Time for another shameless plug for my friends’ projects. I love to see people doing awesome things, especially friends and family.

Liam Mather

An upcoming singer-songwriter in Halifax and good friend of mine, Liam’s music is part alt-country, part singer-songwriter, and all heart. He just released his first album of live tracks, which I picked up the other day to no disappointment. If you feel guilty about all the free music you’ve downloaded in the past year, this would be a good time to repay that karma by paying for a copy of Liam’s album. You can do so here: http://liammather.com/music

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Slacklining

I just got back from the park where Kim and I were slacklining — imagine tightrope walking, but on a line that’s “slack” rather than rigid. Now, before my mom reads this and freaks out (Hi mom…), I should explain that you learn to do this with a line that’s only a foot or two off the ground. So if you fall (which you spend a lot of time doing when you’re learning), you don’t have far to go.

So how does one get into such a bizarre sport? It all started a year ago. I was in my little Bali house doing my lunch dishes and looked out my kitchen window to see this guy balancing on a rope.  (see picture below)

Sensing the opportunity to try something cool, I dropped my dishes and ran outside. The conversation went something like this:

Mike: “Dude. You’ve gotta let me try that.”

German dude: “Sure. Here. Just step with your feet like this and…”

(Mike carefully steps onto line, waves arms frantically, crashes to the ground)

Mike: “Awesome. I want one.”

German dude: “I can get you one.”

The German guy, Sebastian, turned out to be really cool, a fine example of the New Rich — not a millionaire, but definitely living like one.  He was working remotely for German clients doing specialized web design, billing his customers 60+ euros/hr and living like a king in Bali.

Sebastian kept his word and had his girlfriend bring me a slackline from Europe. I spent the next few weeks bruising my knees and learning how to stay upright on the line.

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With all of the things vying for our attention daily — a lot of it available for free — it can be hard to separate the merely good content from the amazing content. Once in a while you come across something free that is so beautiful, inspiring and full of life, that you just have to share it with everyone you know. Here are three free things that have made a difference in my life, available in download form:  (drumroll…)

1. This American Life, the podcast.

I’m not American — I don’t even currently live in North America. However, hands down, the most compelling and beautifully crafted stories (true and fictional) I’ve ever heard have been on this radio program.

You can listen to every episode online in your browser, or download each week’s episode (only that week’s episode) in Itunes for free.

Start with:  http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/339/break-up (then click PLAY EPISODE)

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How much does it cost to travel? I get asked this question a lot.

The answer: Half a million dollars. Read on.

Last time I was in Halifax, while scanning the Globe and Mail’s lifestyle section, a headline caught my eye:  Couple cost out a life of travel.

The article profiled a 40-ish couple who were looking to retire early (at 60 rather than 65) and then spend each year living in a new country: France, Morroco, Egypt — yeah, this was a little while ago…

The article examined the couple’s finances and incomes and calculated how much money the couple would need to save before saying goodbye to their jobs to live their dream life. The number the financial analyst came up with? $50,000 for each year they were on the road. Ten years of travel would mean $500,000. Count those zeroes, that is not a typo. The happy couple estimated they would reach their goal in a mere 15-20 years. Just in time for their first hip-replacement surgery.

So, if I want to see the world, all I need is to wait twenty years until I’ve saved up half a million dollars. Awesome. Inspirational.

The article demonstrates two assumptions that I disdain about mainstream financial culture: the deferred lifestyle plan and the idea that travel needs to be expensive.

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2010. The year of half-baked plans, false-start projects, and half-finished songs. It was not a good year for me and productivity. We had arguments. We threatened each other (“But you need me! You’ll see!”). And for a long time we didn’t speak.

My passion and hobby of writing songs (something I started in 2009) fell by the wayside to watching downloaded episodes of Top Gear and late nights immersed in Japanese animation series.  My promises on the blog homepage to restart writing were continually extended – “I’ll write again when I start traveling” became “I’ll start writing when I’m working again”. Any regular readers I may have had are long gone, I’m sure.

But I let it happen. And sometimes it takes reaching a certain level of dissatisfaction to be able to make a drastic change in your life. In the past, writing on this blog has helped keep me motivated and accountable for my goals, something I sincerely miss. So, I hereby reclaim Project Hitchhiker, and commit to writing one post per week for the next year. To be clear, this is a promise to myself, and to any readers willing to trust me again: I will post every Sunday, for the next year.

What did I actually do last year? 2010 in Review

Despite hardly accomplishing anything of note, I did have a great year. I had fun and traveled a lot – and there were certainly periodic intervals of awesomeness.

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What would you do with your time if you didn’t need to work? This is really an interesting question. Because that’s the exact situation I’m in at the moment.

It’s no secret that I have a lot of free time. This past year I saved enough money to take an extended vacation (a Mini-retirement) of at least six months. Six months, that is, if I were extremely reckless with my money. So here I am with a huge amount of time on my hands, in beautiful Southeast Asia.

One thing that I’ve learned from traveling in the past is that having too much time and nothing to do can be bad for you. A quick glance at the long-term traveler scene and you’ll see the same people at the same bars 6 of 7 nights a week. In some backpacker areas, it’s not uncommon to see people drinking beer on the street or in front of their bungalow at 8am, 10am, 3pm. Which is fine if all you’ve got is a week or two. But a fair number of the people I’ve met have been traveling and partying hard for six months to a year. One guy I met in Vang Vieng, Laos was 320 consecutive days into a river-tubing bender, going for a full 365 days (I’m not sure that Guiness will share his enthusiasm). The partiers party for two reasons: because it’s fun; and because they’ve got nothing better to do.

Sure, not all backpackers party. Some fend off their boredom by traveling frantically from place to place, visiting all the museums and seeing all the sights. Because when you finally get away from that busy job for a few months, you’re left with an abundance of time that you haven’t had since summer holidays in grade school.  I’m not claiming any moral high ground here. I’m not against partying or museum tours, I just think that there’s another way to spend that gap year than getting trashed every other night.

The other option: The Learning Sabbatical.

What would you want to learn if you could learn anything — if you had a few months off work and had nothing but time and ambition? Vietnamese cooking? Spanish? Classical piano?

Wouldn’t it be more effective to study Vietnamese cuisine one-on-one with a private cooking teacher in Hoi An? Or learn Spanish while staying with a local family in Guatemala? Classical piano from a Russian master in Moscow? It would not only be more effective, it would also likely be cheaper.

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An hour of hunting around the sweaty market and nothing. One last time I showed the piece of paper with a scribble of Laotian script on it: “Do you sell dice here?” the paper asked. “No, no, no…” said the woman shopkeeper, waving her hand. There were no dice in her shop of plastic nicknacks and toys. I looked at her watch and saw it was approaching 5pm so resigned my search. If I were to follow options 1, 4 or 5 I would need to buy the ticket and pack my bag right away.
 

It was quite on a whim that I decided to try dice travel. After the high of an amazing motorcycle escapade in the Bolaven plateau, I found myself slightly bored and wondering where to go next. Coincidentally, I was also reading a book called The Dice Man about a man who decides what he will do from one minute to the next based on the roll of the dice (verdict: interesting concept, in fact part autobiographical, but in the end a mediocre novel).  Also coincidentally, I am a thrill-seeking, impressionable young man, willing to try new things. It did solve my problem: part of me wanted to relax and chill out in a sleepy riverside town; part wanted to continue by motorbike; and part yearned for the seafood and the beaches of the central vietnam coast. In the dice options I wrote down, I tried to represent how much I wanted to go to each place, ie. 2 possibilities for 4000 islands in Southern Laos.
 

The options for my first (only?) round of dice travel:
1) Hue, Vietnam (Overnight bus to the home of Vietnamese Imperial cuisine. Appeals to my inner food critic)
2) Stay in Pakse another night (Rent a motorbike again and search out more adventure in the surrounding area. Appeals to my inner petrol-head)
3) Don Kone, Laos (One of the 4000 islands. hammocks, bungalows, and cheap beer. Appeals to my lazy side)
4) Vientiane, Laos (Great city with cafes, great restaurants, colonial history. Long overnight “sleeper bus’, with beds apparently. From what i hear on the travelers circuit, the overnight bus has mice)
5) Don Det, Laos (4000 islands)
6) Phnom Penh, Cambodia (The wild card choice. Appeals to my masochistic side)
 

But unfortunately, as I’ve said above, i couldn’t find any dice.
 

Hence, Plan B: consult the Oracle.
 

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