Photo: senor codo

Where were you on Halloween night?

And what were you?

Send some snaps of you in costume by noon EST on November 1 to julie@matadornetwork.com. We’ll feature our favorite photos in a quick photo essay roundup, which will be published on Sunday afternoon. Be sure to include a caption that tells us:

-where you were;
-what you were;
-what you were doing.

Photos should be at least 600×400 pixels.

Community Connection:

Don’t miss Kate Sedgwick’s photo essay of animals in Halloween costume!

Porters of Machu Picchu, Photo by Lola Akinmade

Americans who haven’t seen the Grand Canyon or Yellowstone. Mexicans who have never been to Chichen Itza. Egyptians who’ve never cast their eyes upon the Sphinx.

It’s one thing to choose not to visit these places. It’s another entirely when your job involves ferrying travelers to the edge of these wonders but never being able to cast your own eyes upon them.

Such is the case in Peru, where porters carry 55 pound packs of travelers’ gear right to the edge–but not within viewing distance–of Machu Picchu before turning around and catching a train to Cusco to start the trek all over again. “[V]ery few porters [can] ever actually visit Machu Picchu,” wrote JoAnna Haugen, adding, “[It] hits a nerve. Global travelers can probably name countless times they’ve met local people who have never experienced the things that draw travelers to a country.”

And she wanted to do something about it… at least in Peru.

Collaborating with Julio Tello, the founder of the tour outfit Karikuy, Haugen co-founded the Karikuy-Haugen Fund, which is raising money to pay`for porters to visit Machu Picchu.

Read more about the fund and learn how you can support the project here.

Community Connection:

Headed to Machu Picchu? Matador Trips co-editor Hal Amen tells you how to visit on the cheap.

Matador managing editor Julie Schwietert eating in Oaxaca. Photos: Francisco Collazo

The Matador editorial tribe is a diverse group of folks, but if there’s one thing we share (besides our love of travel), it’s a love of food. Whether we’re sampling mole in Oaxaca, indulging in Korean tteok in Mexico City, or subjecting ourselves to a tour of the world’s worst pizzas, followed by a full day of binge eating in Berlin, we’re as alert for our next meal as we are for the next adventure.

That’s why we love to hear about other travelers’ favorite food moments.

Matador member Layne Mosler has lots of them… so many, in fact, that she documents them in close detail on her blog, Taxi Gourmet.

Mosler’s mode of travel revolves around food: wherever she goes, she hops into a taxi, asks the driver to take her to his or her favorite restaurant, and then narrates the ride, the meal, and the cultural/political/historical context of the whole experience on Taxi Gourmet.

More than a “Look at what I ate today!” post, Mosler’s writing offers a thoughtful, often funny and often poignant look at cab drivers’ lives. Her writing is so good, in fact, that she’s been featured in The Economist, The Guardian, and The Washington Post, among other international magazines and newspapers.

For the past three years, Mosler’s posts have mapped the culinary landscape of Buenos Aires, but in June of this year, Mosler returned to the US to settle down in New York… and become a cab driver herself.

You can follow her quest to secure a coveted taxi driver’s license–and her ongoing adventures at the table–at Taxi Gourmet. Taxi Gourmet also features loads of useful information for food lovers on the move, including a list of her favorite food blogs, as well as links to cabbie resources in the US and elsewhere.

Community Connection:

Headed to Asia? Check out our 5 favorite Asian food blogs before you go.
What are your favorite food and travel blogs? Share links in the comments below.

Nancy Harder

So what is Kungaroo?

According to its founder, Nancy Harder, Kungaroo is a online social network intended to help travelers who practice yoga or meditation to make connections with like-minded folks during their journeys.

She says:

“My intention for this network is that those on their respective spiritual journeys will find oneness and connection through reaching out to others in their communities and abroad. As I’ve traveled around the globe and utilized other networks like couchsurfing , I’ve often wished I could reach out to others practicing yoga or meditation.

Whether you can offer information to locals or visitors about yoga and/or meditation classes in your area, share your own practice with others by meeting up for yoga and/or meditation, share service projects in your area, or just simply connect to others on the path to enlightenment, I hope this site is of service to you.”

If Kungaroo sounds like a service that may be of use to you–or if you can provide information and support to people who may be traveling through your community– you can register for Kungaroo by visiting the site here.

Community Connection:

Are you new to meditation? Check out Nancy’s beginner’s guide to meditation retreats here.

And you can find all of Matador’s yoga articles here.

VOTING HAS NOW CLOSED.

A big thank you to everyone who submitted their photos! Be sure to be on the lookout for our future photo contests!

1. Anthony Lewis – “Exploring Torres Del Paine, Chile.”

2. Annie Nelson – “At the Devil’s Golf Course in Death Valley National Park. The ground is made up of crystals of pure salt from lakes that dried years ago. I tasted the ground, and sure enough, it tasted just like table salt.”

3. Julie Han – “Jumping over white sand dunes in Mui Ne, Vietnam.”

4. Karen Keeney – “St. Paul’s on Pitcairn Island.”

5. Matt Bigelow – “America’s greatest outdoor past time: roasting marshmallows over a river of molten lava.”

6. KWilliam Beasley – “A little silliness after hiking up from the valley floor in Yosemite.”

7. David Tai – “Preparing to enter the cold pool, Buckskin Gulch.”

8. Emmy Lenevald – “Preikestolen, Norway. 604 meters down. Vertigo.

9. Lara Silver – “Crawling through an ice tunnel while hiking the magnificent Franz Josef Glacier in New Zealand.”

10. Chelsea Raubenheimer – “Exploring the ends of the Earth!!!”

11. Vamsi Vasireddy – “What happens when your shower head is an elephant trunk? The look on our faces – priceless!!”

12. Alex Montalvo – “A joking attempt at backwards dowsing unexpectedly yields a Komodo dragon.”

13. Fabio Barbon – “That’s me walking over the waters of Barra Velha, BA , Brazil.”

14. “With storms coming in, a manatee herd heads for open water, allowing us to swim alongside them before heading down to Paul’s Reef, Florida.”

15. Alex Budak – “Exploring the sand dunes of Rajasthan, India, isolated from the rest of the world, as we watched the sunset as the golden sand in the horizon gradually faded to black.”

16. Jennifer Eden – “My boyfriend showering in the waterfall.”

17. Dacey Zelman-Fahm – “My father and I hiking across a natural land bridge in Sycamore Canyon Wilderness, Arizona.”

18. Laurin Ensslin – “Laurin conquering the Boquette Tree Trek, the real canopy tour of Panama…hope there is cold beer at the bottom!”

19. Katie Peterman – “Sandy Spit in the British Virgin Islands.”

20. Chris Tse – “Stopping to pose while hiking in Plitvice Lakes National Parks in Croatia.”

21. Kurtis Hastie – “Here’s a picture I took while myself and a few friends explore mother nature in the form of ice climing! Picture was taken at Restoule Park in Northern Ontario. Climb pictured is “The Snake”. How much more can you get in touch with mother nature than in the form of seasonal ice climbing? She creates it, we climb it.”

22. Aisha Springer – “Hiking in Great Falls, Maryland.”

23. Curtis McLeod – “We took the phrase “When in Rome…” to heart. So, when in Wales, act like mountain sheep.”

24. Krishana Clark – “The sun setting over the beach in Montego Bay Jamaica! Me on the left hand side enjoying the moment…how I miss this place!!!”

25. Mei-Ling McNamara – “A baptism of solitude in the Desert du Lampoul in Northeastern Senegal.”

Juli Huang; Photo courtesy of Juli Huang

It’s happened to lots of Matador members: you get together with some friends, have a couple drinks, talk about travel, and before you know it, you’ve dreamed up your next adventure.

For Matador intern Juli Huang, it happened at a birthday party last month. After telling some people about her volunteer work with a community health clinic in Berkeley, California and her passion for advocating health care for everyone, Juli learned about Global Medical Brigades, an organization that brings together medical professionals, students, lay health care workers, and volunteers to provide health care and health education to communities in Latin America that lack health care access, resources, and information.

After learning more about the organization, Juli signed on for a week-long volunteer trip in Honduras that will take place in January 2010.

The trip is an extension of the work she’s been doing in Berkeley. As she says, “the provision of health care as a basic human service independent of privilege or race or condition or history is extremely important to me. And though I am not interested in embarking down the path to becoming a medical professional, helping to provide people with the information to exercise more agency over their own health is something I feel strongly about.”

As part of the medical brigade, Juli will help with patient intake, triage, pharmacy, and education. Depending on the amount of money the organization raises prior to the trip, she may also be involved in public health education workshops in Honduras, focusing in particular on getting word out about how hand-washing and sanitized water can cut down on the number diarrheal deaths and disease transmission. If you’d like to make a donation to support the brigade’s work, click here.

We look forward to her first-person dispatches from Honduras.

Community Connection:

Want to learn more about volunteer opportunities abroad? Check out Matador’s organizational member listings here.

David got started on his research early…. Photo courtesy of David Page.

Each year for the past 25 years, the Society of American Travel Writers has sponsored a travel journalism contest that has become the premier competition in this field. The Lowell Thomas Awards, named for a radio and print journalist who made his media reputation as a globe-trotting correspondent, are considered to be travel writing’s equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize.

And Matador’s own David Page earned one this year.

The Lowell Thomas Awards are given in 25 different categories; David took the bronze in the Guidebook category for his Great Destinations: Yosemite & the Southern Sierra Nevada. Explaining why they selected David’s book for an award, the judges wrote:

“David T. Page presents a thorough, entertaining guide to the region. It contains an unusually detailed section on the natural history of the area, sure to appeal to Page’s outdoor-minded readers. It’s a joy to read.”

The Lowell Thomas Award isn’t the first honor David has received for this guidebook; it also won the distinction of the Best Guidebook of 2008 from the Outdoor Writers’ Association of California.

If you’d like to read David’s book for yourself, here it is:

And be sure to check out the articles David has published on Matador, including:

How to Travel to Socotra Island, Yemen

Powderquest Patagonia: Trip Report from Devin McDonell

10 Fundamentals When Packing for a Fun Family Ski Trip

Adventures in Weaning: Cold Turkey in the Great American Desert

Community Connection:

Would you like to see your name on the list of Lowell Thomas Award winners? Join Matador U’s travel writing school to learn how to author guidebooks…and much more.

Matador Life editor, Leigh Shulman. Photo courtesy of Leigh Shulman

It was right around this time last year that Matador launched the blog Matador Life.

The idea behind the creation of the Life blog was that it could be the platform for articles and conversations about everything that happens between trips. As we wrote when we introduced Life:

Everyone comes home from their travels eventually, and the way we return can be the most important part of all.

Matador Life is about people in their hometowns, how they represent where they’re from, and what we can learn from each of the unique places we inhabit.

Here you’ll find articles ranging from financial advice and tips on being more productive at work to portraits of people’s hometowns and profiles of individuals strongly rooted in their communities.

Since then, the Matador community has grown and become even more diverse. Our members range in age from 15 to 70+. They’re parents and partners, single or divorced. New graduates, drop outs. Professionals, retirees. Artsy fartsy, business minded. Expats, experienced travelers, people planning their first journeys into the world, and soldiers looking forward to finishing up their deployments.

What they share is the eventual need to come home and make a meaningful life where they thrive by bringing their travels into daily life. And what they need is someone who’s where they are… and who can publish writing that speaks to their experiences.

The`Matador team is confident that we’ve finally found that person.

We’re happy to announce that Leigh Shulman has joined the Matador editorial team. Her first post is up on Life today… say hi and share your ideas about the types of articles you’d like to read on Life.

Community Connection:

Want to know who’s who at Matador? Meet the team here.
Want to work for Matador? Our job listings are posted here.

Susan Marjanovic, winner of Matador’s Twitter tuition contest.

The winner was Susan Marjanovic, an artist, photographer, writer, audiophile and healer. We interviewed Susan to learn more about her…not surprisingly, she’s totally living the Matador vision.

Matador: Tell us a bit about you: where you’re from.

I kind of feel like I’m from all over. I consider San Francisco ‘home’ these days, but before that I lived in NYC for about a decade. I was born and raised at the Jersey shore, and my parents are from the old Yugoslavia (Serbia and Croatia), so I grew up in a European/Socialist sort of household surrounded by beach culture environment, stuck between two major cities.

When I was younger, I kind of felt like an outcast because of all those crazy juxtapositions but when I got older I was able to realize how lucky I was to have been exposed to so many different cultures all at once and it really shaped me in ways I am eternally grateful for.

Matador:… why you travel…

There just isn’t any other experience that comes close to it. I can’t really imagine life without traveling. I took my first overseas flight to the Adriatic coast & Serbia when I was 4 and was instantly hooked.

Photo: snowcrash

My parents had one of those huge fancy world atlases and I used to spend hours poring over it, planning all the places I would go when I got older and could afford it.

We used to get National Geographic too, which fueled even more daydreams (I loved the free maps that came with it) of exploring cultures all over the world. I was especially interested in tribal cultures, where people seemed to live more in harmony with each other and the earth, and where ritual, dance, and body decoration played a huge role.

Matador: …what you do…

I’m in pursuit of ultimate freedom always.

I’m also an artist, photographer, writer, audiophile, and healer.

I am interested in so many things, so I’ve never had one official career. The idea of doing the same thing over and over for days on end makes me cringe.

I studied photography at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, did some commercial work for record labels and magazines, had art shows, helped run an indie hip-hop label in NYC, worked at Current TV watching documentaries about the world for a brief stint, and then temped for a year because it gave me freedom, not just physically but mentally and emotionally, which were even more important to me at the time.

I tried going back to work at a landscape architect’s office for a bit. Temping doesn’t really provide financial stability, and I really love plants, so I thought I could learn something new and sort out my finances at the same time. But I found the environment to be really stifling and knew my freedom and happiness were worth way more than a steady paycheck so I began trying to sort out ‘How do I get paid to travel around the world doing what I love – creating art, making beautiful images, spending time in nature, meeting amazing people, and helping others?’

I had a health crisis. As I began to learn how to heal through a steady diet of raw/living foods, herbs, spiritual work, and hours spent in the wilderness hiking, I ended up stepping into my power as a healer, which really clicked everything together for me….

All the synchronicities in my life began to increase. I knew I was on the right path and didn’t need to focus only on one thing – what I needed was to find a way to make them all work together.

I signed up for a raw foods nutrition class and was praying for everything to get taken to the next level when I got fired from my job. It was a huge blessing. I began blogging about raw foods, health, life transformation and began consulting with clients one-on-one to help sort out their health issues. I finally had the time to spend my energy doing things I loved, so I began volunteering more than ever and immersing myself in [my passions]: food, permaculture, food foraging, the environment, and healthy living.

I knew travel was an integral part of the puzzle, so I applied for a paid WWOOF sponsorship to study permaculture in Bulgaria for six months and got it. Everything was coming together perfectly.

Matador: What are you up to these days?

I planned to spend some time with my family back east for a month or two before heading to Bulgaria and decided to take a cross country road trip to get there. Just as I was finalizing my trip, the WWOOF Bulgaria program told me that because I wasn’t an EU citizen, they weren’t going to be able to get my paperwork processed in time to make the funding deadline.

I trust that everything happens for a reason, so decided to just roll with it. I turned my cross country adventure into a bigger trip with no real end date. I left San Francisco in February and embarked on an experiment to trust that if we’re being of service, we are always being provided for. In my case this meant educating people about raw food and inspiring them to take their health back into their own hands, volunteering on organic farms and gardens, and exploring the power of community everywhere I went.

Photo: Ian Muttoo

It’s been amazing so far. I’ve met some of the most positive, inspiring, beautiful people who are changing the world. I’ve also been taking part in a lot of intense North American Indian ceremonies and sweat lodges and deepening on my spiritual path. It’s been beautiful and empowering experiencing how everything in your life shifts when you begin to trust the universe, listen to your intuition, and live in alignment with your soul.

My life feels so magical. I don’t really want this trip to end, but I think it’s time to head back to SF to work on a few projects and work my magic on a few other areas.

About a year ago I decided to start a raw, organic, medicinal chocolate company because I wanted to build an eco-conscious business of my own that would allow me to do good things in the world and allow me to travel and fund my art. On this trip I’ve had so many chocolate and herb syncs, so I’m itching to get work on that and start working with an incubator program to get that off the ground.

I’m also applying to school to become an herbalist and continue to work with plant medicines all over the world, especially South America and the Himalayas.

I also have a few big art projects I want to work on, especially one I am excited about that harnesses the power of community and human connection. It’s a roving art gallery in a truck that travels to cities all over the country. I’m really into alternative economies, so instead of purchasing the art, people will barter their own art for what’s already on the walls. The new art show will travel to the next city, and the barter process will continue.

I really like things that are constantly changing and evolving and want to be able to connect art communities all over the world and have everyone be a part of something bigger. I want to try to also capture the whole process digitally in an online museum of sorts so that people can know where their art ended up & keep in contact with whoever has it. I’d really love it if it spurred a few collaborations as well.

Matador: How did you learn about Matador?

I can’t remember exactly, but I know I found it while researching how to be a location independent digital nomad. I think it might have been through a link from Soultravelers3 on twitter.

Matador: You won Matador’s Twitter contest for free tuition… have you ever won anything before?

A few things. I won a small photography scholarship fund in high school. My freshman year of college, SVA had a photo show that was judged by one of the curators of MoMA and I placed…I think my prize was a gift certificate for photo supplies. Oh, and last year I won a Japan guidebook from Lonely Planet.

Matador: What are you hoping to get out of the Matador U program?

I want to connect with other people who are living a nomadic lifestyle and get high off the journey. I feel like I need to learn the economy of words. Several people who read my blog have been writing me to suggest I turn this current adventure into a book, so it would be fantastic to learn how to do that and get published.

I’m also in the process of revamping my photography site, elasticfate.com, so I’d like to learn how to morph it into a monetized travel site that will help me bring in another stream of income from doing what I love and inspire others to do the same.

Matador: What’s your favorite kind of travel writing or travel writer?

The kind that has the power to transport you fully to a place and moment in time without having to rely on crazy partying and outlandish tales to keep you riveted, though those can be entertaining in their own way. I really like travel writing that gets inside the local culture and teaches me something new and inspires me grow in some way.

Community Connection:

Want to learn more about Matador U? You can do that here. To read more about raw food and spiritual healing, check out senior editor David Miller’s review of Sofia Brandon’s book, The Adventure Cookbook, published on Matador Goods earlier this week.

Mongolian girl, Photo by Matador Trips co-editor, Carlo Alcos

But admittedly, photographers have gotten short shrift in our three years of existence.

That’s all about to change.

Matador Trips editors Hal Amen and Carlo Alcos have already taken the lead in highlighting Matador members’ photography by publishing stunning photo essays from Iceland, Brazil, and Papua New Guinea, to name just a few. Other Matador editors have followed their lead, featuring photo essays on Matador Sports and on Matador Change.

We’ll have some other exciting news to share with photographers over the next few weeks and months, but in the meantime, why not add your travel photos to Matador’s Flickr pool?

If you already have a Flickr account, all you need to do is join the group by following this link and clicking “Join This Group.” Then, you can add photos from your own photostream to the Matador pool, sharing your talent and your travels with the rest of us. The photos you add will carry the same license you’ve selected for them in your own photostream. Leave your photos licensed for Creative Commons and commercial use, and you may just see your work featured in a Matador article!

Interested in having your photography considered for a photo essay? E-mail me at julie@matadornetwork.com and I’ll direct your query to the appropriate editor.

Community Connection:

Would you like to WIN a beautiful photograph taken by professional travel photographer Peter Guttman? Check out our Twitter contest– details here.