GoMad Nomad contributers share their top travel destinations for 2010

Photos by Tata Nadaryan

An American in Peru It’s amazing how much a single interaction, or the successful completion of a task can make my day and contribute to my happiness here.  Conversely, a failed task or misunderstanding can be devastating.  Who knew I was so sensitive? Here’s an example. This weekend, Charlie bought me a cell phone (I [...]

An American in Peru It’s hard to believe I’ve been here 20 days already.  I feel like I’m only beginning to adjust to life in Peru.  I’ve had a lot of comments and email responses to my blog and wanted to answer some commonly asked questions… On Married Life… Married life rocks.  I’m really enjoying [...]

I know I shouldn’t complain about business travel to Africa. It’s always a rewarding experience. But it’s also an exhausting one. For nearly three weeks I had been waking up at 6, cleaning out my work emails, and leaving the hotel by 7. We would be on the road all day seeing projects. With the sun long set, I would return to my hotel room, eat an overpriced and usually mediocre hotel meal, and crash. So when I suddenly found myself with a free afternoon in Burundi, I was thrilled.

An American in Peru If I wrote “Peruvian men are a bunch of scum-buckets,”  that would be stereotyping.  So I will phrase it this way:  I have encountered a lot of Peruvian men who are complete, disrespectful slime-balls.  I briefly touched this topic in the previous blog, and I would like to delve a little [...]

An American in Peru Being a housewife here in Peru is easy when you have a maid who comes once a week.  This is a social norm among the upper and middle class.  She cleans the house, does the laundry, irons, can run errands with me (or on her own), and as I was told [...]

Meet the 73-year-old, mountain-trekking, pilgrimage-making, French-born, Swiss citizen, Lydie Carbou. She’s a retired traveler. Not retired from traveling. But retired. And can’t stop traveling. It’s hard for Lydie Carbou to stay in her 7th floor apartment in Geneva for very long without setting off on another adventure. I caught up with her for an e-mail interview after recently returning from a trip to Nepal.

I was never really interested in France or French, preferring to study a less bourgeois language like Spanish in school. Not that my language prejudice mattered, because like most Americans I never mastered a second language at all. Sure, I later got by hitchhiking in Cuba with my rudimentary Spanish, but I didn’t speak the language. And then I married a guy from France…

  Avery grew up on a small farm in north Florida where she cultivated a love for barefooted living. As an adult she took this lifestyle to a remote island on the edge of Everglades National Park owning and operating an organic cafe and gallery. The seasonal business allowed for summer travel, ultimately leading to [...]

Six months ago, I was living in Seattle with roommates, working as an occupational therapist for a home health company. Now, I am a housewife in Lima, Peru. I am delighted to finally be living with my husband who has been working as a geotechnical engineer at a mine here for the past year. We were married in October, but he has continued to work his schedule of three weeks in Peru to 10 days in the States since). When Charlie’s company offered to move us to Lima, we were thrilled as we both love international travel and getting to know other places and people.

The sun rises slowly but the noises of morning come suddenly. I’m used to hearing roosters alarm sleepers that morning has risen, but here a large community (or so it sounds) is quacking and twittering “get up, get up.” As I stand in the yard a parade of animals make their debut, one at a time. A pig is scoffing his nose in the dirt and in seconds a chicken and her chicks come shuffling through in a line. They flip leaves over to see if a worm or bean lays underneath. A dog who has seen better days wanders through looking for any resemblance of breakfast. It dawns on me, poor dogs, that they don’t have it as easy as the other animals because they don’t eat grass or leaves.

Photo Slide Show of the Ukraine by Tata Nadaryan

A photo slide show of the Via de la Plata, a route of the Camino de Santiago in Spain. Photos by Stephen Bugno.

A photo slide show video of the Camino Frances, a route of the Camino de Santiago in Spain