Two round the world travellers and our guide for adding a little zen to your adventures. Travel advice, stories, and inspiration!
Why is it that the best places are often the hardest ones to get to? Travelling to Bardia National Park in Nepal (sometimes spelled Bardiya) is no exception. It takes at least 15 hours to travel to Bardia by a gruelling and bumpy bus ride from Pokhara or 17 hours from Kathmandu. But it’s worth it, we promise! This is because Bardia is the natural home to majestic royal Bengal tigers where you may see them the way they are meant to be seen: wild and free.
“So what’s it like to be back?” This is the question that we’ve had to answer most often since returning from our 14 month trip around the world. The short answer is, it sucks. We would have loved to have continued hiking, cycling, and SCUBA diving our way around the world, meeting new people, discovering favourite foods, and visiting familiar friends in foreign places, but the responsible thing to do was, of course, to make our way back home to Canada.
The long answer is more complicated though. We are very happy to see our friends and family again and we have had lots of fun setting up our new place and settling into a more stable routine. That said, being able to hike and explore every day while we were travelling was pretty freaking amazing.
As a long term traveller, you will find it quickly pays off to learn some tips to sleep on a bus. This is because the cheapest way to get between destinations is often taking a long overnight bus. Long distance bus travel is also a greener option than taking a flight for those who are dedicated to practicing responsible tourism. Despite all of these positives, sleeping on these buses can be very challenging so we have put together some advice for how to get a good night’s sleep on an overnight bus!
Overnight buses are also a common rite of passage in many backpacking destinations. For instance, it’s hard to get anywhere in South America without signing up for an overnight bus and it’s often the best way to stretch a dollar for the budget minded traveller. If you want to arrive at your next destination somewhat refreshed and minimize the downtime recovering from these bus journeys we’ve got some tips for you.
One of the questions we were repeatedly asked prior to our trip was “What on Earth do you pack for a year of travel?”. Even if it’s shorter, what should you pack for 6 months of travel? If you’re planning a similar long term trip this is likely on your mind.
In this post, we’ll review our RTW packing list and the essentials for long term travel. How do you go about packing for a long trip? We’ll reveal what to pack to travel the world as well as what we added and cut along the way. Since there’s two of us we’ll also talk about a RTW packing list for males and for females. Continue reading “Our RTW Packing List – What on Earth do you Pack for a Year of Travel?”
South Africa is a stunningly beautiful country that is on most travellers bucket lists. We’ve got some advice for renting a car in South Africa as despite affordable airfare and long-distance bus services like Baz Bus, renting a car is one of the easiest and cheapest ways to see the most of the country.
Renting a car is almost required for popular trips like the Garden Route/Whale Route, Panorama Route, or visiting Kruger National Park without a guided tour. Unfortunately, some South African rental companies are notoriously shady so it’s best to go in eyes open.
We had both great and miserable experiences while renting vehicles in South Africa so what follows is a bit of advice for renting a car in South Africa to ensure everything goes as smoothly as possible! Continue reading “Renting a Car in South Africa – Advice!”
We have an exciting announcement to make, the Zen Travellers are 2019 Granite Gear Grounds Keepers!
Continue reading “We Are 2019 Granite Gear Grounds Keepers!”
Travel is more than a beloved hobby for some people; rather, it’s a veritable lifestyle. Travel is something that enlightens souls, expands horizons, and as the old cliché goes, is one of the few things in the world that makes you richer as you spend money on it. Responsible tourism is important as it unfortunately takes a tremendous amount of resources to make travel possible. In this post we’ll define what responsible tourism is and how to be a responsible tourist.
From all-inclusive resorts razing natural vegetation to make way for manufactured white sand beaches while paying local staff a pittance, to national parks being destroyed by careless visitors, to locals being priced out of their neighbourhoods by entrepreneurs looking to rent whole apartment buildings out on AirBnB, travel is not without its downsides. And none of those examples even touch the problem of the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that are required to transport a person from point A to point B.