Now Ye're Talking - To a World Traveller

ive to get to venice in 3 days for cheap.... how do i go about doing that?

I wasn't expecting much interest in this AMA to be honest, considering some of the people who have gone before, so thanks for the questions!

ibarelycare wrote: »

What's the most dangerous situation you've ever been in?

Interesting question. One think I learned over the years is that quite often the countries that are on people's top ten list of places never to venture, are quite often the places where people are kindest to you, and most helpful in keeping you safe while you are in their country. I was in Pakistan shortly after the Marriott Hotel bombing, where foreigners were being warned to leave the country. Every single local person I met there bent over backwards to be hospitable, invited me into their homes for meals, in the hope that at least one person would leave with a good impression of Pakistan.

It doesn't hurt of course that I'm (a) male (which unfortunately is a factor in terms of personal safety abroad) and (b) built to look like I can take care of myself, so for the most part I've never felt in any immediate danger - it's often only afterwards you look back on situations and realise how lucky you were, or how things could have gone wrong. Things that have happened that have put me in danger would include a motorbike crash in Cambodia where my dirt-bike went in under a truck and my injuries were miraculously relatively minor, or getting chemical burns from runoff into a river after the earthquake in China that burned around 60% of the skin on my body and has left lasting scars - events that you have to attribute to bad luck or lack of caution, rather than blaming the country you are in.

Probably the instance of most immediate danger was in the north of Georgia, near the Abkhazian border - a country that is still rebuilding after their last encounter with Russian troops. I was visiting a village on the border for Easter supra (big feast), and a villager who was the worse for wear with drink pulled a loaded gun on me with the intent to shoot, thinking that I was a Russian who had come across the border. Luckily he was too drunk to follow through on it with any speed, and we took the gun off him and rejoined the supra. Georgia was one of those countries you look back on afterwards wondering if was just something you dreamt up.

If I were to give two pieces of advice in staying safe while travelling, the would be:

(a) always trust your gut. If something feels wrong, it generally isn't worth the risk of finding out.

and (b), don't look like a tourist if you can. It's a magnet for thieves, hawkers, and corrupt local officials alike. On one particularly memorable instance in Red Square, Moscow, where everyone is dressed in shades of grey and black, myself included, I heard one American tourist dressed in bright red North Face gear and a multicoloured bobble hat, call out to his similarly attired wife across the square. Looking down on the square from above, it was like the scene in Jurassic Park, where the raptors are converging on their prey from all directions in the field of grass, with pickpocket and corrupt police all making a beeline for them to fleece them in some way or another.

ScienceNerd wrote: »

If you could pick one City/Town/Village to go back to and live out the rest of your days, where would you pick?

I get asked that a lot, and it's a hard one to answer because so many places I've been appeal to me and so many people were so good to me there. For me it would be a toss up between Georgia and Nepal. Georgia because living there brings a new surprise every day, and the people there are genuinely the kindest and most generous I have ever met - according to local custom, a guest in your house is a gift from God, and they really do treat you as such.

Nepal, in particular the foothills of the Himalayas, is like going back in time. Many of the villages take quite a few days to hike to through the mountains, and obviously there are no cars, or electricity in most places. It's eerily silent at night, and your morning view is some of the most beautiful mountains in the world, and if that's your thing, which it is for me, then it's definitely a place I could settle for a while.

ScienceNerd wrote: »

Did you speak any other languages before leaving? Did you pick anything up along the way?

Other than English and Irish, I spoke pretty decent French, and high-school German. And I had a smattering of Russian from earlier travels. To greater or lesser degrees I learned as I was going along - my Georgian is pretty good due to the length of time I spent there and the fact that nobody spoke English so I had little alternative but to learn. And my Russian improved quite a bit along the way - it's a handy language to have in former Soviet countries - the older generation will be able to speak it along with their native tongue. Other than that, I picked up the very basics (hello, yes, no, where is the train station) in a few Asian languages, much of which I've forgotten again by now.

Dozen Wicked Words wrote: »

Did you travel on your own, if so did you ever feel lonely and how did you finance your trip?

A combination of both. I had always planned the trip to be a solo one, and open to meeting people along the way. As it turned out, I ended up leaving Ireland with a Polish friend of mine who had grown tired of being in Ireland, and she travelled with me for a few months. Other times I was very much on my own. Depending on where you are though, it's very easy to dip in and out of being surrounded by other people - quite often it can be a distinct effort to be alone, rather than the latter. In the more popular parts of the world I encountered plenty of other travellers, and in other parts I met lovely local people who I still consider friends. There were certainly moments of loneliness for friends back home though, particularly around days like birthdays, Christmas and so on.

Financing it - I was lucky in that I had a pretty decent job before I left that allowed me to save quite a bit (this was in the height of the boom), and I lived and travelled quite frugally along the way. I didn't miss out on seeing anything, but I camped rather than staying in hostels, hitchhiked a lot, ate local food, etc. And of course I worked from time to time, if the opportunity presented itself.

whiskeyman wrote: »

Who did you find where the nicest people?
Who were the most annoying / arrogant / type you didn't get on with the most?

Georgians were probably the nicest people in how they treated me. At the time very few foreigners cane to Georgia, and even fewer left the capital city, so there were times where villages nearly came to a standstill. And they love any excuse to celebrate and get drunk. I've had marshutka (minibus) drivers refuse to let me off the bus, instead detouring into their village and family home for three days of eating and drinking.

There wasn't really anybody I didn't get along with - arrogance is sadly, a more western trait. Some nationalities can be quite stoic and it's hard to crack the outer shell - Russians and Mongolians in particular are like this. Koreans grew a little tiresome in that they love English there, and if they hear that you speak English, they will try to turn anything into a free English lesson.

eviltwin wrote: »

Are you back and if so how did you adjust to normality? What was the most surprising place you visited?

Coming back was hard, and it still is, and I'm not sure if I have at all adjusted to normality. As clichéd as it sounds, it does feel like being back in a 'rat race' if you're used to travelling at a whim, and you either learn to readjust, or it eats away at you over time. Peoples priorities seem very strange sometimes, and very money oriented, compared to poorer parts of the world where they seem by contrast, a whole lot happier. Other things then seem so easy by comparison - access to a hot shower every morning, immediate access to electricity and internet without having to plan around it, not having to worry about finding somewhere to put up a tent in the evening. They are obviously pluses, but it takes quite a bit of getting used to.

kupus wrote: »

ive to get to venice in 3 days for cheap.... how do i go about doing that?

Yeah, you're pretty screwed I'd be on skyscanner with my fingers firmly crossed.

ibarelycare wrote: »

How do you feel about Zayn leaving One Direction?

Pretty gutted, to be honest. It's pretty much scuppered my plans to throw on the rucksack, and follow them, groupie style, on their world tour.

Westernyelp wrote: »

Did you return home for any periods during that 7 years?

Nope - I didn't set foot in Ireland for over seven years, and much of the time, nobody knew exactly where I was.
I never set out with a seven year plan in mind - my thoughts walking out the door all the way back then was "let's see how far I get... I'll probably be gone a year, maybe two". I had one rule, that was not to fly anywhere for as long as possible, and that was it. In some ways it was the best rule to travel by, because I ended up in all sorts of places, in others it nearly broke my heart - in one instance, after the unrest in Tibet where Chinese Army shot some of the Tibetan monks for protesting, and then forced all foreigners to leave, it meant that rather than taking a 2 hour flight, I ended up taking a 3,600km detour, overland, over many weeks, to get to Kathmandu. But that detour led to a whole host of other adventures, and brought me to places I would have never seen otherwise.

Ruu wrote: »

What is your top travel tip?

Top two tips:

Be flexible. Stuff happens along the way - delays, getting sick, parties, meeting people, so on and so forth. Be willing to roll with that. I sat on a bus once in a mud bus station in Africa somewhere (previous trip) on a Tuesday. Sat on the bus fro a few hours before the driver got on to tell me that they'd changed their minds and it was leaving on Friday instead, maybe. What can you do. You can throw a hissy fit, but the bus still isn't going to go anywhere until Friday. Or you can shrug your shoulders and spend three days with the local people and kill some brain cells while making some memories, and friends. On the other hand I've seen people quite literally have meltdowns because they couldn't get a train ticket on the particular day they wanted it (12 hours later, not a problem), which made me wonder why they ever left home in the first place.

The second is don't be an arse. A certain percentage of western travellers are obnoxious, there's no other way to describe it, and look down on anyone local. And it can be extremely cringeworthy as a foreigner there, knowing that you are now all being tarred with the same brush. respect, and a little research into local culture and customs goes a long way.

Ruu wrote: »

Most essential piece of travel equipment or tool?

Not so much of a tool, but while it seems quite obvious, passport and money, and keep both on you at all times. Your rucksack and its contents are all replaceable - but no matter what happens, if you have your passport and enough money for a plane/train ticket to a neighbouring country, you're pretty safe.

Tool-wise, I always carry a decent knife, and a firesteel - though of course the latter in particular lends itself more towards the camping side of things.

thelad95 wrote: »

I too hope to travel the world one day, what tips would you give in terms of staying safe as this would be one of my main concerns?

Common sense goes a long way. It's easy to look back and be judgmental I guess, but I've seen travellers do genuinely stupid things, such as 'oh I think I'll go for a riverside walk by the ghetto at 2am and take some photos, now that I'm nicely drunk'. And that's still not to say that things can't happen - I was pickpocketed in Varanasi, even though I was being careful. And I've been robbed at knife-point in the past. And the latter was because I decided to walk home, at 2am, through the slums, after a few beers. So go figure. But it's no exaggeration that I feel that walking home form the pub along the quays in Dublin poses a statistically higher risk than most of the paces I've been.

Other things worth considering are, as mentioned above, don't advertise that you are a tourist, and if you have the option of not travelling alone, then most certainly take it. Coupled with that, if you're a woman, then the dangers are real, and there's no point in pretending in the name of equality that they aren't. A close friend of mine was almost raped on a boat a few years back, only for the fact that I was nearby enough to intervene. And rape stories are sadly not uncommon, depending where you are. But on the lower end of the scale, even wearing a fake wedding band and saying that you are married, can prevent an awful lot of unwanted advances.

Have you ever been to North Korea? If not, would you go?

In the most technical sense of the word, yes. There is an area along the DMZ where you can step from South Korea into North Korea, and I've been there a couple of times. Would I travel through North Korea? I'd love to, but it doesn't work that way. Currently the only way to see North Korea is as part of a very expensive and very tightly escorted tour, where you are accompanied at all times by armed guard, brought to a few key locations and meet a few key people who have been scripted to sing the praises of the great and glorious leader, before being sent on your way again. Google maps would give you a better experience. As an experiment sometime, take a look at North Korea on Google Maps, and click into the tour photos there. You'll be a long time clicking before you see a local person in one of those photos.

What's the most random place you've ever been to, a place nobody's ever heard of and wouldn't be able to pick out on a map?

There have been a few, but one that immediately comes to mind simply because of the story surrounding it, is Battsengel, a small semi-nomadic village in western Mongolia. I was in Ulaanbabtar at the time, and still travelling with my Polish friend, when we met some Peace Corp volunteers who were dotted around Mongolia, and came into the city once every few months to get together. Long story short, my friend and one of the volunteers hooked up over the few days we were in town, and about a week after he'd returned to his volunteer position, she decided that she wanted to see more of him. And kept bugging me about it, and I relented. Mongolia is quite different to a lot of countries in that there is virtually no road system - most roads are actually rut marks across the steppe, left by whatever vehicle traversed it before. And these tracks can disappear into nothing, or fork in all directions. In short, not somewhere you should be heading out into alone. But we did exactly that. We managed to get our hands on an old Russian jeep (they are everywhere in this side of the world), we headed west, and navigating quite literally by the sun in places, by some minor miracle managed to find Battsengel.

What makes sense now, but never crossed my mind at the time, was that nomadic people don't really eat vegetables - they don't stick around long enough in the same place to grow them. Instead they rely on livestock, usually goats or sheep, and travel with the flock, until they get big enough to slaughter. As it happens, they (a) slaughter all of the animals at once, and (b) the very night I happened to arrive was slaughter night, where the menfolk get together and kill and butcher every animal in the area. Thankfully I'm from a farming background so it's not something that bothers me, but proving your manliness is a huge thing in Mongolia (every Mongolian man thinks they are a descendent of Genghis Khan), so what was supposed to be the longest booty call known to existence for my friend, instead turned into me spending the entire night until sun-up slaughtering and butchering animals, cheered on by a Mongolian village.

shoutman wrote: »

Hi,

Could you tell us more about your life before you started travelling?
How old were you? Did you have a job? Any qualifications?

Sure. Though I'm not really sure what to say I've always been travelling or outdoors-y in some capacity - I was lucky enough that I had a father who brought me up into the mountains from the age of four onwards, or fishing, or camping or similar, so the urge to travel was instilled in me from an early age. And when I was old enough to do so, I'd go myself - first to the mountains around Ireland, and then outwards to Europe and beyond. My first 'big' trip was through Africa when I was 19, and I've been travelling most years ever since. I've posted about some of it to lesser degrees on Boards before - those who know me on Boards will easily figure out my username. The reason I did this AMA anonymously was more to give a little protection from Google searches, and that I don't really talk about travelling, or my personal life on Boards very much.

When I left on this particular trip, I was 27, and I was working as an engineer in South Africa. The job I had at the time suited me very well - I was based in an Irish company, but working and living on-site in various locations around the world as the job required it. But apparently, it wasn't enough and I wanted to do and see more. I've also worked in various other more practical fields which stood to me more in terms of getting work as I went along.

shoutman wrote: »

Could you tell us about your life now that you're back. Did you find it easy to get a job (If you have one) and how do you feel about your future now?

Being back is strange in a lot of ways - in some ways good of course. Being surrounded by Irish accents again after so long was the immediate shock to the system, and hearing Irish people everywhere, from busses to radio and TV. Being amongst my family is particularly strange; even though I did see my parents once in that seven years (they visited me about five years into the trip), I hadn't seen my siblings at all. Seeing that my mind is dealing with snapshots of my family seven years apart, my parent's have visibly aged to me, and my 'little' brother and sister are now grown adults. Same with my friends - the people I used to be out with every weekend are now married and have children and responsibilities I never foresaw them having. But certainly, one of the good things about being back is having a circle of friends again and enjoying myself as part of a group. Being self sufficient is a good skill to have. Being self sufficient 100% of the time means you eventually lose out on experiences.

I do think about my future quite a bit, and what I want to do next. While I'm a firm believer that there's more to life than sitting in an office or making as much money as you can, and that you only get one shot at life, I'm acutely aware that I had a great career which I effectively roadblocked, and there are moments, not many, but moments nonetheless of self doubt when I wonder if I did the right thing. I'm not working full time at the moment - I took some time to upskill in certain areas and I do some contract work - but I have job offers overseas that I'm giving serious consideration to.

eviltwin wrote: »

Is there anything about life here you appreciate more/less since being away?

I don't think there's anything I appreciate less, but there is certainly a whole lot I appreciate more. At risk of sounding like a tree hugging hippy, we live on an absolutely beautiful planet full of amazing people, and time spent getting more in touch with it is time well spent. Conversely, you also get to appreciate the fact that we are destroying it at an alarming rate, and that something has to give. I appreciate my good health, and I very much appreciate the world I was lucky enough to be born into, in terms of ready access to food, education, medication and so on. I volunteered for a while in Calcutta - there are various centres there who help children born to the slums, prostitutes, those suffering from leprosy and so on, and it's something that always reminds me that but by the grace of God (or whatever deity -or not- you happen to believe in), I could have been born into similar circumstances. I also appreciate how little money equates to happiness - I've met the wealthiest of people who are absolutely miserable, and have seen families sit down on the footpath and cook their evening meal, completely happy with what they have.

eviltwin wrote: »

How much did all this cost you in the end and how did you manage for money.

Honestly, I don't know how much it all cost - I've never sat down and totted up my income and expenditures. I left with €31K in my bank account, returned with about €9K, but I worked here and there that all factors in to my spending. My honest answer is that I don't really want to know, partially because I don't want to put a dollar value on it, and partially because on the days where I question my choices in life, I don't want to have an "Oh no! I just blew XXXXX euros on that trip" moment.

kerry4sam wrote: »

Okay so Welcome

In 1-month:
~ Where in the world would you go?
~ What in the world would you do?
~ Money not a subject - where would assistance be most needed & valued?

Many Thanks in Advance,
kerry4sam

Hm, I've seen a lot of the easier-to-get-to places, so my sights as I get older lean towards the harder to reach places. I prefer very cold over very hot locations, and as such I would love to visit the arctic regions - Greenland and Alaska, particularly the Inuit regions.

As to where assistance would be most needed and valued? It's a harder question to answer than one might think. Obviously the locations that have just been hit by disaster, but on a day to day basis, some of the most striking poverty I've seen has been in India, particularly in Calcutta. Despite what the Trócaire boxes of my youth led me to believe, much of Africa isn't extremely poor to that same level, though of course there are plenty of regions in need of immediate relief. And of course, just because I've travelled to a place doesn't mean that I've seen the depths of poverty a country has to offer - it's just that in Calcutta that the disparity between rich and poor was so visible on a daily basis.

eviltwin wrote: »

How long were you thinking about leaving and what, if anything, made you finally decide to do it?

I'd travelled quite a bit before this trip, but I always had it at the back of my mind that I wanted to do something far more extended. The reasons I chose that particular time to go are somewhat morbidly practical - I'd spent a good portion of my life taking care of certain elderly family members, and they had at that time, recently passed away. And for the first time in my life I didn't have to worry about something happening while I was away. From a timeline point of view, I first gave it serious consideration when I was back from South Africa on a visit in April - planning was quite literally an hour at the kitchen table with a world map. I returned to Cape Town to complete my contract, finished out my contract in September and was on the road five days later.

well ive nearly solved the problem of getting to italy cheap... its called driving. you up for more travelling?

So, food questions And believe me when I say that to experience different countries cuisine is a great reason to travel.

bluewolf wrote: »

Did you eat frogs legs or insects

Yes I have. Frogs legs from when I was a kid - part of my family is French, so I spent quite a bit of time there). Insects, again yes. Fried insects of various kinds are pretty common in certain Asian countries, and I've had deep fried crickets, deep fried Cockroaches, and assortment of deep fried insects that I wouldn't even try to identify. It's not uncommon to see a vendor at night in parts of Bangkok for example, pushing what looks like a pick n' mix trolley around the streets. You take your paper bag, fill up with the deep fried insects and sea life of your choice, and pay by weight - like a liquorice allsorts bag

Taste-wise, insects are pretty meh - they're crunchy and taste like something that's been in the fryer for too long. but not bad. The sea urchins and whatnot taste much better, in my experience.

mahamageehad wrote: »

I think this thread will be pretty popular! Some food questions!

What was the most disgusting thing you ever ate or had served to you while travelling? Is there anything you'd turn your nose up at or would you give anything a try once? Even dog or monkey brain?

Personally, I'll try anything at least once, and turn my nose up at very little, though there have been a few notable exceptions. I'll refuse certain foods for ethical reasons - there are still parts of the world where meat from endangered species are served up to tourists, and worse, there are tourists who will happily seek this kind of thing out, so they have a story to tell when they get back home. But I've certainly eaten rat, dog, snake, so on and so forth. Dog was probably the 'strongest' meat to stomach - I came across a guy cooking one over a barrel in Vietnam, and ordered some - it had a very strong taste, and very game-y.

Probably the most disgusting thing I have eaten in my life has been Khashi - it's a traditional Georgian soup/tripe type mix. Traditionally it's considered a hangover cure, with the added benefits of giving strength and virility to men, and after one particularly long supra, the woman of the house served me up a massive steaming bowl of it.

To paint a picture, what sat in front of me was a biology lesson in a bowl the size of a small saucepan, containing a murky greenish-grey liquid. And floating in it were, but my no means limited to, sections of cow intestine, rings of trachea, pieces of lung, with a cow shin/hoof floating in the middle, and it smelled exactly what you might imagine all those things would smell like if they'd been stewing in garlic and onion water for three or four days. It was like somebody had decided to make glue, and about halfway through the process, changed their mind, and figured that it would make a fine dinner instead. And like most Georgian housewives, the woman was hovering over me with a big smile, waiting fro me to try her wonderful food.

I managed to put about a third of it away, and to this day I'm genuinely unsure how I didn't throw up. Thankfully the woman left the kitchen for a few minutes, and I managed to dispose of much of the contents of my bowl before she came back in. But yeah, even now, I feel a little queasy just thinking of that morning.

mahamageehad wrote: »

Were you ever served something that at first you thought was completely disgusting or mad, that actually turned out to be delicious?

Probably not to that extreme. I've eaten a lot of things that looked like crap, and tasted not bad. Nothing stands out as looking terrible, but actually being awesome.

mahamageehad wrote: »

Ever get very bad food poisoning from the food or water in a place? In general actually how did you fare when you got sick or toothache or something, was it a problem in countries where the English isn't good or were there ever any issues with things like insurance etc?

My stomach is pretty cast iron, so it hasn't been much of an issue compared to other people's horror stories about bad food or water, and I'd imagine that I've built up a tolerance to a lot of things over the years. That being said, there was one particular instance on this trip - a few days in to entering Pakistan - where I picked up what I imagine to be food poisoning of some sort or another. It's one of the few cases of illness which genuinely incapacitated me completely - I found a place to stay in the nearest town, some back street rooming house for men, and spent an entire day squatting over a hole in the ground like an upside-down volcano. And that was about as far as I could make it from my room. Between being sick and the heat, I spent two days solid laying down, going between thinking I was going to die and wishing I did, before I managed to shuffle outdoors again. I'm a pretty robust guy, but it genuinely shocked me how much that particular bout took out of me.

Health-wise, I have never travelled with health insurance, and that's foolish of me I know. I guess part of that is borne from that sense of invincibility that every guy in his 20's has, and another part borne from the knowledge that I can take care of the minor things myself (I've previously volunteered in a field which required constant first-aid training), and if I have a serious accident, it will probably be life threatening enough that I probably won't walk away from it anyways. And I have had accidents and injuries along the way, some quite serious. I mentioned a motorbike accident in Cambodia earlier - a friend of mine from the US who happens to be a vet was visiting me for a week, and we were coming back from the Killing Fields back to Phnom Pehn, when we went in under a truck (she was riding pillion). Thankfully she wasn't hurt at all, but I went under with the bike and was pretty beaten up, in particular my left arm was split open from wrist to elbow. My friend ended up cleaning it out back in the city, and stitching it with dental floss and a sewing needle.

The incident in Laos was more serious - it was not long after the 2008 earthquake and I swam and kayaked in a river that contained chemical runoff from factories upstream in China which had been damaged in the quake. And it burned/melted a lot of my skin, particularly my legs and hands. After three days the pain was so bad, I genuinely needed hospital treatment, and the local medical staff opened up the hospital at 11pm and came in on their time off to help me. At that stage I would have given them every penny I had, but when I eventually felt well enough to leave and went to pay, they wouldn't charge me. I paid something like $7 for all of the meds and painkillers, that was it.

There have been a multitude of other more minor injuries over the years, but I've been pretty lucky, definitely.

ScienceNerd wrote: »

What country had the best food?

China, and India - for me, India wins by a hair. By the time I'd gotten to China from Mongolia, I'd eaten almost nothing but meat for for over a month, and I was never so happy to see vegetables and rice in my life - I'm pretty sure my body was trying to tell me something. The great thing about China is the vastness of the country, so each province has very distinct local cuisine, some good, others quite bland. My favourite would probably have been the food from Sichuan Province, in terms of its flavour.

Indian food still tops my list though - I had lived and worked there prior to this trip so it didn't come as a surprise, but the sheer vastness of Indian cuisine is amazing. It's probably one of the few places where I could live a happy existence as a vegetarian - their vegetarian dishes are so diverse and have so much flavour.

scudzilla wrote: »

After having traveled thew world and probably experienced many different cuisines, What is your favourite type of cheese?

I'm still partial to a nice camembert, myself