Last year I was visiting Beijing. For my last dinner before an early train trip to Mongolia in the morning I went out to small restaurant around the corner from my hotel. Chinese food is amazing, in no small part because of the creative titles given to their dishes. There was pimple soup, wonderous pork belly and explosion of tofu & spices to name a few. As a vegetarian, I opted for the later.
“I’ll just have the ‘explosion of tofu & spices’, there’s no meat in that dish is there?”
I‘m writing this post in Northern Thailand, the city of Pai to be exact. I find myself quite inspired by this trip I’m taking along with resident guest poster Shane Brown. See we showed up to Thailand with only one thing planned, to rent motorbikes and ride through the northern mountains from Chiang Mai to Pai, along the Mae Hong Son loop. Other than that, we didn’t care much about what we did, where we stayed, what we ate, or how we would manage any of it.
I’m so sick of the travel section of most mainstream newspapers. The Saturday ‘Traveller’ section of my local paper is pretty much pages and pages of advertisements thinly disguised as destination reviews. I’ve noticed that it’s pretty rare to find a less than flattering review written journalists that travel as ‘guests’ of the tour groups, government tourism departments or airlines that they are writing about. They might point out one or two minor niggles but I’d say 95% of the content in those articles are absolutely glowing reviews of the service or company in question.
Everyone seems to be jumping on the Couch Surfing Bandwagon at the moment. And why not, it’s a great concept. Travel around the world, staying for free and meeting some cool and interesting people at the same time. There’s plenty written about the etiquette of surfing someone’s couch, but not so much available on how to be a good host. Here’s some thoughts I’ve based around my experience of giving up my couch to globetrotters.
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