7 tips for travelling alone

By Kia
May 24, 2014February 1, 2016

1. Don’t feel like you have to make friends

All the travel experts bang on about how you’ll meet amazing people and make lifelong friends on your travels but sometimes that’s just not true. Granted, locals are usually friendly, surprising, eye-opening and delightful but fellow travellers are often of the single-serving variety. I recently boarded a plane and chose a seat next to two young women, thinking they would potentially be good to hang out with. Almost immediately they began to talk 100 words-per-minute about bags and shoes and shopping, and which shoes to wear while shopping, and which bags are best to store shoes in when swapping shoes from heels to flats when shopping. Groaning inwardly, I put on my headphones and turned up the volume. Continue reading →

Airbnb etiquette: 10 tips for guests

By Peter
May 17, 2014February 25, 2019

From sharing bathrooms to tipping hosts, we explain correct Airbnb etiquette so you can be a great guest.

Throughout our trip around the world, we plan to use vacation rental site Airbnb for a large portion of our accommodation. Peter has been a host for nearly three years and has developed a keen sense of what constitutes good Airbnb etiquette. Here, he shares 10 essential tips so you can be a great guest. Continue reading →

How to keep a sense of humour when travelling

By Peter
May 10, 2014November 4, 2015

Sometimes – not often, but sometimes – travelling proves better in theory than in practice. This might be when you arrive in your cheap hostel room in Delhi to find rotten prawns in the shower, or when a random guy in Nairobi blatantly tries to distract you so his friend can get in your bag, or when the bus that’s meant to pick you up is three hours late leaving you alone on a Cambodian roadside at three in the morning. Continue reading →

5 pitfalls of long-term travel

By Kia
May 3, 2014September 10, 2017

So you saved for a year, quit your job and told all your friends that you’re off to see the world on your first ever long-term travel adventure. You bought your round-the-world ticket, subverted the naysayers and bid adieu to the prescripted life. Now you’re several months in and you tell yourself that you’ve broken free; that you’re an iconoclast; that you’ve stuck it to the man. You think you’re having the time of your life, little aware that you’ve fallen into one of the common pitfalls of long-term travel. Here, we list 5 things to ask yourself to make sure your trip is all you hoped it would be… Continue reading →

What qualifies as having ‘travelled the world’?

By Peter
April 26, 2014April 6, 2018

How many times have you heard someone say it? Or read a blog post about it? Seen it in a status or a bucket-list? Scores of people (including me) say they want to ‘travel the world’ but how can we quantify this? By the number of countries visited? Stamps in our passports? Borders crossed? Cultures experienced?

Kia asked this question on Quora a while ago and received a response from Jay Wacker, a former Stanford professor who offered up Hasbro’s Risk Map as a measure, suggesting that you can say you’ve travelled the world once you have visited half the territories on the map – that’s 21 out of 42 in total. Continue reading →