BackpackMojo Blog

Gabriel ! Nice of you to give us a bit of your time. Could you quickly present yourself (Age, time you have traveled…)

I'll be turning 40 this April, which will also mean 22 years of traveling around the world! (Well, not the whole time.) My first trip was to Europe for a summer, which I started the day after I turned 18. Although really my traveling spirit kicked in earlier than that. My aunt took me on an awesome two-week road trip all around the western United States when I was eight years old, in which we saw a National Park or two every day. It was also around that time that I first started hitchhiking. My family lived about a mile up a dirt road, but the school bus dropped us off at the bottom of it. Eventually I got tired of always walking the whole way home, so I started hitching rides from neighbors

As far as international travel goes, I've been on six different trips ranging from 3-6 months each, and I've been to 20 countries so far. Adding it all up, I've spent about 27 months traveling abroad, 15 months of which was spent in India (on four different trips). So, I've got a lot of countries left to see still!

I have seen that you travel a lot by bike, is it your favorite way of transportation in a country? If not which one is it?

It's definitely an excellent way to go, biking is one of my favorite activities. At the moment I don't have a car, so I get around the island of Kauai, Hawaii where I'm currently living mostly by bike. Really the only international biking trip I've done was to Greece, and I wasn't covering large distances for the most part. I did just a bit of biking on the mainland (the Pelion peninsula, which is amazing), but most of my three months there was spent on the islands, of which I visited 12 during that trip (I also visited Greece on my trip to Europe when I was 18).

So, I would bike to the port for the island, take my bike on the ferry (there's no extra charge for the bicycle), hop off at whichever island I was going to next and bike with all my stuff to wherever I planned to stay (a combination of campgrounds, free camping on beaches and the occasional cheap room). Then, I did day trips during the day, exploring the island by bike. This is really the ultimate way to explore the Greek islands, as you save tons of money and can get around easily (at least on the smaller ones). You can explore dirt roads and smaller paths that cars couldn't go down, and then just lock the bike up if it gets too rugged for the bike and start hiking. Great way to find secluded beaches, or get to the highest point of an island for great views. I'd definitely love to do it again!

Share with us your worst food experience abroad.

That's an easy one. When I was in India in 2006, I was taking an hours-long bus ride to another town where I was catching a train. I started to get hungry on the bus. In India, whenever you pull into a local bus station, people come up to the bus windows trying to sell various things. This is great, because it means you can get drinks and snacks, etc., without having to get off the bus and risk losing your seat, or the bus driving off without you since it's generally not clear how long you'll be there.

So, there I was getting hungry but this time no one happened to be coming up to the bus windows with any good snacks (i.e. peanuts, popcorn, assorted bags of chips, samosas, etc.). Finally someone was selling a little round fruit called “chikoo”, with a thin skin and pink fruit inside. I'm not sure if I'd had it before. I bought several of them and proceeded to gobble them all up. They were nice and sweet, with a peculiar taste.

Well, that sweetness and peculiar taste came back to haunt me. If I'd eaten them after a good meal of samosa or something else savory then I probably would have been fine. But sweet fruit in an empty stomach on an Indian bus, and a bumpy road soon revealed itself to be a very bad idea. I started to feel sick to my stomach pretty quickly.

I made it to the next city where I had a train to catch a few hours later. I thought a good solution to my queasy stomach would be to now have the proper meal that I should have eaten on the bus. So I went to a restaurant and had a masala dosa, which is sort of a pancake with a lump of tasty, spicy potatoes inside. And then you get two dipping sauces along with it, one of which is spicy and one that's a little bit sweet with coconut juice. I definitely recommend having one. However, not under these circumstances.

After the masala dosa I headed for the train station. I was feeling slightly better, but still things just didn't feel quite right. Everything seemed to be just sitting there, not going anywhere. I got on the train, which was an overnight sleeper train, and ended up with a top bunk in 2nd class. That's definitely the way to go if you ever travel by train in India, as the tickets are dirt cheap, but the 2nd class doesn't get overly crowded (like 3rd class, which is a whole different ball of wax). And, with the top bunk you get the advantage of having your bunk all night and all day. If you're on the 1st or 2nd bunk, then the 2nd bunk folds down into the 1st bunk during the day and so you have to sit up, along with everyone else who's down there. With the top bunk you get to sit up there above the fray, you can stretch out, read a book, meditate, etc. in your own space.

But I digress. So this time, the problem was that I ended up right near something that was pretty much blowing exhaust right in my face. And the contents of my stomach still didn't seem to be going anywhere. After an hour or two or three, I forget exactly, I finally came to the tragic realization that there was no way to deal with it other than the unpleasant way. I headed for the bathroom. I'll spare the details other than to say that it came out both ends. Oh, and also that this is something you really don't want to have to go through in a 2nd class train bathroom in India, not the cleanest of places! But hey, at least I lived to tell the tale.

At the office, we all read your travel guide about the obscure places of India. Any advice to help new backpackers discover off the beaten track destinations?

Yes, quite simply: do your research, and keep your ears open. Many of my favorite places were right there in the guidebook, but they weren't given much mention, just a page or two or even less. But they sounded intriguing and so I decided to investigate. Also, if you read about a place that sounds interesting, follow it up with some other points of view. I.e. the Lonely Planet traveler's forum on their website, or any other traveler's website, is a great resource for getting on-the-ground, personal accounts of a place. If you plug a particular destination into the search bar, then you'll most likely come up with a myriad assortment of different views on it that will make it clearer whether it's worth spending your time getting there, to find out for yourself what it's all about. It's one of the beauties of traveling, that in every country (at least the ones I've been to!) there are always places that are little visited for inexplicable reasons, as they're even more amazing, and certainly more authentic, than the more popular places.

Also, just keep your ears open while traveling. When someone mentions they just came from such-and-such place that you hadn't heard of before, ask them what they thought about it and whether it's worth going to. And if you're on a train or bus or in a taxi with a local who happens to speak English, ask them about places they would recommend going to. One of my favorite places in India is called Gangnani hot springs, way up in the Himalaya mountains. I heard about it from an Italian couple on a train, who had moved to Rishikesh, India, where I was headed to. I forget how the conversation transpired now, but somehow we ended up talking about hot springs, and they told me about this one that was a day or two by bus north of Rishikesh. I took note of it, looked it up in my guidebook, and I think it had one or two sentences simply confirming its existence. This was in January, and my reasoning was that if I was going to explore the tallest mountains in the world in winter, it would be a good idea to have some hot springs nearby to warm up in, since Indian hotels don't generally have heating in them! So I headed in that direction, taking an all-day bus ride to Uttarkashi, pretty far up in the Himalaya. From there I had to ask around a bit, but eventually figured out I could get the rest of the way by assorted shared jeep taxis. Finally I was dropped off, in the pouring down rain, at the thriving metropolis of Gangnani, which consisted of several chai stalls along a muddy road, and a few random buildings scattered along a hill.

But everything worked out, as I discovered a rickety lodge with one caretaker and no other guests right then, that was about 20 feet from the hot springs. Oh yeah, and the electricity was out at the time. I spent 5 days there (some other guests did pass through eventually) and made ample use of those hot springs several times a day (they were the perfect temperature), since my room was indeed pretty darn chilly. So, I guess the point is just to keep your ears, eyes and mind open to exploring alternate routes and places, other than the ones that you hear about the most.

What is the best beer you have ever tasted and where did you have it?

Hmmm, I'm not sure if it was necessarily the absolute best beer, but the overall most memorable experience was having a Guinness in Inverness, Scotland when I was 18. Part of the reason being that the drinking age in the U.S. is 21. Like most teenagers I'd already done my fair share of drinking anyway, but it was something new and exciting to be able to do it in a public place, plus of course the fact this was in a pub in Scotland. Also I'd been dropped off in Inverness by a couple who had picked me up the day before, let me sleep at their house for the night, and then had taken me on a nice walk along nearby Loch Ness. So it all added up to being a pretty satisfying day capped off with a good beer.

Given that every traveler gets ripped off at least once, what was your worst rip off?

I could pretty much write a book around such experiences! Let's see, was it the time I was on a road trip, visiting Seattle and our car got stolen while we were up on the Space Needle? Or the time my car got bashed in at a hiking trailhead? Or when my car got stolen while visiting family in Portland, Oregon? (There seems to be a theme here with cars, maybe that's why I ride a bike!)

But for overall bummer impact, I'd have to go with the time I was sleeping on the Pont Neuf bridge over the River Seine in Paris, and woke up in the morning and my backpack had been stolen. The good thing was the fact that this was at the very end of my 4-month trip around Europe. Due to being near the end of my trip, I was almost broke and couldn't afford a hotel room in Paris (all the hostels were booked up). And the other good thing was that I had been using my daypack as a pillow, and so it didn't get stolen. In it was my flight ticket, passport, remaining cash and other essentials. So although I was stuck without my tent, sleeping bag, spare changes of clothes, etc., at least I didn't have to deal with going to an embassy to get a new passport, etc. I had a friend in London I'd met earlier in the trip. So I got myself there and stayed with her the last few days before flying back home. Still, it was a major bummer to lose some of the things in that pack, including two rolls of film I never got to see.

If you could spend a day with anyone dead or alive who would you choose?

When it comes to alive people, I'd love to spend a day with Toni Halliday, who is the lead singer for my favorite band, Curve. And in the dead people category, I think I'd go with an Egyptian pharaoh. I'm sure that would be an experience to remember!

What would (did?) you take with you on a desert Island apart from your Backpackmojo travel guide?

If I had to choose one thing, and was being practical, I'd say a multi-tool. If I was being impractical, I'd take every album by Bob Dylan, my other favorite musical artist (and a stereo of some sort to play them on...and a solar-panel to charge it with!).

In your life of travel have you ever disliked a city or a place in particular? Why?

I'd have to say Jaipur, India. It's a major center for gem-sellers, and the hustlers there were relentless. Plus the fact it's a typically dirty, noisy, polluted, congested Indian city. I forget what else I didn't like about it, but I remember leaving it and being really glad to get out of there. But this was also during my first trip to India in 1999, so perhaps I'll have to go through it again and see if I have a different experience. Although, when it comes to India, my #1 recommendation is to not spend much time in the big cities! (I guess my India guidebook makes that clear, since I don't mention any cities in it at all.)

If you came to Paris, would you like to have a coffee with Backpackmojo’s incredible team?

I actually don't drink coffee or even black tea because I don't like caffeine. However, I'd be happy to have an herbal tea or a hot chocolate or some other tasty beverage with you guys. And it would be great to revisit Paris again, more than 20 years later, and not sleep on a bridge this time!