Brendan: What is Brendan up to Now? After 'retiring' from my original Dream Job of Travel Tour Guide (aka adult babysitting), I ended up as a freelance travel and copywriter, doing my best to be paid--somehow, anyhow--while being on the road. In 2009, I managed to stay put long enough to get married to my travel partner-cum-girlfriend Melanie, and have since tried to keep the travel bug limited to only a few months a year, while maintaining a parallel career in real estate...which, considering we spent almost 3 months of our married life on the road already (including two months in Indonesia and Japan), is going swimmingly well!
Former PlanetEye GlobalNomad applies for Ultimate Travel Job!
Just when you thought that writing for PlanetEye was already the best job in the world…
The Irish wedding and honeymoon-focused travel agency runawaybrideandgroom.com has sponsored a competition to win the “Ultimate Job In Ireland (and Probably the World)”: globetrot the world for six months and get paid to test out some of the most romantic wedding and honeymoon destinations in the world. Also sponsored by the Irish Times, the grueling job involves testing luxury resorts and reporting...
April 6th, 2010 | On The Road | Read More
A.F.R.s: Turkish Archaeology 101
Actually, I have no intention of even trying to sum up Turkey’s long and bewildering history—I’ll leave that to a long plane or bus ride and a good guidebook.
However, as pictures are worth a thousand words, I’ll give you a visual smattering of the kinds of sites you’re likely to see in the country.
Turkey is literally strewn with ruins going back millennia. So spoiled are they for history in Turkey that artefacts other countries would put in a museum might end up being used for a new building,...
March 4th, 2009 | Global Nomad | Read More
The Disappearing Nomad
A quick apology from the Global Nomad for disappearing there for a bit–the World Tour is coming to an end a little more abruptly than planned, for reasons that will become clear in a few posts!
In the meantime I have some catching up to do with a few more Turkey posts, and then it’s on to a few gems in Greece.
Globally Yours,
The Global Nomad
No tags for this post.
February 28th, 2009 | Global Nomad | Read More
Whirling Dervish Central: Konya, Turkey
When I was about 12 years old, my mother brought me to a poetry recital. Normally, this would have been a fairly painful experience for a 12-year-old, but this one was different: it was a recitation—accompanied by Indian tabla and tambura to set a meditative mood—by none other than author Robert Bly and Coleman Barks, translator to one of the world’s greatest poets, Rumi.
Aside from introducing me to the beauty of Indian music, the evening changed my life by exposing me to Rumi (properly Mowlana...
February 16th, 2009 | Global Nomad | Read More
Scrubbed, Pummeled and Sweaty: the Hammam Turkish Bath Experience
A mandatory Turkish experience in Turkey is to partake in one of the oldest rituals in Turkey, the Turkish bath.
Found all over the Middle East, the Hammam experience isn’t exactly your gentle spa experience. First of all, your aesthetician most often resembles a hairy heavyweight wrestler. But I’m getting ahead of myself here.
Most high-end hotels in Turkey tend to have their own toned-down version, but to experience the real thing, you need to swallow your uneasiness (and modesty) and head...
February 10th, 2009 | Global Nomad | Read More
Kaş: Turkey’s Mediterranean Playground
The stylish, whitewashed beach towns of the Greek Islands are world-renowned as playgrounds of the tanned über-hip Euro-riche, but somewhat less-well known (to North Americans at least) are the sun-baked shores of Turkey’s Mediterranean coast. Equally as hip and just as starkly beautiful as their Greek cousins, towns like Antalya and Bodrum attract masses of sun worshipping revelers, where they tan in uncomfortable speedos and lounge at cushion-strewn bars to Turkish electro-chillout soundtracks.
One...
February 5th, 2009 | Global Nomad | Read More
Natural Turkish Air Conditioning
In the heat of the summer, Turkey can reach unbearable temperatures. And since the scorching weather isn’t anything new, Middle Eastern architects have been using ingenious ways to stay cool for centuries.
From tall walls and small windows to maximize shade, to wind towers that suck hot air out with the desert wind and qanat (underground aqueducts) to cool air from below, I’ve encountered many different approaches to “natural air-con.”
The most ubiquitous though, has to be the use of water...
January 30th, 2009 | Global Nomad | Read More
The Chimaera: the video
Creepy…
Tags: Chimaera, nature, turkey
January 26th, 2009 | Global Nomad | Read More
The Chimaera
One of the strangest natural phenomena I’ve ever seen is Turkey’s bizarre Chimaera, a hillside pockmarked with flames coming out of the ground. Seriously.
No, this is not some volcanic phenomenon we’re talking about, but a clean flame, as if there were some huge barbecue running under the hill. It’s not just one or two, either, but dozens of them, all over the hill, snaking out to crevices in the rocks. Seriously weird.
Gas leaks out of the earth here and somehow ignites spontaneously—if...
January 24th, 2009 | Global Nomad | Read More
Cappadocia Ballooning
Easily the best way to see the otherworldly landscape of Cappadocia is from a balloon—and ballooning here is now so popular as to have become de rigueur.
There are several operations that run ballooning trips, everything from a quick up-and-down packed into a basket with a big crowd to four hours in a smaller basket where everyone has a view.
We chose the Rolls Royce of balloon trips (hey, when’s the next time we’ll be in Cappadocia?), with Kapadokya Balloons, an outfit run by Lars-Eric Möre...
January 19th, 2009 | Global Nomad | Read More
Cappadocia: the world’s most famous troglodytes
One of the most famous landscapes in the world, Cappadocia (pronounced like the Turkish spelling, Kapadokya) is a huge, arid Dr. Seuss-meets-bad-acid-trip region of fairy chimneys, knife-sharp gullies and scalloped hillsides. The result of millennia of rain and wind eroding what was once a lava-covered plain, Cappadocia is world-renowned not only for its mind-boggling geography, but also for its human inhabitants: generations have taken advantage of the soft tuff by making their homes in caves dug...
January 14th, 2009 | Global Nomad | Read More
Great Salt Flats of the world: Tuz Gölü
Massive Lake Tuz, the largest salt lake in Turkey, is one of those eerie places where you wonder if you’re still on earth. For much of the year the “lake” (technically an endorheic basin ) is actually a flat, arid, blinding white plain of salt; water flows in, but since there is no river draining them, the only way water is lost is through evaporation or seepage. Walking out into one of these salt lakes is a bizarre experience—even up close they look like they should be covered with snow...
January 9th, 2009 | Global Nomad | Read More
Destination: Turkey
Yes, that’s right we have bid Latin America adieu and managed to speed halfway around the world to the dividing point between Asia and Europe: Turkey. At once familiar and exotic, for many westerners Turkey seems contradictory (for Melanie, whose exposure to Islam was of a more conservative variety, the liberal attitudes were constantly a surprise)—it is at once west and East…and happily coexisting. Most of the time.
Meeting place of the Eastern and Western worlds, Turkey has always been a...
January 4th, 2009 | Global Nomad | Read More
Galapagos Wildlife vol.6: for the birds
A few of my favourite bird shots from the Galapagos. Enjoy!
Wishing you all a happy new year
Brendan
the Global Nomad
Tags: birds, booby, Ecuador, finch, flamingo, Galapagos, hawk, heron, nature, pelican, tropicbird
December 31st, 2008 | Global Nomad | Read More
Galapagos Wildlife vol.5: Albatross action
The waved albatross is a Galapagos resident not everyone gets to see the way we did–it breeds only in one place in the world: Española island; it’s only around during mating and hatching season, after which it flies famously unstoppingly to a single spot off the coast of Peru.
Tags: albatross, Ecuador, Galapagos, nature
December 27th, 2008 | Global Nomad | Read More
Galapagos Wildlife vol. 4: frigatebirds
During mating season, male frigatebirds have a bright red sac under their chin that they inflate to attract a mate. Although I’ve seen many of these birds all over Latin America, I’ve never seen them with the sac blown up like this…and certainly not nearly this close!
Tags: Ecuador, frigatebird, Galapagos, nature
December 24th, 2008 | Global Nomad | Read More
Galapagos Wildlife vol. 4: penguins!
One of the great thrills of snorkeling in the Galapagos is the chance to swim with penguins (and sharks and sea lions, etc). My girlfriend is not the most comfortable swimmer but having a whole school of penguins whiz by us as we flippered along like a series of darts made it all worth it.
The Galapagos penguin is the only penguin to live on the equator and can survive due to the cool temperatures resulting from the Humboldt Current and cool waters from great depths brought up by the Cromwell Current....
December 21st, 2008 | Global Nomad | Read More
Galapagos Wildlife vol. 3: Marine Iguanas
Long ago I remember seeing a National Geographic film with footage of iguanas swimming underwater and I almost couldn’t believe it. Who knew I’d be photographing them years later?
Existing only in the Galapagos and nowhere else, Marine Iguanas are one of those bizarre adaptions that made Darwin start wondering how all this weirdness could have come about. One of the strangest things about these guys is that there is an almost constant rain of squirting coming from them that I didn’t...
December 17th, 2008 | Global Nomad | Read More
The big booby video
check it out
Tags: blue-footed booby, boobies, Ecuador, Galapagos, nature
December 14th, 2008 | Global Nomad | Read More
Galapagos Wildlife vol. 2: Boobies!
…and who doesn’t love boobies?
Vying for the title of most characteristic animal in the Galapagos is the glorious booby (boy, I wish I was making that up). There are many different types of booby, but the most famous—for reasons that will follow—is the blue-footed booby.
Aside from their namesake bright blue feet, blue-footed boobies perform one of the Galapagos’ most famed rituals: a mating dance in which a male ‘walks’ by raising each foot deliberately, so as to show off his...
December 13th, 2008 | Global Nomad | Read More
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