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Travelogue The Daily Travel Column of Vagabond Journey.com 10 years of travel, a global journey through 46 countries on 5 continents. Connect with  |  | 
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The potential for being rude is not worth getting sick, cheated, raped, or robbed. Stand your ground on the Open Road.
The items you should take with you for traveling the long road with a baby.
A quick trick to converting world currencies. A necessary tip for travel.
Cheap travel means cleaning your own drinking water. Here is how I have been doing it for more than 10 years through 45 countries.
A simple tip to prevent leaving items behind in airport security.
ANTIGUA, Guatemala- I know bits and scraps of many foreign languages, a couple of which I claim to know reasonably well, but even still there have been times that I have crossed a border into a new country and realized with a start that I could not speak nor understand a word of any language any person was speaking. And there has also been many times when nobody could understand a single word that I could mutter in any tongue accessible to me.
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ANTIGUA, Guatemala- We walked through the automatic sliding doors of the airport and into Guatemala beyond. Airport doors are like portals to other dimensions, you do not what you are going to get when walking up to them in the safe confines of the arrivals hall, and then — BANG — the doors open:
You are in another country.
Guatemala. I have been here before, in 2008.
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FORT LAUDERDALE, Florida- All over the insides of Spirit Air planes are posters saying, “Get three free flights.”
Apparently, you can get these free flights by signing up for their credit card.
I thought nothing of this: credit cards are scams, I don’t want to be scammed so I don’t participate. I have only once participated before — at age 18 — and I scammed myself: credit is not worth the agony.
I flew on Spirit Air from Santiago in the Dominican Republic to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. I had a layover there. In the terminal were booths of pushy old Jewish women trying to get passengers to sign up for their credit card.
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SANTIAGO AIRPORT, Dominican Republic- “No se acceptan dinero. Ni pesos, ni dollares, ni Euro,” was written on large posters stuck to the front of each immigration booth at the Santiago international airport.
Apparently, these signs are suppose to keep the immigration officials honest. My experience can only attest that these posters do not function as intended.
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SANTIAGO AIRPORT, Dominican Republic- What to do about extremely early flight departures? What do you do when your flight is set to leave at 3:27 AM from a foreign city where you have no friends, no form of personal transportation, and a tight budget?
Do you pay for a hotel room for an entire night just [...]
SOSUA, Dominican Republic- We said a lot of goodbyes as we left Sosua, the place in the north of th Dominican Republic that my family had made our home for the past six weeks.
“I really hate saying goodbye,” my wife spoke just before leaving our room behind.
But the number of goodbyes you say upon [...]
“The Search for Home Continues,” is written at the top of Dave’s website, and this statement sums up his travels in full:
Dave is not a traveler in the traditional sense, he is a man who is just looking for a place to live.
The fact that his search has lasted over five years and has taken [...]
SOSUA, Dominican Republic- Projects and traveling should be synonymous. To do something when traveling that you can build upon with each day that passes — a mission, a purpose, a project — is the first and last steps, in my opinion, to building a full life on the road.
Floating around the world without a tether, occupation, or commitment sounds romantic — and it is for a month or two — but even the greatest of romances often turn stale with age.
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HAITI- And then the bus exploded. I am not joking. 30 Haitians clogged the minibus’ door in a solid mass of black arms, legs. A dish of rice when flying, I saw a large butt squeezed in there somewhere, people were yelling, while hot steam and smoke was shooting out from the engine all over the inside of the bus.
I jumped out a window.
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LABADIE VILLAGE, Haiti- “I live in my own little world, but it’s okay, they know me here.”
I read this painted on an inside panel of a boat taxi as I rode into Labadie village on the north coast of Haiti. I had paid 60 cents to ride in a tap tap (the back of a pickup truck with 20 other people) from Cap-Haitien to Labadie beach and then 10 gourde, or 25 cents, for a boat to the village.
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CAP-HAITIEN, Haiti- “Four dollar,” spoke the woman behind the counter of a restaurant where I attempted to make my first commercial interaction in Haiti.
“What!?! Four dollars for a bottle of water?” I figured that she must have meant four gourde, the Haitian standard of currency. Though this would have meant that the cost of the bottle of water would have been extremely low, around 10 cents. This did not seem right, but I handed over a five gourde coin anyway expecting change.
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HAITI- “Do you know Dorthy?” a Haitian high school student asked me as we sat together in the back of a crowded tap tap. He then added, “Dorthy from Michigan?” just to make sure I knew which one he was talking about.
I had to admit that I did not know Dorthy from Michigan.
We had been talking in English for the better part of 20 minutes as waited for the pickup truck to fill with passengers. The student had a high command of the English language, which is something that I found many Haitians possess.
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CAP-HAITIEN, Haiti- If you can afford 40 USD a night for a hotel room, then I invite you to come to Haiti. This is truly an great country for traveling, though the hotel costs are far beyond the purse strings of the average traveler.
There seems to be very little competition for hotels in Haiti, as there seems to be very few people traveling here. Many hotels have seemingly already gone out of business a decade ago, the few that remain are either for the luxury classes or are decrepit, ill kept love hotels.
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CAP-HAITIEN, Haiti- Haiti is an in the streets culture. An “in the streets” culture is one where the people play out a large portion of their days in the public sector, simply put: in the streets. Most of these people have homes to go to, but they seem to prefer just hanging out in chairs in front of shops, in their doorways, on street corners, and in parks — talking, and watching the world pass by. There are people everywhere in a Haitian city.
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CAP-HAITIEN, Haiti- On Monday they cleaned the mud.
On my arrival in Cap Haitien, I found streets caked in mud, trenches that partitioned the main roads into pieces, openings in the road large enough to fall through, and garbage strewn everywhere. I heard a group of American volunteer girls rejoicing in the fact that they were on their way out to the Dominican Republic: “I just can’t take all the trash in the street,” one said while taking a drag on a cigarette.
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CAP-HAITIEN, Haiti- Haiti is a dangerous country for travel. Haiti is a dangerous country for travel as there is a very likely chance that you will fall through the streets and meet doom below. I mean this literally: there are holes, pits, and open manholes all over the streets and sidewalks. One errant step and you’re a goner — consider yourself lucky if you only break a leg.
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CAP-HAITIEN, Haiti- I walked into the Croissant d’Or bakery in Cap-Haitien, and immediately met three very large, armored bodies of UN soldiers. They are here as a part of a re-stabilization mission called MINUSTAH. I walked up to the soldiers — I had little choice, they took up the entire bakery — and asked them in English were they were from.
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CAP HAITIEN, Haiti- There are two main public transport options for getting from the Dominican Republic to Haiti overland.
1. Take an express bus from either Santiago or Santo Domingo.
2. Take a local bus to the border, walk across, then find transport on the other side.
Neither option is very difficult.
[ Continue Reading → ]CAP HAITIEN, Haiti- From where I sit, on a roof top in Cap Haitien, the second largest city in Haiti, life goes on as usual. There is music here, the streets are full of people, some of them are going to work, some are sitting listlessly, some are just talking, some laughing — a Haitian woman across the hotel roof from me is singing to herself — a group of men down below are gambling over dominoes, there is a lottery brokerage on nearly every block, women sit outside of their homes selling bags of purified water, pop, candy, kids chase each other, a group of young girls in Sunday dresses walk by.
[ Continue Reading → ]I arrived in the Haitian city of Cap Haitien around five or six hours ago by bus from Santiago in the Dominican Republic.
Chaya and Petra are still in Sosua. I should only be in Haiti for around one week before going back to the Dominican Republic and then traveling on to Guatemala and El Salvador.
This [...]
