Backpacking travel news and blogs: budget routes, hostels, overland buses and trains, visas and long-term travel, from publishers worldwide.
No, I’m not talking about hostels or scary cockroach hotels you wouldn’t step foot in. Trust me, I have stayed in enough so-called budget hotels to know they are definitely not all created equal. Wint…
There are ways of romanticizing Cairo, but I want to be clear from the get-go: it is, on the whole, a rather dirty and ugly city. The suburbs in particular, which I usually witnessed from a taxi windo…
Hidden away on the South Sinai coast, Dahab is the kind of place I didn’t know Egypt had. In a land where most tourists will cruise the Nile on a luxury boat (often as part of a package holiday) or st…
Entering the Giza archaeological zone for the first time, I’d been bracing myself for the worst. For years I’d been hearing how the world’s most famous monument is actually far from a revelatory exper…
Visiting Cairo for Ancient Egypt’s wonders used to mean traveller’s whiplash — wonder one moment, frustration the next. Egypt’s awe-inspiring past would constantly collide with the harsh reality of st…
Are you ready for a BIG monthly recap? Because it doesn’t get any bigger than this. My dear readers, I visited my 100th country. Botswana. I’ve been working toward this travel goal for many years, and…
When many people who haven’t yet travelled to Asia think of Vietnam, their minds instantly flash to images of chaos. The Vietnamese eat dogs. It’s a lawless and dangerous country. The traffic is a com…
Two weeks is the perfect amount of time for first-time visitors to Japan. I love this country, and it has so much to offer its guests. With so many incredible places to check off, however, planning an…
He's wrong.
I’ve lived in Vietnam for over a decade and love my home city of Saigon, but even I admit that Hanoi is the country’s best city for tourists. It’s just so culturally vibrant, walkable, and full of gor…
I refreshed the page and blinked. “What? Are you…? I don’t…?” I muttered to myself. “Are you kidding me?” Staring back at me from my phone was a message I’d never received before. My jaw dropped. If y…
Where to See Seals in Kaikōura 1. Kaikōura Peninsula Walkway (Our Favorite) If you only have time to do one thing in Kaikōura, do the Kaikōura Peninsula Walkway, located about 3 KM from the town cente…
Fellow travellers had described Bukhara as being very different from Samarkand and often referred to it to me as their favourite. Even though I hadn’t done as much research — and hadn’t looked at imag…
Despite having not done too much research for my solo trip in Central Asia, there was one destination I knew needed to feature on my vague itinerary. That was Samarkand. Time and time again, I had hea…
Stepping out of the $1.50 taxi I took from the airport to Tashkent, the capital city of Uzbekistan, I couldn’t believe my eyes. This was not the image of Uzbekistan I had pictured in my head. The city…
Almaty, the largest city in Kazakhstan, completely surprised me – in the best way possible. While I did not exactly know what I expected, deep down I imagined another large post-Soviet City, but my fi…