BleedTravel Has Moved

BleedTravel is now at: www.HardCorpsTravel.com

2011-04-10T11:33:00.001-07:00

Update on the e-miles Pimping

2010-06-28T07:35:00.000-07:00

As noted in this post, e-miles wants to pimp people for miles and, miles-slut that I am, I thought it was worth it to get paid for what I was putting out for free. Or something. Having had an account with them for a little over a week, I thought I'd share the experience:

June 20: Earned 200 Miles

When I first logged in, e-miles wanted to ask me lots of questions. Worst. First. Date. Ever. There were four lengthy surveys, on which I said I was very wealthy and interested in EVERYTHING with the idea that these surveys help e-Miles target offers to you.

In addition, there were miles awarded for making e-miles a "trusted sender" in your email account (which I didn't bother to do but told e-Miles that I did) and for reading the e-Miles guidelines and then taking a quiz on them.

Interestingly, information about how easy it is to LOOSE miles was not in the quiz, but I found out that:

e-miles are only transfered to your frequent flyer program in 500 mile increments. Have 600 miles? You can transfer 500, but need 400 more if you want the other 100.
e-miles expire one year from when they are earned.
e-miles can suspend your account if you do not respond to one marketing message per month.
e-miles has the right to terminate your account or deduct e-Miles if its rules change in the future

Big daddy can be mean to his children. :-(

I also watched/read ads for Travel + Leisure, Disney and Zales to earn some extra points.

Click "Read More" to read about getting another 595 miles.

June 24: Earned 595 Miles

When I logged in, I saw that I had a number of offers that were 5 + 250, 5 + 100, etc. What this meant is that if I looked at the ad, I could get 5 miles, but if I signed up for something, I could earn an additional 250 miles, etc.

Well, it turned out that some companies that I had abused before happened to be on the list. For example, ING was offering 250 extra miles if I signed up for their ShareBuilder account, and they were also offering their usual $25 bonus. I'd gotten that bonus probably a year ago and had never canceled my account. I thought that would make me ineligible to open a new account, but I clicked on the ad anyway.

Sharebuilder asked if I already had an account and then asked me to log in. I did, awaiting the rejection page, but suddenly they were giving me a second account under the same login and it was still good for the $25 bonus. The bonus appeared in my new account a few days later. So I just got 255 miles and $25. Sweet.

Experian was offering 255 miles as well for signing up for a "free" credit score. You have to give a credit card because, of course, if you do not cancel your account within 7 days, they start charging you monthly. I've done the dance with Experian a number of times before, so it took just a quick phone call and repeatedly saying "No" to a customer representative to get them to cancel the membership.

I did a few more ad-looks and even applied for a "Free 2GB Flashdrive", only to be told that "We will contact you to let you know if you were one of the first 500 respondents" eligible to get the flashdrive. Sigh.

When it was said and done, I had 795 miles in the account and asked for 500 to be transfered to Delta.

Final analysis: If you have free time, it's an easy way to juice your frequent flyer account, but considering it took two hours to get miles worth only $6.00, it's not the best if you consider your time to be valuable.

Abusing Best Buy

2010-06-25T20:57:00.000-07:00

Other than butterflies and newborn babies, there is nothing more beautiful than a Best Buy service plan. If you play your cards right, you can continually upgrade your electronics for only the cost of the service plan. You are, in essence, leasing your gear from Best Buy.

Let me tell you a story:

In 2005, I bought both a $329 Mini-DV camcorder and its $79 service plan. After almost four years of travel video and homemade porn, the camera was still it pretty good condition, which I considered a disappointment. I wanted there to be a problem with the camera, for reasons that will soon be clear. Finally, though, my wishes were answered when it fell off a table while the cord was plugged in. The contacts became loose and now the camera would only charge if the cable was held in a certain position.

So, three years and 361 days after buying the camera--four days before the deadline--I went to my local Best Buy. According to the policy, Best Buy will replace your damaged item with a new one (even if you caused the damage!). Since four years is a cosmic epoch for electronics, they didn't have the same camera in stock, which was exactly what I wanted.

Since they couldn't replace it with an new one, the plan dictated that they give me a store credit for the original purchase price. In 2005, $329 could get you a one-chip SD camera that took expensive Mini-DV tapes. In 2009, $329 would get you a remarkably small HD camcorder with flash storage.

The price of this brand new camera to me in real terms? The $79 I paid for the plan four years ago.

I essentially leased it for that price and then was given an upgrade.

When I got the HD camcorder I also got the 4 year service plan to go with it. Who knows? Four years from now, $329 might by me a contact lens with a camera installed on it. Either way, I've already paid for it, and will go get it as soon as I'm tired of my current camcorder.

Banks that Will Count Paypal or a Bank Transfer as a Direct Deposit

2010-06-24T15:49:00.000-07:00

Chasing bank bonuses often requires jumping through hoops, and one of those biggest hoops is a direct deposit requirement. They put it in there specifically do discourage bonus hunting, because if your paycheck is going to their bank, you're more likely to use their services and stick with them (that, and they get to earn interest by loaning out your money).

The little known way around that is by "pushing" money in from another institution (Paypal and ING are two of the more popular), which the bank's computers see as a direct deposit. Since not all banks count those, though, the members of the FatWallet.com message boards have been steadily compiling a list of which banks do and which banks don't.

ACH, in case you didn't know, stands for Automatic Clearing House, which is the system banks use to transfer money. When you set up a transfer from one bank to get money from another bank, that's considered a "pull" and does not count as direct deposit. When you send the money from one institution to go into another, though, that's considered a "push". Many banks do pulls for free (after all, the money is going into their coffers), but often charge for pushes. You should read the fine print before you do a push from a bank to make sure you don't pay a fee.

If you find any others, please leave a comment and let me know.

Click "Read More" to see the full list.

Banks that people have had success pushing into:

Bank of America (ING, Paypal, ACH push)
Bank of the West (ING, Paypal)
Bank One (ING, Paypal, ACH push)
Bank of New York (ACH push)
Capital One (ING)
Charter One (ING, ACH push)
Chase (ING, Paypal, Etrade, ACH push)
Citibank (ING, Paypal, ACH push)
Citizens Bank (ING)
Columbia Bank (Paypal)
Commerce Bank (ING, Paypal) - refers to one in the northeast
Compass Bank (ING)
E-Trade Bank (ING, ACH push)
HSBC (ING, Paypal, ACH push)
Huntington National Bank (ING, PayPal, ACH push)
KeyBank (Paypal, ACH push)
LaSalle (ACH push, Etrade)
M&I Bank (Paypal)
M&T Bank (ACH push)
PNC Bank (Paypal, ACH push, ING)
Principal Bank (ING)
Salem Five (ACH push)
Sovereign (ACH push, ING)
SunTrust (ING, Paypal)
TD Banknorth (ACH push)
UFBDirect (ACH push)
USAA (ING)
US Bank (Paypal, ACH push)
Valley National Bank (ING)
Wachovia (ING, ACH push)
Washington Mutual (ING, ED, Paypal)

Banks that don't count ING/Paypal/ACH push transfers as direct deposits:

Charter One
Chase
MeadowsCU
Metropolitan National Bank
PNC Bank
Presidential Bank
Salem Five
Sovereign
Wachovia
Wells Fargo

$250 from M&T Bank

2010-06-23T20:51:00.000-07:00

I just got off the phone with one of M and T Bank's representatives about their new bonus offer. She didn't know much about it, so I educated her instead of the other way around. After she asked a manger a couple of questions, though, we got it sorted out.

Here's the deal:

Open a checking account
Sign up for direct deposit: get $25-$150 depending on the account type.
Sign up for overdraft protection: get $50
Make three bill pays in the first month of opening the account: get $50

Click Here to Go to M and T's Bonus Page

Now here is the fine print:

MyChoice Checking has the lowest minimum balance while still qualifying for the bonus. You are must either make 10 check card transactions per month OR have at least $500 in the account to avoid fees. This account gives you a $25 bonus with direct deposit.
Select Checking and Power Checking also qualify for the bonuses, giving you $50 and $150 respectively, but also requiring a $5,000 or $50,000 balance respectively.
The bonuses take 90 days to be deposited, so you much have the account open for at least three months.

I opened a MyChoice checking account, using Paypal to do the direct deposit, and then signed up for overdraft protection as well as bill pay.

I'm only getting $125 instead of the potential $150, but since my commitment is only $500, this means I made a 25% gain for letting them hold my money for a few months.

My First Road Trip: Racing The Sun

2010-06-22T15:56:00.000-07:00

I inched the accelerator closer to the floor, torn between getting a speeding ticket and winning this race. My opponent was bigger, faster, brighter and didn’t actually know that we were competing. In fact, it was content to consume hydrogen while I cursed at both it and my patched-together Mustang, the three of us racing towards the horizon.

I was eighteen years-old and had been sitting bored at home, trying to think of something to do. Then it occurred: Why didn't I watch the sun set over one ocean and rise over another? It was possible in Florida, as we had the Gulf of Mexico on the west coast and the Atlantic on the east. We even had I-4, an interstate that runs from Tampa to Daytona. Great idea, except that by the time I had thought of it, the sun was starting its decent.

Tampa was only an hour's drive from my house, but the sun was already touching the horizon when I exited the interstate, desperately looking for a way to get to a beach. I could see a beach, see it was right there, but I didn’t know how to get my car to it. Fifteen minutes later, my car was parked and I was running across the sand and onto a pier that jutted out in the water. I pulled my camera out just in time to photograph the sun's rays dipping below the water. I watched as the pinks and yellows faded to blue to violet to black.

Relief exhaled. Phase One accomplished.

I had ten hours until the sun rose again and it only took an hour and a half to get to Daytona. What to do until then?

Click "Read More" for the rest of the story

***

Four AM found me hurtling down I-4, headed east. Construction barricades had me in a one-lane roofless tunnel, and I was sliding through this concrete slalom chute at 90 mph. I had found a rave in Tampa, and had gotten so lost in the music and the dance that I again left too late. It was stupid driving that fast in the dark, barely able to see the turns as they shot towards me into the glow of my headlights, driving that fast simply to see a sun that would come up again and again and again. Stupid, but also damn exhilarating.

Odd to need to be near death to feel that.

The earth raced along with me, spinning at over a thousand miles an hour as it moved the continents, the oceans and me, so fast that if it stopped my car would be catapulted forward, tires leaving the pavement before nose-diving into the asphalt. But the earth didn’t stop and neither did I, and we both raced as fast as we could towards the sun.

Five-thirty AM found me in Daytona Beach, illegally parked at some hotel, the sky just beginning to lighten. I ran to the beach. The sun was not yet up, but it was coming quickly. The sky had already lightened to blue; pinks and yellows were peaking up over the ocean. The sand was deserted. I saw some birds flying over the waves and, as I pressed the button to take a picture, I realized I was out of film.

Dammit.

I turned and ran for my car, hopping in and pulling out, racing down an empty street, trying to find a convenience store. Lights flashed behind me, and I looked into the rear view.

Dammit!

I spotted a 7-11 and parked, looking at a store that I knew had film, looking at the sky growing lighter and lighter as the cop came to take my license and proof of insurance, as he took his sweet time writing the ticket.

I had raced breakneck down the interstate without incident and now, going 40 in a 30, I was getting pulled over.

Ticket in hand, I ran into the 7-11, bought the film, raced back to my car and snail-paced myself to the hotel parking lot, making sure I didn't catch the cop's attention again.

I had raced the sun to the west coast and watched it set over the Gulf of Mexico. While in Tampa,I had played beach volleyball, rollerbladed, danced and driven through the night, all while on a planet rotating to bring me to see it again.

Breathless, I sat on the beach and waited. Soon the sun rose in a wash of orange and pink, its edges wavering as it cleared the water. It lifted up into some low-lying clouds, its light refracting into hundreds of rays that spread through the cottony ether. It was just me, the beach and the sun.

Amazing.

After the shimmering disk had come fully over the horizon, I lay back, exhausted, concentrating on its warmth on my face.

I awoke about an hour later. I had been dreaming. There was girl in the dream, walking along the beach. She was young and blonde and pretty and had said "hi" to me. And when I opened my eyes, no lie, she was there. It wasn’t the same girl and she wasn’t standing over me as expected, but she was young and blonde and pretty and walking barefoot in the sand nearer to the hotel, giving me a wide berth. I sat up and watched at her, looked at her lit by the rising sun. I was surprised a film crew wasn't recording it.

Everything else had been perfect, so why not this? I suppose in a novel she would had seen me and I her and we would had felt some deep connection and made love right there on the sand while the water lapped up at our legs. Instead, she walked by, barely acknowledging me. Just as she was passing, though, I said: “I had a dream about you.”

It caught her attention.

She came over. I introduced myself, and she sat by me on the sand. Her name was Jaime, she was sixteen, and she was on vacation with her still-sleeping parents. Our conversation was the basics: where from, why here. I spent a lot of it lying on the sand with my eyes closed against the light, the sun still showing red through my eyelids, white spots dancing as I listened to her. Like the rave, it, too, felt right: me lying there, her sitting beside me, the salty breeze blowing off the water, the sun dissipating the morning chill. There actually was a connection between us, a moment, one of those moments where fate and life converge and you’re left with a simple second of synergy, beautiful for its own sake. There wasn't more, no future where we told our kids how we met, simply a boy falling asleep on the beach after racing to see the sunrise and waking up to share it with a pretty girl.

She gave me her email, and then I stood up, brushed the sand of my jeans and bid her goodbye. And as her hand gently brushed her windblown hair out of her eyes, the sunlight glinting off the near-white strands, she said goodbye to me, too.

I still remember that second.

I never wrote her.

Fantasy aside, life demanded that I get back into my car, and drive home. I had been to my first rave, met an angel, seen the sun rise and set over two oceans and, as it turns out, got back to the interstate just in time to hit the morning traffic.

Welcome back, life.

e-Miles Wants to be Your Pimp

2010-06-20T01:19:00.000-07:00

e-Miles wants to pimp you out for miles, as illustrated by this photograph of a statue called "The White Slave". e-Miles is the yelling man on the right and you are the naked, supple, firm, slightly sad and submissive woman on the... Goddamit, where's my wallet?

The gist is that e-Miles sends you emails with marketing messages that you have to respond to, and in return they give you airline miles. So far, showing you a one page advertisement and asking you three multiple choice questions is worth 5 miles, and asking a page of demographic questions is worth 15 miles. Oh, you also get 200 miles just for signing up.

The catch? E-miles only transfers your miles to your airline account in 500 mile batches, and you have to request the transfer. So you would have to look at 60 of the one page ads in order to get your first batch of miles. Considering that miles are valued at a penny a point, it's like an hour of your time just to get $5.00 worth of miles.

E-miles, therefore, is your pimp, selling your eyes to abusive Johns like Zales and Disney (the first two ads I saw) while keeping the bulk of the cash for themselves. I like being degraded, though (and have nothing else to do on a Friday night0, so I signed up with them. Expect another post in a couple weeks about the experience.

So far, e-Miles works with Delta, Continental, US Airways, AirTran, Alaska Airlines, Frontier Airlines and Hilton HHonors®.

So if being a ~~prostitute~~ escort is what you've always wanted to be, click on this link to go to e-Mile's website.

Deals: 20% Off BooksFree Membership

2010-06-19T07:19:00.000-07:00

Hey! Stop looking at the naked kid reading, you pedophile! I put it there because, you know, this post is about reading, not for you to gawk at!

BooksFree is pretty much Netflix for books and audiobooks: you sign up for a plan and they ship you set number of books or CDs. As you send them back, more are sent to you.

Why post about it on a travel blog? Well, other than the fact that I am also reading naked on a toilet seat right now, it's also good for getting your hands on a lot of audiobooks. Have BooksFree send you a dozen or so, rip them all to MP3, and you have something to keep you sane on the TransSiberian Railway (AKA sounds more fun than it actually is) or any other mind-numbingly long jaunt.

And since I don't believe in paying full price for anything, here's a coupon code for 20% off your membership:

20% off your membership at Booksfree.com. Use coupon code: CJ86

Free Credits and Alcohol from Southwest

2010-06-18T05:23:00.000-07:00

Southwest is currently offering up to 4 credits for signing up for their program.

Click Here for Information About their Program.

The Dealie-O:

1. Enroll in Southwest Rapid Rewards and 2 credits.

2. Sign up for The Rapid Rewards Report and The Rapid Rewards E-mail Update and stay subscribed for three months to get two more bonus credits.

3. The offer is only good for new Southwest Rapid Rewards members.

Click Here to go to the Offer Page

As I was not yet a Southwest member, I decided to get the credits. And then I noticed this on the bottom of the sign-up page:

Southwest is giving me gifts AND alcohol? I know what this means... Bow chika wow chika...

Turkey: Dan-Rah and Skinny Dipping

2010-06-17T10:06:00.000-07:00

It was an island uninhabitable by design: a small oblong of razor sharp rock covered in thorny brambles. Weary of its interior, I opted to sit on a short stone spire sticking out of the ocean, my feet protesting as I tried to find smooth places to place them, my backside unhappy as the point almost pierced my butt cheek. Finally, I found comfort, my legs just over the sea, the water gently lapping up against them.

[Our yacht for five days]

Sarah swam up from a sandbar she had been exploring, pulling off her mask and snorkel and tossing them beside mine on a nearby outcrop. A few hundred yards away floated our yacht. Well, not really ours. We had paid for a five day "Blue Cruise" along Turkey's Mediterranean coast, an experience that had thus far been amazing.

The blobs of color bobbing around the yacht were our fellow passengers, who always seemed reluctant to swim more than ten feet away from the boat. Sarah and I, though, we liked to explore. After an hour of snorkeling, my pockets were already full of interesting shells, some of which would later prove to be owned by well-hidden hermit crabs. The fact of other ownership became known back in my cabin when a couple of the shells magically moved themselves several feet away from where I had put them. The crabs and their homes soon found themselves on an unasked-for adrenaline joyride through the air before splashing back into the brink.

“Think we could climb that?” I asked Sarah.

Mountains—albeit small ones—rose up from the shoreline of the coast. Their surfaces seemed like piles of pebbles left by some small god child, stacked steep up to three separate peaks, the middle one noticeably higher than the others. Goats made noises at each other as they picked their way along those rocks, chewing on the scrub brush growing from the crevices. There was nothing remotely approaching a path to those peaks; but if you thought in terms of climbing rather than hiking, it was just a grade four scramble that couldn’t take more than an hour.

“Probably,” said Sarah, leaving it at that. I took her lack of enthusiasm as an idea rejection.

***

Several hours, the rest of a book and a number of backgammon games later, Sarah tapped me on my shoulder.

“Let’s climb the mountain,” Sarah said to me.

[Enjoying a book on the deck of the yacht]

She said this, of course, with only an hour before we were scheduled to sail out of the bay. Sarah had spent the past two hours tanning herself and writing in her notebook a few feet from me. Why she hadn’t decided to start the climb earlier, save perhaps to make the experience intense instead of leisurely (I do not deny that my subconscious also decides things in this way), I don’t know.

I thought for a moment.

“Cool.”

***

“Don’t let the devil goats get you!” Brenna yelled from the ship as Sarah and I swam to shore, our shoes held over our heads. The goats had been so named because, yes, they did have a certain malevolent look about them. They stayed out of our way, though, as we put on our socks and shoes and started scrambling up the steep rocks, showing up their prowess and hurting their collective pride. They “nahhed” at us in scorn.

Sarah took the lead, locating climbable rocks while avoiding the sharp branches of the shrubs. The rock was a hard, porous limestone that offered a plethora of holds for hands and feet. We practically ran up the thing, and within half an hour were on the top, looking down at our ship and the others in the bay.

[Sarah bouldering atop the mountain]

The site was amazingly beautiful, but I’ll let pictures tell the thousand words. We had enough time to pose for them, take a couple more of ourselves bouldering with that beautiful backdrop, and then rock hop down to the shoreline to swim to the boat, our little adventure taking less than 45 sweat-soaked minutes.

Back on board, I looked at the captain's navigation maps. Although I found our mountain, it was apparently too small to have its peaks named.

So we named it, smashing our own together.

We had just climbed Mount Dan-Rah.

***

Although the climb had made our day, we discovered there was plenty more worth seeing on our journey to where we would anchor for the night. We sailed over a sunken city, the foundations of its houses visible through the clear water. We sailed past by an island only reachable by boat, a castle clinging to its highest point and a fishing village spread across the rest of it. Finally, as the sun started to sink, we reached a cove and dropped anchor.

As night came on, Sarah and I started secretly drinking the raki (a Turkish liquorish-flavored liquor not unlike ouzo) that we had smuggled on board after a stop two days prior. We were not supposed to bring any drinks on board (giving the ship a monopoly on booze), so we had been forced to become raki runners and Pepsi pirates (my treasure trove of cans now buried at the bottom of the ship’s cooler). Tipsy and happy, we scarfed down dinner and got dressed because here, in the middle of the night in the middle of the Mediterranean, we were going dancing.

[Our ship, anchored for the night]

At 11:00 PM, a speedboat pulled up beside the yacht and everyone under the age of 30 got on board. The speedboat stopped at the other boats anchored in the cove and soon a party was making its way to one of the world's most exclusive clubs.

[Enjoying the bonfire in front of the club]

We danced for hours before taking a break on one of the wooden platforms, cooling off in the night air. Then, a movie moment happened shortly thereafter: Four of in the group were American, and we all perked up when we heard the opening chords of Don Mclean’s “American Pie.”

“A long, long time ago/I remember how that music used to make me smile…”

It came to us on the night breeze from the over-amped stereo system, and no matter what we normally thought about our country, at that moment we were proud to be Americans. The thirty or so other people sitting outside—all from other countries—quietly listened, as the four of us began singing together. We looked off at the sky, the water, occasionally glancing at each other but mostly singing for ourselves, our voices in near whispers during the verses but rising up joyously together on the choruses. The four of us: Sarah, Ryan, Brenna and me, were all travelers; we pride ourselves on having visited and lived in many places, on speaking other languages and being comfortable in other cultures, but that moment something was very clear, at least to me: we were inescapably American. No one else on that beach, in that club, knew those words, at those words were just one of thousands of strings that bound us together as a people, a culture, a nation. And while it looked like a cool Almost Famous/”Tiny Dancer” movie moment, it was more than that because we all felt very close just then, something we remarked upon later, drawn together by childhoods staring out car windows while this song played on car radios, now adults out in the middle of nowhere in an area of the world that mostly hates us and being very, very American together.

***

Leave it to the Australians to ratchet up the party. At some point in the evening, two of the Australian girls had gotten behind the bar and were helping to serve drinks, taking a shot or two (or seven) for themselves. I noticed they were back there only when I was hit on the back with ice cubes and, turning around to find Jess, one of the Australian girls, tugging the front of her tank top down to offer me a target. I underhand tossed a cube at her and she maneuvered to catch it between her breasts. Another ice cube, another perfect catch and soon our Turkish bartenders, Vinnie and Hussein (actual names), happy about all that close-by cleavage, began giving out free shots of vodka.

The dance floor was a loud group of moving bodies. Most had partnered up and I noticed that Sarah was dancing with Ahmed, the first mate of our boat, who had started the evening by saying to her: “I want be with you tonight.”

The lack of English meant that the insinuation could have gone either way but his intentions were pretty apparent when, a few dances later, he was pushing his tongue in her mouth. Being attractive, Turkish and made of muscle, Sarah wasn’t minding.

***

I stripped naked and dove into the water, narrowing missing Sarah, who dog-paddled in all her pinkness. Skinny dipping had not been our idea: it had been suggested by two of the girls on our boat. Although both backed out when we returned from the club, I'm not one to waste a good idea. Besides, who wouldn’t want to say they had gone skinny dipping in a cove in Turkey in blue-black water under a moon one day from full?

After a few minutes of being shrinkingly-cold, I told Sarah I was getting back on the boat. Showered off and carrying my blankets up to sleep on the deck, I noticed Ahmed spreading out a blanket over two of the deck cushions, creating a double bed. He was ambitious. I knew he had told Sarah things like: “Look my eyes” and “I think I loving you,” but from what I understood, she had declined his offers. Still, I made my bed up as far away as possible.

A few minutes later, I couldn’t find Sarah. She wasn’t in the water, she wasn’t on the deck and she wasn’t in the cabin. I didn’t think she was drunk enough to have had a problem swimming, but it was too small a boat for her to have completely disappeared. Finally, though, she swam into view from the front of the boat and I handed her clothes to her when she got on board.

Sarah declared what had happened to be "amazing". Seeing her in the water, Ahmed had descended a chain that stretched taut from the bow of the boat to just above the water. He had sat on it while Sarah had pulled herself up out of the water, one hand on the chain, the other on the back of his head, breasts exposed and dripping in the moonlight, to make out with him.

I think her decision to sleep on the double bed with Ahmed fell into the category of teasing. She had no intention of having sex with him, but the topless making out had probably given Ahmed the idea that he was on his way to scoredom.

I awoke a few hours later, almost at daybreak, to hear her telling him to stop and that she wanted to sleep. Knowing she could take care of herself, I went back to dreamland.

In the debrief the next day, Sarah admitted that sleeping in his bed had been a bad idea, and not just due to the lack of sleep. Apparently Achmed's kissing was of the “shock and awe” variety, and she showed me where his tongue, in its forceful incursions, had actually torn a bit of that flap between the tongue and the bottom of the mouth. Hers was swollen and bleeding a little.

Apparently for her, it had not been a Turkish delight…

Still, it'd been one hell of a day.

Deals: $20 off o2 Gear Shop

2010-06-16T07:56:00.000-07:00

o2 is a pretty sweet gear shop that I've purchased from in the past. They currently have a deal for $20 off all orders of $100 or more. For all you non-math people, that's a million percent off or something. As you can tell, I am also a non-math person.

Here's the link:

Save $20 on All Orders of $100 at o2 Gear Shop Use Code: "GETDOWN"

How to: Turn Your Travel Pics into Photo Books

2010-06-15T11:36:00.000-07:00

A friend recently showed me travel photos from a trip to South America. But instead of pulling them up on her laptop like I like to do, she took out a leather-bound book and opened it.

Since then, I've been wanting to make a photobook of my own, containing my best travel pics.

Since I spent some time searching for discounts (because that's what I do), I thought I'd do everyone else a favor and put all the current coupons for photo books into one spot:

1. Photoworks.com

Free shipping with coupon: MYFIRSTORDER

2. StorePhotos.com

Save 5% on your entire order with coupon: SCRAP

3. Pixable.com

Save 25% on all hard cover photo books with coupon: 25HCPB

4. Kolo.com

Free ground shipping with every order of $100 or more

5. Mixbook.com

Free shipping on orders over $30

6. OurHubbub.com

Save 20% on any order with coupon: DADSGIFT

Deals: 15% off Frommer's Products

2010-06-10T07:04:00.000-07:00

It worked! If we were to compare travel guides to types of women, Frommer's would be the Old Money Princess and Lonely Planet would be the book that everybody's had.

Since I kept posting so many Lonely Planet Discounts, it finally made Frommer's jealous and now she's mine!

Which means I found a discount for 15% off their products. They are best known for their travel guide books, but they also do vacation packages as well.

When you click on link, it will take you to their homepage, and when you go to checkout, a 15% discount will automatically be applied.

Click Here for 15% off Frommer's Products

Most Complained about Domestic Airlines

2010-06-09T16:31:00.000-07:00

Yahoo Travel just put out an article detailing the most complained about airlines. For all the problems I've had with JetBlue, I would have thought they would have been #1. Huh.

The Top Offenders:

Delta
United Airlines
US Airways
Northwest Airlines
American Airlines
Comair
Continental Airlines
AirTran
Frontier Airlines
JetBlue Airways

Deals: Free Audiobook From Audible

2010-06-07T06:53:00.000-07:00

Audible.com currently has an offer for a free audio book of your choice. Could be just the thing to shorten a long bus ride or plane flight. And I mean that literally by the way, because I know you would choose to listen to "The Anarchist's Cookbook" while hugging a bag of fertilizer.

The catch is that you have to sign up for a 14-day free trial to get the free audio book, but you're smart enough to just get your book and then cancel the trial. Right? Right?

Well, I guess it won't matter since you're blowing yourself up anyway, leaving your Audible debt to your relatives.

Selfish.

Click Here to Get your Free Book.

American Airlines Helps Old Men Impregnate Women

2010-06-06T16:34:00.000-07:00

American Airlines currently has a deal that feels more like progressive Vegas slots than anything else. Biggest payout: 100,000 bonus miles. Chances ANYONE will get those miles: 1 in Well, Think Back About the Hottest Person in Your High School that You Forever Crushed on But Never Got the Chance to Be With; Your Chances Are the Same.

The Deal: Basically, you need to fly a round trip flight in or out of some of their less-traveled destinations. Fly to 2 of them and you get 1,000 miles. Fly to 3 cities and you've got 4,000 miles. Get to ten cities and you will net you the 100k.

I can't think of a single situation in which someone would fly to all these particular places (listed below). I mean, Kentucky and China? Seriously? Well, maybe it could be done by an independently wealthy geezer (pictured at right) who has two months to live and wants to impregnate women in each of these cities. You know, setting up franchises.

Have a better reason for why someone would? Leave it in the comments.

Tidbits:

You have to register prior to travel using Promotion Code NEWAA.
Flights after July 31, 2010 don't count.
2 cities = 1,000 miles
3 cities = 4,000 miles
4 cities = 6,000 miles
5 cities = 10,000 miles
6 cities = 15,000 miles
7 cities = 25,000 miles
8 cities = 50,000 miles
9 cities = 75,000 miles
10 cities = 100,000 miles

Eligible cities:

Allentown, PA
Asheville, NC
Augusta, GA
Beijing, China
Charleston, WV
Cheyenne, WY
Eleuthera, Bahamas
Fargo, ND
Fayetteville, NC
Harrisburg, PA
Lexington, KY
Myrtle Beach, SC
Rapid City, SD
Scranton/Wilkes Barre, PA
Sioux Falls, SD
Treasure Cay, Bahamas
Tri-cities, TN

$300 from Comerica Bank

2010-06-01T08:48:00.000-07:00

Comerica Bank is offering a sort of a la carte bonus system at the moment. It ends on June 30th.

Link: http://campaign.comerica.com/campaign/spring10

Notice: This promo is open only to new checking account customers.

You must open a new checking account (minimum $2,500) and add any of the following:

1. $75 for Signing up for Bill Pay and Making 5 or More Bill Payments a Month for 6 Months
2. $75 for getting a Comerica Check Card (free) and Making 5 or More Transactions With It for 6 Months
3. $75 for setting up a direct deposit that deposits at least $150 a month
4. $75 for opening up their Premiere ($5,000 minimum to avoid fees) or Platinum Circle Account ($50,000 minimum to avoid fees). The account must stay open for six months.

It breaks down thusly:

1. If you invest $2,500 for their free checking account and just do options 1-3, you earn $225, which works out as a 9% return on a six month investment.

2. If you invest $5,000 to do all four options, you earn $300, which works out to a 6% return on a six month investment (although an extra $75 in your pocket).

The five bill payments and five check card transactions could be a little difficult to keep up with, but free money is free money...

Get 1,000 American Airlines Miles

2010-05-30T10:01:00.000-07:00

If you've not done so, you can currently get 1,000 bonus American Airline miles by signing up for the AAdvantage eSummary. Pretty much, they're paying you miles to save themselves postage.

To sign up for eSummary, click on the "Profile" link in the upper-right area of the home page and log in. Then scroll down and select the box "AAdvantage summary via E-mail instead of via the postal service" to subscribe.

Earn Up to 25,000 United Mileage Plus Bonus Miles

2010-05-29T09:53:00.000-07:00

TD AMERITRADE has a new special going with United Airlines that gives you miles for opening an account with them. You have to be a new customer and open an account by June 30, 2010.

The amount you deposit determines your reward:

1. $2,500=5,000 miles

2. $10,000=15,000 miles

3. $50,000=25,000

Here is the link

Here is the fine print, with certain things bolded by me:

†Offer valid for new Individual or Joint accounts opened and funded by U.S. residents with $2,500 or more by 6/30/2010. Not transferable and not valid for IRA or other tax-exempt accounts, internal transfers, current TD AMERITRADE clients, or with other offers. Limit one offer per client. Offers are not valid for TD AMERITRADE Investing accounts using the Amerivest service. Offers are not valid for accounts managed by independent investment advisors and maintained by TD AMERITRADE Institutional. Account must remain open with minimum funding required for participating in the offer for 9 months, or TD AMERITRADE may charge the account for the cost of the miles. Allow 6 weeks from account funding for the first half of miles to appear in the Mileage Plus account. To qualify for the second half, TD AMERITRADE account must remain open with minimum funding required for participating in the offer for 6 months from the first posting date. Miles will be deposited in the Mileage Plus account within 6 weeks. TD AMERITRADE reserves the right to restrict or revoke this offer. Miles accrued and awards issued are subject to the rules of the United Mileage Plus Program. United, its subsidiaries, affiliates and agents are not responsible for any products and services of other participating companies and partners. The Mileage Plus Program, including accruals, awards and bonus miles, is subject to changes without notice. Taxes and fees related to award travel are the responsibility of the passenger. Bonus miles and miles earned through non-flight activity do not count toward elite status. United and Mileage Plus are registered service marks. For complete details about the Mileage Plus Program, visit united.com. United Saver Awards are currently redeemable at 25,000 miles within the U. S. (excluding Hawaii) and Canada. For more information on Mileage Plus Award Reservations, call 1-800-421-4655. TD AMERITRADE and United Air Lines, Inc. are separate, unaffiliated companies and are not responsible for one another's services and policies.

TD AMERITRADE has teamed up with United to bring you a special offer…
Open and fund a TD AMERITRADE account by June 30, 2010, and earn up to 25,000 United Mileage Plus bonus miles…
The more you deposit, the more miles you earn…

Pointswizard.com Spin: Click here to find out how to Earn up to 25,000 United Mileage Plus bonus miles – Open and fund a TD AMERITRADE account by June 30, 2010

Travel Advice: Five Hidden Hotel Fees to Avoid

2010-05-28T10:27:00.000-07:00

If you can toss down $55,000 for one night in a hotel room (which is what you'd have to pay for the Royal Penthouse Suite at the President Wilson Hotel in Geneva--the world's most expensive hotel room), then you're probably not too worried about hidden hotel fees.

But for the rest of us, here are the ways that hotels might try to gouge you:

1. Electricity Surcharge
Usually found in carribean hotels, they can be up to 10% of your bill.

2. Charitable Donations
A number of hotels, particularly higher-end ones, will toss on a small charge to go to a charity of their choice. You can opt out, but, of course, you have to ask to.

3. Credit Card Fees
Many hotels outside of America and Europe will charge you as much as 2% of your bill for paying with a credit card. I've personally seen this in Egypt and Thailand and know that it's also common practice in Australia. The problem is that you might approve your bill and then then the credit card charge goes on AS they run the credit card.

4. Paying for Coffee, Tea or Bottled Water
Although those bottles of water or packets of instant coffee or tea in your room used to be free, some hotels are trying to make up for recession-based losses by charging for them as if they were part of the mini-bar. This even includes higher-end hotels like Barclay's in New York, which charges $3 for its coffee.

5. Conversion Fees
When travelling abroad, you should always pay in local currency (drawn out of an ATM for the best rate; read this post about getting your ATM fees reimbursed ). Why? Because if a hotel rings up your bills in dollars or euros, they can also charge you a "conversion fee" for doing a currency exchange. This conversion fee can be as high as 4%.

Avoiding the Fees
How can you avoid these fees? A little knowledge goes a long way. Firstly, ask, ask, ask. Unsure if you're going to be charged for that coffee? Don't be lazy and use it anyway. Ask! When checking in, ask what fees might be charged on top of the rate you booked it at or were quoted. If they want to charge you for housekeeping (some hotels do) or electricity, ask to have those fees waived. If it's low season, they'll likely do it.

Just knowing what the costs could be will let you skip a lot of fees ahead of time. When it's all said and done though, carefully check your bill. You can get a lot removed right at the front desk if you are persistant enough (persistant does not mean being rude or yelling).

Good luck.

Travel Advice: Three Tips for Scoring a Hotel Upgrade

2010-05-26T10:14:00.000-07:00

Advice for Scoring an Upgrade:

1. Ask
Seriously, just ask. I've found it works about half the time, but the half the time that I get a half-priced suite is, well, pretty sweet.

2. Visit Popular Destinations in High Season
This one is counter-intuitive, so let me explain: Even with the recession on, popular destinations such as New York, Orlando and Las Vegas find themselves flooded with requests for standard rooms. What they don't get flooded with--particularly since we're on the tail end of a recession--are demands for high-end rooms. So when hotels have more requests for standard rooms than they can honor, it makes economic sense to start bumping people up to high-end rooms in order to keep booking the standard rooms.

3. Check in Late
The later in the day you check in, the better able the hotel is able to judge demands on rooms for the day. If they see that a lot of their upgrade rooms are oversold, it costs them little and gains them a lot (of customer favor) by upgrading the room.

[Personal example of the above three: I arrived on a early evening flight into Vegas during the summer and was checking into my Circus Circus hotel room at around 8:00 PM. There was a long line ahead of me and a long line behind me, meaning that the hotel was probably booked to the gills. When I got to the desk, I asked if there were any available upgrades. Without batting an eye, the attendant immediately gave me a strip-facing suite. Sweet.]

The Top of Poland (By Way of Slovakia)

2010-05-24T12:43:00.000-07:00

We clear the treeline and have no words. The valley looks as if God's boat had sailed through, the keel carving the rock and leaving fecundity in its wake. Below are the trees we spent an hour hiking through, above are green grasses dotted with purple and yellow flowers, their petals high enough to brush my biceps. This mountainside meadow spreads up until it merges with the grey rock and white snow that mark the peaks of the Tatras mountains.
Up there, facing each other across a saddle are the highest points in Slovakia and Poland, for this range marks the border between the two countries. The Slovakian peak, barely 150 feet higher than its Polish partner, is inaccesible without a guide. But Rysy, the Polish peak, has a trail right to the top and is frequently climbed from both sides of the border. At 8,199 feet, this should be a cakewalk.

Carrie and I are hiking extremely light on this trip: tennis shoes and day packs. We're walking past those who took this trail a little more seriously, who are heavy with their hiking boots and refrigerator backpacks. I suppose we could have weighed ourselves down more: at the bottom of the trail were bags of coal and a sign that promised a free drink at a hut on top of the mountain if you brought one up. Beside the coal were two wooden frames with shoulder straps, each ladden with 70 pounds of firewood. For shlepping that to the top, you would get a free night's stay. Someone had taken that offer, and as we were climbing down, we saw someone, bent nearly double with the wood frame on their back, their own backpack strapped to the frame. When we got closer, we saw that it was a woman.

Bags of coal, to be taken to the top

The way up was beautiful, walking through those angled mountain meadows fed by cold mountain streams that we crossed via woode bridges. These gave way to glacial lakes as the weather briefly broke. As it lightly rained we walked past a stream running over and waterfalling down the mountain side.

Glacial lakes

The terrain seemed to change every 20 minutes: after the rain stopped, we had to use ropes and chains to get up the slick, steep rock, and then we hit the snowpack. I slipped and fell a couple times, my cheap, Ukrainian sneakers finding no purchase on the icy snow.

Using the ropes and chains to climb up. Carrie on the snowpack, me slipping below her.

We passed the mountain hut and kept going, trudging up the snow until it gave way once again to rock and the saddle between the peaks. We were nearly blown off our feet by the gusts of wind that hit as as soon as we cleared the valley walls.

The red and white blazes marking the trail disappeared and we followed two people ahead of us. We found ourselves climbing, using hands and feet as the trail completely dissapeared. Looking up, my hood acting as a sail in the wind and tugging at me, I saw the top of the mountain. Rather than a peak, it ended in a straight, thin line, one you would have to straddle just to say you were on top, because there was no room to stand. With the gusting wind, I was genuinely worried that we would get blown off the top.

Then we looked back and saw other hikers, saw the path leading up the other peak. We were on the wrong mountain and were twenty minutes from scaling the highest peak in Slovakia, even though we weren't legally allowed to do so.

Despite my fear, I entertained the notion of finishing it, but Carrie firmly refused. We climbed back down and followed the path up to the other peak. The two people that had been ahead of us kept going, still climbing. Whether they were mistaken, one was a guide, or they were just doing it, we never found out.

The other peak was much easier to summit, requiring only a bit of scrambling at the end before we passed a sign saying we were now on Polish territory, and then we were at the flattened top of the point. The views were amazing, and we stopped to eat lunch there, chatting with an Australian who had come up from the Polish side, a Swiss would had come up from the Slovakian.

At the top!

Carrie and I had made it up in 3.5 hours. It was supposed to take us 6. Our lunch finished, we blew back down the mountain, passing the laden people who we had passed on the way up. When we hit the snow pack, we both simply sat down and slid, an exciting, slighlty out of control plummit down towards the rock. An elderly couple who were hiking came up in front of us. Carrie stopped short, and I ran into her. Rather than stopping, I sort of bounced around her, angling past the couple before the snow leveled out and I was able to stand up. A Slovakian family, who was just beginning to go up the snow pack and had watched me come down, congratulated me.

The snowpack we slid down.

In any case we made it to the bottom, and for less than four dollars, I celebrated our topographical victory with a fantastic steak dinner with a cold Pepsi.

Life was sweet.

Best and Worst Airlines For Redeeming Frequent Flyer Miles

2010-05-19T11:09:00.000-07:00

IdeaWorks, a company that specializes in researching and improving loyalty programs, recently published a study on how likely a person could find a requested seat using frequent flyer miles. It made 280 flight reward queries per airline and then posted the percentage of how often they were able to find a reward seat and the lowest-tier reward pricing.

You can see the full rankings below, and they confirm what most of us have long suspected: it's hard to get a domestic flight for miles. Airlines only open up a small percentage of seats on a given flight that can be bought with miles ("reward seats") and the reality is that although an airline like Delta might tell you that you can get a free round trip flight as soon as you accumulate 25,000 miles, as this study shows that it can be damn near impossible to get it.

Southwest Airlines seems to be the exception. They top the chart at 99.3%, and then from there the next six are all international carriers. Delta Airlines and US Airways are at the bottom, at 12.9% and 10.7% respectively.

I love loyalty programs, but only in as much as I can abuse them. I have almost every single airline-branded credit card, each of which gave me (supposedly) a free flight's worth of miles after my first purchase, but, yes, it takes a flexible schedule and a lot of patience to actually book a reward seat. In fact, I still have enough miles with both Continental and United for free flights, but have yet to redeem them because my BleedTravel study shows that you can redeem them 0% of the time that you want.

Because of this, I try not rely on frequent flyer miles to get free flights and instead use credit card bonuses that either credit you all or part of the cost of a flight (like the Chase Sapphire card, which I talk about in this post) or whose loyalty programs buy regular seats for you when you cash in your points, thereby bypassing the reward seat limitation altogether. My favorite of those types of programs is the ThankYou Network, and I talk about how to bonus stack several of their credit cards together to get a free flight in this post.

Here are the rankings:

Travel As Business: Dissecting IRC 183, Pt I

2010-05-18T13:57:00.000-07:00

[NOTE: Quotes below refer to "Schedule C losses". For those who do not know what those are: if an individual has their own business, they file the income and expenses of that business with the IRS using a Schedule C form; losses on that form can then be deducted from their overall income, reducing the amount of taxes they have to pay.]

Internal Revenue Code Section 183 (IRC 183) is sometimes referred to as the “Hobby Loss” part of the code because it deals with the very complex and murky subject of whether a taxpayer is engaging in a profit-driven business that also looks like a hobby or whether they are engaged in a hobby that they are trying to make look like a business in order to deduct costs.

It is so murky because the code is pretty much based on intent (whether a person is trying to make a profit) and--sharp objects aside--an auditor cannot get into the head of a taxpayer. The way tax courts have ruled on this matter has further complicated this matter for both taxpayers and auditors.

By being familiar with IRC 183, though, a person can take steps to make their businesses legitimate in the eyes of the IRS, even if they are taking substantial losses from something that some could argue is just a hobby.

First, a Discussion of the Code

It is worth noting that the code is a work in progress. The first version was created in 1943, in almost direct response to the actions of a man named Marhall Field. At the time, Field was operating two newspapers in Chicago as a sole proprietorship and taking a loss on them on his personal income taxes. Essentially, the Federal government was helping to subsidize his newspapers.

A large amount of litigation followed as the IRS tried to use the code to stop others from reducing their overall tax burden through loss-making side projects. The Tax Reform Act of 1969 was supposed to clarify how much a person could loose before they hand to stop: no more than $25,000 in 3 out of 5 years. A disagreement between the House and the Senate, though, killed putting a dollar amount on losses, resulting in a tax system that “defined profit as not only immediate economic profit but also any reasonably anticipated long term increase…" In other words, the IRS did not have the right to tell someone they were loosing too much money, provided that a profit might be seen at some point in the future.

In order to limit litigation over the now quite subjective rules about profit making, IRC 183 was put into place in 1988. The essential component was that any business which was profitable for 3 years out of a consecutive 5 year period would be considered a business, no matter how much it looked like a hobby. If the IRS wanted to pursue a case, the onus of proving that a business was really a hobby would fall on the IRS.

Today, IRC 183 is considered flawed by the Treasure Department. A recent review stated that “the IRS faces considerable challenges in administrating the tax law for taxpayers who take Schedule C losses year after year for potentially not-for-profit activities.” It said that current regulations “do not establish specific criteria for the IRS to use to determine whether a Schedule C loss is a legitimate business expense without conducting a full examination of an individual's books and records.” A full examination, of course, is a huge drain on IRS resources. According to the report, the IRS experimented with several cheaper methods of recovering money, including sending warning letters (which were often ignored) or doing audits by mail (which turned out to be nearly as time consuming and expensive, and which did not deter most taxpayers from taking losses in subsequent years).

The investigation made it clear that IRC 183 is not a “good tax” because it is so hard to enforce: “we conclude that it is difficult for the IRS to efficiently and effectively administer this provision.”

In its summation, the Treasure Department recommended that the legislation be changed to establish a clearly defined standard or “bright line rule” for determining whether a deduction is legitimate or not.

What the Code Means for Someone Who Turn a Travel Hobby Into a Business

1. According to the guidance the IRS publishes for auditors, “an activity could be considered a for-profit business if a taxpayer shows any profit during a 5 year period, even though larger losses are claimed in the other taxable years.” The safe harbor provided by IRC 183 helps protect the taxpayer. If a business takes three years of profit (which could technically be only a dollar in profit) and two years of heavy losses, the burden of proof still lies on the IRS to prove that it is not a for-profit business. An example of this might be taking a European vacation one summer, taking the cost of the trip as a business loss, and then selling a story ever year for the next three years, generating small profits in those years. The trip was an investment that paid off in the next few years with sold stories (which further your cause of turning your writing into a profitably business). You can do this provided that you “devote time to the business in the honest belief that the business will sometime in the future become profitable."

2. The IRS states: “It is not necessary for the taxpayer to show what their projected profit is expected to be.” Also, the IRS does not have the right to determine whether a business could be profitable, and a “reasonable expectation of profit” is NOT necessary. It is only important that the taxpayer is honestly trying to make a profit.

3. Although the code states that being profitable in 3 years out of 5 should alleviate most suspicion, it still allows a taxpayer to take losses year after year provided they can demonstrate that they are trying to make a profit. In one court case, a taxpayer took $700,000 in losses over seven years and the courts still ruled that he was conducting a for-profit business.

4. IRC 183 provides 9 considerations that an auditor should look at when determining whether a business is for-profit or a hobby loss. Those considerations will be looked in part II of this post.

In Summation

For now, the subjectivity and murkiness of the code is on the side of the taxpayer, particularly if the taxpayer shows three years of profit in a five year period. Provided that the taxpayer is conducting the business in the hopes of making a profit, even if the potential for profit is almost nonexistent, the current law sides with them and allows the loss, even if the loss is quite large and taken year after year after year.

Travel As Business: Assessing the Risks of Taking a Business Loss for Your Travel Business

2010-05-17T15:38:00.000-07:00

Turning your travel into a has several benefits, the greatest of which, obviously, is having your job (even it's only your side job) be something that you love. Beyond that, though, it has the benefit of either generating profits for you if the business does well, or generating tax savings for you if the business does poorly .

But taking a business loss on your taxes does have a risk: the IRS determining that you are conducting a hobby and not a profit-driven business and penalizing you for that. And since no one wants to end up in jail while trying to save money on their taxes, here is a blunt discussion of the risks involved in taking a business loss.

If you are audited, an IRS representative will try to determine if your loss is tax evasion or tax avoidance.

Tax Evasion

If you are evading taxes, you are risking a lot of grief. You could be jailed and you could be fined (the amount you owe plus a 75% penalty). If you are found guilty of evading taxes, there is no statute of limitations and and the IRS can look at your entire tax history when trying to assess how much you owe. Obviously, no one wants to be guilty of tax evasion.

Tax Avoidance

Avoiding taxes is another matter. Provided it is legal, you are allowed to avoid as much tax as you can. One way to think about it is if you were to take a longer route home to avoid a toll road. Your effort has allowed you to legally avoid a tax and it was your right to do so.

An IRS agent might disagree with your interpretation of the law, but it is not illegal to take a tax avoidance position that later turns out to be wrong. In this case, the penalty is likely to be the amount you owe, plus 20%.

The statute of limitation on tax avoidance is three years. The IRS cannot recover money from a return filed four years before the audit, even if they determine that on those returns you were incorrectly avoiding taxes.

The Difference

As a CPA once told me: “Mess with the deductions, but never mess with the income.” Lying about income is considered tax evasion. Taking a deduction that the IRS later considers incorrect, though, is usually a case of tax avoidance.

Of course, if you are taking a deduction that you are clearly not entitled to (like taking an education deduction when you obviously weren’t going to school or taking a dependent deduction for kids that you don’t have), then that would almost certainly be considered evasion.

But, as my CPA friend told me, taking a business deduction for an activity that you are making some money on is simply “taking a position. The IRS may later disagree with you, but it was not illegal.”

Chances of Being Audited

Even with Obama’s increase of funding to the IRS, the chances of you being audited if you report less than $100,000 a year is slim. The reason is that when the IRS chooses which cases to persue, they want the potential recovery to make up for the cost of the audit and then some. Most of the cases that are cited when
dealing with hobby-loss are for huge deductions. One was a doctor who tried to deduct his polo playing hobby because he met clients while conducting it. Another was for the owner of a car dealership who was deducting more than $30,000 a year for his stock car racing hobby because he said it helped advertise his dealership. In both cases, the courts disagreed.

If you’re saving yourself $1,000 a year in travel deductions for your travel writing business, it’s hardly worth it for the IRS to spend almost that amount in payroll hours just to get it back.

That said, I firmly believe that you should take deductions as if you were to be audited. Taking Schedule C losses is a red flag for the IRS, even if your deductions are too small to be worth the effort. Individuals also do get randomly selected, and you might get audited for that reason.

While it’s your right to avoid tax by taking business losses for a pleasurable business that you are trying to make a profit from, you should conduct that business as if the IRS will be investigating it. That shouldn't deter you from doing it; it just means that you should be mindful when doing so.

Worth It?

That’s a question only you can answer, but here is a way to think about it: Let’s say you take business loss deductions that net you $1,000 in savings. That’s likely a significant amount of money for you. The chances of you getting audited are slim, but if it does happen and the decision goes against you, you will likely be penalized the amount you owe plus 20%. Since you would have paid the $1,000 if you hadn’t taken the deduction, your loss comes to $200.

That, too, might be significant, but it can help to think of that $200 as an investment. The chances of getting audited if you report $25,000-$50,000 on your tax return are 0.58%. So, would you be willing to invest $200 in a stock if you had a 99.42% chance of turning it into $1200? Even in a casino, it would be a good bet: a 600% instant increase in your pocket with only the smallest chance of you having to give it back later.

Many others have agreed that it's a good bet, which is why Schedule C deductions loose the treasury $1.9 billion a year. Because of this, the Treasury Department recommends fixing the tax code to make it harder to take a business loss for what may appear to be a hobby, but until that happens, taxpayers are allowed to turn their hobbies into businesses as long as they are trying to make a profit from them.

Disclaimer: I am not a tax professional, and can not be held liable for losses incurred while following the advice of this website.

Deals: 10% off Coupon for Wickers Sportswear

2010-05-17T04:28:00.000-07:00

Wickers, which I mention in this post about cold weather gear, makes clothes that wick sweat off your body, keeping you dry in hot and cold weather. It's not as good as outsourcing your wicking to a Cambodian boy who towels you down with his loin cloth whenever he sees sweat appear, but from experience I can say it's a close second.

I currently use their soft silk long sleeve crew neck as a base layer when I travel, and wish I had found this coupon six months ago: 10% off your purchase with code WEAR10.

Deals: Free Shipping and 25% Off "Tell Me More" Language Learning Software

2010-05-16T10:21:00.000-07:00

Tell Me More is currently having a 25% off sale and are tossing in free shipping to boot.

Although it doesn't have the advertising mojo and mall kiosks of Rosetta Stone, Tell Me More is Language Learning software that has something else going for it: it's used by a number of universities as well as the U.S. State Department and the FBI.

Might be something to it. Unfortunately it's useless to me as I already know every language ever created, including one that I'm making up right now: foifi gerun blat!

Travel As Business: 47 Travel Websites That Will Publish (and Pay for) Your Travel Writing

2010-05-15T15:04:00.000-07:00

You know I love you, right? Which is why I give you this very, very long list of travel websites that accept travel writing submissions. Most pay, even if only a little, and that can let you deduct your travel as a business expense.

HINT: Read their submission guidelines before submitting! Editors routinely toss out stories if they aren't submitted correctly. If you can't get the details straight on sending in a story, how they expect you to have gotten the details straight about travel in a far off country?

ANOTHER HINT: Since I plan on adding more magazines to this post as I find them, I would suggest bookmarking this page and coming back to it periodically.

If you find other online magazines that will publish travel writing, or if there are any problems with any of the links, please leave a comment and I'll add/fix them.

Lastly, if you are published on one of these sites, leave a comment and I will link to your story!

Now go get published!

WEBSITE	SUBMISSION GUIDELINES OR ADDRESS
http://www.outpostmagazine.com	http://www.outpostmagazine.com/contributor-guidelines/
http://www.studenttraveler.com	eric@studenttraveler.com
http://www.perceptivetravel.com	http://www.perceptivetravel.com/guidelines.html
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How to Save Weight: You Need to Use Less Shaving Cream and Hair Care Than You Think

2010-05-11T08:45:00.000-07:00

This was straight stolen from a Men's Health Article, but hopefully paraphrased beyond litigation. Bring it, lawyers!

So, considering how much weight and space toiletries can take up in a travel pack, it was enlightening to read that, in general, we WAY OVERUSE our toiletry products. Cutting back is not only healthier for your skin and hair, but means you can take less on your trip in the first place.

Here's the coin system of product measurement:

For shaving cream, you only need a quarter-sized portion of foamy face lube. Of course, I recommend not using shaving cream at all.

For shampoo, you only need a nickle-sized portion of follicle soap,

For hair conditioner, you only need a penny-sized hunk of silky hair love

For gel and other hair products, you only need a dime-sized dollop of tress bondage.

Travel light, travel far!

Bootsnall Just Published One of My Stories

2010-05-10T09:59:00.000-07:00

BootsnAll just published my travel story on climbing an erupting volcano in Guatemala.

Do me a favor: Go to the site and vote it up!

http://www.bootsnall.com/articles/10-05/new-rule-dont-climb-a-volcano-while-its-erupting-pacaya-guatemala.html

How to Save Weight: Two Things You Might Not Have Thought to Leave at Home

2010-05-10T08:00:00.000-07:00

My travel pack's contents are a contradiction. For example, I've cut out two feet of a power cable and spliced the ends together to save an ounce of weight and a bit of space, but I happily bring along a 1.5 pound netbook. I suppose my philosophy is that there are some things that I want to have along, like the netbook and a digital camera, and to make up for it I get rid of almost everything else.
So here are two things I have realized that I don't need. They may sound odd at first, but hear me out:

Underwear

Yes, underwear. You don't need it. Really, you don't. In fact, ladies, this article from Queen's University actually recommends going without underwear when possible for "Vulvar Health".

Cotton absorbs moisture and drys slowly. This keeps your nether regions warm and damp, which provides a great breeding ground for bacteria and fungus. This is how you get jock itch and why it gets to smelling funky down there. The more air you get down there, the drier and healthier it's going to be. This is why soldiers in Vietnam stopped wearing underwear in that country's damp climate, and hence the term "going commando".

Plus, while women's undearwear tends to be so flimsly that they can seemingly pack a week's worth into a film canister, men's underwear, particularly boxer shorts, tend to be thick and bulky, taking up space in your pack and adding to the weight.

So, ditch the underwear. Trying going without for a week or two before traveling to get used to it, and maybe take along a pair just to remain modest in hostels (although in European hostels people seem to have no qualms with walking around in the buff. Thank God for co-ed hostel rooms).

Shaving Cream

For the longest, shaving cream was my travel bane. I couldn't leave home without it, but even the travel cansiters were bulky and heavy. I tried different kinds of shaving strategies in order to not take the cream, including using glycerine bars and leaves of shaving foam, but they were expensive and almost as bulky.

Then, one sexy day, I watched a lover shave her legs. And realized she was ONLY USING SOAP. If a tiny, uber-feminie girl can shave twenty-times the area of my face with only soap, why am I--manly man that I aspire to be-- lathering up with specialized cream out of a big, expensive metal can? Exactly.

I just use soap now. That's it. I take a hot shower beforehand to prepare my face and make sure to use a shark razor. Otherwise, the soap provides all the lubrication I need. And not having to take along a can of shaving cream saves a nice chunk of weight and space. If my beard gets really out of control while traveling and I worry that soap won't cut it, I just pay a couple bucks to have it done professionally.

Here is a pic of me getting a shave in Thailand. No, I'm not wearing underwear:

How to: Pack the Right Clothes for Cold Temperatures

2010-05-09T10:35:00.000-07:00

In their guidebooks, Lonely Planet loves to say “take half the clothes and twice the money.”

Okay. Good advice. But from all the massive backpacks I've seen on the road, not a lot of people have figured out how to take half the clothes. A bit of knowledge can lead to a clothing system (yes, system) that really does let you get rid of half the clothes while not sacrificing function.

This post is about the bulkiest part of any travel wardrobe: the cold temperature clothing. Even when going to a warm destination, I've found that having my cold temp system comes in handy. It's kept me warm atop a windy (and erupting) volcano in Guatemala, an ice cave while traveling in Slovakia and has even saved my ass in, of all places, Egypt in July, when a jet powered air conditioner on an overnight bus dropped the temperature to just above freezing.

[At Right: Staying warm on a windy volcano in Guatemala]

Now, if you have a lot of money, you can buy specialized gear that folds into a matchbox and makes you spontaneously combust while wearing it, but this blog is not only about having travel gear that's not only light, but cheap. Which is why knowing how gear works can let you make smart choices instead of spending money for magical gear.

How Cold Weather Gear Works

The reason a sweater or fleece keeps you warm is because their fibers trap air, creating air pockets that your body heats up. It is these warm air pockets that keep you toasty. Their primary enemy is water (particularly sweat), which collapses them.

Actually, sweat period is a heat-killer. Not only does it collapse air pockets, but it conducts heat away from your body. That's its purpose. But if you're active in a cold environment (say, climbing Mount Arat at night to watch the sunrise), then the sweat you're producing is actually going to kill your ability to keep warm once you stop moving.

So the goal is also to get your sweat away from your skin so it won't conduct your heat away. Some fibers (like polyester) are fantastic about wicking sweat to the surface of the strand, letting it evaporate so that air pockets can reform. Other fabrics (like cotton) hold the water in their core, meaning they take forever to dry and the pockets stay collapsed.

Additionally, one other enemy is attacking you at the same time: air. Wind hitting your sweater also collapses the air pockets and draws heat off your body, and even the air created by the bellows effect of walking destroys those pockets.

So in addition to trapping air and wicking sweat, you also need a fabric that will block wind and rain from getting to the air pockets. Ironically, the materials that do this best also keep water (your sweat) from getting out. So what you need is a fabric that is “breatheable”. What this means is that the fabric has microscopic holes that are big enough for water vapor to pass through but too small for water droplets to enter. This miracle fabric was once the patetented property of Gore-Tex, but that patent has expired and you can now get them cheaply from other companies.

So here we are. You need to wick sweat. You need to trap air. You need to block wind and rain. No fabric is good at doing all three, which is why you need a three piece system.

Layer one: a short or long sleeve shirt that wicks sweat.
Layer two: a fleece or sweater that traps air.
Layer three: A waterproof/breatheable jacket.

Although many jackets are an air-trapping layer and a protection layer combined, I think it's better to buy a jacket that is just a thin shell. That way it can serve as a light rain coat that you won't sweat to death in. Buying three layers also lets you "layer up", putting on an additional layer the colder it gets.

Currently, my system is:

Wicker's Softsilk Long Sleeve Crewneck
Columbia Men's Fast Trek Full Zip Fleece
Redhead Thunderlite Jacket

Although I do like Wickers, I'm not really partial to any brand. I suggest looking for sales and finding the cheapest that will do the job.

Some tips:

Since the wicking layer is often be worn as its own shirt, don't be afraid to get one that's stylish
Get the tightest-fitting fleece you can find. It does it's job better when there is no air between the layers, and the smaller size means less bulk in your pack. I actually asked my grandmother to size my fleece to me by taking material out along the hems.
Make sure your jacket has a hood
I prefer my jacket to be only a thin shell so it can serve as either a rain jacket or the protection layer.
I also prefer my jacket to be able to zip into its own pocket so that it's easy to store in my pack.

How to: Minimize your Medicine Kit

2010-05-08T09:05:00.000-07:00

The Problems of Travel Meds

Ah, I miss Peace Corps. Especially the medical kits they give you. It was the size of a large lunch box and packed with every over the counter medicine you could think of (in single-dose packaging), along with various bandages, antibiotics, antivirals (there was avian flu in the area) and exactly four condoms.

Since finishing Peace Corps, I slowly bled (figuratively and literally) through that box. I thought I'd just pick up what I'd need on the road, but what I quickly discovered is that the foreign brands are completely unfamiliar and half the time I can't read the packaging. I've had salespeople recommend what to take, but I also know that in a number of countries they prefer herbal remedies and distrust pharmaceuticals. A number of times I took something without knowing what was really in it.

For a time I kept tossing in packs of DayQuil and NyQuil in the hopes that they would nuke any sickness I got while traveling, but I soon realized two things:
1.They're expensive
2.They're bulky

It says how anal I am when I look at thick gelatain capsules and think: “These take up too much space!” and it definitely speaks to how stingy I am when I think: “Eight dollars for medication? That's a night at a hostel!”

So I looked at what it was that I was actually taking—as in the ingredients—and started looking around for the specific meds within them.

What's in a SymptomPak

What I found was a brand called SymptomPak (the link goes to the product page on Amazon.com). The idea is that instead of buying multi-symptom medications, you buy only the base ingredients and take what you actually need.

I bought their 5-pack for $25, and in it was the following:

1.Acetaminophen, for aches and pains

2.Phenylephrine, for nasal and sinus congestion

3.Dextromethorphan, a cough suppressant

4.Guaifenesin, for loosening chest congestion

5.Chlorpheniramine, a antihistamine for allergies (runny nose, itchy eyes, etc.)

When I was taking DayQuil, for example, I was really taking acetaminophen, phenylephrine and dextromethorphan mixed together. From a economic standpoint, this is pretty sweet: there is 30 doses worth of Dayquil in there, not counting the other meds, and if the cold you'd take the Dayquil for didn't have, say, coughing, then you could just not take Dextromethorphan.

What's Worth Taking and Leaving

When I bought the multipak, I got it to have all the meds at home, while knowing that only some would accompany me on the road. I'm picky about goes into my pack, so I decided on the following:.

1.Acetaminophen: Definitely. I've turned to this for everything from a strained foot ligament (Prague), aching muscles from diving (Egypt), to hangovers (Thailand).

2.Phenylephrine: Definitely. Although I tend to eat healthier when I travel, constant overnight travel, increased stress and less overall sleep means that I have gotten head colds while on the road. And since time is such a factor in travel, I'd rather dope up and enjoy another day than do a day of bed rest. My motto: I'll sleep when I get home.

3.Dextromethorphan: Nope. I rarely have upper respiratory problems and rarely have problems with coughing. Rather, if I'm coughing, it's because I have mucus in my lungs and throat, and for that I'd rather turn to amoxcicillin.

[Read the blog post about getting antibiotics while on the road and how to use them]

4.Guaifenesin: Nope. Same as Dextromethorphan.

5.Chlorpheniramine: Yep. Ironically I don't like taking antihistamines for allergies, but I have discovered that they are important for two things: Insect bites and overnight travel. When I was in Honduras, I could barely sleep because of the sand flea bites ringing my ankles, and antihistamines made the itching temporarily go away. Also, I used to pack sleeping pills for overnight bus, train and plane trips because I find it almost impossible to sleep while sitting up, but then I had a nurse tell me that popping 3-4 antihistamines will have the same effect. She was right.

What Else You Get:

The kit came with a color-coded chart listing symptoms and what to take, and you can take all five together if
need be. The pills were actually the same color as on the chart (acetaminophen is green, for example) and each was marked with the first letter of the medicine.

I don't think the chart is needed because the dosing is uniform: adults are meant to take two pills every four hours, no matter which kind you are taking. From there it's just a matter of memorizing what symptom goes with what pill. I didn't memorize the whole names, just thing like: "Phenyl=Runny Nose", "Dextro=Cough", etc.

What I hadn't realized would come with the kit, but which is pretty cool, is a small (about the size of two thick matchboxes) pill case with six compartments. As someone who has watched his pills get crushed in their packaging while in his backpack, I'm surprised I never thought to get one before.

All in their compartments, I realized the pills looked a little like candy and not unlike ecstasy pills, so they might cause a slight issue at border crossings. Still, I now easily have a year's worth of medicine in the space formally taken up by three doses of DayQuil liquicaps.

Sweet.

Deals: Coupon for 20% off the FuelTank

2010-05-02T19:34:00.000-07:00

Almost everyone and their mother (including my mother) has either a smart phone or an MP3 player these days, and it's hard to find a hostel that doesn't have half a dozen flashpackers bobbing their heads with their earbuds in.

Although I stopped taking my iPod on trips once I got my netbook, one of the biggest problems I remember was that I could only play one two hour movie before the battery was dead. For an 8 hour bus trip where all the windows are drawn, chicken feathers are floating in the air and the karaoke is blaring, that's six hours too short. I'd have brought along extra batteries except, well, Apple doesn't let you replace the battery.

So I'm assuming that's why Callpod came up with the FuelTank Uno Essentially it's an extra battery that plugs into an iPod or any one of "3,000+ devices" according to its website, but it happens to be a battery with four times the capacity of a normal battery, even though it only weights four ounces. Technically, it'd even get me through a 10 hour bus ride.

If that sounds like it's for you, then now might be the time to get it, because Callpod is currently selling them for 20% off. Use coupon LS2010.

Bow Chika-Wow-Wow: 20% Off Match.com and Two Free Weeks at Chemistry.com

2010-05-01T16:04:00.000-07:00

Where once finding love was a matter of being the best plower in the village (um...), now we have to do new-fangled things like go online and add women to our shopping carts before checking out and waiting for UPS to deliver. I'm all for online break-ups, so I suppose I have to be for online dating, too.

What does this have to do with travel? Not a damn thing! But I did meet my girlfriend through Match.com and Chemistry.com is part of the same company, so when I saw these deals, I thought it'd be worth posting for your lonely travel-bleeding ass!

Coupons:

1. 20% off Match.com

2. Tw o free weeks at Chemistry.com

Go forth and conquer, clicker!

Hitchhiking Romania

2010-04-28T20:06:00.000-07:00

I am a millionaire!

At least in Romania, where about $34 will get you 1,000,000 Lei. Of course, thanks to inflation, this isn't really worth much. Romania is in the process of revaluing it's currency (AKA, dropping the last 4 zeros off of all the money) and all the prices are listed in both the old and new versions. I kind of like the old version, though, because I feel like I have a lot of cash.

I'm in northern Romania to see some monasteries. Painted ones that are unique to the area and that made it onto UNESCO's World Heritage List.

Unfortunately, seeing them would not be as easy as I'd thought.

Hiding from the rain that has flooded most of central Romania in a rented room in Gora Humoruli (a tiny town that is the closest bit of civilization to the monasteries) I realized I could have planned this a bit better.

And by that I mean I should have done some planning.

Problem #1: The Language Barrier

I came to Romania thinking that language would not be a problem. I am comfortable using three lingua francas (English, Spanish and Russian), and, if someone I met knew none of these, I knew that Romanian was a Romance language. Because I know Spanish, I am, to some extent, able to understand Portuguese and Italian, so I thought that I would be able to get the gist of something said in Romanian.

Wrong.

At both bus and train stations, I met attendants who spoke none of the languages I did and who became agitated and rude the second they realized that I didn't know Romanian. As they waved me away in a torrent of words so that they could attend to the people behind me, I realized that Romanian is just close enough to Spanish to be familiar while still being completely impenetrable. Hearing it, I was thinking: "okay, I feel like this should make sense to me, but I don't understand a goddamn word you're saying."

Problem #2: Transportation

Since I couldn't get any information out of any of the attendants about travel options, I finally had to find a bus to Gora Humoruli by looking at signs in bus windows. When I finally found one, I was ripped off by the driver. I gave him 100,000 Lei for a 45,000 ticket, and in return he gave me a 5,000 Lei coin and communicated through gestures said he would give me the change when he had it. Simple enough; happens all the time.

When we arrived at Gora Humorului and I asked for my change (using Russian, since he seemed to be getting the gist from that), he waved me off and acted as if he didn't understand me. The money was a pittance, but it still annoyed me.

In the town itself, I realized that there was no identifiable public transportation. Mostly, what I saw were horse drawn carts. Unable to communicate and unable to find how to get around, making it to the monasteries suddenly seemed impossible. I felt angry, isolated and vulnerable. I know I like to think of myself as this great traveler, but sometimes reality likes to sit me down and smack me in the face.

With the rain coming down, and little idea what to do, I started searching for a place to sleep.

Maria

Salvation came from a woman named Maria, a sweet woman in her 50s who had a sign in the window of her tiny house that simply said "Room".

She answered the door and, it turned out, had learned some Russian in grade school. She invited me inside, her watery-eyed, thirty-year daughter sitting at the table and staring at me the way that girl from the exorcist probably would, and we negotiated a price.

A few hours later, we were chatting about her childhood, her pushing bread and coffee at me from her meager stores. as we sat at her table and talked a bit. Every once in a while, her husband would appear, an old man who kept his hands in front of him as if he was constantly offering you something. She would say something to him in Romanian, and then he would disappear.

After a while, we got to the reason I was in Romania. No, she said, there were no buses to the monasteries.
But, she went on when she saw my crestfallen face, I could hitchhike.

My First Ever Hitchhike

I'd never hitchhiked, before, and I'll admit I was a little nervous as I set out down the dirt road towards the monasteries with a three hard-boiled eggs, two bananas, a few slices of bread and a bottle of water in my satchel. Images of of being stabbed to death and my mother's horrified face circled in my head as I stuck out my hand at the first car that came by.

I was surprised when it immediately stopped. The driver, a slightly balding man in his late 20s, didn't speak English, Russian or Spanish, but understood where I wanted to go. As we silently trundled down the road, I wondered if it was proper to pay for the ride, and debated how much I should give and how I should do it. He dropped me off 100 meters from one of the monasteries, refused the money that I tried handing him with a smile and drove off.

That really brightened my day. I had resigned myself to the fact that most Romanians were rude, and here was this stranger, paying me a kindness.

Humor

I could see one of the monastariesfrescos on the wall and watching the Sunday service being conducted. Orthodox services are interesting to me: people are expected to stand, and there were no pews. High-backed carved wooden chairs lined the walls for the older attendees, but to be honest, all the attendees were older, none younger than fifty. They sat hunched in the chairs while a priest, unseen behind a wooden wall adorned with icons, chanted in Latin in a call-and-response with another priest who stood on my side of the wooden wall, chanting back. The elderly people walked around the interior of the church, kissing icons and crossing themselves. I felt a little sad that there were no younger people there, that religion was simply relegated to the old.

The monastary, which was next door, was amazing. Called Humor (Gora Humorului means "the mouth of Humor"), it was built in 1530. Small, round, with a pointed roof and enclosed within a protective wall, what landed it--and the other nearby monestaries--on UNESCO's list are the paintings on its exterior walls. I could see how the paintings had weathered over the years, those near the top and under the eve of the roof being better preserved than those near the bottom that were exposed to centuries of rain. Most of the paintings at the very bottom had faded past recognition.

The art was theoretically Byzantine, but it definitely had a style of its own. What the artist had done, which I had never seen in other religious art, was break the walls into rectangles, almost like a giant comic book, each frame holding a different saint or scene from the bible. Inside, nuns wearing habits chanted in Latin to a congregation of the elderly, who stood and crossed themselves.

I hitchhiked back. Once again, the first car that passed me stopped, and although there were four people in the little car, they moved to make room for me. The rain had given way to a beautiful summer afternoon, and pressed against the window I was treated to open fields with grazing horses, Romanian houses with roofs tiled in wood or covered in tin, and past freely-wandering cows and chickens. When we arrived back in Gura Humorului, everyone but the driver got out. The man sitting beside me handed the driver 10,000 Lei, so I thought that was expected of me, too. I handed the driver the money, but he looked confused. Finally, though, he just kept it and drove off.

Voronet

I hiked across town and down another road that I knew led to another monastery. This time a Romanian couple in a motor home picked me up. They had been living in Germany for 25 years they told me in English, and had come back to see their home country for the first time in a quarter-century.

They dropped me off at Voronet, a monastery built in 1488. Larger than Humor and crowded with worshippers, Voronet is famous for the color of blue that is the background of all its exterior paintings. Apparently this shade of blue is found only at Voronet ("being unique in the world like Rubens' red and Veroneses's green" said my guidebook) and they're having trouble restoring the faded murals because they don't know how to reproduce the paint. Dominating the western wall of this monastery was a painting of The Last Judgement: it was the book of Revelations in graphic novel form, including the rising of the Leviathan, the battle between good and evil, and all the people of the world being judged by God, compressed into one, huge painting. One thing I saw in the painting that I'd seen in no other Last Judgements: God sitting on a scroll unfurled by angels, the scroll obviously representing the heavens. What was on this scroll, though, were representations of the Zodiac: Pisces and Sagittarius and Cancer and so on. I hadn't known these symbols to ever be included in a Christian painting before.

I could barely see the interior of the monastery because it was packed with worshippers. Most were kneeling and crossing themselves, taking up every square inch of floor space, crowding into the tiny stone rooms and kneeling three abreast in the tiny stone archways, listening to a man chanting from a place I couldn't see. It was all I could do to duck my head in, and when I did, I got a couple of angry looks from those who were kneeling there. I wanted to take a photo of this carpet of people pressed into this ancient monetary, but I thought someone would probably throw something at me, so I left.

Once again, I hitchhiked back into town, being picked up by a Romanian man who just nodded at me as I got in and then flew down the road, leaning on the horn whenever a pedestrian got too close to his car. The man didn't ask for payment and I didn't offer. Actually, we didn't say a word to each other the whole ten-minute trip. We shook hands when I got out of the car, and he immediately took off. I was really happy about all this successful hitchhiking. It seems that in Romania it's just customary to pick up anyone who wants a ride, provided they're headed your way.

I assume that without regular buses to move people around, those with cars just fill in the void. Sad that I couldn't see something similar happening in America. It's a shame that paranoia prevents us from doing that. What was once common has been legislated and media-fear inundated almost out of existence. Don't pick someone up! They'll rob you or rape you! And maybe so, but it's unlikely. More likely to get robbed or raped just walking down the street. To Romanians, it seems that if someone needs a lift, why not give it to them? I like that. It probably wouldn't be a bad idea to hitchhike around the rest of the country, but I've also been programmed to fear getting robbed or raped and so, despite everything I just said, was too leery to trust it. A couple miles down a country road into town in daylight is one thing, but anything else and I could hear my mother yelling at me.

Sigh.

Slovakia: Big Ass Castle

2010-04-20T13:36:00.000-07:00

For 2,000 years, fortified settlements stood on a hill above the city now known as Spisske Podhradie.

A linguistic lesson: "Spisske" is the name for the region in Slovakia. "Pod", the same in Russian and Ukrainian, means "under". "Hrad", I learned quickly, is the Slovakian word for castle ("Zamok" in Ukranian and Russian; sometimes the langauges don't line up at all). So, shifting "Hrad" to the locative case, you have a town that means it's in Spisske reason and it's under a castle. A big ass castle. You couldn't possibly name this town in relation to anything else because every view from this town is dominated by that enormous castle on the hill.

Bury an aircraft carrier on the top of a hill 2/3rds up the keel. The width and height to the deck would be the perimeter of this castle's wall, the superstructure would be the size of the keep and the turret. That's how big this castle is.

Carrie and I had meant to be on the top of Poland, hiking through the Tatras from the Slovakian side, over the border and to the top of a mountain called Kysy. Dark clouds swirling around the mountains, obscuring the peaks sent us on a day trip south. And instead we found ourselves at the top of the turret of one of the largest in all of Europe and the largest in Central Europe, a UNESCO treasure that has never been militarily taken.

At the bottom of the hill was a beautiful cemetary. Slovakians have th tradition of marking graves not just with a headstone, but a slab of stone the length and width of the coffin. Many of these slabs were hollow in the middle, filled with earth and used as planters, many with beautiful flowers in bloom.

The castle, as seen from the town's cemetery (notice the planter in front of the grave behind the cross)

From the cemetery, we started our assault on the castle. I couldn't imagine charging up that steep hill in armor while arrows rained down from the hundreds of arrow slits carved into those beige walls. Any messenger carrying a declaration of war would probably stop halfway up, hands on his knees and panting, before going back down and telling the commander that it wasn't worth it.

Tourists and not archers now covered the walls, walking their immense length and soaking in the enormity of it. Built starting in the 13th century by the Hungarians, it had been steadily enlarged for the next four centuries until an accidental fire burned down everything but the mortared stone in 1780. We walked through the entrances of three separate walls in our constant uphill plunge to the oldest structures: the keep and the turret: the outer one had a courtyard so large you could put a mall into it (or a lot of livestock and frightened villagers), a wooden one being constructed by carpenters (probably to regulate tourist flow), and the inner one to the keep.

The castle keep

Once inside the inner one, Carrie and I both looked at an indentation in the wall and, with climber's instincts, both started walking towards it without saying anything to each other. Looking at it, there was probably once a ladder there, but we simply climbed the uneven stone to the top of the inner wall. There, we saw that there was a tiled area over the arch that admited us through the wall, and walking over to it, found a slit that ran over the arch, one we hadn't even noticed walking through it. It was proabably used to shoot arrows or drop oil onto attacking soldiers. Not only was it cool to be somewhere where most people didn't go (because most people don't climb UNESCO treasures), but the views were spectacular. Now, before anyone gets into a huff, it wasn't like these walls were crumbling. They had withstood 6 centuries. They easily withstood us.

A view from the keep

The only views more spectacular than on the inner wall were those from the top of the turret. The stone steps leading up the narrow, winding stair had been polished smooth by centuries of soles and were slippery.

Carrie, on the way up the turret

Using a chain to assist, we got to the top, where we had a clear, 360 degree view of the Slovakian countryside We could see farmland, the wheat sprouting in brown rectangles, villages, thin black roads with tiny cars racing down them, patches of forest on undulating hills. We could no doubt easily see an approaching army.

A view from the turret

Following the stairs back down, we went even lower, into a dungeon holding a smattering of torture items, including Spanish boots, stocks, a primitive rack and a "torture table", where metal bands held prisoners down while they were whipped or worse. Also on display were some of the weapons used to defend the castle: cannons, mortars, armor and very large stone balls. The stone balls were rolled down the hill at an attacking army.

Getting tortured on the torture table

Just walking the breadth of the castle defeated us, so we retired back to the quiet little town in the Tatras that we were staying at: Tantranska Lominice.

Me, being me (although the photo was Carrie's idea)

Deals: 30% off Lonely Planet Pick and Mix Chapters!

2010-04-13T17:12:00.000-07:00

When I first started traveling, I voiced several times my wish that I could just buy only the sections of a guidebook that I needed instead of lugging the whole thing around. It was suggested that I just razor out the parts I wouldn't need. To me, though, cutting up a book felt sacrilegious.

And then the Lonely Planet gods (hey, I do hear people referring to their Lonely Planet as their "bible") answered my prayers with their "Pick and Mix Chapters".

Basically, you choose the chapters you want, pay and download the PDF files of that chapter.

At this point, lazy people just print the whole chapter. My advice is to read through it and only print the pages you need. For example, I never need the restaurant and accommodations pages because I usually book a hostel through HostelBookers by looking at the ratings and then eat at what every is in the area of the hostel, or whatever happens to be around when I get hungry.

By only printing the pages you need, you save a lot of weight (and can throw away pages on the road as you go from city to city). I would say that this also saves trees, but I am guilty of photocopying the printed pages so that they are double sided, thereby cutting the amount of pages I have to carry in half.

Oh, and now that I am done expounding on guidebooks, how about I get around to the deal: 30% off Lonely Planet Pick&Mix Chapters!

Click Here: To Save 30% off Lonely Planet Pick and Mix Chapters

Soviet Skydiving

2010-04-08T19:30:00.000-07:00

"So one option is to do it tandem. You get strapped to an instructor and jump from really high, so there's a lot of free fall. But it's $200."

"The other option?"

"A four hour class, and you jump out of the plane by yourself."

"The class will be in Russian?"

"Yeah. Well, it might be in Ukrainian."

"How much?"

"Thirty dollars."

"Let's do it."

*

Catch a bus from the capitol of Kyiv. Ride it an hour to the concrete village of Borodyanka. From there, catch a taxi to the largest airfield in Ukraine.

Military tourism was supposed to be a moneymaker. In 2002, to bolster its budget, the Ukrainian army invited the world to come and play with its toys. Few foreigners arrived to pay $400 to drive a tank or $50 to to lob a grenade, but the Soviet Union's assembly line system of throwing soldiers out of airplanes turned out to be easy and cheap enough to tempt thrill-seeking Ukrainian youth.

And the occasional American one.

Diana and I were late.

Eighty-two people (I counted) were encircling a short, middle-aged woman with dyed red hair whose hands emphatically underlined her crisp, loud Russian. Her name was Olga Alexandrovna, our jump instructor for the day and the inverse image of the gruff and surly soldier who I imagined would teach us.

She was standing in front of a rusted airplane door that was missing its airplane, holding up the worn canvas sack of a Soviet surplus parachute, and showing us a frighteningly frayed strap with a metal clip at its end.

"This will be hooked into a wire on the plane," she said, "and it will deploy your parachute after you jump."

Someone asked how old the parachute was.

"Thirty two years-old," she said.

The group, nearly all of them younger than the parachute, glanced at one another.

It's not the fall that kills you, it's the geriatric silk.

She then held up a smaller canvas pack, once blue but now faded to gray. "This is your backup parachute," she said. "You only paid for the main parachute. If this deploys, you have to pay a 50 hrivna fine."

People chuckled.

"I'm serious," she said.

People frowned. Fifty hrivna was only $6 to an American, but it wasn't cheap to a Ukrainian.

The backup parachute was not the only possible fine. Although Olga had grown up under communism, she well understood the capitalist mantra of economic incentives. If you landed in a wheat field instead of the designated landing zone, it was 70 hrivna. If you landed in the woods and tore your parachute, you had to pay for the repair. If you landed on someone's house, you paid for the damage.

Olga told us what to do when we were 2,400 feet up and falling: count three seconds. Feel the parachute engage. Make sure the parachute is okay. Disarm the altimeter that wants to release the backup at 900 feet.

If you don't, pay the fine.

Disarming an altimeter sounded complicated, but I soon learned that it only required tugging out a piece of string that connected two loops of wire together.

That was it.

Pull out the string.

Life hanging by a thread now had a way-too-literal meaning.

As we took turns jumping through the door, arms crossed, feet together, it all seemed easy and simple and I felt very, very confident. That waned when Olga began telling us how to avoid running into each other.

It's not the fall that kills you, it's the other skydivers.

Worry started to worm.

Ten of us were going to jump one right after the other, and the possibility of a midair collision was frighteningly real.

Olga started going through the possible scenarios: if someone is coming in on your right, pull down on the left control cable to spin out of their way. If they're coming from your left, do the opposite.
If you're going directly at one another, spread your arms and legs to try to catch onto them or their parachute cords, push them back, and then turn out of the way. Only don't turn out of the way if you're less than 600 feet off the ground because landing while spinning might break your legs.

Push another person? In mid-air?

Jesus good lord gravy.

Olga kept going.

Now, she said, when can you self-deploy the back up parachute? Even with the altimeter disengaged, we learned that there was a red metal handle that we could yank out to release the backup parachute. And if we dropped that red metal handle, which apparently was an expensive red metal handle, there would be a fine.

This was probably the most important part, but two hours of heavy concentration and a rising panic was throttling my Russian.

Something about failing something.

Something about something a hole something.

Something about three something somethings.

I am going to die.

Diana listed it for me later: If your parachute fails to completely open, pull the back up. If there is a hole in your parachute larger than three feet wide, pull the back up. If more than three of the strings attaching you to the parachute are broken, pull the back up.

Olga kept going:

If you land in the woods, protect your face with your arms as you hit the trees. If you see that you are about to land in a lake, unhook your harness while in midair and jump out of it right as you are about to hit the water. If you are about to land on the roof of a building and one step or jump will clear you, good. If not, attach one of your cords to something on the roof as quickly as possible.

"What if we can't?" asked a girl.

"Make sure you do," said Olga.

*

Despite graphically describing all the ways we could die in the pursuit of a cheap, three minute thrill, Olga said we should worry less about those and more about the most dangerous part of skydiving: landing.

It's not the fall that kills you, it really is the oh-so-sudden stop.

Diana and I had opted to spend the previous night in Kyiv, staying with an American friend named Peter. We had invited him to go skydiving with us, only to have him say that he wasn't interested. After we returned, he explained: "Yeah, everyone I know has hurt something when they landed."

"And why didn't you tell me this before?"

"I didn't want to worry you."

Next to the airplane door were three plywood platforms built at different heights, the lowest about three feet off the ground and the highest at about seven. We spent the next hour jumping off of them. Falling came naturally to me, but others freaked out with mid-air yelps, landing with their feet apart or not tucking their arms as they rolled. Olga kept sending them back up onto the platform, an nfinite conveyor belt of frightened, flailing lemmings.

We were well into our fourth hour of instruction, and the landing wasn't even the end of it. We even had to learn how to pack up the parachutes after we reached the ground, correctly wrapping the cords so that they wouldn't tangle and rolling up the parachute in such a way that it could easily be repacked later.

Not doing so would earn a fine.

Finally, when I was sure we were about to learn how to start raising silkworms and

weaving parachute cloth, Olga told us to go to the airfield.

I was the second in line to jump.

Inside the sheet metal airplane, deafened by the engines, sitting packed five to a side on two narrow benches, we waited. Our parachutes were clipped into wires overhead. The jumpmaster had pulled the pin that activated each of our altimeters. Below us, the world was rectangles of brown and green.

An opened door. A blast of cold.

It became real.

The jumpmaster nodded at the man ahead of me, who we'll call Sergei. Sergei stood up, stood at the door, looked out at forever. I blinked. He was gone.

Trying not to hesitate, I stood and moved to the door, feeling off balance with the wind and vibration, put my left foot on the threshold as I'd been taught, crossed my arms--left over right--as I'd been taught, and there was the world, so very far below.

The jumpmaster put his hand on my back.

"Pashol!" he yelled.

I jumped.

*

Maybe he was used to people not jumping. Maybe he thought I needed a push.

His push had spun me.

I was terrified. Deafened in a frigid fury of wind and turbines, I was twisting, rotating, falling backwards. My psyche was screaming. My feet were flailing. I had no control. I waited, prayed, for my parachute to open, but it didn't.

It's not the fall that...

I whipped around and everything ended.

I looked up. My parachute was open, but the cords were twisted around one another. Not good. Do I pull the back up? Do I risk the fine? I started slowly spinning, the cords unwinding themselves.

Then the world made sense again.

There was peace, and there was more. An undefined feeling, somewhat the antithesis of fear. I was slowly drifting, bathed in beauty, seeing what birds see. I was floating backwards from the plane, watching eight other parachutes make a line of cotton drops against the sky. I looked up and saw the control handles, pulled the left one, felt myself turn in that direction.

Am I okay? Yes, I'm okay.

I reached down and tugged the string.

It was calming up there, gorgeous, quiet. There was much thoughtless awe before I remembered that I was supposed to be controlling my descent.

I wasn't sure where to land, noticed that Sergei and I were drifting in a different direction than the other eight. I tried to guess where I was supposed to touch down, but what once seemed like a massive drop zone was hard to find in the patches of color below. I just knew that I wasn't headed towards water or trees or buildings or a wheat field and that was good enough.

I pulled out my camera and took a couple pictures of the other parachutes and a few of myself. I did it quickly, wanting to have the pictures but also not wanting to waste time on them, wanting instead to openly appreciate, rawly experience, ego-lessly breathe.

I gave myself that for a few seconds, and then a few more seconds, and then a few seconds more before sighing. Using the controls, I followed Sergei towards the ground. The world approached slowly as I tucked my legs into a sitting position, feet together and flat. I was falling so gently that I imagined it would be like drifting onto pillows.

Crunch. Ow.

I rolled, landing on my side, hearing angry protest from my ankles.

I gingerly stood up and walked backwards to get out from under the falling silk.

I was supposed to pack up and wait, but everything that had built up inside of me, the fear and the joy and the worry and the awe, it wanted out. I threw back my head, spread my arms and howled.

Nearby, Sergei answered my call with the same.

Alive.

*

In the end, Diana almost hit a tree. Others nearly landed on cows. One skydiver was so excited about the view that he forgot to disengage his back up, floating down under both parachutes. His girlfriend landed in a wheat field.

Both paid their fines.

Diana and I caught a cab and a bus and a subway.

I smiled all day.

Deals: 11% off Your Purchase at All-Batteries.com

2010-04-07T19:50:00.000-07:00

Ah, batteries. Always need 'em, whether it's for my digital camera, netbook or Real Doll. Nah, just kidding. Real Dolls don't use batteries! They plug into the wall, just like a real woman!

And yes, the picture to the right really is a sex doll.

Anyway.

It just so happens that All-Battery.com currently has a special going:

11% off your purchase from All-Battery.com Use Code: Battery2008

So if you've been debating over whether to pick up a spare battery for whatever electronic toy your flashpacking self is taking with you on your next trip, now'd be the time to man up and buy yourself a Real Doll. Wait! I mean...

Nevermind.

Deducting Your Travel on Your Taxes: Overview

2010-04-06T22:33:00.000-07:00

NOTE: I am not a tax professional. Although I do deduct my travel as a part of travel-based media producing business, I am not licenced or authorized to give tax advice.

The Idea:

Question: Let's say no one was willing to pay money to hear Lady Gaga's music (not too far fetched: although I like listening to her, I'd stop if it required cash), but she was given the opportunity to perform for for free for 30,000 people. Would she do it? Of course she would, because she loves to sing. No matter how much music stars may gripe about money, there was a time when every single one of them was willing to perform for free. But even if Lady Gaga is not getting paid to do the thing she absolutely loves, she's not working.

It's the same when you're traveling. You love to travel. And maybe you love to write stories about your travel or blog about it. Maybe you love to take pictures and show them to anyone who cares to look. Or maybe you shoot video while on the road and then edit edit it later into movies. You know what you're doing? You're working, even if you're not making a dime.

And that means you can turn your travel into a profit-driven business. You might be able to make quite a lot of money on it, but even if you never turn a profit, the tax deductions alone make it worth it.

Now, before we talk about the specifics, let's talk about both the benefits and the legality of this.

The Benefits:

Firstly, if you have enough money to travel but not enough to disregard its costs, you're probably in the 20-25% tax bracket. Because every dollar you deduct comes from your highest tax bracket, you'll likely be getting $0.25 of that dollar back. If you're deducting your travel, that means you'll be saving 20-25% off your travel expenses. Your $3000 Christmas trip? It now only cost you $2,250. Oh, and the camera you bought for the trip, the new backpack and the clothes? All now 25% off as well.

If you travel a lot or spend a lot traveling, this can be worth thousands of dollars to you.

The Legality:

"Any one may so arrange his affairs that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which will best pay the Treasury." -Judge Learned Hand (Helvering v. Gregory, 1935)

Firstly, this is not a matter of trying to scam the government. If you travel purely for pleasure and produce nothing but memories, than this is not for you.

But if you're someone who spends time make sure your pictures are properly composed and exposed, if you're someone who spends hours editing your videos when you get home, or if you're someone that re-reads a travel blog post four times before publishing it, then you are a media-producing artist. And if you are willing to turn your media-making into a profit-driven business, than you deserve to deduct your travel from your income.

Now, it doesn't matter if you actually make money. It doesn't matter if you spent $5,000 traveling and only earned $10 from the resulting photographs. The IRS can't penalize you for sucking at your business. And it understands that you may invest and loose money for years before you turn a profit because that is what start-up businesses do. It can't penalize you for failure, either. If you spent five years traveling to compile enough stories to write a book that is rejected by a dozen publishers before you finally give up, you are still entitled to deduct every dollar you spent researching that book. That is the beauty of American entrepreneurship.

All this needs on your part is a little organization and a fundamental shift in the way you view your travel. You're not wasting time, you're trying to make a profit. It doesn't matter that you're having fun. In fact, it's awesome that you love your job!

Oh and, before you start worrying about the paperwork, don't. The IRS has done an amazing job of keeping tax forms simple for a small business person like yourself. You won't have to incorporate your business or register it. You will not have to save receipts for your meals and entertainment. The Schedule C-EZ tax form is only a page long, and if you file electronically, you won't even have to bother with that.

The key thing to note is that if you are willing to try and make a profit from your travel, you'll save a ton of money off your travel even if you fail.

How to: Get a Cheap International Mobile Phone

2010-04-04T09:10:00.001-07:00

\Finding a quad-band international phone under $300 used to be impossible. Now, though, Roam Mobility is offering them for as low as $99, (and they are even offering a 10% coupon off the Sightseer Package with Coupon Code B9FUS).

Why so cheap? Because they want you to also use their calling plans, which are ridiculously expensive. While it's true that their international rates are cheaper than other American cell phone companies, their in-country rates are damn near abusive. I checked their rates for Ukraine (since I'm there once a year) and while it would cost me $0.10 a minute to call another Ukrainian mobile phone using a Ukrainian SIM card (available on almost every street corner), Roam Mobility charges $2.70 a minute to call another Ukrainian mobile phone using their SIM card!

And while some people might want to use the Roam Mobility plan to call internationally, it's still far cheaper to buy a calling card or use Skype while abroad.

So get their phones, but don't use their plans. Since they they advertise that they have "No Contracts, No Minimums and No Activation Fee!" there is nothing to stop you from buying the phone, ditching their SIM (after you use the $10 credit that comes with purchase, of course) and replacing them with SIMs in the countries that you visit. Because they are quad band, the phones will work in almost every single country that has cellular access.

Roam Mobility offers three phones in three packages:

10% coupon off the Sightseer Package with Coupon Code B9FUS

$99 Sightseer Package:

• Motorola V195 (Unlocked)

• Roam Mobility SIM Card

• $10 Calling Credit

$199 Adventurer Package:

• Motorola ROKR U9 (Unlocked)

• Motorola USB Cable

• Motorola Headphones

• Roam Mobility SIM Card

• $10 Calling Credit

$299 Voyage Package includes:

• Motorola ZINE ZN5 (Unlocked)

• Roam Mobility SIM Card

• $10 Calling Credit

Roam Mobility Website

Interlaken Extreme

2010-04-04T09:10:00.000-07:00

There are many kinds of natural beauty—deserts, forests, oceans—and they are as comparable as Hindus and hamsters. Still, I can say that Interlaken, Switzerland is the most beautiful place that I have ever seen.

Imagine two crystal-clear white-blue lakes. Imagine a river winding between these two lakes. Put a city on the banks of the river. Nestle that city between two pine-covered mountains, and then behind those mountains put the permanently snow capped peaks of the Monch, the Eiger and Jungfrau. That's Interlaken, and it's that kind of beautiful.

Interlaken was an interesting mix of the pastoral and the progressive. The pastoral was embodied in the century-old cottages with huge vegetable gardens that lined its streets, the progressive in the internet cafes, youth hostels and extreme sports companies that were interspersed amongst them. The cottage about 20 meters from our party-hard youth hostel had sheep grazing in the backyard. Maybe the people that lived in those cottages wished to preserve the traditions of their ancestors. Or, perhaps it was because the only way they could afford to live in Interlaken was to grow their own food (much like my grandmother's approach to living in Miami).

Interlaken was expensive. While in Interlaken, Robynne and I spent more money in two days then we had in the past two weeks. Every thrill and beauty was available to us in Interlaken, at a price. Want to stand on the highest point in Europe reachable by train? You can, for $110. Feel like bungee jumping off a gondola strung between two mountains? $130. Feel like free falling down the face of the Eiger before parachuting onto a field at its base? $330. Or how about a scenic flight over the mountains, stopping off to have a champagne lunch on top of a glacier? $450. After a long, hard look at our budgets, Robynne and I decided our twin poisons would be paragliding and canyoning, for a total of $205 a person.

Since those activities would be the next day, we thought we would opt for a free Swiss experience: hiking in the Alps. This, we found, was anything but free. After deciding on a trail, we had to pay for the train to the trailhead. After an amazing two-hour hike past glistening glacial rivers, abandoned farmhouses and several waterfalls, we had to pay for the cable car up the mountain at the end of the trail, pay for another cable car down to a lower town on the mountain and then pay yet again for a funicular to get back to the train station that would get us back to Interlaken. Oh yeah, and then the train back to Interlaken. Our "cheap" day cost us about $40.

Still, we came back to the hostel very excited about the extreme sports we planned on partaking in the next day. That joy became waylaid when I jumped off my bunk, forgetting that my feet were still wet from showering. I slipped on the floor, slamming my right foot into a wall. Robynne took a look at the red welt now shining on my middle toe and pronounced it bruised. I went to sleep. The next morning, I awoke in pain, and Robynne took another look at my toe, which was now completely swollen and a purplish-blue color. New prognosis: broken.

Now, a broken toe is not cause for an emergency room, but it certainly grinds to a halt your X-sport planned day. Robynne gave me IB Proffen, and I propped my foot up while sitting on the lawn chairs outside the hostel. Actually, a day off in Interlaken can be just as good as a day spent sporting. We were staying at Balmer’s Herbage, consistently ranked as one of the best hostels in the world. It has a concentration-camp style approach to beds (forty people packed into co-ed room, but plenty of women walking around in their underwear), a club in its basement (where all the soon-dressed-up women go to sweatily dance), and a huge outdoor chess set (where you can watch women sunbathe while you play).

After two hours of hobbling around the chess set (beating a Swiss guy but getting my ass royally kicked by a Russian), the pain had subsided enough I could comfortably walk, and that meant we could salvage the afternoon. Although we had time for paragliding in the late afternoon, we had already missed the canyoning trip for that day. Luckily, we had not yet paid for it, as they had a nice big sign that stated: NO REFUNDS.

***

I was 4,000 meters up on a mountain. I was in a harness hooked into a man with limited English named Tom. A parachute was spread out on the grass behind me. What the hell was I thinking?

Paragliding is, as the name suggests, gliding using a parachute. An OCU professor of mine once described paragliding in Interlaken as one of the most amazing experiences of his life, comparable only to backpacking the Grand Canyon. I had already backpacked the Grand Canyon, so it was time to do this.

Robynne was ahead of me in the takeoff queue, and I watched as she and her pilot ran down the slope. Within a few steps, the parachute behind them was filled with air and they were aloft, an updraft pulling them up into the sky.

Tom checked our harnesses and said, "okay, we go." After a few steps, awkward like those of a two year-old, I felt something pulling hard on my harness and I realized that my feet were no longer on the ground. We were up in the air, the houses that we had just stood beside receding, looking like those belonging to a model train set.

It was the kind of view you get from an airplane, only I wasn't in an airplane, simply hanging beneath a few yards of fabric. Still, I wasn't afraid. If anything, I was serene. The view was beautiful. I was finally able to see the lakes, the river, the city, the mountains in full view, all in one tableau sparkling in the afternoon sun. Soon, the rest of our group was aloft, their red and yellow parachutes looking like graceful birds floating in front of the pine-green mountains.

Tom seemed to be more excited then calm about the experience, letting out wild whoops and yelling joyously to other pilots as we passed them, destroying my tranquility. In hopes that he wouldn't get bored and set us down too soon, I let out a few half-hearted whoops myself. I took pictures of the scenery, and then Tom swung us close to Robynne and her pilot so I could photograph them, too. She looked surreal, hanging there with a grin on her face with nothing below her but air.

Maybe it was the result of too much MTV, but after about fifteen minutes of floating there and looking at the same scene, I became bored, wanting to go lower or hook around a mountain to see something else. Maybe Tom sensed my boredom because he asked "you have strong stomach?"

I said "yes," and he yanked hard on a cord.

We were suddenly whipped out, spinning in a circle nearly parallel to the ground. The g-forces shoved me back hard into my harness and we spun around and around. But when I saw that we were nearly horizontal, the parachute no longer completely filled with air, I felt a sudden surge of fear. Surely we were about to break a law of physics and pay for it with a swift plummet to our deaths. We didn't even have a backup parachute! The adrenal glands started churning and my fear and elation became one long--and this time sincere—bellow of ecstatic joy. Around and around we spun, thousands of meters above the ground, nothing but air pressure holding us aloft, both crowing until our throats were parched.

Soon, Tom brought us back to vertical.

"You stomach good?" he asked.

"Yeah."

Tom dropped us lower, in over the city. He extended a camera on a monopod and snapped pictures of us hanging there. With a little maneuvering, he even managed to get Robynne in the background. After another ten minutes of admiring the new view, Tom brought us into another tight series of circles, spiraling us towards the ground. Over a park in the middle of the city we straightened out and, in a few quick steps, were on the ground.

On my face was a Cheshire cat grin

***

The next morning, we went canyoning.

Canyoning, for those who have never heard of it, has a pretty simple goal: follow a river down a canyon. But you don’t do this by boat or kayak or raft. You do this all by yourself.

Since water tends to find its way around or through things, the only obstacles one has to face in canyoning are the sudden drops. Canyoning is really pragmatic about how to deal with these: if the river flows down at an angle, you slide; if the water below is deep enough, you jump; if it is not deep enough, you rappel. If none of these work, you take a zip line down.

Canyoning requires quite a bit of gear. At the base camp, we donned wet suits, booties, life jackets, climbing harnesses and helmets. In all her gear, Robynne said she felt like a turtle.

We were driven to the top of the canyon with our two guides, a quiet Swiss I didn't catch the name of and a psychotic Australian named Bernie. Both managed to successfully act like this was the first time they had been to this particular canyon, which heightened the danger factor considerably.

Added to this was the very real danger of low water. Water that should have come up to our chests now only came up to our knees and the result was that we were jumping off cliffs into pools no longer deep enough to do it safely. Despite the danger, we jumped, slid, rappelled and forded the briskly-cold, briskly-moving water. It was an amazing, adrenaline-soaked hour, especially when I was looking off a 20-foot cliff at a pool of water only waist deep, Bernie yelling to land on my butt or I would break my legs. Robynne opted to take the zipline down on that one.

I, of course, jumped.

Despite the fact that we were haggard by the end of the trip, my body managed to find a couple hidden sources of adrenaline to deal with Bernie's driving on the way back. Hyped from the trip, he drove us at high speed down the narrow mountain roads, bouncing in the front seat in his red helmet, a maniacal grin on his face. He repeatedly slammed on the brakes and then immediately slammed on the gas, yelling "I keep getting the foot sticks mixed up!" while the other Australians in the back, gripping whatever handholds they could find yelled back "you mad bastard!"

That we arrived safely at the bottom is a miracle the Catholic Church should take note of, and I will bring it to their attention when we get to Rome.

The Long Way To The Promised Land

2010-04-04T09:00:00.000-07:00

It's said that the Israelites wandered the desert for 40 years before they finally reached the Promised Land. While it wasn't 40 years for us, getting to Israel certainly took about 40 more hours than it was supposed to.

Diana and I stepped off the bus in the Egyptian town of Taba, near the Egypt/Israel border. After combing the Cradle of Kings, we were eager to poke around the Promised Land, our enthusiasm only slightly doused by the dead seas of sweat forming under our backpacks as we walked from the bus station to the border, bodies bleeding buckets under the hot June sun. We were processed quickly on the Egyptian side before heading across the spit of land separating the two countries. The turquoise waters of the Gulf of Aquaba lapped to our right and I looked longingly at them before being slapped by blessed air conditioning when we walked into the Israeli passport control building.

There, my two years spent as a Peace Corps volunteer in Ukraine paid off because the language the border guards were most comfortable speaking wasn't Hebrew or English. It was Russian. Although I knew Ukraine and Russia had once collectively been home to the largest Jewish population in the world and that many of them had taken advantage of Israel's Right of Return policy, it was a surprise to find that the majority of the control officers were Slavic.

Diana should have been right at home here, as she was not only Ukrainian, but a Ukrainian of Jewish decent. She handed her passport to the control officer and patiently waited. The control officer flipped through the passport. When she reached the end, she returned to the beginning and began to flip through it again.

"Where is your visa?" the girl asked Diana in Russian.

"I want to get one here at the border."

"You can't," the girl said, her tone implying that she really wanted to add: "you idiot."

"No, I asked before I left," said Diana. "I can get a visa at the border."

The girl looked annoyed, then picked up her phone and began talking to her supervisor.

I turned to Diana: "You're sure you can get it here?"

"That's what they said," she replied.

"The Israeli embassy said that?"

"No, I called them a dozen times and the line was always busy. I asked a travel agent."

The girl hung up the phone and said that Diana could not get a visa at the border, and that the best way to get a visa would be to go to the Israeli embassy in Cairo. Mental images emerged of the overnight bus ride we'd just taken from there, the Arabic action movies being played full volume throughout the night, shivering in a tee-shirt because the jet-powered AC had turned the bus into a meat locker, being awoken almost every hour by Egyptian police doing passport checks. I quickly became habituated to sleeping with my hand gripping my passport, thrusting it forward with eyes half-open whenever the bus stopped.

No, we did not want to go back to Cairo.

We spoke to the supervisor, also a Russian immigrant, but she said there was nothing she could do. I looked out of her office window at the Gulf. We could dive into the water and swim to Israel in under ten minutes, bypassing the border altogether. I glanced at the guards--native Ukrainians--who were wearing body armor and fingering assault rifles. How good was their aim? Maybe if we rented scuba gear...

Diana was talking, and my attention returned to her. Jordan. Something about Jordan. Oh. Since we were going to visit Jordan after Israel, why not go there first? Not a horrible idea: its capital of Amman and wasn't on the itinerary, but there was an Israeli embassy there and we could possibly get the visa. We also knew that there were ferries crossing to Jordan from the Egyptian town of Nuweiba, just a few hours south. We'd lose some time, but we'd be in Jordan by the end of the day, right?

Wrong.

We stepped back into the heat and walked towards Egyptian passport control. There, I tried to explain that we'd never really left Egypt, but the Egyptians disagreed, and we each grittingly paid the $20 visa fee and a $12 Taba entry tax. Piling annoyance on annoyance, we emerged out of the Egyptian border area to be descended upon by cab drivers, in our faces and yelling "very good price!" It was now almost noon, and the sun--vindictive about being jilted for the air conditioning--raged down. Diana suggested we splurge on a cab for the mile back to the bus station as she was too tired and aggravated to walk. I agreed, and post-haggling we trundled down the blazing blacktop with our driver asking where we were headed.

Nuweiba, we told him.

"No buses to Nuweiba today!" he said. "I will take you! Good rate!"

We'd been lied to literally since the moment we stepped off the plane in Egypt, so we were already inured to his words. In all honesty, we'd developed a bit of a bitter attitude towards Egyptians because of it. We reasoned that this was just the part of Egypt that dealt with tourists, that surely a normal Egyptian wouldn't be so happy to lie to strangers. So far, though, that thought was just a mirage in the midst of a whole lot of sand.

"No, just take us to the bus station," I said.

He seemed upset that I didn't believe him. "No, no! There is no bus. We go to Nuweiba!"

"Just the bus station," I repeated.

When we reached at the bus station, our cab driver hurriedly jumped out and ran to the counter, commanding excitedly in Arabic. As I walked up to it, it was obvious from his face and gesticulations that he was telling the bus station attendant to lie to us. Which is exactly what the bus station attendant did, uncomfortably and without looking me in the eye.

I sighed. At least I knew how to play.

"Really?" I asked. "No buses?"

"No."

"What time are the buses tomorrow?"

"Sorry?"

"If we stay in Taba tonight and come back tomorrow, when do the buses leave?"

He hesitated. "One o' clock and six o' clock."

It was currently 12:30. "And where is the one o' clock bus today?"

He hesitated again. "It already left."

"So we will get tickets for today's six o' clock bus."

"No, it will be very late. Very, very late."

"We have time. Lots of time."

The disgruntled cab driver stormed off as the bus station attendant sold me two tickets for the one o' clock bus.

***

Normally I'm a patient and understanding boyfriend, but when we discovered that the ferry would not leave until the next day and that we'd have to stay a night in Nuweiba, my annoyance became directed at Diana. I felt justified because I had asked her several times to call the Israeli embassy and be absolutely sure about the visa. Diana is a redhead, so the fight on the bus went like this:

"I'm angry you didn't do a better job researching this."

"I'm angry that you're angry."

End of argument.

Luckily, you don't actually have to talk much to your partner to find a hotel.

Nuweiba turned out to be a quiet town on a beautiful stretch of Red Sea coast and was the perfect place to be absolutely nowhere. We checked out several of the run-down hotels dotting the beach, haggling as we went, before settling into the Mermaid Hotel for $10 a night. To get some space, Diana went down to the beach to watch the sunset.

A little later, I heard the sounds of drumming. Outside, I saw Diana dancing in front of the hotel's non-working fountain. An Egyptian girl of about twelve was dancing with her and surrounding them were a circle of people, one of whom was a boy beating out a rhythm on a hand drum. It turned out that we were the only guests at the hotel, and that we now had the attention of the family that ran it: two women who were both married to the same man in Cairo, their two daughters and their three sons. Fighting through the language barrier with smiles and hand signals, we finally got to know the real Egypt. We danced. We created a "net" with a line of shoes and played volleyball with a half-inflated soccer ball. We listened as they sang songs, and Diana taught them how to play a Ukrainian card game. The mirage became a little more real, and the backtrack from Israel finally became worth it. Until the next day.

***

We were told that a ferry was leaving at 8 AM, and so awoke with the sun to discover that Nuweiba was decidedly lacking in taxis. After talking to some men who were sitting on the steps of a nearby store, one offered--for a price--to drive us there. Around the corner, we found his car in a state normally reserved for junkyards. Much of the dashboard paneling was gone, leaving only exposed wires. There were no windows. We waited while he poured water into the radiator, and then, because the battery wasn't working, he asked me to help get it rolling so that he could push start the car.

The day worsened as we arrived at the port ticket office. The price for crossing to Jordan was $80 each, a week's worth of hotel rooms for a one hour boat ride. Any entrepreneur could buy a couple speed boats and take people back and forth across the narrow Gulf of Aqaba for a fistful of dollars each, but Egypt and Jordan had instead agreed to have one massive ship make the journey each day, charging as much for it as they wanted for it. As it was now 7:30 AM, we sucked it up, quickly paid and then hurried through the ticket control into the massive warehouse that served as the waiting area for the ship. The air was stale, the lighting dim and the windows caked with dirt. Rows and rows of wooden benches held hundreds of soon-to-be passengers, with hundreds more milling about or sitting along the walls.

In our hurry, we had decided to not grab food, deciding that we would just eat in Jordan. We also hadn't found an ATM and we'd spent the last of our money to buy the tickets. Didn't matter, we said, we'll be in Jordan in a couple hours.

Wrong again.

Eight AM passed, and I began to ask anyone in a uniform when we'd leave. Twenty minutes, one said. An hour, said another.

Three hours later we were still sitting, watching life around us. A girl in a red and white dress and curls was being scolded by a woman in a black chador. Large Egyptian men fanned themselves as they leaned against bulging suitcases, presumably with contents meant to be sold on the other side of the Gulf. This was Egyptian life rarely seen by tourists, and we were the only non-Arabs in the room.

Well, save one.

Tatyana found us and then clung to us, a Russian woman in her early 30s who recognized Diana as one of her own. It turned out that she had been vacationing for several months in Huggurah on the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula, a vacation she'd been making every summer for the past 6 years. Now she was leaving the country to renew her visa and, like us, had no idea how problematic catching a ferry could be.

Tatiana was in Egypt to find a man, she said. Sick of Slavic men, she was looking for an Arabic one.

"The men here are simple, uncomplicated," Tatyana said. "They know what a woman likes and how to make a woman feel like a queen."

The wait suddenly felt longer.

***

Another hour passed.

Then another.

The officials still kept saying the same thing: maybe twenty more minutes, maybe another hour. We didn't want to leave the waiting area because we didn't want to miss the boat, but now we were exceedingly hungry.

An angel came in the form of Jacqueline, a paunchy, middle-aged Egyptian woman with a French name and rudimentary English who was sitting on the bench behind ours. She seemed amazingly modern in a pants suit that showed her arms from the elbows down, and, even more surprising, her head was uncovered.

She was jovial in nature and was making us repeatedly laugh with her angry condemnations of the ferry. We learned that the ferry never arrived at a fixed time. Instead, it arrived only after it completely filled up in Jordan and crossed the gulf, any mechanical problems nonwithstanding. Sometimes it managed to make the trip twice a day, she said, sometimes only once. It showed up when it showed up and you just had to make sure you were at the port when it did. While Jacqueline was talking to us, she pulled out packages of flat bread and cans of tinned meat and forced us to eat. She wouldn't take no for an answer, and we didn't say it for long, hungrily consuming everything she pushed at us.

The mirage, we discovered, was finally real.

Ten hours (yes, ten hours!) of waiting later, the ferry arrived.

Although inside the building was hot, at least it was also dark. Out the back gates, we were temporarily blinded by intense brightness before being herded onto buses. The ferry was only a ten minute walk from the building, but they still required us to bus over. We were packed in elbow-to-stomach and then left to sweat in our metal saunas for fifteen more minutes before the engine started and we were on our way.

The entrance to the ferry created another crush of people. The size of a cruise ship, much of the ferry was actually a massive hold being loaded with goods, and I finally understood that this wasn't a passenger ferry that was ridiculously late, it was a cargo ferry that let you on if you waited long enough. They were glacial in letting people on, carefully checking each ticket and passport without bothering with orderly lines. After another twenty minutes of suffocating in a sea of humanity, I pulled out my American passport. Sometimes showing it helps, sometimes it doesn't.

This time it did, and we were led to the front of the line and soon were sitting in torn and stained canvas seats on one of the trash-littered upper decks of the ship. On board, there was no access to the outside, but we could see the Gulf through the windows. We wanted to smell the sea but instead smelled mildew.

An hour and a half later, the ship started to move.

***

Luck, it seemed, ebbed and flowed like the tide. After a soul-wearing day of hungrily waiting in the heat, the moon tugged luck back our way.

I was sitting as I preferred to be sitting:

between two beautiful women. Diana's red-headed sultriness was on my left, blonde and classically good looking Tatyana was on my right. A white-uniformed officer walked over and said to me: "the captain would like to know if you would like to be seated in first class."

I briefly wondered if it was my passport creating this request, but then I correctly realized it was the ladies whom I was with. Either way, the answer was obviously yes. The officer escorted us up a set of stairs into another world. The air was fresh up there, the carpeted floors clean and the deck largely empty. We were guided to plush leather swivel chairs surrounding a table bolted to the wall. I quickly excused myself to the bathroom. The one on our deck literally had excrement on the walls and an inch of brownish liquid on the floor. My first thought in that bathroom had not been disgust, but curiosity: just how, exactly, does poop end up on walls? Unable to conceive of an answer, nor a way to get to the toilet that didn't involve stepping into that liquid in non-waterproof sneakers, I had decided not to use it.

The bathroom in first class? Immaculate.

After sitting by ourselves for about twenty minutes and debating what, exactly, had gotten us our invitation, the captain and one of his engineers came by. The captain was a good looking man in his forties, clean shaven and with a noticeable paunch. He introduced himself and then quite quickly asked about the marital arrangements among us. When he found out that Tatyana was single, he smiled and invited us out onto the upper deck of the ship.

Outside, "worth it" became redefined again. We were speeding up the Gulf of Aquaba, salty air whipping at our clothes. The sun was slowly setting as we stood and talked at the stern of the ship, Diana settling back into my arms while the captain escorted Valentina off to woo her. We took pictures, we closed our eyes and breathed in, we marveled that from that spot we could see four different countries: Egypt to our left, Saudi Arabia to our right and Israel and Jordan up ahead. Visually, though, the countries were just one single curving landmass with nothing to distinguish them save history and politics.

The engineer--a Jordanian--brought us cold sodas and explained how it'd been time consuming to unload cargo in Jordan that day, leading to our wait, before telling us about the many ships he'd worked on all over the world. We sipped and talked and enjoyed the sea air as night came on and the ship eased into its dock at Aqaba

***

Several days later we found ourselves in Amman, Jordan's capital.

Waiting.

The tide of luck was back out.

The journey north had been enjoyable, stopping off at the carved city of Petra and standing in awe of it despite the heat. Amman had turned out to be a wonderful city filled with beautiful ruins and friendly people. But we were not enjoying where we were now: in front of the Israeli embassy and packed yet again into a crowd. We had showed up half an hour before it opened, hoping to quickly get a visa and be in Israel before nightfall. We sat with about a dozen others in front of the guardhouse, waiting for them to raise the gate and let us in. Half an hour later, though, we were still sitting. The four Jordanian guards standing near the gate refused to answer questions about when the embassy would open. Around us, more and more people arrived, but without being allowed in we began to pack up around the gate. Two hours later, more than fifty of us stood, shoulder-to-spine, sweating in the quickly warming day. Diana had gone to sit in the wan shade of a tree while I held our "place", the term being amazingly fluid in a mob.

I struck up a conversation with a Jordanian man beside me in his late 20s. He was well dressed and annoyed and kept yelling into his cell phone. It turned out he had studied in the United States and spoke excellent English. He kept calling different phone numbers, trying to get someone to let him in. Apparently he had connections.

"Someone important is at the embassy today," he explained. "So the whole place is closed for security."

"For how long?" I asked.

"Until he leaves," he said.

"When will that be?"

"No one knows."

We stood and sweated and talked about his time in America. He was particularly appreciative of the women there. As women were also my favorite topic, we had a long conversation before I remarked: "it must be frustrating then, to come back to Jordan where you have to get married first."

He gave me an odd look. "What are you talking about? Hijab girls are sluts."

"What?"

"Oh, they wear the scarf because it is tradition, but trust me, they'll fuck."

Wow. His English was really, really good.

A few minutes later, his connection came through, and a guard at the gate called out his name. I followed him to the front, but was not allowed in. I tried to explain that I was an American and not a security threat. They didn't care. Annoyed, I took out my passport, folded my arms and held it--eagle side forward--against my chest. Then I stared at them. I blinked sweat out of my eyes and scowled, thinking: "my tax dollars keep weapons and aid flowing to the country of this embassy and if we weren't around, Israel would only be a smudge on a map and you'd be out of a job."

Okay, it wasn't the most mature line of reasoning. I kept up the scowling, though, hoping that--even though they had the weapons--I was making them uncomfortable.

I stood like that, staring at various guards, them looking away whenever our eyes met, for another hour.

Finally, a man with a clipboard walked out of the embassy and handed it to one of the guards. The guard started reading names out loud. Behind me, there was commotion and struggle as people on the list pushed forward. I kept staring. After all the names were called, the guard looked over at me, looked away, and then looked at me again again.

"You too," he said, waving towards the embassy.

"Diana!" I yelled.

***

It was a Ukrainian with an M-16 who looked through our bags at the Israeli border.

Deja vu.

We stood in line.

Deja vu again.

Diana handed her passport to the woman. The woman flipped through it. She turned to the front of the passport and then began flipping through it again.

This time she found the visa, Diana's picture smiling out from it.

She asked Diana a question. Diana answered.

Question. Answer.

Question. Answer.

The woman picked up her stamp and chu-chunk, we were in.

It took 40 extra hours to get to that point.

But no matter. We'd finally reached the Promised Land.

New Rule: Don't Hike the Volcano While It's Erupting

2010-04-04T08:55:00.000-07:00

“Okay, who brought the One Ring?” I asked, slightly out of breath.

The worn-out hikers around me only chuckled in response, but at least my Lord of the Rings reference didn't go to waste. I took another step up, and my boot slid in the scree, sending a shower of pumice onto those climbing below. We weren't on Mount Doom, but I'm pretty sure we were on its stunt double: Pacaya

Pacaya was a volcano.

One that was currently erupting.

As one of Guatemala's most active and accessible volcanoes, Pacaya is very popular. Tourists from all over the world attempt to climb to the top and look into its burbling mouth, high above and far away from the lava churning below.

Diana and I were two of those tourists, except that we ended up closer to the lava than most.

After two bumpy hours, the mini-van that we were packed into slowed and then stopped. Children appeared outside, brandishing long sticks and yelling and slapping at the windows. I had a brief moment of panic, fearing that we had stumbled onto some blood-thirsty Lord-of-the-Flies style tribe. Instead, it turned out to be kids trying to sell us hiking staffs. One of our fellow riders bought one for $3 before we followed Jose, our assigned guide, up a steep dirt path.

For the next hour we walked up through the woods, panting along switchbacks and trying to get a glimpse of the future through the dense foliage. Although our group of 8 was mostly alone for the first hour, as soon as we broke the tree line we could see hundreds of people hiking almost single-file up the volcano, their windbreakers creating a tapestry of multi-colored threads on Pacaya's black cloth.

The polarization was striking. The woods we had been in were verdant: thick, lush and Technicolor green. In contrast, what went before us was a waste: barren, lifeless, black on a blacker black.

Here, we could see straight to the top of Pacaya's near perfect cone, could appreciate its full measure. The measure as of late was 7,650 feet, but that was only approximate since Pacaya was fond of growing itself taller by slowly painting its way up with the innards of the earth before blasting a few feet off itself whenever it has the whim.

We'd been given two choices before leaving Antigua: a morning hike or a sunset hike. We thought the sunset hike would be more beautiful, the night hike back more exhilarating, but as our mini-van had been an hour late in picking us up, the sun had already brushed its teeth and was heading to bed before we'd even left the trees.

We began walking up in the dimming light, the forest's packed earth giving way to loose pumice and ash, the remains of continuous eruptions going back to 1961. Above us, earlier climbers were gleefully volcano surfing down, sliding in bounding steps, waves of scree sliding before them. We hiked away from them, trying to keep to a rocky path glazed shiny by former lava streams.

The higher we got, the harder it got, and I felt more and more like I was in a fantasy movie, climbing towards its climax. Hard winds blew, pummeling us with ash and grit. We all had our hoods up to protect our faces, tunneling our vision and muting reality. Sulfur strongly scented in the air as clouds of vapor shifted us into fog and then clear, fog and then clear. The ground was sliding constantly underfoot, those above showering us with pebbles of pumice before we did the same to those below. I hadn't brought gloves, a bit of a mistake as the path became progressively steeper, forcing me to grab onto sharp, jagged rocks to haul myself upwards. What seemed really cool when I was looking at pictures in Antigua was now starting to really suck. Climbing a volcano isn't an adventure. It's: Climbing. A. Volcano.

As the light continued to fade, I tenderly tested my footing and took another step up.

After an hour and a half of climbing, a process of going two feet up only to slide one down, we finally began to reach the top. The sun was almost completely below the horizon, and I started to notice that something was glowing up ahead. I was confused. Wasn't the top of the volcano still several hundred feet away? Didn't I have to climb over the lip before I could see the magma below?

As I got closer, I saw that those ahead of me had stopped and were looking at something.

They were looking at magma boiling over the lip and streaming towards us..

My brain does not process danger like most. I should have been thinking: Run! What I was thinking was: Amazing.

The volcano was slowly erupting. I had heard that this happened on occasion, had even seen pictures of people standing beside flowing lava with grins on their faces. I had seen those pictures and thought: I want that to be me.

I had gotten my wish.

The lava was a glowing yellow and orange ribbon undulating ever so slowly towards us. It was unbelievably thick despite being a liquid, inching forward so snail-like that it gave me the feeling of safety and control. Its surface was crusty in places, cooled by the air into black rock that slid down and crashed in sparks against the ground.

The sun had gone down, and now this glowing lava was our only source of light. I hiked past its end and along it, entranced. The heat was absolutely intense, that feeling you get when you open an oven to see how the food is cooking, only to get slapped in the face by 400 degrees. This was that, only now I couldn't shut the oven. I looked and looked and looked, the wafting vapor stinging my eyes, but me not wanting to do anything but stare at the shifting colors.

This was nature primal. This was the blood of creation. This was the center of the earth.

I took pictures of it. I had people take pictures of me beside it. Diana and I kissed in front of it. I even took a hiking stick and poked it, the end of the stick bursting into flames.

And then I noticed that it was starting to speed up.

People began yelling. The path we'd hiked up, that path of glazed rock? It had been made by the last lava flow. Which meant it was the path that this lava was going to take.

Our path.

Our way down.

I hurried back along the river of lava, saw it now covered a place I'd been walking on not ten minutes before. And it was then I realized that I had been idiotically taking pictures while a volcano was erupting.

People were moving quickly now, half-running, half-sliding down the sheer path. I put on my headlamp and hurried after them, Diana's hand in mine, past people who were just now able to see the what was causing the glow.

“The volcano is erupting,” we told them.

“Cool,” they said back.

I volcano surfed down, something that would have been far more enjoyable were it not pitch black, and were I not worried about spontaneously combusting. How would that work? Would I catch flame like the stick? Would I instantly char? Would my flesh immediately melt into the magma?

I tried not to think about it as my feet sunk into calf-deep ash, the black grit filling my boots as I kicked up a dirty stream of dust below me, hands outstretched for balance and feeling exhilarated despite myself. What took 90 minutes to climb took less than fifteen minutes to slide down.

As we neared the tree line, I took a moment to look back.

Pacaya was a black silhouette against the purple night sky, an orange-red haze crowning its top and a thin, glowing yellow line marking the lava. Scattered down it were moving dots of white: headlamps and flashlights. Then, as I was watching the lights jig and dance, I saw Pacaya spurt. Red and yellow streams flashed twenty feet into the sky and the lava shifted directions, flowing into a new channel blown open by the explosion and arcing into the air like a molten waterfall.

It flowed away from the hikers, and I felt like I had just witnessed a miracle.

I thanked God, and walked into the woods.

The next day, Diana and I were chatting about our close call when an American woman overheard us told us the news: hikers had been caught in the spurt that I had seen, had been hit and burned by chunks of flaming rock.

“They had to bring them off on the backs of donkeys,” she said.

Luckily, no one had died.

I digested that information, wondered why we as a species felt the need to put ourselves in harm's way for photos and mementos and meaningless entertainment.

I decided to stop thinking about it and went about my day.

Chicago Wanderings

2010-04-03T15:01:00.000-07:00

I was…

… running. Hurricane Charley had dropped trees onto my normal route to the airport, so I had arrived with 30 minutes until takeoff, too late to even do a self check-in. The line at the American Airlines counter was queued four rows deep, so I selfishly grabbed a roaming attendant and told her how little time I had. She escorted me to the front of the line, and I was able to do the same again at the security checkpoint. A few minutes later, I had my bag back and was stuffing my wallet and cell phone into my pockets.

The next step was to board the monorail to my terminal. Still clutching my boots, I ran across the tile in my socks, sliding onto the monorail and grabbing a pole for balance as the doors closed behind me. I put my boots on while trying to stay standing in the moving monorail, ungainly hopping while trying to tug them on. Curious onlookers curiously looked on.

The monorail doors reopening was like a footrace gunshot. I was off, dashing across the colossal terminal, past vendors and bookstores and gourmet restaurants, past scowling people unimpressed with my Mercury impression. I arrived with eight minutes until take off, just in time to wait in line…

…stepping off the train, much relieved. I had spent the evening in the Chicago suburbs, ignoring the fighting of my host, Brandy, and her boyfriend, Mike. I called Laura, who also lived in the Chicago suburbs, to see if she wanted to hang out, but she had just finished a major fight with her boyfriend and her medical cure for depression had left her incapable of driving. This is why I hate suburbs, hate sprawl. A thousand miles from my car, I was effectively stranded, at the whim of anyone else who owned a gas-guzzler. Twenty miles from me was one of the world’s most exciting cities, built the way any place with over a hundred people should be built: everything within walking distance or only a metro ride away.

The next day, sick of the drama, sick of the lack of mobility, I wished best-wishes to Brandy and hopped on a train into Chicago, relishing in my freedom, the liberating dynamism of a city. In the suburbs, there was nothing entertaining that was not a franchise. In the city, though, anything could be found. As I’d already seen all the major sites in Chicago on previous visits, I had no plans for what I’d do once I’d arrived in the city. Rather, I wanted to see what I could find by simply wandering around…

…eating a hot dog and drinking a Pepsi by the Centennial fountain, that big one you see in the opening credits of Married With Children…

…watching fighter planes roar overhead, part of the annual Chicago Air Show…

…sitting at a free open air jazz concert put on by a local group called Gallery 37. All the players were of high school age and fantastically talented. I particularly enjoyed the pianist, a boy of about fifteen or sixteen with unkempt black hair, thick glasses and a mouth that permanently hung open. He looked like someone who never notice the “kick me” sign other kids had stuck on his back. He didn’t seem very excited about being there either. If you plugged your ears and just looked at him, you would think that he was at mother-mandated piano lesson, playing scales over and over. But unplug your ears, and boy could that boy play. Goddamn! His fingers flew, pounding those keys as if he were Gershwin reincarnated. He was the idiot-savant of hipness…

…dancing at a free night rave in Grant Park, getting caught up in the energy of the crowd. The crowd was cheering as the records were changed, hollering and clapping because they were being changed by Green Velvet. I hadn’t recognized Green Velvet’s name, but I knew his music. His signature track “Answering Machine” (along with its obscenely catchy hook of “I don’t need this shit!”) had long been a rave staple. Ira, my hip-Chicago-plugged-in savior had told me about the rave when I called him that afternoon, and now we both danced under the stars, moving in the tangle of bodies, moving with the music within us…

…grubbing on pizza and wings at Innjoy, a hip little bar near Ira’s apartment. Joining Ira and I are two others from the rave: Ira’s friend Sonya and her friend Rachel.

Rachel and Ira, meeting for the first time, were hitting it off famously. She worked for an extremely large advertising company that did ads for Nintendo, Phillip Morris and others. The thing was, she was wearing knee high socks, a short skirt and raver buns. I realized, sitting there, that this was okay. More than okay.

There had been a schism amongst my friends after college. Some began professional careers, got married, bought homes and started having kids. They were no longer into going clubbing or having seat-of-the-pants road trips. But my other friends, still partying and working hourly wage shit jobs, had too little responsibility and didn’t understand my concerns about such little things as, oh, there being drunk sixteen-year olds at their parties. Plus, they didn’t have the funds to travel. So I had been torn. Half my friends couldn’t stay out late, the other half could barely make it to work in the morning. I straddled the middle, with neither end completely approving of my life.

But here was Rachel, completely comfortable with being a professional by day and a grubbing post-rave raver in a bar on a Tuesday night. Here were the four of us, college degrees all around, having a late-night great time and the focus of our conversation was neither home decorating nor drugs. It was a lifestyle confirmation, and that made me very happy…

…listening to a high school opera group perform mediocre opera in Millennia Park. The park, only recently completed, was an interesting clash of influences. Behind the opera group were Greek Corinthian columns supporting nothing but air. Around them was a huge photography exhibit called Family Album, dozens of 5’ X 4’ prints of families from around the world: an Indian family with their pet elephant; an African family, both of the sons cradling AK-47s. Behind me was a giant sculpture, nearly twenty feet tall and in the shape of a jelly bean. Its surface was reflective, warping my mirrored self as I walked around it. To my left were two monoliths, both two stories tall, with video screens that displayed smiling children, water running down the monoliths onto the playing children below. I have a Kevin Bacon connection to that art installation. A friend’s boyfriend’s aunt’s husband designed it. Seriously. To my right was a Ghery designed open-air concert hall. I sat on the grass and listened to the Grant Park Orchestra rehearse for a performance that evening…

…relaxing in a Chicago bookstore, reading a bit about its history. Apparently “chicago” is a Potowami word meaning either “raw onions” or “skunk cabbage”.

…getting free food at Mod, an upscale restaurant where Ira works, where even a tiny bowl of macaroni and cheese costs $12…

…touring a museum. This is great to do in Chicago, as there are many, and most are free. The museum of Contemporary Photography was showcasing both an exhibit on twins and another on the prostitutes of Calcutta. The Chicago Cultural Museum had a very cool exhibit on underground comics, from feminist think pieces to ribald sex fantasies. The Museum of Science and Industry was not free, but I still paid to go there two days in a row, once with Ira, once alone, simply because it’s a fantastic museum with fantastic interactive exhibits. As part of its exhibit on movie making, for example, you get to make a trailer for a fictional movie. Luckily, I got picked to be one of the two stars…

…watching OutFoxed, an independent film playing in Chicago that I knew would never make it to Oklahoma City…

…walking down the Magnificent Mile, Michigan Avenue, home to some of the world’s top shops, the testing area for many a franchise. Crossing a bridge, I saw a really cute blonde girl walking in the opposite direction. I flashed her a smile. She smiled back. That’s what I love about traveling: I’m bolder because these people will never see me again.

Half a block later, I stopped to watch a street performance. Three Jamaicans were performing acrobatic stunts in between funny banter. While I was standing there, the cute blonde walked up and stood beside me. Not right beside me, but still beside me. As she had been going the opposite way, my assumption was that she had turned around to talk to me. Before I could say something to her, she ended up getting pulled into the act. The trio lined up a group of nine people, including the girl, and then and one of them did a complete flip over the entire line.

After the stunt, the girl stood beside me once more. I turned to her. “What was it like?” I asked. Banal question, but the best I had at the moment. She looked at me, then looked away. Oh. I guess I misread the entire situation. She hadn’t come to talk to me after all. After the performance was over, one of the performers said something to her as way of thanks for her participation. A look of confusion crossed her face, and she didn’t respond. Suddenly, I got it.

Turning to her again, I said, slowly: “Do you speak English?”

She nodded. “A little.”

Her name was Jana and she was from the Czech Republic. She lived in a village an hour outside of Prague and was in Chicago visiting her brother, who was an architect. Her English was better than I had first anticipated; it was simply a manner of slowing my speech down so that she understood.

As the crowd had dissipated, leaving the two of us standing alone on the sidewalk, I went for broke: “I’m going to the Museum of Modern Art, four blocks that way,” I said slowly, pointing. “Do you want to go?”

She thought about it for a second. “Yes.”

So we went, talking along the way. She told me about the Czech Republic, about her travels in America. I told her about going into Peace Corps, that I might learn Russian, which her parents spoke. She said that if I went to Prague (just a 12 hour train ride from Kyiv), I should contact her and she would meet me there.

I asked her to teach me a bit of Czech in case I did go, the basics: hello, good-bye. Then, going for broke yet again, I asked her how to say “you’re beautiful.” She smiled and said “Sesh haska.”

We arrived at the museum and I paid for us, and then we wandered its floors, looking at an art installation of hundreds of pencils stuck into a wall, a room made out of pressed packing foam.

She had to leave after that, was meeting her brother for dinner. Walking her to the L-train, we got to talking about stereotypes. I asked her what she thought of Americans, and she said that she thought most were arrogant, but that I didn’t seem to be (little does she know). She asked me what I thought of Czechs. I said I didn’t have an opinion about them, that she was the first Czech I had met. She asked me what I thought of her.

I said: “Shesh haska.”

She smiled again. Now at the L-train stop, she gave me her e-mail and then a hug. A kiss would have been great, but a bit much to hope for considering we had just met two hours before. We e-mail about once a month now, and if I do ever get to the Czech Republic, she says that I need to come see her village…

…checking out the Frank Lloyd Wright designed “Robie” house with Ira…

…flying home, missing my friends and missing Chicago already…

The Camel Tried to Kill Me

2010-04-03T12:43:00.000-07:00

“Better to guess the grains of sands in the desert than count how often one must shift his balls on a camel.”

It’s not an Egyptian proverb, but it should be. Pushing down on the pommel of the saddle, I lifted myself up and--again--adjusted.

The camel, I should point out, was not my idea. I had a girlfriend. Her name was Diana. Sometimes we saw things differently. For example, when it was suggested that we rent camels to ride them up to a plateau overlooking the Pyramids of Giza, I heard words like “ugly, angry animals” and “blistering, desert heat.” She heard words like “achingly romantic ride” and “postcard-perfect views”.

Which is how I found myself sipping a lukewarm Pepsi and sitting on purple pillows while haggling with a man named Abdul over the price.

I adjusted again. I was hampered in my ability to rise out of the saddle because I only had one stirrup. The other had broken off moments after I had put my foot in it, an event which caused Abdul to exclaim, “don’t worry! You don’t need it!”

My camel didn’t like me. It had started braying and spitting the moment I came within ten feet of it, and only Abdul smacking on the nose and yelling in Arabic got it settled down enough for me to throw a leg over it.

This was an animal that obviously hated its life. Perhaps it was meant to be roaming the unknown wastes with its loved ones, searching for watering holes and adventure. Instead it was kneeling on the edge of a sooty city, patterns of palm trees shaved into its flanks and a dirty garland of plastic flowers hanging around its neck while some clumsy tourist struggled to mount it. That, or Satan himself had decided to incarnate as a camel for a day.

One of those two.

Some lurching and whiplash later, it rose from its knees and I was swaying ten feet over the sand.

Abdul got on a horse, and his assistant—a beleaguered-looking man in his 30s—threw a piece of cloth over the back of a donkey in a sad an attempt at a saddle. The two led our camels into the desert and up the dunes.

I spent the next 20 minutes rocking and adjusting while Abdul answered unasked questions about his life. He told us of his tough life as a camel renter. He told us of his nine children. And he told us of his two wives. It had been my experience after a month in the Middle East that almost any middle-aged man had more than one, although Abdul was the first to brag that Thursdays were “threesome Thursdays”. I used to think of Middle Easterners as conservative, but the Cairo windows full of lingerie and Abdul's stories of his sex life made me realize that they may have far more kinkier coitus than we.

I actually found myself being jealous of the camel man.

“How do you keep up with pleasing two women?” Diana asked him with a smile.
Abdul leered at her and said: “Camel's milk! It keeps you vigorous!”

I adjusted again and—with effort—kept my mouth shut.

Eventually, the swaying of my camel slowed and then stopped. We were on a windy rise overlooking all three pyramids. The panoramic was amazing.

The classic guidebook shot of the pyramids is actually impossible to get without riding the camels. From the main entrance to the pyramids, all but their tops is obscured by a hill. Once you climb that hill, you're so close to the pyramids that you can't get them all in frame.

But here we were, far enough and high enough to get that shot.

Diana was right. It was beautiful.

Of course, we were also able to see what was right beside the pyramids: the sprawling city of Giza. We made sure it wasn't in our shots.

To Abdul's credit, he knew how to create a moment. He unrolled a blanket and laid it out on a patch of rock overlooking the pyramids, having us get off the camels and sit on it together. Half crouched and circling us with my camera, he photographed us looking at one another lovingly with a 5,000 year-old backdrop, kissing each other while the wind tugged at Diana's headscarf, making it flutter cerulean blue before the pointed tops. In the pictures you don't see the saute-ing July heat, the gritty sand blasted our skin. What you see is a perfume ad. Awesome.

Abdul asked us to get back on the camels for a few more shots. His assistant held onto the reins of my camel while he maneuvered Abdul's camel towards me.

Another blast of wind hit us, knocking the cloth off the donkey’s back. When the assistant ran over to grab it before the wind could carry it away, he left the reins for my camel hanging unguarded over the desert sand.

I thought: you’re not supposed to do that.

The camel—Lucifer's steed—stayed surprisingly still, and the assistant came back to reclaim the reins without incident. While Abdul was snapping shots with my camera, though, another breeze knocked the cloth back off the donkey. The assistant again went to retrieve it, again letting the reins to my camel hang loose.

When he returned, he reached to take hold of them.

The camel bolted.

I think it had been waiting for that chance. For the first time since being captured as a baby and after a lifetime of being beaten and forced to give rides to light-skinned strangers, it had the ability to run home to its family. And I can only assume that its family was in Libya, because it was now galloping pell-mell towards the east and out into the Sahara dessert with me clinging tightly to its back.

My mind was in an adrenaline frenzy as I gripped the pommel with both hands, my body flying up and down with every stride, my left leg flailing because yes, I really had needed that other stirrup. As the pommel began working on what would later be a three inch blister along my thumb, I realized I was currently in the very real danger of getting either A) getting thrown or B) ending up miles into the desert and then getting thrown..

But despite that, I wasn’t feeling fear. What I was feeling was thrill-ride excitement, and what I was thinking was: this is going to make a great story.

The camel’s neck was straight, its head was down and the reins were completely out of reach. Jumping off was out of the question because I was very high up, moving at almost 25 miles an hour and likely to damage something on impact.

So I took my only real option, which was to repeatedly scream the Arabic word for stop and hang the hell on.

Back on the ridge, Abdul was not riding to my aid. In fact, I later learn that he was sitting calmly on his horse and was flirting with my girlfriend. Another group of tourists were about 100 yards away from us on horses, and their Egyptian tour guide had seen my camel bolt. He was currently galloping at an angle towards me, and Abdul had figured that guy would take care of me.

What is a girl to do when her man is riding to his death in the desert? Take a video of course! It shows me in the distance, clinging to the camel as the horse closes in on me, the assistant far behind us, arms pumping and running in flip flops. In the video, the three of us just become rapidly disappearing blobs and you don't get the truly visceral experience that was my hands becoming blistered and my balls turning into mash. In the video, we go over a dune and disappear from view.

Past that dune, the horseman finally caught up. I thought he would help, but his arrival only made things worse. He rode ahead and turned to cut the camel off, but instead of stopping, the camel shifted directions and bolted to the right, my head and torso whipping to the side, my body as a whole nearly slipping off. The horseman whirled and galloped ahead of us again, only to have the camel bolt in yet another direction, me clinging hard and my hands singing pain. We danced that dance several times more.

The one boon the horseman was giving me was that every time he got in the camel’s path, it had to slow to shift directions. My mortality confronting me and knowing that this had to soon stop, I launched myself forward the next time the horse rider ran in front. The pommel slammed into my stomach as I reached forward and grabbed the garland of plastic flowers around its neck. Then, with a slightly sadistic glee, I yanked back hard. The camel brayed as its head reared back, but I pulled and twisted and was damn well ready to choke the thing into unconsciousness.
Despite the noise and twisting, the camel soon slowed, calmed and finally stopped. The horseman rode up and grabbed the reins, handing me a stick and miming to hit the camel.

“Fast, fast,” he said in Arabic.

He turned his horse and began galloping back the way we had come, guiding the camel by the reins while I gladly smacked its flanks and yelled “yalla, yalla!” As we cleared a dune, we saw the assistant running towards us, but the horsemen didn’t even slow down, and we galloped right past him. He hurriedly turned and ran after us up the dune.

I had expected Diana’s face to be a canvass of worry, so was chagrined to find her amiably chatting with Abdul. She hadn’t seen most of the action, hadn’t realized the danger, and hadn’t seen me stop the camel with my own two hands.

Sigh.

The horseman handed me the reigns and galloped back to his group, and the three of us waited for the assistant to get back. His donkey patiently stood beside us, the cloth saddle lying at its feet.

When the assistant finally arrived, coated in sand and out of breath, I refused to give the reins back to him. We continued on the tour, me firmly in control of my own camel, past excavation sites and the sphinx until we came to the foot of the pyramids themselves.

After I had dismounted my camel and had given the reins to the assistant, after his carelessness had gotten me maimed and quite nearly killed, he actually had the gall to ask for a tip.

I just laughed, took Diana’s hand with my non-blistered one, and limped off towards history.

Deals: 10% off Lonely Planet Products

2010-03-31T13:27:00.000-07:00

Here is a 10% off discount code for Lonely Planet Products:

Coupon Code: CJCOUPON10

Hint: Don't buy their books. Download what you need from their Pick 'n Mix Chapters and only print up the pages that you need from the PDFs you download. You'll save weight and space in your bag and you can throw away chapters as you visit cities, meaning you'll decrease your weight as you go.

Click Here: Save 10% off your next purchase at Lonely Planet! Use coupon code: CJCOUPON10

How To: Withdraw Money With A Debit Card But Get the Fraud Protection of a Credit Card

2010-03-31T10:25:00.000-07:00

So here's the conundrum:

1. You don't want to carry a lot of cash overseas because it might get stolen.
2. Traveller's checks are an option, but in reality they are hard to use because so few establishments take them, especially if you're in a non-developed country.
3. You can use a debit card to withdraw money from ATMs in major cities (which also gives you the benefit of a favorable exchange rate) but debit card protection liability is $50 (meaning you have to pay the first the first $50).
4. Credit cards have almost unlimited liability protection, but they also have abusive rates if you withdraw cash from them, which compound daily.

Meaning: You want to use a debit card, but if it's stolen you're screwed.

Well, Visa Prepaid has a card that's a good solution: the Vision Premier. Basically, you deposit money into your prepaid account (which can be done via bank transfer or direct deposit) and then you use it the way you would use a debit card: to pay for purchases, buy things online or withdraw money from ATMS.

But since the card has Visa's Zero Liability Protection, you're completely covered if it's stolen and someone rings up charges on your account. So: protection of a credit card without the rates of a credit card. Pretty sweet.

Since Visa is promising no credit check and no fees with this card, I assume they are making interest off the money you deposit on the card prior to spending it. That means you aren't making any interest.

My advice: keep most of your money in savings or high interest checking, and try to be organized enough to only move what you need onto this card when abroad. Since bank transfers usually take 3 days, I'd also keep a couple hundred extra on the card in case of emergencies.

Click Here: Learn More about the Visa Prepaid Vision Premier Card

Deals: 25% off Gap Adventure Tours

2010-03-30T12:02:00.000-07:00

What? You didn't know that Gap did adventure travel? Yeah, me neither. Although I don't think this is Gap the store, but GAP, the "Great Adventure People".

Whatever.

Th ey are currently running a 25% off special. I've never been on one on of their tours, but I have been on tours with some other companies. In general, I'm partial to not paying a company to guide me, as it allows for more freedom and interaction with locals, but the times I have signed up for a tour, I was usually given the following 3 things:

1) Lack of stress (someone else is doing all the planning and will take care of it if the bus engine blows up)
2) Access (tour companies negotiate to do things that a lone traveler can't)
3) Women (groups are usually age-similar and, well, you're going to be with the same group for a week or more; plenty of time for game)

If it is an arm of the Gap store, maybe all the women will be in black and white. Although you may be competing with Gap men with perfect six packs. Dammit.

Click Here: More Information on Gap Adventure Tours and 25% Off Your Tour

How to: Let People Can Call You for Free While You Are Traveling

2010-03-28T12:56:00.000-07:00

Here is how you can be reached for free almost anywhere in the world:

1. Take your iPhone or iPod Touch with you and make sure it has the free Skype App installed.
2. OR have your netbook with you with Skype installed.
3. OR get on the internet at your hostel if they have Skype installed.
4. Get a SkypeIn number and give it to everyone you like or love or are trying to keep the sexual tension going with while you are on the road.
3. People call you on your number and it's free for them (assuming they have nationwide calling) and free for you (other than the cost of getting the number).

That's right. People call you when they want and can talk to you as long as they want anywhere in the world that has an internet connection.

Even if you aren't available when they call, they can leave a voicemail that you can check the next time you get online.

The service is not free for you (after all, you are getting a second phone number), but it is a relatively cheap way to let your mom hear your voice whenever she's worried sick because you're currently traipsing around the Australian Outback with a couple of Cambodian hookers and a kinky kangaroo.

It's $18 for 3 months or $60 for a year. The nice thing is that if you already have one of Skype's unlimited subscriptions, you get 50% off. Since the USA/Canada Unlimited subscription is $2.95/month, you can bring the total to $12 for a one month trip and that means mom can call you whenever she wants and you can call her whenever you want and (provided you're somewhere there is an internet connection) the two of you can talk as long as you want for $12/month.

Click Here to Learn More about SkypeIn

Deals: Discount Codes for WorldTraveler.com

2010-03-27T13:59:00.000-07:00

Couple of discount codes I found for WorldTraveler.com

1. $10 off an order of $150.00 or more at WorldTraveler
Use coupon code AF0501 at checkout.

2. 10% off and Free Shipping on a $100 or more order of Luggage or Briefs
Use Code CJ10 at checkout

Briefs means Briefcases and not underwear. Buy the way, if it did mean underwear and you did buy $100 worth of it, I'd ban you from my site. No person ever needs either A) that much underwear or B) underwear that expensive.

Unless we're talking lingerie, in which case I'll unban you if you model it for me. Ladies?

3. WorldTraveler's Closeout and Discount Page (So You can Look for More Deals)

How to: Call Home for (almost) Free

2010-03-26T13:22:00.000-07:00

I have a mother.

She doesn't like that I travel.

Well, she likes looking at the pictures and listening to the stories, but she also worries non-stop, even once throwing a fit and forcing me to call off a trip to the Middle East just because Israel and Lebanon happened to be at war. What I've learned from this are two things:

1. Don't tell my mother where I'm going
2. Call or email her frequently when I'm there

I used to just email her, but technology has gotten to the point that letting her hear my voice is ridiculously simple and cheap. This makes her feel better, and it means she puts up less resistance when I'm about to go somewhere new that may or may not have a working government.

Firstly, it seems that almost every hostel in the world now, from Egypt to El Salvador to Thailand has the internet. And not just the internet, but wireless internet. Although I was surprised to realize it, it's actually cheaper for most places to set up a wireless router than to try and lay down an ethernet connection.

This means two things:

1. Most hostels now have Skype on their computers
2. You can now access Skype via the hostel's wireless internet either on a netbook or your wireless 3G phone

Hell, Skype even makes a free app for your iPhone or iPod Touch that you can get HERE.

By the way: anyplace you have a wireless connection, you can use your iPod Touch like a phone if you have the Skype app installed. All the functionality of an iPhone without getting locked into a contract. Woot!

Skype has saved my butt abroad more than once, particularly a time in Egypt when I had lost my ATM card and I was able to call the bank's 800 number via Skype on my hostel's computer and get it sorted out.

But while most people already know about using Skype to call other Skype users or 800 numbers, Skype now has unlimited calling plans to a number of countries, including an unlimited world calling plan for $12.95/month and an unlimited plan to the USA and Canada for $2.95/month.

So it works like this: if I'm going to be gone for a month, I fork over the $3 to have unlimited calling for my trip. Every couple of days, when I find a hostel with wireless internet or Skype installed on one of its computers, I can call my mom and let her know how I'm doing. It's that simple.

Here is the Link to the Program

The Ultimate Travel Card? Chase Sapphire.

2010-03-23T17:15:00.000-07:00

The Chase Sapphire card is a card designed with travelers in mind. Not only does it have one of the easiest point-for-benefit redemption systems I've encountered, but it also comes with a slew of free travel insurance coverages and nice touches like no expiration date on your points and your calls going straight to a live person.

Oh, and, the three things most important to me bonus grubbers like me: a 10,000 sign-up bonus after your first purchase, no dollar minimum on the first purchase, and no annual fee!

Check Out and Apply for the Card by Clicking this Link.

The Chase Ultimate Rewards system seems to Chase taking the American Express points and ThankYou point systems and improving on them. Like those other two, Chase Ultimate Rewards has an online mall where you can buy various products and gift certificates, but unlike those programs, you can instantly use your points to get cash back on your card.

For every 2,500 Chase Ultimate Rewards points that you redeem, you get a $25 credit on your card. That simple. This means the 10,000 point bonus is worth $100.

This is an improvement over AE or ThankYou because when I want to redeem points for a flight through them, I either have to have enough points to cover the entire flight or pay an abusive cash-for-points fee.

With the Ultimate Rewards program, though, even if a one-way flight is $124, I can just use the bonus to take $100 off it and then pay the rest when my bill comes at the end of the month.

You can use the credit for anything, by the way, not just travel. You could buy $100 of Spam and Pepsi if you wanted to (and who could blame you?), but it does pay to put your travel on the card because doing so gives the travel the following protections:

1. Reimbursement for travel if you have to cancel for reasons outside your control (this will also save you from buying cruise insurance). Super Sweet.
2. Free Auto Rental collision coverage (this will save you from buying collision coverage from the rental car company) Super Sweet.
3. Reimbursed meals and lodging if your trip is delayed more than 12 hours due to reasons outside your control. Pretty Sweet.
4. Reimbursement of "essential items" you may have to buy if your checked bags are delayed by 18 hours or more. Somewhat Sweet.
5. Coverage of carry-on or checked luggage that is lost or stolen. Super Duper Sweet.

Here it is again in case you're to lazy to scroll back up:

Check Out the Chase Sapphire at this Link.

$300 in Bank Bonuses

2010-03-20T16:24:00.000-07:00

I'm always on the lookout for bank bonuses that don't require a direct deposit. This is just a little way to make money on the side, but I usually earn about $500-700 a year on this. Here are $300 worth of current offers:

$150 from Suntrust Bank

Link
1. Open a checking account: Get $50
2. Make three bill payments a month for three months: Get $100

$100 from Chase
Link
1. Open a Chase Checking account
2. Make 5 debit card purchases (or set up direct deposit): Get $100

$50 from ING
Link
1. Open an Electric Orange Checking Account using code EM262
2. Use your debit card 3 times within 45 days: get $50

Passive Income: Hubpages

2010-03-16T07:37:00.000-07:00

Hubpages is a website for articles about, well, everything. Basically, you can write about anything you want (travel stories, advice about alien anal probes, how to breed fire ants) and post it. You add keywords so that others can find your article (it also suggests keywords for you), and within a day it's showing up in Google searches. Hubpages then tastefully surrounds your articles with Google Ads and you can get revenue one of two ways:

1. You get 60% of the revenue for every time a Google Ad appears on your page.
2. You get 100% of the revenue everytime someone clicks on one of your Google Ads.

There are also other ways for you to generate revenue for the site, including driving traffic towards other people's articles and recommending items on Amazon, which you'll get up to a 15% cut of if they buy it.

I'm just starting to work with the site, having my personal assistant upload columns that I wrote in college. Yes, I have a personal assistant. She lives in the Phillipines, she's awesome, and I pay her $0.66 an hour. More on outsourcing your work in a later post.

The columns have already gotten several hundred views in a day, each of which generates me money. From what I hear, having up 40 quality articles will generate you $40-50 a month. Between my articles on this blog, my column and my travel stories, I should have several hundred articles posted, so we'll see what kind of revenue I might be able to get.

I'll update on Hubpages in a month and let you know how it's going, along with any tips or tricks I learn.

You can sign up for Hubpages here: Sign up to Hubpages

How to: Backup Your Passport Online

2010-03-15T07:35:00.000-07:00

This is actually a simple bit of advice, but it seems to be little known because every time I mention it to someone, they kind of slap their heads and thank me.

You probably know that you should leave a copy of your passport with someone that you trust in case something goes wrong while you're on the road, but that is problematic because then you have to A) Get a hold of them (when you're likely not even in the same time zone as them) and B) Have them find a fax machine so that they can fax it to the embassy.

It's better is to give a copy of your passport to yourself.

1. Scan your passport.
2. Email the photo to yourself or store it online
3. Access it from anywhere in the world with internet access.

Since every American embassy has internet, it means you can pull it up while you are there. Simple, right? But most people don't think to do it.

Also worth emailing to yourself and storing online (provided said storage place is secure):

1. Credit card numbers (in case they get stolen)
2. Travelers Checks numbers
3. A passport photo (so you can print if you find a place that prints photos)

How to: Handwash Clothes

2010-03-14T16:01:00.000-07:00

This was taught to me by my host mother when I was in Peace Corps, and I have two years of experience doing it.

1) Fill up a sink/bucket/tub with hot water.

2) Add soap. As in actual soap. I break bits off or just rub one piece of clothing over and over under the water until the water becomes whitish.

3) Put your clothes into the water, and stir them around for a few minutes and then let them soak for 5-10 minutes.

4) Get each piece of clothing and rub it against itself, pushing the cloth together between your knuckles and rubbing up and down. You really only have to work the underarms and collars of your shirts and the butt and knees of your pants as these are the areas most likely to be dirty.

5) Give a light wring to each piece and put them aside.

6) Rinse out the sink/bucket/tub and fill it with cold water.

7) Dunk and wring each piece of clothing several times to get the soap out.

8) Give one final, serious wring to each piece of clothing. When you are done, no water should drip from it (my host mother used to hand me back clothes that I hadn't wrung out enough).

9) Hang your clothing up.

10) If you are anywhere near a laundromat, or if your hostel has cheap laundry service, skip steps 1-9

Bonus Stacking: ThankYou Points

2010-03-13T12:55:00.000-08:00

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The ThankYou rewards program is used by both Citi and Expedia (the two might be part of the same company; I'm too lazy to find out) and can be found at: http://www.thankyou.com/. There are thousands of ways for you to redeem ThankYou points (including cruises and hotel rooms), but I always head straight for the airline tickets.

Using your points to buy tickets is easy compared to using frequent flyer miles, which have blackout dates and limited seats per flight. With Thankyou, you do a flight search that's similar to the one Kayak uses and looks through all the major airlines. If you find a flight to your liking, you buy it at a penny a point.

Have 25,000 points? You can buy a $250 ticket. That simple. Even if it won't buy you a round trip ticket, you can still get it one way and pay cash for the return flight.

Bonus offers for ThankYou Points change frequently, but I'll post some recent ones:

Citi Forward (6,500 points after $250 in purchases and signing up for paperless statements; 100 points a month)

Citi Checking Account (16,000 points for opening an account and qualifying activities)

22,500 points right there. Enough to get me from New York to Orlando and back, which I've done every month since September, most of it for free. :-)

It pays to Google "Thank You Bonus Points" frequently.

Happy stacking.

Bonus Stacking: The Basics

2010-03-12T13:08:00.000-08:00

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I can't claim credit for the idea, but I can claim credit for the term.

Bonus stacking.

It's the art of combining credit card and banking bonuses to rapidly (as in, by next month) earn free flights and hotel rooms. Not only is it completely legal, but in the long term it also helps your credit score. I started doing this a year ago and have gotten four free domestic flights and a room at a five star hotel in Cancun. In all, I've have gotten well over $1,500 in travel savings for a few hours of effort. I cannot recommend bonus stacking enough.

The gist: in order to attract and retain customers, credit cards and banks offer reward programs. Almost across the board, the points (or miles) in these programs are worth a penny apiece and are usually given for each dollar spent. Which means for every $1,000 you spend, you'll get $10 in value. Racking up the $30,000 in purchases required to enough points for a $300 ticket could take most of us years, which is what the companies want, since in that time you'll likely have given them far more in finance charges and late fees.

In order to get you going, though, the financial companies like to start you off with a sign-up bonus to lure you in, usually between 5,000 and 10,000 points. With a little organization, you can stack the sign-up bonuses from several cards to immediately earn enough points for flights and hotel rooms.

Here is the nitty-gritty:

1. You need a decent credit score to even get the cards in the first place. This is good thing in my opinion because if you are bad at managing your credit to begin with, the last thing you need is is a half a dozen bright, shiny credit cards lying around asking to get used. Anything above 650 will usually start you off.
2. In the short term, this will hurt your credit. From the companies' point of view, if you are ordering a large number of cards, it's because you are about to fund a super-model, cocaine-filled orgy and then off yourself at the end. Or similar. So ordering a large number of cards will ding your score, probably 15-20 points. Because of this, it is best to order a number of cards all at once, because the next month your score will drop.

3. In the long term, this will help your credit. A significant bulk of your score is determined by your credit-utilization ratio. This is the dollar amount of credit you have versus the amount that you are using. If you are $9,000 in debt on $10,000 in credit, your score will be lower than if you are $20,000 in debt on $50,000 of credit. So adding another ten credit cards will actually inflate the amount of credit you have (because you are NOT going to start using your bonus stacking cards, right?) and month after month your credit score will go up.

4. You can use the credit building thing as an excuse. I got greedy once and ordered six different American Express cards in a day and they called me to see what was up. I said I was trying to increase my score by increasing my available credit. They asked for proof of income, I faxed it to them and they approved all six cards. Those bonuses got me two free plane flights.

5. Be organized. A simple spreadsheet program like Microsoft Excel, Open Office Calc or Google Docs (which I use) will do wonders for your sanity. This is because different cards require different hoops to jump through. Some require a single purchase, others require a certain dollar amount of purchases (say $250). Some have annual fees that are waived the first year, meaning you have to cancel them before the year isup. Some post their bonus points in four weeks, others in six to eight. In a future post I will give tips on free finance programs and provide a spreadsheet template to help minimize your Advil use.

And that's about it! Future posts will cover different programs and how to get the most out of your points.

How to: Get your ATM Fees Reimbursed

2010-03-11T05:38:00.000-08:00

I thought I was going to cry the first time that I logged onto my Bank of America checking account while traveling in Slovakia and saw that the last three ATM transactions had been hit with $5.00 surcharges (on top of the $2.00 the Slovakian ATM had charged me). Basically, more than a day's travel budget had been blown on fees.

What, did the bank WANT me to carry around huge amounts of cash while I was traveling in order to minimize my withdrawals? Or did they want me to bring a bunch of money from the states and get hammered at the exchange bureaus (if you didn't know, ATM withdrawals give you the best rate of exchange)?

So that's why, after looking around, I settled on Evantage Bank.

Why?

Evantage reimburses your ATM fees, even international ones!

This was proven on a recent trip to Honduras and another one to St. Maarten. Rather than fearing the ATMs, I was able to visit them as often as I wished. True to their word, Evantage paid for my ATM fees.

That's the big one for me, because I live in the South Bronx, which has a cash based economy, so I find myself withdrawing money once a week even at home.

On top of that, Evantage has:

1. High yield checking (currently at 4%) up to $10,000.
2. Low requirement to get that rate (10 check card uses a month)
3. No phone tree when you call customer service! A real Oklahoman immediately picks up and answers your questions!

Obviously I can't use my check card 10 times a month abroad, but what that means is that when I'm in America, my liquid cash earns 4% and when I'm abroad I'm saving almost that percentage in ATM fees.

All in all, it's pretty sweet.

How to: Bribe an Official

2010-03-10T16:12:00.000-08:00

Although I try to avoid bribing when I can (and have successfully talked my way out of having to bribe the police a few times), sometimes it's necessary. When? When I've messed up, that's when.
Scenario: Something has gone wrong, and the official is acting like he is going to do something bad to you.

Your Magic Words: "I'm sorry about this. Is there a fine?"

The Rationale: Of course there isn't a fine, but this is the official's way of taking money without looking like it's for him/herself.

After They State the Fine: HAGGLE! Yes, haggle. I had a Moldova train attendant who wanted $100 and I got him to $60, and I had Cambodian border guard who wanted $20 and I got him to $10. There is no harm in trying, and it saves you money.

Your Magic Words: "I wish I could pay that, but I don't have that much. I only have ___ on me!"

After They State a Mid-way Price: "But sir, if I pay that, I will not be able to eat tomorrow. At most I could pay..."

And so it goes. Just remember that when someone gets a bribe out of you, it means they will try to get it out of others after you. So use sparingly.

Passive Income From Lending Club: Minimizing Loss

2010-03-09T09:30:00.000-08:00

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The risk of using Lending Club is debtors that don't pay. So far, I've only had three loans fall behind, and so far there were three different outcomes.

1. Worth noting, though, is that the only loans that were late were those that I invested in as new loans. I have yet to have a loan that I bought on the trading platform go late, and that's because I only bought loans from debtors who had been paying on time for eight months or more.

2. The first was when I wasn't regularly checking the account, and when I caught it it was already more than a month late. The debtor had made only one payment before he stopped paying. I tried to sell the loan, but no one would buy it, even at 2/3 off the price. I believed I was going to loose the money. The something interesting happened. The loan was referred to debt collection and then the whole thing was paid off. I don't know if he secured another loan from elsewhere or put it on a credit card, but either way I got my money back.

3. The second one happened while I was checking on the first. I noticed that its status was "In Grace Period", which meant that the loan was late, but less than two weeks late. After "Grace Period", Lending Club marks it as "Late", which will make it hard to sell (I assume most people, like me, do not buy late loans). So I put it on the market and steeply discounted it at $20, a 20% discount. It was purchased a day later. I lost almost $5, but it was better than loosing $25.

4. The third one is currently late, but I'm waiting and seeing. It was one of the loans I picked up when I was still bidding on new loans instead of buying them on the trading platform. It was a $75 loan that had been paid for 6 months before the debtor fell behind. I saw that it was "In Grace Period" and put it up for sale, again at a $5 discount. Possibly because it wasn't a steep enough discount relative to the worth of the loan, no one bought it. I saw that the debtor had been communicating with Lending Club and had been put on a payment plan by them.

I now had a choice: discount deep enough to sell and loose that money, or hold onto the loan and hope the debtor caught back up on his payments.

Since he had paid on time for six months, I decided to take a gamble and see if he would bring his account current. If he does, I am going to sell the loan. With the listing at "current", it hopefully should sell with only a minimal loss. His next payment is due on 3/10/10. I will post after to notify everyone if he paid.

Lessons:

1. Don't invest in new loans.
2. Check the status of loans weekly to make sure all are current.
3. If a loan is in Grace Period, immediately try to sell it before it becomes "Late".
4. Keep loans to $25, so that you don't have to loose too much money trying to sell them before they become late.

Update: Someone bought the $75 loan off me. It was still discounted at $5 off, but considering I'd already gotten $4 in interest payments off of it, my loss was $1.

I'd like to also point out that since I've made hundreds of dollars in interest from Lending Club, loosing $6 is just the cost of doing business. The trick is to stay on top of it so that you don't end up holding a bum loan and having it blow a hole in your bottom line.

Travel Gear: Chargepod

2010-03-08T18:11:00.000-08:00

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Okay flashpackers, let me know if this is worth having:

Chargepod Base Unit

When I travel, I take a netbook, a digital camera and (sometimes) an HD camcorder. In the past, I've been annoyed that I have to pack a separate power cable for each of these devices, and since I've also seen flashpackers with all those AND cell phones and iPods, then The Chargepod from Callpod might be worth having.

Basically, you buy it and adapters for your devices and it allows you to charge everything off one plug. It looks tiny, too; smaller than the size of a cellphone in the pictures and apparently it only weighs a few ounces. So not only will you likely be saving space, but you also won't be fighting for outlets in hostels or the airport.

So, if you have a Chargepod, leave a comment and let me know if it's worth it.

Passive Income from Lending Club: Step-by-Step Investment Strategy

2010-03-06T06:50:00.000-08:00

Here's the biggest thing I learned from my time with Lending Club: don't invest in new loans.

Why? Even though you've looked at their credit history and read why they needed the loan, checked to make sure their income is verified and asked questions about their monthly obligations, there is still one thing you don't know: Will they repay?

Luckily, Lending Club has a way to sidestep this: the trading platform.

Run by FolioFN, this is where Lending Clubs notes can be bought and sold, and it provides filters that let you find the loans you need.

After I got to "Browse Notes" on the platform, here is what I do:

1. For "Status", click the checkbox for "Never Late". Unclick the others. You don't want someone who pays their loans late. Ever.

2. Put the "Remaining Payments" at 28. This means that they have been paying on time for eight months straight. This is more of a "gut" number. If you want more saftey, pick a lower number (which means they've paid on time longer). Vice versa if you want more risk.

3. Click "Search".

4. The right hand column is "Yield to Maturity". Click on it twice. This will order them from greatest yield to least.

5. I look for loans that were originally $25 (by now they're around $20) and that have yields higher than 11%. Buy them.

6. Although I've been tempted to buy loans with high returns that were above $25, I have stayed away. Why? You can absorb a $25 default. A $200 default will kill your bottom line. Buying a large number of small loans will spread your risk more than a small number of large loans.

7. I recommend checking the platform once a day rather than trying to invest everything at once. One day all the good loans available might be at 10% and the next day you'll find good ones at 13%. I recommend buying $100-200 a day until you're fully invested.

Passive Income from Lending Club: Overview

2010-03-04T06:50:00.000-08:00

In my continued quest to earn passive income, I am really glad I found Lending Club.

Lending Club is a peer-to-peer lending site where people apply for loans through Lending Club, Lending Club vets them and then it chops those loans up into $25 "notes" that people like you and me can purchase. Essentially, we are putting up the money for the loan and we get the repaid principal and interest. Lending Club takes 1% as its fee.

With the stock market having completed its bull run and looking to go sideways for the near future, this is the strongest return on investment that I've found. Plus: low volatility. Currently I am averaging 11%, and the principal and interest is paid monthly into my account.

To give you an idea of how this helps: Say you invest $10,000 and are making 11% interest. You will be making an extra $1,000 a year after Lending Club takes its cut, paid monthly. This means that as you are trotting around the globe, you are getting an $83 a month paycheck.

In cheaper countries, like Cambodia, $83 is pretty much all you need. In a country like Ukraine, that'll still cover half your expenses, meaning you can travel twice as long.

The drawback, of course, is that someone might not repay the loan, in which case you can loose the money you invested. Although Lending Club says they have been able to fully or almost fully recover 40% of loans that go into collections, you are still risking your money.

I've gotten pretty savy with it, though, so there's more to come on how to maximize your return and minimize risk and loss.

Switching from Verizon to Virgin Mobile

2010-02-05T18:33:00.000-08:00

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Saving money for travel often means saving money in general, so I'm always on the lookout for how to cut my bills. One recent way I've done that is to stop using Verizon and go to a prepay plan.

Why? The StraightTalk deal is just too good.

Firstly, I am out of the country several months a year. When I turned off my Verizon account during these times, they charged me $15 to do so each time. With a prepay plan, I only pay for the time I want and not get charged to not use my phone for the large chunks of time I'm out of the country.

Secondly, it's just so damn cheap!

I had one lowest available plans from Verizon, one that wasn't even posted on its site but which I had to ask for over the phone: 100 Anytime minutes for $25. But with a text message plan, taxes and fees, I was still paying almost $50 a month and was constantly at risk of going over my minutes.

The StraightTalk plan? $30 for 1000 minutes, 1000 text message and 30MB of data usage every 30 days. In other words, I am now getting a lot more for less money and since it uses Verizon's network, I get the same level of coverage.

The trick was that I had to buy a StraightTalk phone. I bought one of the cheapest from Walmart.com (and even got a discount by going through Bing.com's cashback store), which came to $40. The phone is a severe step down from my LG Dare, but I found I wasn't using most of the Dare's features, making it an expensive toy not worth having and one that I was constantly worried about having stolen (I live in the South Bronx). I should be able to sell the LG Dare on eBay for about $160 and pocket the difference.

How to: Use Toilets in the Middle East and Asia

2009-09-17T07:14:00.000-07:00

I created this blog to address travel issues that other websites or blogs wouldn't normally cover. And one topic that you never see anything about is how to use bathrooms in the Middle East and Asia.

Here is what you will see: either a porcelain bowl (for you to sit on) or a wooden/earthen/porcelain cover over a hole in the ground (for you to squat over). You are also likely to see: A) a small basin built into or out of the wall of your bathroom stall with water flowing into it or B) A bucket and a hose.

What you are not likely to see is toilet paper.

What you should know is that toilet paper is a relatively recent and wholly American invention. It was created by us only 150 years ago (made of aloe-infused hemp) and even that didn't catch on until a softer version was put onto rolls. Believe it or not, it took a couple decades for the rolls to catch on, people buying them only after they had been heavily marketed to hotels and gas stations.

What did they use to wipe their asses before? Anything: corn husks, magazine pages, and, as is still the case in the Middle East and Asia, their hands.

So this is how you do it: take your hand, scoop some water from the basin (or bucket) and use it to wipe your ass clean. Think of it as a manual bidet.

Will you get poop on your hand? Yes, you will get poop on your hand. Use more water to clean it off. After, clean your hands in the sink with water and soap.

Oh, and use your left hand for this. If you've noticed, people in these regions will never shake hands or touch food with their left hands. This is why.

Think this is disgusting? They think it's disgusting that you dry wipe your ass and leave bits of poop to crust on your bunghole. This is why you have itchy ass. This is why you get track marks on your underwear.

Do I agree with wiping my ass with my hands? No. I just carry toilet paper with me whenever I travel to these regions.

I'm just explaining how it's done.

Happy pooping.

Make Thousands of Dollars by Converting an IRA While Traveling

2009-09-14T17:48:00.000-07:00

If you plan (like me) to take significant time off of work for a long-term trip or you've been laid off for a significant amount of time or you're going to join Peace Corps, you can make thousands of dollars by converting an IRA when you're not generating income.

Don't know much about IRAs? Read here: All about IRAs

What I'm going to walk you through is slightly complex and would leave a lot of people shaking their heads, but since I'm actually doing it, I can assure you that it works.

1.Open a traditional IRA. If you already have one, this is going to benefit you beautifully.

2.Contribute as much as you can each year up to the legal limit of $5,000. This will let you save a thousand dollars or more in taxes each year.

3.After a few years, take a year off to travel (using those tax savings to help pay your travel costs, of course) and convert your traditional IRA into a Roth IRA during the tax year that you are traveling.

4.After five years, take out the money tax and penalty free.

5.Need the money sooner? You can take it out penalty free if you A) buy a first home, B) pay un-reimbursed medical expenses, or C) become disabled (try not to do that).

EXAMPLE:

Bob already has $5,000 in a traditional IRA and will contribute $5,000 a year for 2009 and 2010. Since he's in a 25% tax bracket, every $5,000 that he puts in the IRA is an EXTRA $1,250 in his pocket because he's not paying that in taxes to the government. As of 2010, Bob would have $3,750 more in his pocket to put towards travel than if he had not contributed to his IRA.

Now let's say it's 2011. Bob is chilling on a beach in Thailand after having emailed his mom and asking him to convert his IRA. Since he gave his mom power of attorney before leaving on his trip, she is able to convert his traditional IRA into a Roth IRA. Because Bob has been traveling for the year and has only been making a little money from passive income (more on that in future posts), his taxes are pretty much limited to the IRA he has just converted. Let's say it's $15,000.

The marginal tax rate for a single filer is 10% of the money between $0 and $8,350 and 15% of the money between $8,350 and $33,950. With basic deductions, Bob's taxes are $165. Already he's saved $3,585, but since Bob also take deductions for his travel-based business (more on that in future posts), Bob just gets to keep the full $3,750.

After five years, Bob can take out that $15,000 penalty and tax free, or can let it grow as long as he wants. Even if he grew that money to $80,000 over 30 years, he won't even pay taxes on the $80,000.

And that is sweet.