South America

Travel through South America by country:

Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Uruguay, Venezuela

Travel through South America by popular city:

Bogota, Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro

Travel through South America by popular things to do:

Adventures in the Amazon, Falkland Islands, Iguazu Falls, Tierra del Fuego

Couch Surfing Travel

by Erik Olsen on

Many many moons ago, I traveled to Europe with a program called Servas that essentially set yo up with people in other countries and allowed you to stay with them for a few days. A quick Google effort reveals that, indeed, the organization is still around. This was pre-widespread-Internet days, and so what the group did was give you a stack of books with people’s names and numbers, and you had to arrange the stay via the telephone and a archaic system of communicating whereby word were written on paper and actually sent in an”envelope” to another person, thus conveying a message. Anyway, Servas was cool, and offered me, a fresh-faced kid right out of college, the opportunity to meet and stay with other people who I am sure I would never have met otherwise. It got me out of the hostel system, too, which can be both hectic, over-crowded and annoying.

Well, in the modern age we have the Internet and we have enterprising people eager to make these types of connections easier. And we have a new program called the Couch Surfing Project, a Web site that lets travelers and adventurers get a unique taste of local life. The project is the brainchild of Casey Fenton, who got hold of a university list serve and e-mailed hundreds of local students asking for a place to crash. Rather soon after, he received scads of e-mails from students offering their couches and their friendship him. Very nice. And so for now, Couch Surfing is a free, nonprofit service with more than 60,000 members. Some seven continents are represented (although we haven’t confirmed this and wonder where in Antarctica one can find a couch….and close to 200 countries.

Could be a very cool opportunity not just to reduce the cost of travel, but to get in with the locals.

More on the Ugly American

by Erik Olsen on

Borat is far from the first person to make a name for himself by skewering Americans and American culture…but he is one of the best to do so in recent memory. But the whole Borat phenomenon is just comedy, it’s show business, and no one really takes what Hollywood does very seriously. But one thing people DO take seriously in this country is business. The business of America is business said one sage President (if I correctly recall my Roget’s, that is). And so when anti-Americanism starts to affect the country’s bottom line, well, folks start to take notice.

This piece in the Chicago Tribune takes a look at a relatively new movement of business people who are concerned that anti-American attitudes are causing American businesses to lose business overseas .And so they have taken action to try and turn things around. The problem is not just the perception of American businesses as purveyors of obesity-inducing, LCD garbage, the problem too is that Americans who travel abroad help promote stereotypes of Americans as bumbling ignoramuses with pre-Copernican views of self.

And so, to combat these problems, several business-folk founded the Business for Diplomatic Action, a group of educators, executives and citizens working to combat the spread of anti-American sentiment. As mentioned here a while back, the BDA extended its efforts to all Americans traveling abroad via its World Citizens Guide…basically just a series of booklets and pamphlets that offer a crash course in other nations’ histories, religions, traditions, peoples and language.

Personally, I think all you need to be an aware and thoughtful global citizen is an avid desire to travel, a nice book collection and a subscription to the New York Times. A couple of pamphlets are only for the worst off cases, IMHO. But I salute this group’s effort, none the lees, sine any press given to this topic helps make people aware that it’s important. And it is.

Photo Tips

by Erik Olsen on

If there’s one thing most every person brings with them when they travel these days, it’s a digital camera. Sure, there are some oddball holdouts, people who still use film, but most of us have not just graduated to digital, but to mega-mega-pixel video.

Of course, that being said, how many people with these fabulous, no-brainer new cameras actually know how to use them? If you take a trip around Flickr (excepting the Gadling Flickr site, of course, which features prodigious talents ;-)) you see that there are a LOT of amateur shooters out there, people who just pint and shoot without much concern for composition or depth of field .that’s fine. Shoot and be happy. I’m all for it. But if you want the best pics possible, the fact is you have to work at it. All of which brings me to a couple of sites that might help you take better pictures.

First of all, Photosecrets offers tips for all sorts of travel photogs from how to get the beset shots to how to get your pictures into the hands of stock photo sites, a potentially lucrative avenue, though one that is very competitive.

Here is a brief list from about.com with links to tips like how to turn day into night and how to use Photoshop (a no-no with many mags and newspapers, tho)

Photographytips offers articles on how to understand light and how to make the best use of your flash…something many people do NOT do.

Finally, if you want to shoot like a master, you should heed the advice of the masters, and there is no better resource for shooting great photos than National Geographic. Nat Geo has put together a superb site helping you learn the techniques that Nat Geo photographers have employed to craft some of the most memorable photos of all time.

And if you are interested in taking a trip with the explicit purpose of learning how to shoot, take a look at this piece over at Frommer’s which offers a list of trips and companies that take people on photo safaris. Heading out with actual travel photographers who know what they’re doing is a great way to get some real experience with your camera.

Happy shooting!

Worldwide Panos 2006 Best Of

by Erik Olsen on

Some folks here know I’m a big fan of panoramic photography. One of the organizations/Web sites that I often visit and have occasionally contributed to is the World Wide Panoramic project. This project comes out of the geoimages group at Berkeley and has provided some of the best panoramic photography on the Web today. Every three months (each quarter) they hold a…well, it’s not a contest exactly…it’s more just an opportunity for pano photographers around the world to contribute according to a particular theme.

The previous eleven events have created a showcase of VR photography, with over 2500 panoramas by over 750 photographers from more than 70 countries. It’s very cool. Trust me. And at the end of this year the are holding their annual Best of – A World Wide Panorama event. All you have to do is contribute and you have a chance to, well, not win a lot of money but to get the admiration of lots of other pano photographers. I’m gong to do my best to contribute this year, as I have been lax in contributing to some of the other events. So, if you shoot panos, go over and upload your best shot .

Glow Shrooms

by Erik Olsen on

Here’s the first of several Halloweeny posts on this All Hallows’ Eve.

I know there are some of you out there for whom this will be an inspiration to scamper out into the woods in search of the next great hallucinogen. But hold on, we don’t know yet if these mushrooms can kill you. And foodies, yes, I’m sure many of you are also dreaming of glow in the dark pizza, the hottest new thin to hit Chuck E Cheese since, well, that little machine that grabs toys with a metal grappling hook. Well, I just found this little blurb from Nat Geo to fascinating not to post about. What we’ve got here are bona fide glow in the dark mushrooms from Brazil. These bioluminescent fungi were collected from Ribeira Valley Tourist State Park near São Paulo, and are – amazingly – capable of producing light through a chemical reaction.