Blog of a Modern Nomad Welcome to Jordan The Jordanians, like most Arabs, are known for their hospitality. On the street people call out, “You are welcome to Jordan.” You’ll hear the same from those in the tourist industry, although it’s much less sincere. From them it’s more like, “You are welcome to spend your money [...]

Photos by Stephen Bugno

By Stephen Bugno Blog of a Modern Nomad The next day I rode the slow, winding topo train to the French border town, Hendaye, where I caught a short ride out to the on-ramp of the divided highway. After about 25 minutes standing with my thumb up, I was picked up by a guy heading [...]

They told me the gunfire only rings out at night. But this morning, after sunrise, I woke up to loud clashes across town in the Al Ein refugee camp and the upheaval continued until 11am. Then we checked the internet for the story: Ma’an News reported that one Israeli soldier and an 18-year-old Palestinian youth were killed.

One of the oddest relics of the breakup of the Soviet Union is the Transdniester Moldovan Republic, known locally as Pridnistrovia. As part of the ethnic gerrymandering in the Soviet Union, Moscow added a Russian and Ukrainian populated slice of land on the eastern bank of the Dniester River to the original Moldovan Soviet Republic. This was part of a larger policy of diluting ethnic concentrations in all of the republics to weaken any indigenous nationalism.

On the morning of the 21st, I left the Atlantic for the interior of Alentejo. Leaving Sines and changing buses in Setubal, I arrived in Evora at about 2pm, and had a bit of a problem finding affordable accommodation. My main reason for visiting Evora was to see the Chapel of Bones, a church entirely [...]

Hundreds of kilometers through the flattest, most desolate landscape I’ve seen, we rode south from Mersa Matrouh, the last city on the Mediterranean coast. This was the final stage of a nine-hour bus ride from Alexandria to the Siwa Oasis. The remote oasis is a depression that stretches 82 x 28 km and contains 310,000 [...]

I got a budget flight on the German carrier TUIFly from Cairo to Berlin for $60 US total. I was very impressed with the quality and service and would fly with them again. The first thing I noticed after arriving in Berlin were the electric signs at the airport bus-stop which told we when the [...]

“Amsterdam is the greatest city in the world.” With such a recommendation we knew we couldn’t go wrong. We felt we had to break up the trip from Paris to Berlin by stopping in Amsterdam for a couple nights. Our drivers on the way up all had great things to say about the city, they [...]

Liverpool played a major part in the African slave trade, serving as one of the angles in the triangle. Tropical goods such as sugar, indigo, and cotton would arrive in Liverpool and much of its 18th century prosperity was a result of the slave trade. Liverpool has been designated a 2008 European capital of culture. [...]

Gomad Nomad’s European correspondent Gilbert Carlson has crossed the continent countless times, usually with his thumb up. From Syria to Norway to Morocco and all the places in between, he blogs on Gomad Nomad’s Follow Gilbert and resides in Paris when not on the road. Follow Gilbert Travel Blog Gilbert’s posts on Gomad Nomad: The [...]

We hitched into Sarajevo in separate groups after splitting up in Tirana. Nathan and I had enjoyed the oddest succession of rides and a night in a sixteenth century monastery in the mountains of Montenegro while Aby and Jamie had slept on a bloodstained floor in a dodgy apartment in Durres, the Albanian seaside resort. [...]

Jett Thomason works for the U.S. government managing small agricultural development projects in Africa. A former Peace Corps volunteer in Uzbekistan, he has worked in Afghanistan and Iraq and traveled extensively in Latin America and the former Soviet Union. In his current job, Jett copes with responsibility and limited time for indulging wanderlust by writing [...]

We’ve all been there. The crowded hostels of Europe. The well-beaten path along the Turkish coast. Khao San Road or Jalan Jaksa’s traveler’s ghettos. You’re getting tired of spending so much money to be so far away from home only to fritter away much of your time drinking and talking your next travel move with other western backpackers…