Northern Africa and the Middle East - Clean Breaks: 500 New Ways to See the World - page 149

More and more people are questioning the way they travel and exploring
alternatives, whether by avoiding fl ying or staying with locals rather than paying for
hotels. While you may not be able to follow exactly in the footsteps of the following
fi ve pioneers, their experiences are instructive for anyone searching for a new way
to see the world.
THE TRAVEL NETWORKER
In 2008, Vicky Baker travelled through Central and South America, staying with
locals - from apartments in Colombia to the thatched huts of the Kuna tribe of
Panama's San Blas Islands. She was able to do this through the rise of travel
networking websites such as couchsurfi ng.com (see p.377), where members offer
one another accommodation in their homes for free. She also used networking
sites to get to know local people, who showed her the cities, towns and villages
she visited, enabling her to discover the sort of things no tourist normally fi nds, from a village of
descendants of Laotian refugees in French Guiana to the coolest underground music spots in Quito
- courtesy of an Ecuadorian musician.
Vicky's blog and a wealth of information on hospitality exchanges can be found at W goinglocaltravel.
com.
THE ADVENTURER
Jonny Bealby's fi rst book, Running with the Moon , details the ten-month solo
motorbike trip he took down the west side of Africa from Cairo to Cape Town in
1994. He's also ridden along the Silk Route on a horse, just as Marco Polo did some
seven hundred years before, and travelled through the remotest parts of Afghanistan
and Pakistan. His love of adventure led him to set up a travel company called Wild
Frontiers (see p.286), whose aim is to entice more people to get off the beaten track
and out of their comfort zone while on holiday. Needless to say, as a man with such wanderlust in his
soul, Jonny still personally guides many of the trips his company offers.
THE NO-FLYERS
In 2007, Ed Gillespie and his girlfriend Fiona King took a sabbatical and headed off
on a round-the-world trip. But rather than select the seven airports their plane tickets
would let them stop at, they declined to fl y and went instead by as many other forms
of transport as they could, from coaches through Eastern Europe to camels in the
Mongolian desert. Along the way they were battered by a severe storm in the Bay
of Biscay, drank with fellow travellers on the Trans-Siberian Express, rode mopeds
through the hills of Vietnam and watched whales from the deck of a cargo boat while passing the Great
Barrier Reef.
To read about Ed and Fiona's trip, as well as the travel blogs Ed's written since coming home, go to
W www.lowcarbontravel.com.