closer. By the end, I had a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach – which I ignored. Something I never do.

I asked Lief if we could move to a better spot. And we did. We decided to hide behind a set of two rocks. Like a cave. Or, as Lief called it, ‘our little bunker’. It was just the two of us, laughing as we filmed the massive explosions in the sky.
All of sudden, one of the large fireworks fell to the ground. It wired towards us, so fast that we didn’t even have time to stop laughing. The next thing we know it was directly underneath our feet. It was ready to detonate and we we’re stuck between the three giant boulders.
BOOM!

The rest was a bit hazy.

Lief stood there and looked over to his right where I was supposed to be, but only my shoe remained. “Uh no!” he thought later, “This is all that’s left of Jer!”

All I remember is frantically trying to step out of our bunker onto another bed of rocks. I failed and didn’t escape until after the blast. The next thing I remember is standing 15 feet away from Lief, deaf from the blast, and unable to see from the light and smoke.

Body scan. Nothing. Not a single amount of pain. I was ok…But was Lief??

I saw Lief and yelled back. He was dazed but looked perfectly fine, holding my shoe, but fine. We came over to each other in completely shock. Laughing that we had survived. Adrenalin pumping through our body. We scanned each other for wounds knowing we probably wouldn’t feel them just yet – and then I saw his arm.

It looked as bad as any gash I’ve seen. It seemed appropriate for how bad that blast was. It was about a 4 inch flap and his bicep appeared to popping off his bone. I didn’t want to worry him so I asked him calmly to take a walk with me to the paramedics. Concerned, he looked down and realized how serious it all was. All of a sudden he got really quiet and walked calmly toward the busy street.

When I finally found someone to help, Lief was sitting n the curb nodding in and out of consciousness. Finding someone wasn’t easy. After all, how do you say ‘get my friend to a hospital’ in Thai? Especially when all they say back is ‘500 Baht for a bucket’ in response. The most popular drink concoction on the island. I finally found a boy who took my panicked expression seriously

He took Lief and me on his bike as we rode to the emergency clinic. We got there and Lief scared the life out of me. He went ghost white and started growing cold. I yelled buzz words…ANYTHING someone could understand. Doctor! Paramedic! Help! Ambulance! Hospital! No one understood my urgency. I thought he was dying.

We shouted at him a couple times but he was unresponsive. I didn’t see much blood but he had the appearance of the man who was losing more blood than one could handle. I gently tried to wake him up by tapping him in the face. I quickly grabbed the nurse’s hand and put it on Lief. She finally understood the situation. He was going into shock.

She got him to lie down and slowly, but surely, he started to come to. I chatted with him light heartedly…trying to make him laugh as she dressed his wounds. Burnt in three or four place with two gashes, one on his arm and one on his ribs. But no bleeding. And thank the Lord for that. Had the size of that gash been anywhere important, it would have been fatal.

After about 45 minutes he seemed to be getting better. We made our way back slowly and hobbling, checking in with each other periodically to make sure we were both ok. And every Thai person we met along the way said the same thing. “Lucky Lucky”. And that we were.

We have a video of the fireworks just before we got a front row seat. The last thing Lief says in the video is – Oh my God I’m going to die – and we laugh. I didn’t realize just how right he could have been.

And just for the record it’s ‘Loang Pra Ya Barn’.

That’s how you say hospital in Thai.

About the Author : Jeremiah McNama (left) is a Canadian traveling around the world for the past year. Back at home in Toronto he’s a copywriter and writes at www.getjealous.com/jer.

Lief is the pasty looking man to the right. Way too pasty to be in Thailand. He now lives in Toronto after spending three years teaching English in various Asian countries.

The TSM Fall Travel Writing Contest has been organized in association with On The Beach Holidays

This is your last chance to get those stories in! Some of us work better under pressure (me included) so you now have only 12 hours left to transform that memory into a real traveling tale.

Submission will not be included in the contest after Midnight tonight Novemeber 15th and your story will require at least 10 votes to qualify. The winner will be announced on November 25th so to all those TSM readers out there make sure you actively vote on those stories your reading!

This project has been very successful and has not only motivated travelers to spin tales that would otherwise be lost, but has also provided our community with daily exotic adventures. A big thinks to all of our writers and readers.

A great way to keep reading new tales is to subscribe via e-mail below.

This entire trip I’ve been looking for a great place to go streaking.

I keep picturing my buddy Dave’s desktop of this dude running through the green fields of Ireland and I said…I want to be that guy.

Well after a couple days of searching for the perfect location (I wanted a wooden fence, a couple sheep, and endless greenery) we found it. I say we, but I know my girlfriend Sue isn’t going to subject herself to such a thing. At the very least she’ll enjoy a good laugh at my expense.

I roll our futuristic space van into a little parking lot beside a farmer’s field. I didn’t see a farmer in sight so I make my move while Sue stood on the other side with a camera. The wires separating us from the field look easy enough to climb so I put one foot on the top wire and one hand a little further down to keep me balanced.

I’ve never known what it feels like to be electrocuted but, let me tell you, it pretty much feels exactly how it looks.

My hand was FIRMLY grasped around the wire when I felt the jolt. The electricity was enough to catapult me through to the other side.

Directly into a pool of cow manure.

Being covered in cow manure does funny things to a man. And in moments like this it’s either cry or start laughing immediately. I burst into a furious roar of laughter. The best part was that I was now on the opposite side of the electric fence soaking wet from head to toe.

I figure the amount of electricity was designed to stun a dumb sheep. The farmers probably get a better kick out of it when guys like me try to climb over. This might explain why there was no sign. Surely there should be a sign.

I think my last words before I stumbled into poo were “It’s Electric”. But Sue says she didn’t hear me say anything. So it may have come out as what I can only describe as electrified grunt of air. I guess my neck muscles flexing involuntarily didn’t help in producing an audible sound.

In hindsight I should have taken my clothes off right there and gone for the streak. Nothing could been more perfect. But my body was still processing the electricity and my mind was preoccupied with the thought… how long after being electrocuted does a heart attack occur?

I found a gap under the fence so I could crawl through uncharged. I actually gave thought to hopping back over to get the picture I wanted. But Sue, being much more of an adult than I am, talked me out of it. Needles to say, I ended up getting the shot a couple days later

Before all this, I thought nothing was funnier than streaking. But I was wrong. Getting electrocuted while TRYING to go streaking is much much funnier.

(What good is a story without the picture to say it all actually did happen?)

About the Author : Jeremiah McNama (adjacent) is a Canadian traveling around the world for the past year. Back at home in Toronto he’s a copywriter and he writes at http://www.getjealous.com/jer . He also claims to have the whitest rump in all of South Pacific.

The TSM Fall Travel Writing Contest has been organized in association with On The Beach Holidays

New Zealand is well-known for gorgeous scenery, friendly people, adventure hotels for tourism and clean, modern cities. There are many places for tourists to visit in New Zealand. They can find good hotel deals. In New Zealand one can also find places or hotels like guest house hotels which are cheaper compared to conventional hotels. Before going to New Zealand its better to check and compare the prices of discount hotels and choose the one which gives the most concession. One can find cheap us hotels by comparing prices online like New Orleans hotel prices vs. dallas hotels prices. Reading reviews about different hotels is also a great idea like florida hotels reviews to know what people say about that hotel.

Photo: Flickr/Teseum

I was 22 when I embarked on my first proper traveling trip in Europe: the ‘Top Deck Highlights of Europe’ tour. It was an organized trip; 16 days, taking in cities like Amsterdam, Munich, Salzburg, Florence, Nice and Paris. Now let me dispel any visions you might have of a coach-load of pink-haired ladies and obese, tweed-wearing men. No. ‘Top Deck’ trips were the preserve of young, drunken, hedonistic Aussies and Kiwis on their European walkabout (I was the token Irish guy). It was on this jaunt that I learnt of the live-for-the-moment attitude of the typical traveling ANZAC. In fact by the end of the trip I had probably learnt as much about Oz and N.Z. as I had about Europe.

It would be two years before I would travel in Europe again. I did go to Italy in the intervening year but that was for the 1990 soccer world cup. My wanderlust would have to wait. As a wise man once said: “Football’s not a matter of life and death; it’s much more important than that.”

It was in the summer of 1991 that I found myself enjoying a few beers with a group of backpackers in a bar in Luxembourg. One of them, a guy from Melbourne, was on a two-year round-the-world trip. When I heard that, I realized that life doesn’t have to be about the 9 to 5, year in year out, snatching a couple of weeks of holidays, if the boss will let you. I thought it would be instructive to ask the Uber-traveler which were the most striking places he had visited.

The Pyramids of Mexico, he said, and the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland. His first choice was truly exotic; vast, enigmatic structures built under the searing sun of Mexico thousands of years before the old world knew anything of the Americas. His second choice didn’t seem nearly so exotic. The Giant’s Causeway is a coastal area composed of interlocking rock columns with regular shapes. It’s unusual, yes, but it couldn’t be that impressive. After all it was little more that 100 miles from where I lived? Well the Uber-traveler had called it as he saw it and so I resolved that one day I’d go to both places.

Since that time I’ve seen a bit of the world, including Australia and New Zealand, the strange far-off lands that were first described to me during 16 drunken ‘Highlights of Europe’ nights. I’ve also been to the Pyramids of Egypt, though I haven’t yet been to their mysterious cousins in Mexico. I’m determined to go there though and, you never know; one day I might just hop in my car and drive to the Giant’s Causeway.

About the Author : Joe Mc Kiernan was born in 1967 in Dublin, Ireland and lived much of his life there. During the 1990s he travelled extensively in over 30 countries in 6 continents. His twin passions are travel and writing and much of his writing relates to his experiences abroad and the people he met on the road. He has written a novel ‘Here’s to the Primary Colours’ for which he is seeking a publisher. It concerns three backpackers who meet and become friends on a plane bound for Sydney, Australia.

The TSM Fall Travel Writing Contest has been organized in association with On The Beach Holidays