The Cheesiest Travel Photo Contest: Part 2
The Cheesiest Travel Photo Contest is back and your embarrassingly touristic photo could win you $150 cash, an 8GB iPod nano, or a $25 Amazon.com gift card. Send me your cheesiest picture by Sunday, December 13th 1700 GMT to win.
You can be creative and the only requirements are that your face must be visible, just you are in the picture, and it’s got to be clear where in the world the picture was taken.
I’ll begin posting the entries on Monday, December 14th and the prizes will be determined by a reader poll on December 21.
The Contest Rules
- Email me your pictures to anil(@)foxnomad.com and please make sure to add the ‘photo contest’ somewhere in the subject line. I’ll also need your name (or something to call you), a 1 line caption, and a link to your website or blog if you have one.
- Pictures must be original and yours. If you entered the last contest you can enter again, just use a new photo.
- The deadline to enter is Sunday, December 13th, 1700 GMT (12pm US Eastern time).
- The iPod nano will be an Apple-certified refurbished one. I buy all of my Apple products this way, including the laptop I’m writing on now.
- Entering the contest means you are giving me permission to use your photo in other posts and promotions on foXnoMad and my other travel blogs.
I will announce the winners on Wednesday December 30th, 2009 and deliver the prizes by January 15th, 2010.
Why Part 2?
There were so many people who emailed me after the last contest that said they wished they had entered or were too nervous to send in a cheesy picture I decided to give them another shot. I really want to see you at your best (or worst!) so pull out your dorky travel pictures. We all have them hidden in our digital cameras, put yours to good use and good luck!
The Hidden Underbelly Of Traveler Debt
It’s lurking out there, the aspect of financing your travels many travelers don’t talk about. Debt. Many travelers are funding their journey using debt in some form and racking up hefty bills to keep their trips going. Debt is the short path to traveling and the simplest way to get there is by credit card. It’s much more prevalent than you think and if you’re considering traveling in the long term you’ll do yourself a favor by avoiding the dark (or red) side.
The Easy Path
Credit essentially reduces the amount of time you have to wait to buy most things, including airline tickets. Traveling now in the long or short term is not worth paying off debt later. You can avoid the underbelly of debt by first off assessing your own financial situation and then doing something most travelers are good at – minimize.
- Overcome debt by hacking away the inessential.
Reducing
Many people who want to travel or follow a vagabond lifestyle are good at reducing and saving…at first. The more you cut back and save, the increased temptation you have to spend on other things. You’re saving now so why not buy a few tickets to Europe and just pay yourself back? Often you don’t end up paying yourself back and will still have a wonderful trip at that.
That’s where the troubles can begin.
More Travel Less Saving
As your travels increase the more you want to keep the momentum going and maintain the sense of freedom and exhilaration traveling can bring. The problem becomes almost a cycle, except that the debt actually keeps you grounded and makes it virtually impossible to leave the things that may tie you down. Funding your travels with more and more debt also can’t continue indefinitely.
First Thing’s First
Save for each of your trips before you take them so you don’t have to rely on plastic to pay for any part of them (you can’t payoff in time). Get real and add up the numbers, what are your total credit card balances?
- Don’t finance your travels with credit. Attack the credit card debts you have and knock them off, then you can work on your simple travel budget.
- Turn your skills into money, Elance is a great resource to look for freelancing projects.
- Learn some of the travel secret ways to save when you do travel.
- Try the free online tool BillShrink to efficiently hack away at those credit card payments.
- You can pay off $50,000 in debt with a 20K salary in 10 steps and 5 years.
Is It Really So Bad?
Having debt isn’t a necessarily bad thing, it only becomes troublesome when every time you travel the total amount increases and you take your next trip before whittling it down. Dumb Little Man has a good set of ways to maximize credit card reward programs and Bankaholic has a good set of tools to compare various rewards programs, interest rates, and more.
But Life Is Short
There is the argument that life is short and with the future unknown, getting into a little bit of debt to see Thailand fox example, is a good trade. It seems as though younger travelers subscribe to this line of thinking more than middle-aged and older people. Take a look at your average life expectancy and consider that we live in the safest time in human history. Chances are you’ll live long enough to pay off your credit card balances.
Why The Traveler Debt Cycle Won’t Be Going Away
Human beings are poor assessors of risk, one of the reason why things like hotel terrorism plans are a waste of time. People in debt will still take trips because they find “a great deal” (there are always great deals somewhere and deals come back on everything) and will spend because they perceive they are saving.
The Taboo of Traveler Debt
I suspect there is much less saving going on among travelers than it seems or who at least use plastic as much as the general population (which varies quite a bit around the world). Debt is a big issue, the elephant in the room that isn’t talked about very much. Much of travel writing focuses on saving or getting a good deal – but what about if you’re already a few grand deep in credit card bills?
Do You Use Credit Cards To Finance Your Travels?
- Yes, but I pay them off at the end of every month (33%, 6 Votes)
- Nope, I don't use credit cards at all (22%, 4 Votes)
- I use credit cards for some travel but never carry a balance (22%, 4 Votes)
- Credit cards come in handy sometimes and my balance is manageable but not zero (17%, 3 Votes)
- Yes, and I've got some debt to worry about (6%, 1 Votes)
Total Voters: 18
Loading ...[photos by: iandavid, alancleaver_2000, MENE TEKEL]
My Guest Post On Learning To Love American Culture In New York City
December 3, 2009 by Anil P.
Filed under Guest Post
I’ve always been interested in human culture and behavior, which is probably why I got (one of) my college degrees in anthropology. So it was especially fun to write learning to American culture in New York City for The Brooklyn Nomad. I thought a good old New York post would fit well with Andrew Hickey’s site and I hope that you’ll make your way over there to check it out.
Andrew has recently been running a series of guest posts on his blog each week and you can read some of the others from Heather D’Amico, Sarah V. (Wandering Off) and Sarah Van Auken (Volunteer Global).
[photo by: meironke]
Can You Really See The Whole World In A Lifetime?
Ask people who are enthusiastic about travel the places they’d like to see and you’ll often hear city after city only for the person to realize, “I want to go everywhere!” After having a similar conversation like this recently I began to wonder, is it humanly possible to see the entire world in a single lifetime?
What Is Seeing The World?
In this rather unscientific approach, let’s define “the entire world” as all of the cities with a population of 500,000 or more. That leaves us with approximately 1,000 cities. Let us also add a quarter of that for smaller cities that you might want to happen upon and another 250 places that aren’t cities all together (i.e. Grand Canyon). So, for the purposes of this little mind experiment, we’ve got a world that comprises 1,500 places to see.
How Long Are We Staying In Each Place?
There is a lot of debate on how long you need to be somewhere to “really” see a place. I think a week is a good average time to become familiar with a city (especially the smaller ones) and plan excursions outside of town. Due to travel time, I’m going to add 1 day of travel between each city. That equates to 8 days (7 per place and 1 day of traveling) for each destination in the world you’ll be visiting.
The Length of Time For The Entire Trip
In order to see 1,500 places and stay a week at each plus the added days for travel to and from each destination it would take 12,000 days, which is 1,714 weeks or 32.9 years. If a traveling lifetime starts at age 20 and goes through 80 you can see the whole world with quite a few years to spare. Now if you include all of the towns in the world with populations 100,000 and over that’s 3,200 destinations. Using the same traveling criteria it would take you 3,657.14 weeks or 70.3 years to see it all.
A Thought Experiment
This is all theoretical however and assumes an infinite budget, no health issues, and non-stop traveling to see as much as possible in a lifetime. In reality these numbers are probably very optimistic and would only be met if you were actively seeking to beat a record. You now however have a better idea of how long and possible (or not) it might be to “see it all” although I don’t think it will stop any of you from trying.
As far as how much the total trip would cost, well, that’s a much more difficult calculation I won’t even attempt.
[photos by: JasonRogersFotographie, sean dreillinger]
