Bohemian Traveler

Trains are too romantic. Buses don’t stop enough. Motorcycles too fast. And forget about planes. But not walking. “Walking reminds us of who we are.” says Paul Theroux in an interview about his new book, The Tao of Travel. We feel the earth beneath our feet while walking. We are one with the weather. We need [...]

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After 56 days on the road, I’m back home again. I set off with fellow travel blogger Juno Kim of RunawayJuno.com at the end of July. She’s from Korea and had never been to the North American continent, so my goal was to show her around as best I could. I thought a road trip [...]

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Overall my Southeast Asia trip was a great success. I witnessed incredible experiences, met extraordinarily friendly people, and saw how people live life in places that are very different from where I’m from. What went well Got a good mix of seeing places, people, and experiences. Managed the marriage work and travel together well, stopping [...]

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I feel like my three months in Southeast Asia symbolically came to a close the moment I stopped a lone Cambodian school boy riding home on his bicycle and placed my camouflage trekking hat on his head. I crossed paths with him while cycling back from my second full day touring the ruins and temple [...]

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The Lack of Culture What I mean by lack of culture is the outside, in-your-face culture. If you’re a traveler it’s hard to find. Lao food, for example, is not readily available. The majority of cafes have one thing on the menu: sub-standard imitation Vietnamese noodle soup pumped up with MSG. I didn’t see any [...]

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By Stephen Bugno Before visiting Laos I had images of gliding down rivers at an impossibly  slow speed all the while enjoying both the view and necessary transportation with friendly locals. That was hardly the case. In fact, it describes only one of my four slow boat rides. The reality is, the slow boat is [...]

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This was the view out the front door of my guesthouse room along the Mekong River in southern Laos. The area is known as Si Phan Don, or 4,000 islands, and is quite popular with independent travelers. I stayed in the hamlet of Ban Khon on Don Khon Island. This is the larger island located [...]

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By Stephen Bugno Packing light is a refined art—I’ve been trying to perfect it for years. I’m almost there. The good news is the longer my trip , the less stuff I bring. On short trips I tend to over pack. I think I’ve done a good job this time. It takes a lot of [...]

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By Stephen Bugno If you’re a member of couchsurfing.org, you may already know how awesome it is. For those of you who are not, I just want to stress all the amazing experiences I have had because I’m using it. Traveling for me is an extension of real life—not some holiday I take for two [...]

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By Stephen Bugno Work and travel as a lifestyle A former coworker of mine and up-and-coming musician recently asked me how I do it. How did I work the same hours at a slightly-more-than-minimum-wage job at a Virginia wine shop for six months and got to travel for the other six months, she wondered. She [...]

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By Stephen Bugno Salento is not the type of place where you’re going to be the only Gringo in town. Don’t try and fool yourself, it is a touristy place. But it’s popular for a reason. And even if you only have a limited time in Colombia, it’s still worth the effort to make it [...]

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By Stephen Bugno Tayrona National Park, Colombia. The guidebooks hype this place as what we should expect from a tropical paradise: “Thick jungle teeming with wildlife spilling over onto golden sand beaches with pounding surf.” And for once, their description is not far off. The Footprint guide asks us to squint our eyes, add a [...]

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By Stephen Bugno I don’t know why I thought it would be a good idea to visit Death Valley in the middle of the summer. It’s eight pm and we are shirtless in our campground preparing dinner. Gilbert is cooking up some garlic scrambled eggs for dinner. We are sweating. Our mouths constantly feel dry. [...]

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By Stephen Bugno We camped the night before on BLM land up on the Devil’s Backbone Road, the original road from Boulder to Escalante, close to the last place in the continental US to be mapped. Up until 1940, the US Postal Service was still delivering mail to Boulder, Utah by mule train across the [...]

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By Stephen Bugno Leaving Winter Park on our way south we would cross the Continental Divide three times before day’s end. A few miles before Vail we exit I-70 towards Breckenridge, where we stopped at Breckenridge Brewery’s  Brew Pub to share an eight-glass sampler. Through the Hoosier Pass, we just barely descend into Alma, the [...]

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By Stephen Bugno After a big final night out in Boulder, we rolled out of town in the am twenty miles south to Golden where we picked up the keys to the condominium in Winter Park where we would be staying the next few days. Two days earlier, on the way home from Rocky Mountain [...]

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Due to the lack of public transport, we hitched the long way out to the end of North Cyprus’ remote Karpas Peninsula, a place few others make it to see. Two long-haired Italian graduate students drove us in their little rental jeep to check out the views from Apostolos Andreas Monastery, then dropped us off [...]

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Discrimination in Great Britain By Stephen Bugno Arrival at Heathrow Airport “You were borderline: fifty-fifty. I could have had you on the next plane back to the States.” The Immigration Officer explained. My wrongdoing, as stated on the Reasons for Detention and Bail Rights form given to me by the United Kingdom Immigration Service: You [...]

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