Writing a travel blog can sometimes be a daunting task. The reason is that there are so many kinds of travel. On the one hand, there is luxury travel, where folks ho aboard a pristine ocean liner and drop into ports of call where the main activity is being led off like a herd of sheep, perhaps dining in a restaurant and more or less having your whole experience orchestrated by some tour group.
I generally look at this kind of travel with a measure of revulsion. It might be OK when you’re 70 and are less, shall we say, mobile than you used to be, but it seems to me that this kind of travel is rather sterile. Then there’s the whole backpacking adventure, which is much more appealing to most of the folks that read Gadling. But yet another kind of travel involves real commitment…you might even call it work…and that is the volunteer vacation. We’ve posted about volunteer vacations numerous times, and usually we’re quite bullish about the concept.
Our good friend Josh Berman did this and talked about the experience at some length in the podcast we did a while back. But I just recently stumbled upon a whole magazine that’s largely dedicated to the subject, and I figured it was worth mentioning.
Verge Magazine comes out of Canada, and is geared, as you might have guessed, towards Canucks (wait, is that the right use of thee term? Oh, well). It’s got articles galore on the volunteer vacation concept with other fine pieces about conservation, science and profiles of folks who make travel a part of their occupation. The online pickings are actually rather slim, so I’d love to actually get my hands on a bona fide copy, but the site has some pieces online that make it worth a visit. But one section worth checking out is the resources area where you can find links to organizations who offer vacations for activits types and adventureres with a leftie bent.