the 9 to 5 alternative

My first stop is Lusaka, Zambia. It’s a tame city, ever-sunny, sleepy in the evenings, amicable, the kind of place I’d be interested to shack up—did I phrase that right?—for a couple of years, the kind of place one could enjoy a nice, lazy meal. You could get some serious reading done here.

Greetings from the road, folks. I spent the first four nights of this survey in Lusaka, Zambia. It’s a calm city, easy to get around and an overall solid start to my African excursion.

In my last post, I had mentioned a new writing gig with Flightster. The quote above is from my most recent article over there, “From Zambia, With Love.”

Billboards

Zambia, like many other African countries, has oodles of billboards. Some of them are funny, like the one below. FYI: Zambezi Airlines has been on the EU blacklist since December 2009.

Mobile Phones

Walking off the plane, down onto the tarmac and through the long tunnel before immigration, I’m bombarded with advertisements. Zain and MTN, the two largest telecommunications operators in Zambia, hug the walls with their large, bright ads.

Throughout my stay in Lusaka, driving around and walking through its centralized shopping complexes, I see Zain and MTN, head-to-head, vying for consumers’ attention. It’s a familiar sight in the developing world, where telecommunications is a budding industry, highly opportunistic for bigwig investors.

Serbo-Croatian Lunch

My final afternoon finds me relaxed, lounging at a road-side café, book in hand, waiting on an ice cold Coke. Upon sitting down, I soon realized that I had snagged the last open table, as two gentlemen come up to me and ask if they can join.

We start chatting, and I learn that one of them is from Croatia, the other Serbia, and that the two of them had both traveled independently to Zambia nearly two decades ago. “Only Africa can bring our two countries together like this,” one of them told me.

We discussed dual-identities, various engineering and non-profit initiatives in Zambia and what kinds of changes they had both seen in the country over the last several years. It was a fantastic conversation, healthy, engaging, just the kind of experience I needed as a proper send-off. As I mentioned in my Australia write-up, these are the kind of random, chance encounters I live for on the road.

Cheers to the many more to come.

Greetings from Lusaka, Zambia. After mysteriously disappearing for 24 hours, my luggage has finally arrived, putting me in high spirits. It’s always nice to put on a fresh pair of undies. Sigh.

I’ll be in Lusaka until Friday. I then head to Harare, Zimbabwe for the next leg of my survey. More on that later.

Postcards

When I was younger, my grandfather would send the family postcards from his travels. I’d like to think that these notes-from-afar helped inspire my jet-setting proclivities, so, to honor his memory (and to engage future vagabonds) I’d like to carry on the tradition.

Want a postcard? Comment below with a fun fact about world travel, and I’ll send you an email asking for your address. I’m not sure what kind of response this will generate, but let’s limit this first exercise to 15 responses.

Flightster

I want to introduce you to Flightster, a new travel site that I’m writing for. They plan to launch a flight booking engine this fall, but in the meantime have asked me and three other writers to populate the site with content. So far I’ve enjoyed everyone’s posts and am happy to be part of such a fun and eclectic crowd.

Also, if you’re interested, Flightster is hiring a new writer to join the team. Want to apply? Check out Srinivas Rao’s post, “How to Become the Next Paid Writer For the Flightster Blog” for details.

Spanking New Look

In other news, I’ve been working out the kinks for a new look and approach here. I’ve enjoyed writing haphazardly about travel, business and lifestyle design, but it’s time to refocus my online presence. Here’s a sneak peak:

That’s it for now. Short and sweet, with more to report on Lusaka in the near future. For now, it’s back to war with the common cold. Nose..must..stop..running.

[photo credit to tpmorrow]

Australia! Land of kangaroos and aborigines and didgeridoos. A shell-shaped opera house. Pristine beaches, fish and chips, box jellyfish, breathtaking harbors and boomerangs. Oh, and we can’t forget the Outback! Australia’s own heart of darkness, a ghastly blank, wild, expansive and arid interior. The kind of rugged terrain only a well-rigged 4×4 should tackle. I hear there’s a large rock out there.

Australia is one of those countries that would take years to properly explore. As an American, exposed in my youth to the likes of Steve Irwin and Crocodile Dundee, I had my own idea of what Australia would be like. It wasn’t until I picked up Bill Bryson’s In a Sunburned Country that I realized how ridiculous/remarkable/under-appreciated a country Australia was. Did you know that:

• the aborgines have the oldest continuously maintained culture on Earth? They inhabited Australia at least 40,000 years before the first Europeans arrived.
• of the world’s ten most poisonous snakes, all are Australian?
• five of its creatures (the box jellyfish, blue-ringed octopus, paralysis tick and stonefish) are the most lethal of their kind in the world?
• no other nation lost more men in WWI as a proportion of population?
• Australia boasts the longest straight stretch of railroad track in the world, 297 miles without a hint of deviation?

I was exhilarated to visit such a fascinating country.

Perth

My first stop was Perth, capital of the Western Australia state and one of the world’s biggest exporters of minerals. Gold, nickel, alumina, iron ore, mineral sands, coal, diamonds–you name it. Also, due to its severely southwest geography, Perth is one of the most remote major cities in the world, over one thousand miles from Adelaide, the nearest notable city.

Perth is a city of suburbs. Fremantle and Cottesloe, Subiaco and Northbridge. This photograph was taken in the CBD (central business district). An entire outer-wall of potted herbs? Very cool.

While I didn’t have much free time in Perth, I snuck away one afternoon to Cottesloe, a western suburb famed for its pristine beaches, laid back atmosphere and fish and chips. On a Tuesday afternoon, there wasn’t much to see, but from what I’ve heard, Sundays are quite lively. I spent an hour or so on the beach, reading, listening to music, feasting on fish and chips like there was no tomorrow, eventually walking south to Fremantle.

Sydney

Sydney is, in a word, breathtaking. Certainly one of the world’s most impressive cities. With one third of its residents having been born in another country, Sydney is diverse in the finest sense of the word. All kinds of cuisine and people, neighborhoods and architecture. Oh, and both Darling Harbor and Circular Quay offer two of the coolest vantage points I’ve ever seen. Bill Bryson says it best:

Life cannot offer many places finer to stand at eight-thirty on a summery weekday morning than Circular Quay in Sydney. To begin with, it presents one of the world’s great views. To the right, almost painfully brilliant in the sunshine, stands the famous Opera House with its jaunty, severly angular roof. To the left, the stupendous and noble Harbour Bridge. Across the water, shiny and beckoning, is Luna Park, a Coney Island-style amusement park with a maniacally grinning head for an entrance (It’s been closed for many years, but some heroic soul keeps it spruce and gleaming.) Before you the spangly water is crowded with the harbor’s stout and old-fashioned ferries, looking for all the world as if they have been plucked from the pages of a 1940s children’s book with a title like Thomas the Tugboat, disgorging steams of tanned and lightly dressed office workers to fill the glass and concrete towers that loom behind.

Just working out the principles necessary to build the opera house roof took five years.

I spent an afternoon walking through the Royal Botanic Gardens, just east of Circular Quay. The Dragon Tree (Dracaena draco), native to the Canary Islands, was one of the more interesting trees I saw. This particular one is over 100 years old and actually fell over in May 2008, hence the protective barrier.

This shot was also taken in the Royal Botanic Garden, looking back at Sydney proper.

The aquarium, one of the largest in the world, attracts around 55% of the tourists that visit Sydney each year. While I wasn’t particularly impressed–it’s old, cramped, dim and there’s not enough emphasis on Australia’s dangerous sea life–I enjoyed the one crocodile they had on display.

A Conversation About Super Geeks

My last night in Sydney, I met up with Steve and Scott, both relatively new to Sydney (one from the U.K., the other from Melbourne). We grabbed food and drinks, listened to live music and chatted about business, academia, blogging, travel and music. It wasn’t until Scott brought up Intellectual Ventures, a conglomeration of super geeks that try to solve the world’s problems, that I realized how much fun I was having. Sure, call me a geek, but to be halfway around the world, chatting with complete strangers, quasi-inebriated with both alcohol and atmosphere–something hit me. This is what travel is about. Exploring. Meeting people. Engaging with the world around us. Growing.

Already looking forward to my next trip in a few weeks. Stay tuned.