Jason and Jennifer

aspiringnomad

your eye on the world...

Quarter of a million hits and counting!

@aspiringnomads

Visited Countries Map


Since leaving the UK and hitting the road!











Travel Blog Posts


aspiringnomad icon
aspiringnomad
May 4th 2013

You've just been robbed of all your money and credit cards, still six hours’ travel from the city you fly out from in three days, without the means to pay the bus fare, the outstanding hotel bill, or even the airport departure tax. This poses a problem at the best of times. Add to that the fact it just so happens to be freaking Thanksgiving in your bank’s country of residence, 8,000 miles away, and you’re in a spot of bother. So here's a spoiler: my third trip the Philippines ended almost as badly as it began. The bit in the middle wasn’t short on events either... In the beginning… Singapore’s urban transport system is clean and efficient, as you would expect, so we sought to exploit this by cutting our arrival at the airport very ... read more



aspiringnomad icon
aspiringnomad
January 27th 2013

The guy you’re sharing a drink with at the bar is smoking a cigarette complaining about how smoky it is. How passive smoke is not only ghastly, but that it can create very real long-term health problems for those who breathe it, including cancer. “They’re killing everyone in here with their bloody smoking,” he blasts. As he takes another drag on his cigarette he derides the chain smoker over in the corner, the group of ladies at the bar who light up together as one of them passes round a packet for the others to share. Then there is the cigar smoker, who creates twice the cloud without even inhaling. He says he should give up himself, but somehow his smoking isn’t as harmful to him or others… perhaps because he smokes lights, or that he ... read more



aspiringnomad icon
aspiringnomad
January 8th 2013

I can’t remember whether I was coming or going, or where indeed that somewhere might have been. I’m not even sure if this particular conversation occurred before or after The Lord of the Rings had cast its spells over us all. I do remember I was stood on an Underground platform somewhere beneath the streets of London, with a backpack slung over my shoulder when a man in a suit made eye contact, approached, and proceeded to talk to me. Having lived in London for the first twenty years of my life I was fully conditioned to know that this type of behavior isn’t customary, so it came as no surprise when fellow passengers abruptly stopped what they weren’t really doing, and stared. It was the international backpackers’ frat-code which had enabled this breach of the ... read more



Guilty Pleasures

Published: July 3rd 2012Oceania » French Polynesia » Moorea
aspiringnomad icon
aspiringnomad
July 2nd 2012

To die a backpacker death allows you to exit your body, to float up and see yourself from above, from the outside, to look down on what you have become from afar. This new perspective allows you to evaluate what you have become, what you have learned and where you wish to go. New perspectives are why I began my journey all those years ago. Location: Opunohu Bay, Moorea, French Polynesia. Time: Sunrise. Weather: Fine. Speed: Cruising. Mood: Elation. I’m at the bow of this huge ship some ten stories from the ocean beneath, as it glides into this outlandishly exotic harbor (see panorama above). I don’t feel it at the time, but as I write it now, it seems like the finale to some cheesy chick flick adventure. The scene dwarfs me, the ship and ... read more



aspiringnomad icon
aspiringnomad
June 4th 2012

In all my life I’ve never looked at a landscape with my own eyes and thought it looked photoshopped; the colors a little too saturated a little too vibrant, rendering it too good to be true. I never would have believed it possible before I laid eyes on Kalalau Valley during the golden hour. I had first seen it in photographs and it was love at first sight, hovering at the top of my to-do list for the past few years, and now here I was. Those photographs I had seen in books and on the internet had drawn me here to one of the best views on Earth. But it wasn’t as simple as that; much of the research had said that with Kauai being one of the wettest places on earth, the valley would ... read more



aspiringnomad icon
aspiringnomad
May 21st 2012

All that fresh air must have had some weird homeopathic affect on our AC Unit because the minute we departed Yosemite National Park it all but lost its mojo. Even though we would be selling the car within a month, we only seriously pondered the option of living without AC for about five minutes before we were once again beholden to civilizations accesses and had it repaired; meaning we were able to retain the essence of Yosemite’s breeze whilst charging though the scorching heat of southern California. Jennifer took it to a mechanic in Merced who topped it up with Freon™, which for those of you who aren’t in the business, or nerdy enough to have researched it, is the long time brand name of something called chlorofluorocarbon (CFC). Meanwhile, whilst this flagrant act of wanton ... read more



aspiringnomad icon
aspiringnomad
May 12th 2012

The towering grandeur of these majestic Giants provides a living relic from a prehistoric age. Their immense girth soars up into the sky as a striking symbol of longevity and strength. Some of these trees were alive when Jesus walked the water, once dominating an area of some two-million acres of the Californian coast, and before the last Ice Age pruned them back they covered almost the entire northern hemisphere of Planet Earth. Today they survive in parks created by the very species that brought them to the brink of extinction. Knee-jerk: We should save the Giants and restore these forests to their original state, right? Crescent City is the first town we came to heading south into Northern California. I’ve long known of this place because a certain anarcho-primitivist, Derrick Jensen, lives there. I had ... read more



aspiringnomad icon
aspiringnomad
April 12th 2012

I’d like to offer an opinion about Seattle. Only problem is I am at a loss to do so. A few months before embarking on this trip I had the opportunity to attend a conference there. I rejected this out of hand since it was February, which meant it was cold where I was, and doubtless be cold, and wet, in Seattle. Anyway, one of my student comrades did go, and beforehand he and another quasi-intellectual-beer-drinking-archaeologist type brainstormed what we thought Seattle was renowned for. We came up with the big needle thing, but then we thought, they have one of those in Calgary and Toronto and any number of cities. It must be famous for something other than that… - Grunge maybe? We drew a blank. “Good Coffee,” my wife suggested, although she’d only been ... read more



aspiringnomad icon
aspiringnomad
March 28th 2012

I once was a wee lad who used to go fishing on the weekend with his mates. As I would sit on the riverbank eagerly casting my bait in anticipation of what lurked beneath, my eyes would be drawn to the shadow of an overhanging branch on the far bank, where the river ran tantalizingly dark and deep. That is where the monster surely lay, undisturbed and uncaught, and that is where my bait, and I, by proxy, needed to be. When the urge took possession, I would walk downriver to just past the riffles and wade chest-deep through the water and fight my way up the far bank through thickets and nettles until I stood excitedly within rod’s reach of that very spot. In hindsight, the monsters I caught there may have looked the same, ... read more



aspiringnomad icon
aspiringnomad
November 9th 2011

Sarah: “They say they have an intact culture, but they have volleyball, toothpaste, plumbing and I saw a guy with an Abercrombie and Fitch pullover.” Zoe: “Yeah, the guide has a Lacoste T-shirt!” Tony: “No culture is completely untouched.” Sarah: “…oh yeah, I know; it was alright though.” Indigenous people who fail to live up to the tourists’ expectations of authenticity run the risk of being labeled illegitimate and faux. The construct that equates indigenous authenticity with lack of Western goods lives on in contemporary public attitudes and was emphasized in this conversation between three tourists, as we drove back from a tour having just visited the local museum. Here we see Sarah insinuating dishonesty, by highlighting obvious cultural in-authenticities. She implies the Saraguro are fakes; their culture cannot be “intact” despite what... read more






Tot: 1.093s; Tpl: 0.018s; cc: 17; qc: 71; dbt: 0.0788s; 1; s:apollo w:www (50.28.60.10); sld: 2; ; mem: 7mb