How to Travel the World Archives

How to Talk to People in a New Culture

As I travel the world, how do I talk to people in various cultures around the world and learn about a new place? I have a slightly different approach in each place based on the culture, but this is my overall approach as I learn the specifics of the communication style when I arrive somewhere new.

Who to Talk to

First, I figure out who I can talk to. The best people may vary widely depending on the culture, and it depends on whether that person has time. Staff members of the everyday establishments I frequent (like waiters and waitresses, store clerks, hotel workers, store clerks, security guards, etc.) are a low-hanging fruit, but I have mixed feelings about talking with them. They are paid to be around, and in some cases, there can be implied pressure to interact. In others, it’s fine. I find it best to sort that one out by ear.

In some places, asking someone to take your picture can be a way to strike up a conversation. They take your picture, and then you can ask them where they are from and what it is like living here. In a culture where most people don’t speak English, it can be hard to initially approach someone with limited linguistic overlap, and this can be a good way to initiate a conversation. Gesturing that you want a photo is one of the easier things to convey; almost everyone has a photo these days and understands the concept of taking pictures with it. Once done, then you already have your phone out, and you open your translation software and start a conversation. In heavily tourist areas, this technique may lead to you talking more with tourists than visitors, but it can still work well.

Otherwise, I might be simply talking to random people on the street. I find the best way to do that is to start tangible. For example, if someone is wearing a really cool shirt, ask where they bought it. You’d be surprised at how much you can learn from a culture by learning what kinds of clothing people buy and where they shop. If you are at a restaurant and you see someone eating an interesting dish, ask them what it is called and whether they’d recommend you eat it or only think it’s okay.

What to Ask About

I generally prefer asking broad, open-ended questions about their experience living there. That said, I often start the conversation tangibly and use that to open up. Take the examples in the last paragraph: start by asking about their shirt or the food they are eating, and then if they are up for continuing to chat, pivot from that to learn about where they are from and what they think about living here. (And translation apps work wonders when you first arrive in a place; some apps like Google Translate allow you to download a language ahead of time, so you can still talk to people when you don’t have reception.)

The tangible question does a few subtle things. First, it presents a clear starting point in the conversation, especially useful for someone who does not speak the same language as me. Second, it provides me with a clear goal, humanizing me in the process. Humans tend to relate to stories, which we experience through a goal. I am at a restaurant in a new country, trying to figure out what to order, or I am considering buying some clothing. Either of these implicitly present me as a genuine human to the person I am talking to. It also demonstrates that I am interested in learning about the culture and their world here.

So, how do you pivot to broad, open-ended questions about their experience with the place? People’s answers to your specific questions often teach you things that you can then generalize into a broader conversation. For example, if they say, “I bought my shirt in China” when we are in Malaysia, I then ask if they are from China or were simply visiting China. If they are from China, I may ask where, and what it is like living there (or what it is like visiting Malaysia).

If nothing comes up to go off of, I just ask as a follow-up after they walk through the previous tangible topic we were just talking about. The two most common first questions I ask are, “What is life like here?” (or “Do you enjoy living here, or what do you think about it?” or “What are your favorite things to do here?” (or “What do you do for fun?”) The first one makes clear I want to learn about them as a person. The questions emphasize that I want to listen to their opinion or perspective.

The second emphasizes that too but can also trigger an activity-oriented conversation. Often people will go into their personal favorite activities, but some will go into listing the best tourist attractions. This can be fine, but in my follow-up questions, I usually try to keep the conversation about their personal experiences with the places: for example, “What is your favorite part about X place [that they just mentioned]”, “How often do you go where?”, “When was the last time you go there?”

Here are a few other examples of good starter questions that emphasize their personal experience. I often also use these as follow-up questions after asking what life is like:

1) What is it like working as a waitress [or whatever job they do]?

2) How long have you lived here?

If they give me a list of recommendations, I make sure those are written on my phone. Most often, I get out a new page and have them type up the names of the places. This is both because they will often say names of places faster than I can type them, especially when the place names are in a different language. This way I can record them to look up later. More importantly, however, having them write it down confirms that I am really interested in what they say and want to hear every word of it. It is a form of validation.

Being Shown Around

Also, I learn so much more being taken to neat places than going by myself, because I can listen to their take on it instead of only seeing through my own perspective. Even hearing people describe their favorite places is a window into their world. Sometimes, they will simply offer to take you to their favorite places.

Some societies are set up to navigate by yourself pretty easily (such as big cities with intricate public transit networks), but in some parts of the world, having someone drive you around is really the best or even only way to navigate it. In the latter, making friends who then show you around is the best way to approach it (or sometimes hiring a tour guide, although I do not generally do the latter). In my experience, in big cities, people are less likely to show you around themselves. The places where people will show you around tend to be rural, but not all rural areas are like that. It varies by culture.

To determine whether it is safe to go with them, I generally assess two things: 1) how well I know them, and 2) what I sense their self-interest is. On how well I know someone, the most important factor for me is knowing some of their other interpersonal connections. For example, have I met their friends or family? Do I know where they work?

If I met someone at their job, for example (say a waitress or waiter), then I know where they work. If they do something really bad like rob me (assuming I am still alive), then they are now identifiable to the police who can use that to learn their name. That helps me feel secure. But for a complete stranger I met in a big city who could in theory rob me and blend back into the crowd, I may have my guard up a little more.

Knowing their friends and family is similar (although that can be more likely to be deceptive in an extreme situation). Friends of friends are great (say one of your friends knows someone who lives in the place you are about to visit): I now have a social network and can feel much more confident.

The second way I evaluate safety is in terms of what the person’s self-interest is. Everyone has a set of self-interests or motivations. Why are they interacting with a foreigner (me)? These can range from virtuous motivations like wanting to talk with someone from another culture to learn more about the world, hospitality/graciousness, just a desire to be nice, or just enjoy explaining their world. They can also have self-interested motivations like forming connections that can help them find a job in or move to another country, or they want you to pay them to give you a tour. A given person can have a combination of motivations.

Different travelers tolerate different types of motivations. For example, I do not like the motivation of trying to get money from me that much and tend to stay away from interactions where I sense that is their primary goal. In tourist areas, people may offer rides or offer to show you places with the understanding that you’ll pay them for it, and I will generally stay away from them.

At the same time, specifically getting a sense for people’s self-interest is most useful in understanding what they may or may not do. For example, someone who is interested in connecting with you because they want an international friend are a lot less likely to rob you. They may have other interests that you have to navigate, but making sure you have a fun time connects heavily with those motivations. Knowing this provides a type of safety.

Similarly, someone who wants you to spend money for their services generally sees you as a potential buyer. They may try to upsell you or rip you off, but they are less likely to downright rob you. Like I said above, though, I tend to be more skeptical of those with this motivation. I may complete an exchange (getting a ride or buying something I need like water) from someone demonstrating this motivation, but I am less likely to have a longer interaction with them. Other travelers may have a different opinion or strategy for how to respond to people’s motivations, though.

All of this is how I learn about different people from around the world. The people I meet are the real gateways for me into understanding the world and various cultures around the world, much more than visiting the key sites, eating the food, or other things. This is both because learning about how people in a place think about their lives, their society, and their culture tells me so much more about the place than just visiting it myself, but also because they will be quick to show you the best places to visit, the best foods to eat, and the best other things to do anyways.

Freedom Found by Leaving One’s Home and Traveling the World (A Life Snippet)

(This Life Snippet is about a young adult from Barcelona, Spain, also traveling the world. For her, this journey is about leaving the “prisons” of her hometown and finding herself in the process. You can see more of my Life Snippets of different people in different parts of the world here.)

Julia is a 29-year old Spanish woman from Barcelona who is traveling the world. She has spent most of her time so far (about a year) in New Zealand on the work-travel visa program doing various odd jobs (ranging from picking fruit to hospitality jobs). I met her on a short trip to Tonga in Oceania, where she went on a couple day vacation to swim with whales.

She likes aspects of Barcelona’s culture but also felt the need to get out. One reason is the city’s recent rise in cost of living (largely due to the increasing influx of tourists). More importantly, however, she felt constrained by the community there. She wanted space from her abusive, alcoholic mother, in particular.

She likes the fact that Spanish culture is communal, but as a young adult woman, she found those relationships constraining. In her experience, people there tended to have a prescribed model for how people (especially women) should live their lives: find a job, get married, and then build a family of kids. For example, when she tells people back home that she is currently traveling the world, their most common response is, “What is wrong with you that you are not building your life?”, as if the fact that she is not settling down with a job and family is the only way to build one’s life.

One of her most valuable lessons traveling is seeing how many different ways people live their lives in various cultures around the world. She sees a freedom in this that she can’t experience in her hometown. In her experience, in New Zealand, people leave each other alone, and she also finds a freedom in this. For example, she can walk down the street without having to talk to people or implicitly explain herself like she would back home.

She really enjoys New Zealand but sees it as a place to live for a year, not long-term. She plans to head back to Spain in about three months. She will travel to Southeast Asia and/or Micronesia first, though, before heading back. She plans to get her dive master training so that as she travels throughout Southeast Asia she can pay her way working at different dive centers along various beach towns as she goes. She may work at t one for a few months before moving on. To me, this seemed like her ideal lifestyle (at this moment in her life), and even though she said she planned to head back to Spain in three months, I suspected she would end up preferring doing this for several months longer instead before heading back. She seems to gush at the possibilities, clearly excited about it.

I have talked with many Westerners who want to travel the world by working at different dive centers like this. For them, it seems like an ideal way to make enough to get by for those who want to travel and really enjoy beaches and the beauty of the ocean.

As a college student, her first international trips were to other parts of Europe (such as London and Prague). That is when she first experienced how visiting a new country can free you to be someone else: she is not tied down by others in her community and their associations with her. She can explore new parts of herself.

She studied biology with a focus on animals and in graduate school, took a more extensive trip researching how tourists feeding monkeys influenced their behavior in Bolivia. In the specific part of the Amazon she stayed, tourists frequently fed a specific species of monkeys causing them to expect food from humans and become violent when a human they encountered did not feed them.

This reflects a wider concern she has about animal-based tourism. She talked about how many tour companies do not respect the animals, instead preferring to mistreat the animals so that they can guarantee tourists will be able to witness them. For example, she saw tour companies in Indonesia feed whale sharks to encourage them to show up and then bring large groups of tourists who then swarm and frighten sharks. This influences their behavior, causing problems and potentially harming them and the ecosystem in the long-run.

In certain situations, she has mixed feelings about this, however. For example, in Kalimantan (also called Borneo), Indonesia, she went on orangutan tours. Some tour companies seemed to feed the orangutans to encourage them to come, but at the same time, the tours were a key source of income for a relatively impoverished community. If they were not able to do these tours, the people would most likely have to cut down the forest to plant farms (the next option as a viable source of income). That loss of habitat would wipe out the orangutan population anyways. Thus, in this instance, she felt like the tours were a reasonable middle ground for both the local human and orangutan communities, allowing them to best meet their needs. This reflects a tension and complexity I have also felt about animal tours while traveling the world (maybe one day I will write about this topic in more detail, after I have had time to do some more research on it).

She really loves New Zealand, but she does not like how the country seems built on the labor of immigrants, particularly those who come on a work-holiday visa like her. She gets to see New Zealand, but she is also stuck working low-pay, temporary jobs while those in New Zealand who own and manage those businesses receive all the benefits. New Zealanders don’t like to work, instead preferring to rely on immigrant workers such as the pool of young adults on work-holiday visas. Many on this visa are paid close-to break even, especially since rent in New Zealand is high. Thus, they cannot save. She could only save when she bought a camper van, deciding to live camping outside even for several months when it was cold. This allowed her to avoid the high rents, though.

Overall, she seems to enjoy her life. She is not only discovering the beauty of New Zealand but also seems to be finding herself. This experience is giving her a break from her family (especially her mercurial mother) and her confining community back in Barcelona. She seemed content just being and seeing where life takes her.

How much does it cost you to travel the world? How to Know Whether You Can Afford to Travel the World

This is one of the most common follow-up questions I get asked when I tell people that I am traveling the world. Surprisingly, it’s a lot cheaper than you’d expect.

I find that on average, it costs about USD $20,000 a year to travel the world (or roughly $50 a day). For those of us from the Western countries, it’s far cheaper than a regular life at home. It’s much cheaper than living in New York City for a year, where I was before.

This isn’t necessarily the case for those in places with a cheaper cost of living, but for anyone from those places, keep in mind that there are ways to cut this in half or a quarter. Some people travel even more cheaply, but I find $20,000 to give me the right balance of comfort without spending too much/being too extravagant for me personally.

I base this on a rough ratio of 8-9 months in Global South countries (which tend to have a lower cost of living) and 3-4 months in the Global North or upper income countries where things tend to be more expensive. I personally like this ratio and tend to be more interested in visiting Global South countries anyways. $50 a day is hard to sustain in Western countries. For example, on a recent trip to Australia and New Zealand, I blew well past that. But in most of the Global South, one can spend much less than $50 a day, so it averages out at the end of the day (or at the end of the year).

Most people’s reference point for how much it costs to travel are vacations. That’s the only form of travel that they do. But, long-term travel is far cheaper than a couple day or couple week vacation. The longer the trip, you are better able to lower the cost per day. Here is how to reduce three major costs when traveling long-term: transit between destinations, lodging, and food.

Transportation

Transit is often the most expensive portion of a trip. If someone wants to visit a far-flung part of the world, most likely they will fly there (unless they prefer taking a long time to get there). Flights are often one of the most expensive single purchases.

When traveling long-term, though, you fly sparingly. You may need to initially fly to the region of the world you want to visit, but once you are there, you can mostly take buses or trains between places. For example, if you’d like to visit Southeast Asia, it’s best to pick a city in Southeast Asia that has the cheapest flights you can find. If you’re coming from North America, though, that flight is still likely to be pretty expensive: maybe $1,000-$2,000. That’s a one-time purchase, though. Once you are there, you can go between cities or districts by bus (or sometimes train), often for under $10 or $20. Such bus rides may take several hours, but they will get you to the new destination.

Island regions like Oceania or the Caribbean form exceptions to this: sometimes the only way in and out of an island is by flying. You often need to fly between the islands, increasing the complexity of visiting those regions, but for most of the world, you have to pay the upfront cost to get there, and transportation is pretty cheap after that.

Now, I only need to buy expensive flights when I jump to a new region of the world. For example, if I am done with the Old World and want to cross an ocean into North or South America, that jump will require another initial expensive flight. Otherwise, once I am in a region, I can move over to a new region slowly with local transportation.

In general, traveling switches the trade-offs one has to make when on vacation. On a vacation, people often really want to visit a specific location: they want to visit that city they had always wanted to visit or that specific national park. If they don’t visit it on their week or two-long vacation, they won’t see it, and in some cases, they could well never have another chance when they are in this region of the world anyways. Thus, many find it worth it to eat the cost and just visit that place on their vacation. This puts you at the mercy of the market on how much it costs to fly to that location.

I still have my top destinations, but when traveling the world, there are multiple places A, B, and C that I also want to visit even if they are not my favorite. If one of them happens to be cheaper, I can go there next. Once there, maybe the price to go to my favorite destination will suddenly go down. I can wait to see my absolute favorite places and visit the cheaper place first because I have more time.

Lodging

For most people, the next largest expense when traveling is lodging. Lodging is often cheaper when you do long-term stays of several weeks or even several months rather than several days. Most often the price per day goes down.

It is usually also cheaper in the long run to choose places with a kitchen rather than hotel rooms. That way you can cook meals yourself, which significantly reduces daily costs. In much of the world, I find Airbnbs to be the cheapest option, and generally staying in a home provides you a kitchen with which to cook your own food. But in some parts of the world, Airbnbs are unusually expensive and in other booking sites might be cheaper, so it does vary.

I rarely stay in hostels, only doing so if I absolutely have to (and I’ve only had two in two of the 36 or so countries I have visited so far). I’m not 19 anymore and find that I prefer my own space. I am naturally social while I am out and about, so when I go home, I prefer a quiet place to unwind when I need to be by myself. That said, some people can cut my $20,000 a year expense in half by staying in hostels, and others by a quarter by mixing hostels with pitching a tent somewhere some nights. That’s great for them, and I do enjoy both camping and communal living. But I can only handle doing it for a few nights before I prefer the comfort of my own place. It’s worth it to me to have my own space.

Food

Learning the local cuisine is a fantastic idea, yet cooking your own food is much cheaper than eating out all the time. Unlike on a vacation, where most people eat out every single meal, generally, I find balancing tending to cook your own food most foods to be the cheaper option. In some places, I try to eat out maybe one meal a day, and in more expensive parts of the world, one meal every few days. In most places, though, whether that place has a high or low cost of living, I generally find that I can buy a week’s worth of groceries for the cost of a single meal at a restaurant, so if you do the math, eating three meals a day, that means eating out is 21 times as expensive than cooking on your own.

The other trick with food is to determine cheap but healthy foods you like in the places you visit. Some foods are also healthy and generally cheap everywhere you go, making them my go-to foods to first look for when in a foreign country. I have found, for example, that rice and lentils are generally cheap everywhere and a really healthy source of carbohydrates and protein respectively. They also keep for a long time and are portable if you need to carry leftovers to your next destination. Thus, I often use them as my basis for the dishes I cook, adding spices and other flavors that I can find cheap in that locale to build the dishes I cook myself. (Eggs too are often a good cheap source of protein, but I prefer lentils because they are more portable and don’t go bad or break easily.)

Similarly, the cost of different fruits and vegetables will vary widely in different parts of the world. Often the trick with fruits and vegetables is to just walk through the grocery store or market and see which ones are cheap at that time. Buy those and try them. You may learn about new foods you’ve never heard of. At the same time, there is one fruit and two vegetables that are almost always cheap: bananas, carrots, and lettuce/cabbage (and sometimes oranges). When in doubt, look for these.

In the world of healthy fats, peanuts tend to be another cheap option no matter where you go. If you check your labels properly for the peanuts to ensure no added sugars or other unhealthy additions, all of these tend to be rather healthy as well.

So, lentils, rice, bananas, carrots or lettuce, and peanuts have become my go-tos. These are almost always cheap in pretty much every country I visit. It’s especially helpful to have a list in your head when all the food at a grocery store is in a foreign language. For example, if I don’t have time that day to wander the fruit aisle looking at every fruit, I just grab some bananas.

Finally, be aware of which places sell the cheapest foods wherever you are, because it varies between cultures. In some cultures, supermarkets are the cheapest places to buy food. In other places, street markets where farmers sell what they grow tend to be much cheaper. Sometimes, some foods are cheaper to buy at the grocery store, and other foods like fresh produce are cheaper to buy at a market. It will depend, so one aspect of learning to shop in a new culture is to figure out the best combination of places to optimize costs.

Conclusion

These are the techniques I have honed to reduce cost while traveling the world without destroying the quality of my experience. Different people have different preferences, so if you do travel, you should explore what techniques work best for you. Either way, traveling the world is surprisingly cheap. When people think about how much it would cost to travel the world, they often take the cost of a vacation and extend it to their whole life, but the cost per day of long-term travel is a lot lower than a vacation. At around USD$20,000 a year, you may even find that traveling the world is cheaper than living for a year in wherever you call home.

A Safety Guide for Travelers: Avoiding Petty Crime on the Streets

Traveling the world, I have been to a lot of places. This is a basic guide to how to stay safe in a city environment considered “unsafe.” I will focus on how to avoid being targeted for a petty crime like muggings or other theft while physically on the street, not organized or systematic crime like gang violence or political unrest. Petty crime is what a traveler is most likely to encounter when visiting a new city.

How to avoid being a target of petty crime:

1) Listen to people who live there

In most places with safety issues, local residents will warn you and otherwise advise you on how to conduct yourself. For example, in some cities, multiple people have told me not to take your phone out on the street for fear that someone will nab it. If you make friends in the place, you can also ask them their opinion, but because some people may have unrealistic or false impressions, it’s often best to ask multiple people if possible, to cross-reference with multiple perspectives. People naturally want to help others. Their advice is golden, because they know far more about the specifics of the place than you do as a traveler.

In my experience, many outsiders to a city have stereotyped and otherwise false views of how dangerous a city or neighborhood is. Maybe, they hear tons of horror stories on the news, not realizing that is far from the daily life of someone living in or visiting that space. That said, the best way to determine whether a place has issues with safety is to talk to people who live there. It is not perfect; residents can also have a biased conception of the place they live, but given that this is their reality, their opinions are far better than yours.

2) Notice how others conduct themselves

You should also listen to (or look at) how others conduct themselves in that space. One of the most important ways to stay safe from petty crime like theft is to not stand out. There is little you can do if you physically look different (say you are a different race than most people there), but even in such situations, walking and otherwise moving your body like you are a person who lives there, casually going about their day. Registering as someone who lives there significantly decreases the likelihood of being targeted. In addition to giving you practical actions you can take to avoid being targeted, residents’ advice often implicitly helps you blend in and seem like you belong there.

For example, while on the bus, subway, waiting at the bus stop, or walking down the street, etc., do most people around you (not counting any obvious tourists) have their phones out doing whatever? If so, you are probably safe doing the same. If not, however, then it’s probably best to keep your phone in your pocket as well.

Do people walk fast like they know where they are going (common in big cities)? Do people keep their heads down? Do people say hello to everyone they see walking down the street? I have seen urban neighborhoods with high crime adapt both extremes as a way to cope.

3) Learn to walk as if you know where you are going.

In most big cities, people walk fast and intently, so in many city environments, the best way to avoid being targeted is to look like you know where you are going. It doesn’t matter whether you actually know where you are going; simply walk as if you do. Walking fast, with intent in your step, and not like you are deciding which way to go at each intersection helps with this. In large cities like New York City, this is the default way most people move.

To walk with intent, the most important trick is to pretend like you know what you are doing and not to stop or gawk at the scenery for too long unless you absolutely need to (yes, you can still look at cool buildings and other scenery without stopping or gawking in an obvious manner). Even if you are just aimlessly wandering, set up checkpoints in your mind and walk to them. Decide you are going to walk to that corner or that store not too far away. Walk straight to it like that’s your goal, and then on your way over, pick a new one. Don’t stop and decide where to go; decide as you reach the destination, so you continue moving once you get there, even if it’s arbitrary. If you need to wait to see what is around the corner to decide, then continue moving while you are deciding what to do with the new information.

What if you realize you have been going the wrong way and need to turn around? That is the hardest thing to do when you want to look like you know where you are going, but it happens all the time when you are new to a place (even when I have lived in a city for a long time, I still get lost there). If you need to turn around, do it assertively, not like you are indecisive. That’s key. In many places, you are fine just stopping where you are, turning around, and just walking the other way. Just do it quickly and decisively with intent in your body. Once you are walking the other direction, keep walking at a brisk speed like that was the direction you were walking all along.

If you sense that you are in a significantly less safe place, you can cross the street and then start walking the opposite direction. Unless someone is specifically watching you during the couple seconds it takes to do that, then most people will not even notice that you turned around. In an extreme, worst-case scenario, the best bet would be to duck into some business, wait there for about 30 seconds to a minute (or longer if you are in real danger), and then walk out going the opposite direction. Then, anyone who saw you before will think of you as having gone into that business to buy something, and then when you come out, anyone who sees you now just sees you going about your business after visiting a store. Pretty normal.

If you need to take out your phone to determine where you are going, I find it best to keep walking while checking your phone. Be aware of your surroundings when walking with your phone out to make it look like you know where you are going but are just checking a text or something, and then put it away once you are done. This is rare, and I only need to do this when my GPS is making some kind of error, which I can check for in under a few seconds. Be aware of your surroundings and do it when someone is not near you, on the sidewalk well away from the road where someone can nab your phone as they drive by.

I wouldn’t do that for longer than a second or two, not only for fear of someone taking it, but also because it’s good to look in front of you when you walk. So, if you need more time to look at your phone’s map to reorient, it’s best to stop and go into a business where you can take your phone out for longer. Maybe a convenient store, cafe, or something like that. There, you can take the time you need to get your bearings. In an extreme scenario where you still feel threatened while in the story, I may go into a locked public restroom away from others entirely. If you walk with intent, most people will assume you were just going to that shop or cafe, not knowing you ducked into there to figure out where on earth you ended up and how to get to your destination.

4) Keep precious items near to your body and minimize how often you need to take them out.

If you can, keep precious items in one’s top pockets near one’s hips (not your butt pocket where someone can easily nap it without you noticing). If you are like me and often wear cargo shorts, in places where theft is a problem, you should not put your wallet, phone, or other valuables in the lower, cargo pockets because they are much more stealable. If you are carrying a backpack, keep it over your chest, and any purse or other bag over your shoulder or front waist, so you can keep an eye on it. Anything you are carrying behind you is easier for someone to stab open with a knife and make a run for it.

In areas where theft is a concern, I minimize the amount of valuable goods I bring. I generally always need my phone and wallet throughout the day, but I don’t generally bring my laptop, an extra camera, or other goods unless I feel like I absolutely need them for a specific activity. In some neighborhoods, these are fine, but others not. This would also apply to expensive jewelry or other wearables if I owned any, but they are not my style personally.

Further, I minimize how much I need to get out such items. For money, I often take out enough cash from my wallet to pay for things like lunch, snacks, or other daily items and keep it separately in my pocket. That way, I can pay for daily needs like public transit or food without getting out my wallet, especially in an open market or other public space. For any city that I need to swipe a special public transit card to ride the bus or subway, I also keep that card out, separate from my wallet for ease of use. Keep in your pockets other small items you may need while walking down the street, like a few tissues so that you can blow your nose without having to open your bag to find them.

5) Pro-tip: Listen to directions on your headphones.

Google Maps, for example, does walking directions. Put on headphones and turn its GPS on like you would driving directions. It will tell you when you need to turn, but to anyone else on the street, you look like you are listening to headphones. Listening to headphones actually helps you seem like someone who lives there simply going about your day. It will tell you when to turn as you walk, preventing you from having to constantly get out your phone to make sure you are going the correct direction or not miss a turn. Occasionally, you may need to double check the map if it is misfiring in some way, but that is rare, and in my experience, these checks are often brief; just checking to make sure I need to go left, right, or straight here.

Most often, I will turn on directions to where I am going when I am in a safe place before I leave, put in my headphones, and then go onto the street ready to go. You can also listen to music, a podcast, or whatever else while you walk, or be in complete silence. That’s up to you. Just make sure you are still able to hear enough to not get sneaked up on.

I hope this helps you stay safe in urban neighborhoods. Crime can be an issue in some cities around the world, but they are an overcomable one if you know what you are doing. Most cities are still worth visiting despite the low chance of crime. Most people who live there don’t experience any problems on most days, and these precautions help you make sure you are among the many there who have a wonderful day there.

A New Angle on the World: How Photography Keeps Me Present

*Photo Credit: Me. You can find it* here.

I have discovered that I love photography, especially of taking pictures of the beautiful landscapes as I travel the world. I started to realize when I would get overexcited and bombard my poor friends with dozens of pictures of beautiful landscapes a day, obsessed with showing each new angle of the places I visit.

I have heard many people complain about how taking pictures when they are traveling removes them from the moment. For them, it’s a type of addictive trap that ultimately worsens their vacation experience. They end up spending their time only thinking about the next photograph.

I do not doubt that taking pictures can have that impact on them, but my experience has been the opposite: photography helps me stay in the moment and appreciate the environment in new ways.

Photography forces me to slow down and experience new angles of the places I visit. When I walk around thinking about pictures, I notice the small things. The ways the trees curve in the wind or the shape the rocks form against the hillside. By trying to figure out new and interesting photographs, I experience the environment in a new way. Recently, I have been doing photography walks, where I walk around and try to find interesting photographs to take as I go, stopping every few meters or yards to take a picture. I notice the little quiet moments, whether in nature or in a city, that I would otherwise breeze right by. It helps keep me in the moment.

I also find photography creatively exhilarating. I have aphantasia, which means that I cannot visualize images in my mind. Thus, I often struggled with most forms of visual art. With drawing, for example, I cannot see what I am creating until I start drawing it, in contrast to skilled drawers visualize in their minds what the piece will look like and then start drawing it step-by-step.

With photography, I can bring a piece of aesthetically pleasing artwork by positioning the camera in innovative angles and other ways to tell a compelling visual story. For example, I may set up the lines created by rivers, mountains, and other scenery so that they move towards the corner of the shot because this lack of “conclusion” causes my mind to follow the lines passed the picture, often giving a feeling of curiosity and wonder. I am quite literally creating it right before my eyes.

Maybe this is just me, but whether you do so with photography or something else, you should try to find new ways to explore the places you inhabit. Often all it takes is a little bit of ingenuity to imagine a new way to engage the world around you.

The Pros and Cons of Staying in Hostels

When you are traveling the world, sometimes you have to stay in hostels. As someone who generally does not like sleeping in the same room as someone else, I find it happens a lot less than you think: in most places, there are single room hotels or Airbnbs available within my budget, but that’s not always the case. Here are the pros and cons of staying in hostels specifically for someone like me less accustomed to it and maybe a little skeptical of the whole idea:

Pros

1) Cost: Their obvious advantage is that they are cheap. I remember in New Zealand, the difference was between under USD$10 a night to $80-100 a night in many places, making it worth it. Most places have more of a middle ground, but almost everywhere the cheapest place to stay off the street itself is a hostel.

2) Meeting New People: You can meet fellow travelers. Hostels can provide a nice social setting for fellow travelers. If you read other blogs and forums from digital nomads or other travelers, meeting new people who are also traveling is the most commonly cited reason people list for staying at hostels other than the cost.

At the same time, if you mostly meet people at hostels, you are generally meeting tourists or other travelers, not locals. This can lead to a bubble. This seemed most pronounced in Nonwestern countries where I noticed many hostels would be an oasis for Westerners to mostly hang out with themselves rather than get to know the people in the culture where they were visiting. Some hostels offered “cultural experiences,” but these were artificial introductions rather than just making friends with the people in that place. I found that where you hang out is where you will meet people, so the better way to meet someone was to get an Airbnb by yourself in the part of town where tourists were less likely to gravitate. That way, those around you are mostly those from the culture you are in, so you are more likely to take the cross-cultural hurdle of talking with them rather than staying in your Western bubble.

3) Falling Asleep: I found it easier to sleep than I thought. I worried that I would not be able to fall or stay asleep given potential noise or activity by others, but this was not as big of an issue as I first expected. In some places it was an initial problem, but I was generally able to fall asleep okay, whether the light in the room was on or whether there were others in the room doing stuff as I fell asleep. Two places were an exception because of the degree of activity late at night (which I will discuss in more detail Con #4).

Cons

1) No Private Space: After many days, I wanted a quiet place to unwind in the evening. In some hostels, there was a place where I could hide out when needed, but in many, that was not possible. The constant movement of others could eat at me slowly overtime. One night was generally okay, for example, but not having the ability to be by myself overtime influenced my ability to vegetate, decompress, and otherwise be myself. I was rarely forced into an interaction I did not want but not having space dedicated to me made it more difficult to unwind. It also made more private activities that I do not want someone potentially looking over my shoulder while doing, such as checking personal finances, making personal calls, etc. more difficult.

2) Worry about Theft: Theft is a worry. A few people in the hostels I stayed report having their stuff stolen. Only a few hostels had personal lockers where you could lock your stuff, but it could not usually fit all valuables. This could range from food to precious electronic equipment, and range from theft of stuff temporarily left around to break into locked lockers. In most cases, I had a rental car, so I generally left my stuff locked in my car. That worked, but when traveling, one does not always have a rental car.

This is a probability game. Even if it’s a low probability that my stuff would get stolen, if I stayed at hostels everyday I traveled, each day it is more likely to happen. Even if there is a 1% chance of it happening on a given day, after spending 100 days in hostels, the chances of it happening to you at least once is pretty high. It only takes one moment to loose something valuable to mess with your life. Because of this reason in particular, I do not plan to stay at hostels unless I absolutely have to and preferably if I have a rental car for storage.

3) Noise: Some hostels are rather loud. This depended on the environment, but in my experience, they ranged from rather quiet and chill on the one extreme to common rooms full of talkative people (difficult if this is the only place where you can do work) to one where guests routinely partied until around 1:00 am. This could be a major problem, although even in the latter, I personally was still able to fall asleep at the end of the day.

4) Far Away Bathrooms: Surprising con, but most often you have to walk a far distance to go to the bathroom. This stinks for me since I personally wake up a few times in the middle of the night to visit the toilet.

5) Difficulty Running Electronics at Night: As a data scientist, I often run stuff on my computer overnight, and this is not possible in a hostel, unless you kept those devices in bed with you as you sleep and hoped you didn’t turnover in the night and squash it by accident or something like. This was surprisingly agonizing for me, who is accustomed to frequently running programs that can take several hours to complete.

Overall, I would say that hostels were not as awful as I expected. They are doable (best to choose one with a security guarantee such as locked boxes for your stuff), but I still only do them sparingly. I handled staying in hostels for the better part of a month and a half, but let’s just say it was not ideal and only do. If needed, I could sleep in one for a few nights here and there, but I would only do so if I had no better option.

How to Overcome the Nomad Nihilism

Traveling can encourage a certain type of nihilism. Often every few weeks (or sometimes every few days), you are in a new place. This can produce a constant sense of churn, kind of like a time loop movie, where you constantly reexperience new things and a new setting of people going about their lives. You don’t usually stay in a place long enough to experience the long-term consequences of your actions or to develop roots. Thus, like some of Phil’s benders in “Groundhog Day,” you could, in theory, live as hedonistically as you would like (as long as you do not break any laws) if you really wanted to. Pure hedonism was never really my thing, but I could understand its pull on many travelers.

Each new place starts to fit into the standard pattern of all other locations. You end up looking at people going about their lives, removed from the signals of meaning that ground most humans in their daily lives. You technically don’t need to wake up at a certain time (unless you choose to impose that on yourself), go to work at a certain time, or otherwise follow the rhythms that produce the structure for most people’s lives.

Likewise, you are not connected in the web of relationships that many encounter in their daily life. Instead, you witness an endless stream of new people you meet along the way. If you do not click with a certain person or even those in an entire community, you can simply move on to another place. This produces the advantages of flexibility. You are not stuck with the same people over and over again like how many people are forced to tolerate their neighbors for years on end. This allows you to be yourself. At the same time, though, you are presented with endless choices and often do not have to experience the social consequences of social sanctions for your actions.

All of this can give the feel of endless cycles, leading to a type of nihilism. I can understand Phil’s “whatever” attitude in Groundhog Day much better after experiencing tons of new places in rapid succession. After a while of being in new places again and again, it can feel about the same after a while. What do you want to do today? Whatever you want. Some days that is a grand adventure, but others it’s sitting on the couch and doing nothing. It’s all been done before, and any grand adventure is probably similar to ones you have already done many times.

I call nomad nihilism. It’s the dark side of flexibility. After a while, you can start to feel meh about the specifics of where you are (the new people you meet, the new sites you see, and so on) since to you, it’s all been done before.

Unlike in Groundhog Day, you are in new places, which can produce new dynamics. This only goes so far and eventually these small novelties start to compress into a singular lull. Within this, though, lies the start of the solution.

You still take some things with you, however: your memories, photographs and any other physical or written artifacts, and most importantly, any relationships you made along the way. These grounded me against the meaningless lull of novelty. Notice these are mostly the positives of the places you have been to: the people you clicked with and maybe form a lasting friendship with, not those who never clicked with; the beautiful photographs of the places you found interesting, not the ugly places or tourist traps you wouldn’t go back to again, etc. Except for memories, which are always with us no matter how harmful, you have the choice, meaning you can focus exclusively on the positives.

This produces a significantly different dynamic than regular, settled life. On the one hand, you have significantly greater control to craft the experience that works best for you. You can decide where in the world to go, what to visit in each place, and when to interact with others in a locale with less “intrusions” into your time by others than in settled life. At the same time, this means your decisions do more to craft the experience you have. That day, you can choose to be hypersocial and speak with tons of people you can, or you can choose to be a hermit talking to no one (or anywhere in between).

Over time, your choices influence your overall experience over the long-run. If you choose to focus on yourself or your work in the short term, that is often fine, but if you do that all the time, you run the risk of never finding time for those around you and creating an overall less immersive, less vibrant experience for yourself. The freedom to craft your own experience comes with more responsibility as you are often what stands in the way of living your joy.

Constantly changing environments can also help you see the arbitrary constructions of human existence. Constantly witnessing new environments with new variations of the human experiences can make you notice the parameters that form normal human affairs, whether that be a conversation or seeing how a specific community celebrates a particular holiday. This removes some of the “magic” of normal life that someone may experience if they only lived within one community. The external world losing some of its muster can make retreating into your own world more appealing.

It seemingly hyperindividualizes you. Our society glorifies being completely able to choose when and how you interact with others, and traveling the world is an ultimate manifestation of that. You both learn much more about humanity from seeing the diversity of experiences around the world, and you have the freedom to construct the experiences that you want. It enables you to see the strings that hold communities together, but such a removed perspective can also feel distancing, reducing community to the assemblage of specific factors. To work through its cons, you must figure out how to take time to engage with the communities in which you are in.

You ultimately need a balance between solitude and external. You need to explore, learn new things, and meet new people. These relationships, in particular, help center us, both who we are and how we regulate our emotions. You also need to relax and rest. Finally, creativity is crucial too: I agree with the Youtuber Sisphysus55 that art or creativity is the ultimate solution to burnout. Producing whether for others, just ourselves, serious, or whimsical helps reorient ourselves as well. I found these three to be the pillars of overcoming nihilism: relationships, rest, and creativity.

Visiting the Komodo Region of Indonesia

Flores, Indonesia is a beautiful place. Many stay in Labuan Bajo on the northwestern tip of the island to be able to visit Komodo National Park with its komodo dragons, beautiful mountains and beaches, and the many coral reefs around it. It is a truly spectacular place to be.

The Best Places to Visit

Once you are in Labuan Bajo, there are dozens of tour companies that will take you around the islands. Most tours will take you on a speedboat (with 6 stops) or slowboat (with 4 stops) to the various islands in and around Komodo National Park. At the moment, a day trip speedboat tour tends to cost, including the national park fee, around 1,500,000 rupiah (about $90 in USD) and slow boat tours around 1,000,000 rupiah (about $67) per person. Every tour charges about the same amount, so you can walk the street, talk with them, and pick your favorite. The exact sites vary slightly by tour, but the following are the most common:

1) Padar Island: A gorgeous island where you climb a mountain with gorgeous overlooks. At certain points, it gets steep, but it is a rather doable climb. This is where the Instagram photos everyone takes of the mountains overlooking the sea.

2) Pink Beach: A tour group will also usually take you to a pink beach to relax. These are an interesting and beautiful phenomena where the sand becomes pink.

2) Komodo Island (or maybe Rinca Island): Here you walk around with a park ranger looking for Komodo dragons. These animals can be dangerous, so it is best to stay in a group with your ranger. You should be fine in a group, but this is not a place to wander alone. Komodo dragons are ambush predators known to pick off solo animals (including humans but it is rare) if they get too close. They are not likely to go after groups, however, and the park ranger has experience in how to avoid that anyways.

Komodo dragons are amazing creatures. Many are massive. One we saw was easily 3-4 meters long. They may sit and look chill, but don’t let that confuse you. They are vicious, opportunistic predators. They often lie in wait for solo animals to come close enough to them, and then they lounge at them with top speeds around 20 km/h. They will bite and then wait for the creature to die, following it throughout the process. Some zoologists think they are venomous (although there is some debate on this), and their saliva also has tons of bacteria that can make you sick. They will eat anything: deer, boar, humans, even other Komodo dragons. As a matter of fact, after being born, baby Komodos run for the trees to avoid being eaten by their mother. They are an amazing force of nature to witness.

3) Manta Point: A common spot for manta rays. They come here to be cleaned by the fish on their migration route, chilling in the natural vents. There are a few different potential places tour groups may take you to jump in and see mantas, but Manta Point is one of the most common. When we came to the main point mantas are known for, we only saw one manta ray, but the next coral reef we snorkeled in, we saw about five. So, where the mantas hang out and the best place to see them varies by day.

Scuba Diving

The scuba tours will usually take you to three dives throughout the islands, although which spots vary widely by the company, the conditions, and the time of year. Be mindful that some spots have very strong currents. A day trip snorkeling tends to cost 2,900,000 rupiah (about $175 in USD) including the national park fee. I found it a lot cooler to see the manta rays while diving, because you could hang out in the bottom where they are. Snorkeling you are often stuck seeing them from above. Yes, you can free dive down in your snorkeling gear, but you only last for a few seconds before needing to come back up. It’s not the same. This is especially limiting if they are really deep in the water. In a scuba dive, you can hang out and watch them for several minutes.

What Journeying throughout South America Taught Me about Find Meaning in Everyday Life

These are some of the lessons about life I learned during my trip in South America in 2024:

1) The Importance of Balance: I think I tried to do too much during the trip, hurting my mental health. Each day I gave myself too many items on my to-do list. This made me less in the moment, detracting from my ability to meet people and be open where I was. It also made me more stressed and irritable.

2) Always another adventure: No matter what happens, life goes on. There’s always another day, another struggle. When you travel, you don’t stay in a place long enough to really experience the benefits of community or the long-term consequences of your actions. You can keep certain positive things – like your memories, photos and most importantly, any good relationships you made along the way – but many negatives you can continue to leave behind. That person you accidentally offended because of a cross-cultural difference, you will never have to see again, for example.

This can create a type of Groundhog Day-like nihilistic feeling, if you allow it to. You are freed from certain types of consequences and can focus on those personal experiences, memories, and relationships that you do take with you. Navigating this can be very different from regular, settled life, and it took me many months to get used to that. You must create your own meaning as you go.

3) Finding Meaning: I think this trip made me think more about how I should find meaning and fulfillment in life. I learned how vacuous the typical “career life” can be, and how beautiful and fascinating other parts of the world are. At the same time, seeing more and more places took some of the novelty of adventure. It forced me to be more at peace with myself. I had to pause during the key moments and realize that I will be forever who I am and that I need to figure out how to find satisfaction in that.

Contentedness does not mean I do not have passions or strive to do new things: knowing myself, I would not feel fulfilled with stasis. Contentedness, for me at least, means that I feel fulfilled as I follow my passions: that’s how I find satisfaction each day of my life.

4) Every day of traveling won’t feel magical: Endless amazement only exists in one’s mind. Some days feel drab, tiring, or just plain annoying, and you need these days to make the wondrous ones feel magical. Happiness and satisfaction are really in your mindset. I can do an activity one day and love it, and do an activity another day and find it mediocre or even taxing, and the main difference is my attitude. Maybe the trick to finding satisfaction in life is to align one’s passions with what one is doing so that the winds feel at your sails as you do it.

5) The importance of communication: Traveling with my girlfriend, I learned that communicating your expectations is crucial. I think I overall did a bad job at this, and we had two different expectations for how we were traveling. In addition to getting on the same page at the beginning, communicating expectations is a constant, iterative process at almost every stage of travel. We constantly navigated between what I wanted and what she wanted while traveling. This was a constant dance that we had to work on together.

All this said, the most important lesson I learned is that traveling the world is amazing, and I would recommend it for anyone who wants an adventure.

Unlocking the World: Balancing Exploration and Reflection While Traveling

One lesson I have learned while traveling is that in order to learn from the world around you, you must first be open to listen, and to be open to listen, you must be comfortable with yourself.

You no matter where you are in the world, you are always yourself. People often think that when they travel, they will magically become a completely different person with a completely different set of interests, but that is never the case. You are who you are, no matter what continent you are on, and when traveling, you will have to face the same inner demons and flaws you already struggle with.

At the same time, the ability to learn from the world around you opens up new possibilities; the trick is to use them wisely. By learning about the world and engaging with others, you both encounter new rhythms that can get you out of your cycles, try on different identities that may offer innovative ways to resolve some of your inner issues, and can learn from other lifestyles and ways of thinking.

But how to best leverage these gains is easier said than done. I find the trick is to balance extrovertedly exploring and learning about wherever I am and introvertedly reflecting and processing.

The more I explore and learn, the more I get my own internal juices going. Learning and creatively are multiplicative: innovation connections produce even more innovative connections, cascading out overtime, and new thinking from the culture I am currently in will naturally spill over into innovative thinking in my personal life.

An S-Curve: Ramping up suddenly and then slowing

But such innovation grows exponentially and can thus become overwhelming. I need alone time to rest and process all of it. Like the s-curve models of the spread of diseases in populations (common on the news during the Covid pandemic), my learning at first shoots up rapidly but then slows down significantly as my brain becomes too filled with new ideas to handle new ones. That’s when I need to rest and process what I have learned so far. If I don’t, I will become tired and often cranky. After taking the time to process it all, I can go back out and learn some more.

That is how I navigate between both personal growth and learning while traveling the world. How you do it may be different based on your different personality, but I hope this provides good food for thought. When doing something as long-term intense as traveling the world, intentionally strategizing how you meet your mental needs and work on yourself while experiencing a literal world of things is important.