Of course, I do travel differently than I did in the days
before I had a family, a mortgage, and other responsibilities. Nearly all my
travels now have to do with updating my Moon Handbooks to Argentina,
Buenos
Aires, Chile,
and Patagonia,
and this differs greatly from traveling “for pleasure.” Given that, almost
every year, I spend four to five months in southernmost South America, when I
return to my home in California, I don’t feel like traveling much farther than
around the block, whenever my dog needs to go out. Even less do I feel like devoting
a month or more to, say, take the Trans-Siberian Railway across Asia.
That’s not to say my travel is not pleasurable – I greatly
enjoy revisiting the sights of the Southern Cone countries, and seeing people I
have grown to know over more than two decades as a guidebook and travel
writer. I enjoy good meals and fine wines, but at the same time I’m aware this
is now work. While a first-time visitor to Buenos Aires needs to find one
hotel, I need to know dozens or more; where the one-timer needs to know when
the next bus leaves from Bariloche
to El
Bolsón, I need to know them all. Guidebook writing means long days and much
of the product is inevitably formulaic – there’s only so much you can do with
bus schedules.
I don’t regret this change in the way I travel but, at the
same time, I do miss the spontaneity with which I once backpacked down the
“Gringo Trail” all the way to Tierra del
Fuego and through Western Europe in the days before the Berlin Wall came
down. Another person who’s adapted to the times is my travel-writing colleague
Edward Hasbrouck, probably the best-traveled person I know, who’s just released
a new fifth edition of The Practical
Nomad: How to Travel Around the World.
The Practical Nomad is exactly what it says: a
nuts-and-bolts manual on traveling abroad – not necessarily literally “around
the world” - for extended periods of time. It is not destination-oriented;
rather, it offers suggestions on how to get the best out of whatever
destination you choose. I recall that, after renting our apartment in Buenos
Aires, he and his companion Ruth Radetzky found plenty to see and do in muggy
subtropical Posadas
- a city that foreign air travelers rarely even see and most overlanders visit
only long enough to change buses for Iguazú
falls. To quote a phrase from the classic People’s
Guide to Mexico, “Wherever you go, there you are.”
That said, it The Practical Nomad offers informed tips that,
given Edward’s background as a professional travel agent and right-to-travel
activist, are far more knowledgeable that the scuttlebutt rumors I used to get
from other travelers whose paths I crossed. They are light years better than
any crowd-sourced information on the Internet, even though I might quibble with
some of his details. I agree with him, for instance, that the countryside of
Argentina, Chile and Uruguay is best seen by rental car, but would emphasize that
Chilean roads, particularly, are fast reaching North American standards –
especially given the fact that Chile is investing in its infrastructure, even
as the United States is letting its highways go to pot(holes).
The Practical Nomad, though, focuses on topics such as
getting time off for foreign travel and financing it, flights and other
transportation options, the bureaucracy of documents, visas and border
crossings, and especially tech suggestions. Edward also writes the informative blog of the same name, The
Practical Nomad, which stresses of freedom-of-travel issues but also
provides perspective on topics such as The Amazing Race “reality” TV show.
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