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Adventure, Business, Travel

Adventure

The Beer that Changed my Life | An Incredible Experience in Myanmar

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It was pitch black outside as my fiancé Karla and I peddled our way back to the guesthouse from the restaurant we had dinner at. There were no street lights as we raced through the little town of Bagan, which proved a little scary but also enjoyable as it was one of the rare times to experience no traffic. It was much more serene.

As we got closer to the guesthouse, we passed by a small stream that made it’s way into the Irrawaddy river. Under one of the few streetlights in the area, a couple of guys were singing while another played the guitar. We were certainly tired and ready for bed but I couldn’t help but think how cool it would be to mingle with them. These are the kind of opportunities I long for when I travel. Karla decided to go back to the room and I decided to park the bike and sit down with them. They welcomed me to join them but not much was said. I didn’t speak Burmese and they had little english so I just listened and enjoyed the moment. Eventually, one of them sat down beside me and tried his best to learn about me. He told me his name and asked what brought me to Bagan. He mentioned how surprised he was that I would come sit with them.

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10 Tips for Traveling the World with No Money

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Okay okay, I know what you’re thinking. Bullshit.

To some degree, you might be right. You do need some money to travel. But not much. In fact, most of the people I have met seem rather broke. However, they are living an incredible life. Some are living that life for just a moment while others are doing it long-term, including families with children.

One of the most important things to remember is that you don’t need to be rich to travel. In some ways, being rich might even hinder the experience, since you’ll likely be coming at it from an angle of luxury and status. If you think travel is only about beach resorts and 3-star restaurants, this is likely NOT for you, unless you’re trying to open your mind to new possibilities.

I’ve stayed in gorgeous 4-star hotels and I’ve done the all-inclusive thing. If all you’re seeking is a one-week escape from life, then this probably does fit the bill. You’ll get to relax with ocean waves in the background and you won’t need to worry about anything except the timing of the next buffet meal. It won’t be all that different from home because you’ll still be mingling with other people just like you who may even be from the same city or the same country. It won’t be an adventure. It will simply be relaxation time, which is fine.

However, if you’re looking to experience travel from a life-changing point of view, then you’ll need to ditch the resorts and high-end hotels and opt for the more independent and adventurous route. You’ll want to meet locals and dive into the culture, not-to-mention the ocean for an up-close and personal look at life under the sea. You might be wanting to zip-line across jungles or look for wild elephants along the river bank. You might just be looking to meet very interesting people, hike to minority villages and simply expand your mind in a way that only independent travel can provide. [Read more…] about 10 Tips for Traveling the World with No Money

How to Have 1 Full Year of World Travel and Adventure For Less than $1500 Per Month

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Last year, my soon-to-be-wife Karla and I spent 10 months in SE Asia and 2 months in Mexico. We travelled from Canada to Mexico and back to Canada for our big departure overseas. We had about $30,000 for the both of us and came back with basically nothing.

We spent less than $1500 per month each (including all our flights) but had the time of our lives. We spent thousands on world-class scuba diving and didn’t hesitate to spend money on any experience we felt was special.

The most amazing and life-changing travel is cheaper than living an auto-pilot life in a developed country.

The cost of a car can send you on a thrilling adventure all over the world for three years. The cost of a house can send you all over the world for the rest of your life. Crazy right? [Read more…] about How to Have 1 Full Year of World Travel and Adventure For Less than $1500 Per Month

How to Create Your Own Burning Man Experience Without Going to Burning Man

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Wow. What can I say.

Burning Man was fantastic. A journey more than an event. Truly a “life” experience.

68,000 people camping in the middle of an inhospitable desert.

Dirty. Excited. Open.

Dressed in costumes, people parade around proudly gifting things to one another and appreciating the generosity of others.

Massive art projects give an impressive life to the playa, mesmerizing people by day and dazzling them with neon lights at night.

Seminars and workshops around everything you can imagine go from dawn til dusk. Sex, spirituality, flexibility, change, dance…you name it.

But not everyone wants to make the journey to Black Rock City. Not everyone wants to live on a desert for a week. Not everyone wants to go without a shower for 7 days or wait in a 12-hour lineup to get in.

If you can’t make it out to one, you could always create your own at home. You’d simply have to…

  • Organize space for a large gathering of open-minded people from all walks of life.
  • Arrange for massive, expensive and extremely detailed art projects to be lined up all over the community. I’m talking about large climbable 30-foot iron statues of wolves, 20-foot tall human hands that can cup you like a baby and big tents with the most insane psychedelic paintings known to man-kind. This is just a start.
  • Find extremely generous people who are willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and years of effort to transform their vehicles into giant mutant flaming octopuses, disco-dance floors and double-decker armadillos.
  • Encourage generosity amongst all participates where people gift everything from hugs, kisses, food, alcohol, and even free plane rides.
  • Organize hundreds of “seminars”, “meet ups” and “talks” around subjects of all kinds. Things like samba dancing, female masturbation classes, yoga, unconditional love, TEDx talks, erotic massage, improv, Michael Jackson Thriller dance sessions and so forth. Yup, anything goes.
  • Set up massive parties all over the place every single night that don’t stop until the sun comes up. Bring in DJ’s from all over the world willing to perform for free.
  • Make a human carcass wash come to life with hundreds of naked people cleaning each other just like a car wash. Pre-soak, soap, rinse and squeegee.
  • Create a safe environment where people can try new things, challenge their boundaries or simply be themselves. This includes walking around completely naked, dressing in ridiculous costumes or anything else that participants feel they need to do.
  • Create a large, impressive structure to go with the events theme. Maybe a UFO that people can walk in and play around with. Build a giant “man” on the top of it. Make it beautiful. Then burn it down. Actually, make it explode after launching an insane amount of fireworks into the sky.
  • Build an absolutely stunning temple for people to visit and feel. Here, people can leave prayers for loved ones who have passed away, write down things they wish to change about themselves, share their love for the event, or anything else they feel compelled to do. They can just sit and think about life or make plans for the future. Anything they want to say, think or pray about. The temple is a peaceful place for all. At the end of the event, burn it down.

I could go on. This is just a start.

Then again, you could just make a trip to Burning Man.

Welcome to the playa.

Have you been? Do you want to go? 

 

 

Driving Across Canada with Mom and Dad (or Seizing Opportunities)

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It’s now been eleven days since we left Okotoks, Alberta on route for Newfoundland. We will drive more than 7000 KM to get there, including stops in places like Moose Jaw, Winnipeg, Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, Quebec City, Charlottetown, and Halifax. It’s a crazy five-week trip that will bring us to almost every province in the country. It’s also a great chance to see family that I don’t get to see that often.

But I wasn’t that excited at first.

As someone who loves travel, Canada just doesn’t excite me on the same level as places like SE Asia, Africa or South America do. It’s not because it isn’t beautiful. It is very beautiful. It’s not because it’s extremely expensive, which it is. I guess it’s just because it’s not the kind of different I look for when I travel. The East coast is extremely different from the West coast but it’s still Canada and it still feels like home for me. It’s just not as different and culturally ground-breaking as going to Eastern Europe would.

Niagara Falls Ontario

At the same time, the scenery in Canada is stunning. The food is great. There is a lot of nature. Maybe more nature and natural beauty than anywhere else on the planet. There is more coastline than any other country on earth.

But there was something else that made me really want to go.

My parents.

They were the ones who had planned on driving across the country to visit my dad’s side of the family in Newfoundland. They were planning on doing the gruelling drive so that they could stop in Northern Ontario to visit my moms friends and spend some time with them cruising around on a lake nearby. They usually do the drive in as little as ten days, barely visiting places along the way. It’s a verrrrrrry long drive.

I started thinking…will I ever get a chance to do a road trip with my parents again? A five-week road trip with my mom, dad and fiancé?

Probably not.

I’ve been thinking a lot about opportunities like this. Opportunities that don’t come around too often. Opportunities to spend time with people who are really important to me.

My parents and I are very close. Like best friends. Karla, my fiancé, is also best friends with them. I have family all over Canada and especially in Newfoundland. I don’t see them often. Many have died already. It really makes one realize how fast time goes and how precious that time really it is.

This seemed like a precious and priceless opportunity.

So I turned their one-week trip into a three-week drive and we jumped in and headed east. As of now, we’ve gone through the tunnels of Moose Jaw, met one of Karla’s childhood friends in Winnipeg, Spent some time in a lakeside house in Northern Ontario, jumped on extreme roller-coasters in Canada’s Wonderland, Peered out over Toronto from the top of the CN Tower, watched an amazing light show at Parliament in Ottawa after enjoying the Byward market, watched the fury of Niagara Falls from the Maid of the Mist and walked around Old Montreal eating smoked meat sandwiches and poutine. Tasty.

tall guard changing of the guards parliament hill ottawa
Little taller than me…

Over the next week, we will be strolling through the beautiful city of Quebec, watching the highest tides in the world in New Brunswick, spending a day in Montreal, driving across Prince Edward Island, eating fish n’ chips in Halifax, visiting the UNESCO World Heritage town of Lunenburg and then taking the ferry across to Newfoundland for another two-weeks of amazing scenery, whale-watching, icebergs, family visits, fishing and hiking through the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Gros Morne National Park. I’m also hoping we get to visit Fogo Island and hoping we get to do a road trip to the Gaspe Peninsula, but we’ll see…

It’s gonna be fun but most importantly, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance to experience it with my future wife, mother, and father.

With our wedding just around the corner and a couple of years of travel coming up, my practical self wanted to stay and work. I wanted to spend more time online, building up Canadian Free Flyers and other projects. Getting prepared for the wedding, not to mention Burning Man on August 26th.

But I looked at this trip as a priceless opportunity. I’m not sure how much longer I have with my parents. I hope many years to come. But at the same time, a road trip across Canada is even rarer. It’s long and tiring, which is hard as you get older. My parents are in their sixties. It can also be hard to find a five to six-week span where everyone can take off without worry.

This was that chance and I jumped on it.

I’m so happy I did.

Do you have any big opportunities coming up? Are you going to jump on them?

Want more Canada road trip advice? Check out these articles below:

World Domination Summit & What Comes After

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Wow.

Last week I attended the World Domination Summit in Portland , Oregon. It wasn’t my first World Domination Summit but it was every bit as spectacular.

The first WDS I attended consisted of only 500 people. This one was 3000. Six times the size in just two years.

Despite the rapid growth, it was one hell of a show. Kudos to Chris Guillebeau and his team who manage to blow away attendees each and every year.

world float world domination summit 2013
That moment before crushing a Guinness World Record

10 Inspiring speakers took to the stage over two days to dispel their wisdom and motivate all of us to chase our dreams, challenge our fears and live remarkably. The welcome party had 3000 of us take over the Portland Zoo while the closing party had us create an epic dance party at Pioneer Square in downtown Portland. We also broke a world record, took a cruise down the Willamette River and connected with inspiring people from more than 30 countries.

It was a heart-warming, energizing and soul-lifting weekend.

But what happens after?

Someone I spoke to a few days later mentioned different sales conferences they used to attend. Sales conferences are different from World Domination Summit but still filled with motivational speakers inspiring people in their particular field. She mentioned how much she enjoyed those conferences and how inspiring they were but was always disappointed in the months that followed.

I understood what she meant. She was talking about all those crazy dreams and ideas that are born during the conference but slowly wile away as time goes on. Maybe she set her short-term goals too high or maybe she just didn’t work hard enough.

This happens to many people after a conference / summit. It certainly has to me. We hear all these amazing stories from people who have been primed to give mind-bending talks. They come out on stage and blast us with an hour of well-rehearsed and coached talks that fill our hearts and souls with all kinds of dreams and aspirations. We come home ready to tackle the world head on only to realize a few months later that nothing has happened or that our goals were not reached to the extent we had dreamed.

Did we fuck up? Were we tricked?

No, it’s just us. We can be motivated and inspired all we want but unless we actually take action, we won’t see any results. If we do take action, we need to realize that we are likely to fail along the way. The important part is to not let that stop us. We must learn from it and fail again, becoming “professionals” as we go.

Don’t let that inspiration fade away. We need your project.

Chris Guillebeau world domination summit 2013

Here are some quick tips for what should come after the World Domination Summit:

1. Set some time for yourself to write down your thoughts after WDS. Try to capture that inspired version of yourself so that you can continue to look back on it when the WDS-momentum starts to fade. Jot down everything you can. Small ideas, big ideas, outrageous ideas. Everything. Use this as your starting block.

2. Get started on your project immediately. Don’t worry about it being the “right” one or not. Just get started on step one and move from there. If the idea changes, that’s fine because you’re learning as you go. If you never start, nothing happens. Even if you start with just 15-30 minutes per day, it will add up to a finished project and it will feel damn good!

3. Stay connected with the people you met during the summit and tell them about your project. This will not only help build the relationships but will also hold you accountable for getting your project out into the world. Another idea might be to form some sort of accountability/mastermind group for further accountability and collaboration.

4. As a bonus, join the World Domination Summit Facebook group. It’s a great place to stay connected with the WDS spirit and also a great place to post your project and get feedback.

Do you have any other ideas for continuing the momentum after a summit?

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Feature photo and photo of Chris courtesy of Chris Guillebeau.