Travel off the beaten track and experience

As a Leave No Trace trainer, I’m pretty passionate about teaching people the importance of keeping the wilderness wild and minimizing our impact. While I’m pretty well-versed in the theory behind leaving no trace while hiking with a dog, I don’t own a dog. So I didn’t feel qualified to write a post about how to Leave No Trace with dogs. But you know who is qualified? My friend Amanda. (In fact she’s super-qualified!) She and her dog Frank have hiked and backpacked more miles together than any other human-dog duo I’ve ever heard of. They’ve summited over 50 peaks in BC’s Coast Mountains and last year they thru-hiked the Pacific Crest Trail southbound. (Amanda’s thru-hiker trail name is “Naps”). You can follow along with their adventures on Amanda’s Instagram, @tidelinetoalpine and website, tidelinetoalpine.com. She put together a great overview of the 7 principles of Leave No Trace as they relate to dogs. Plus she a...

After leaving Siem Reap I decided to break up the impending grueling 12-hour bus ride and head to Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, about 6 hours to the southeast. It’s likely secure to say most people do not know substantially if something about the city, and the first issue they wonder is how to pronounce it (for the record: drop the 1st “ph” in Phnom and the “h” in Penh and you have got it). Far from the current, turbulent history of the city, Phnom Penh is now a bustling capital, a great deal like Saigon, with construction going on all more than the city, and a burgeoning middle and upper class emerging. Brimming with NGO workers, rural migrants, and, yes, Cambodian yuppies, Phnom Penh is a surprisingly lively, vibrant city. The city’s most famous landmark is the Royal Palace, positioned close to the Mekong River near the center of the city. Built in 1866, the complicated is house to the King of Cambodia, and regardless of its relative newness (at least compared to Angkor), t...

I’m sitting on the bottom bunk of my hostel in El Calafate, household of the famous Perito Moreno Glacier, and exhausted from a days journey by bus from El Bolson, a tiny hippie-town nestled in the Andes. What was exhausting was not the 26 hours spent in a barely reclinable seat, but that there had been no stops to stretch my legs nor meals given to ease hunger. Travelers beware of Taqsa, the only bus organization that runs from Bariloche through El Bolson to El Calafate without taking the infamous grueling, gravel road and “ultimate experience” that is Ruta 40. Personally, Taqsa did not offer a significantly far more comfortable ride. Nonetheless, despite what I was told, El Calafate is all the desolate beauty that a single conjures when considering of Patagonia. Desert, mountains, a modest lake in which flamingos nibble, and of course glaciers, which we are saving for tomorrow. I wish I could write far more, but the sheer power needed to handle this French keyboard (my new travel...

What occurred to day 4 you ask? Well, I actually did practically nothing of note, or at least absolutely nothing that was so important that I wanted to weblog about it. I went to this giant outdoors mall with a couple men and women from Germany where we shopped for footwear in about a hundred diverse little shoe stores, each and every selling the precisely similar footwear. Then the rest of the day was spent arranging travel arrangements, choosing up a handful of souvenirs, and ultimately watching “In The Name Of The Father” back at the hotel with an Australian, an Englishman, and an Irishman. We virtually had the entire British Commonwealth covered. Wonderful movie although, I wasn’t expecting to come all the way to Colombia to find out a new-discovered interest in the Northern Ireland conflict. Anyways, immediately after almost absolutely everyone I met and spoke with (both in English and in broken Spanish) I took their tips and headed to Medellin. It genuinely is ...