Hostels and the Traveler

On the Road

To travel is a culture in itself.

Road Junky has 144 On the Road articles. Scroll down to view.

Travel Guide Books

The evolution of the travel guide books was always going to be bad news for the planet. They’re responsible for a generation of consumer travelers who talk about ‘doing’ places ...

Around the World Travel Guide - Getting far away for a long time

Working in the real world has got you down? Feel like you’ve been at school forever? With the stresses and strains of modern society it’s easy to feel like we’re ...

How to Carry Money when Travelling

Now that you’ve worked for 6 months cleaning toilets, waiting on snotty customers who don’t tip at restaurants and creating future spinal complaints picking fruit, the last thing you want ...

The Rainbow Gatherings - Hippy Paradise

Those who think that the age of hippies has died have obviously never attended a Rainbow Gathering. Hippies, freaks, musicians, jugglers, and all kinds of weird and wonderful people ...

Travel Scams Guide

Wouldn’t it be great if love really did make the world go round? Alas the path of the righteous traveler is set with scams, cons and hustles to leave him ...

First Time Travel Guide

So you might have been away with your folks before or even been on a weekend trip to Paris but getting on the road for real is something else. To ...

Learn a New Language For Free

What do you call someone who speaks 3 languages?
Trilingual.

What do you call someone who speaks 2 languages?
Bilingual.

And what do you call someone who speaks only 1 language?
An ...

Travel Insanity

I’ve seen a lot of crazy people in my time on the road. People convinced that they were a new incarnation of Jesus Christ, King Arthur or Buddha ...

Spain Travel Hippie Village

I trekked up the stony path beside the tumbling river and the almond trees in flower accompanied me to either side. I reached the carpark where there were stationed trucks ...

The Traveler and World Injustice

I remember as a boy I once sat listening to an old traveler as he told me about the world. Whilst he knocked back beers and chain-smoked cigarettes, I hung ...

Hostels Travel Guide

Hostels are both the bane and the salvation of the budget traveller. On one hand they can be an excellent source of information; notice boards advertise what’s going on ...

Across the Andes: the Beginnings of a Long Walk

We are currently in Latacunga, and I don´t quite know where to begin summarizing the last several days. These mountains are more than incredible. For eight days, Deia ...

Theft and the Traveler

There are many dangers faced by the traveler on the road- – violence, illness, losing one’s grip on reality etc. But one of the ever present perils is that ...

The Instant Global Morning-After Self-Locator

With the release of The Hangover 2 it has become more fashionable than ever to wake up lost and hungover in a shitty hotel in a strange city (sorry Bangkok, ...

In Croatia Even the Inanimate Sea Life Hated Me (Part Two)

The first available ferry brought me to Korcula, one of the few Adriatic islands to boast a real backpackers’ hostel. I’d heard that it filled up fast, and that it ...

In Croatia Even the Inanimate Sea Life Hated Me (Part One)

For 49 weeks the world had loved me. For 49 weeks I had made my way around the world, through South, Central and North America, and then onto Europe. When ...

The Hitchhiker's Guide to Slovenia

Early the next morning we made the beds and slunk out of the hostel so that they wouldn’t charge us for the extra night. I was carrying the pizza box ...

Vegetarian India Travel

I’ve always harboured a secret respect for vegetarians. There’s something inherently distasteful about rearing an animal, nurturing it, then killing it so you can eat its flesh. I’ll freely admit ...

Goodbye Osama, Hello International Travel

Osama bin Laden is dead. One of the world’s most wanted men, the nemesis of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the architect of the September 11 attacks in New ...

Road Junky Sells Out to the Lonely Planet for Undisclosed Sum

Everyone has their price.

Since Road Junky was founded back in late 2004 we have always aimed to be the black sheep of the guidebook family, to say what other magazines ...

Searching for the Saddest Kid in Cusco (twice)

The first time we found Miguel, the saddest kid in Cusco, he was outside Cusco’s football stadium. It was game day, and hundreds of food stalls had bloomed around the ...

Travel the World One Regime at a Time

To be considered a truly wild, truly brave traveller these days, you have to be prepared to go pretty far. You could visit every country in the EU, bungee jumping ...

The Strangest Places Travelers Have Slept?

We asked a little while ago over on our facebook page what were the weirdest places travelers had put their heads down for the night and the following thread ...

Carrying Musical Instruments on the Road

Just picture it: 4 travelers meet in the dormitory of a hostel in Turkey and they all simultaneously discover that the local electric supply is incompatible with their Ipods! There ...

Sailing for Travelers

I still remember the day I got onto my first sailboat. It was a few years ago, making a small passage through the Bay of Islands, New Zealand. We ...

Christmas Sucks for Expats

One Christmas, a few years ago, I sat opposite Bobby in a bar in Rio de Janeiro and watched him slurp up his chicken – his teeth had fallen out ...

The world's worst border crossings

1. Canada
Despite its G8 status, trying to enter Canada – at least by air – can often feel like trying to cross into a tinpot African dictatorship, a ...

Airports are a Waking Nightmare

A while ago I took a whole bunch of flights from South East Asia to Europe and I spent days in planes and airports, falling asleep to surreal dreams and ...

The other side of the bars – visiting prisoners in Kathmandu

In 1992, I did a four-month overland trip, starting in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, and ending up in Kathmandu, Nepal, via Kashgar in China’s Xinjiang Province, Western Tibet, Lhasa, and the southern ...

Airlines: the best and the worst...

“Taking a plane today, regardless of the destination, amounts to being treated like shit for the duration of the flight.” (Michel Houellebecq)

Here, in no particular order, are the world’s five ...

Just how well-travelled are you?

Whether they will freely admit it or not, most people who have the travel bug will at some point have counted the number of countries they have visited. That moment ...

Forget Travel Buddies - Hit the Road Alone

One of the great things about the internet is that it’s brought travelers together; in forums and on social networks, backpackers and vagabonds can share experiences and tips, discover new ...

Travel and Languages

I think I must have picked up a survival vocabulary in about 15 languages since I started traveling. The Kurdish, the Arabic and the Korean have disappeared without trace but ...

Tripping.com - Couchsurfing Aint Seen Nothing Yet?

We recently came across www.tripping.com – a site designed for – wait for it – hospitality exchange and traveler’s networking! At first glance it might seem that they’re trying ...

Some Embarrassing Travel Stories

Naked on a Rooftop

Some years ago I was in Delhi and was pretty sure there was something living in my gut. A book on ayurveda suggested that rubbing some fennel ...

Interview with Tim Leffel of Perceptive Travel

RJ: What makes good travel writing?

Tim: That depends a lot on the media and the audience. For service writing, the object is to teach someone something: how to get a ...

A Backpack Stained With Blood, Sweat and Tears

When I first hit the road in 2007 my mum bought me a backpack. It was an unassuming little bag: utterly generic in appearance, with no special features to set ...

The XKCD Map of the Internet

Cartographers hate politics. No sooner are they done with one map then a country goes and has a revolution and changes its name, there’s a civil war dividing a country ...

Anick-Marie Bouchard Talks About Women Traveling Alone

Anick-Marie’s talk was one of the highlights of the Road Junky Film Festival and threw light on a subject which few of us knew to be so complex and engaging. ...

Interview with Florian Fischer, CouchSurfing Celebrity

Florian Fischer is one of the most prolific couch surfers and hosts in the world – just check out his profile but more than that, Florian is one of ...

New Google Translator App Eliminates Need to Talk Abroad

We all knew it was coming. The day when technology takes over and robs us of the last shreds of our remaining humanity. A leak from Google today confirmed rumours ...

The Soul of a Road Junky

When you travel for long enough, you eventually leave your past behind. It becomes another place that you might visit physically or just behind your eyelids on another bus journey ...

The Microcelebrity On the Road

Reading Joseph Campbell I learned that the difference between a hero and a celebrity is that the first lives for a cause greater than himself whereas for the latter, ...

What To Do When You Find a Bag of Money

What would happen if we found a bag full of cold, hard cash? Like Snake Plissken, we’d disappear. Hit the road for a while, hiding our cash in the gasoline ...

Every Traveler is a Video Journalist

Once upon a time the dividing line in a population was whether you could read or not. In the era of blogs, Youtube and Twitter, the relevant distinction has become ...

10 Murphy’s Laws of Travel

Variously called Murphy’s Law, Sod’s Law or just a typical day on the road, the basis premise familiar to anyone who ever hit the road is this:

Anything that can go ...

Korakor - Spread the Love!

Keveen is a French traveler in Central America who believes that love really does make the world go round and is doing his best through various projects to spread the ...

Some More Travel Scams

We love hearing from road junkies around the world, especially when they have cool stories like these ones to offer. This is from RenÃ©, a German traveler in Singapore.)

Message: Fellow ...

Volunteers Wanted to Promote Road Junky Film Festival - Also Translators!

Ever wondered how online promotion works?

You, too, can become a web 2.0 expert by helping us spread the word about our amazing travel film festival – we need to ...

10 Travel Fashion Tips

On every traveler’s list of priorities, just after avoiding getting mugged, scammed, sick, ending up broke, going insane wondering what to pack or working out where to go when the ...

Couchsurfing Can Also Be A Bit Sad

We wrote an editorial a while back praising the internet miracle of couchsurfing.com, a site that proved the spirit of hospitality and the milk of human kindness weren’t a ...

Travel Writing and the Art of Telling Stories of Diversity

Watching Chimamanda Adichie talk about the danger of the single story reminded me why we founded Road Junky. The age of political correctness serving up paper-thin stories of travel ...

Road Junky On Facebook

Road Junky is run by travelers who would rather write poetry on desert dunes in moonlight or smoke a chillum in the Himalayas than sit in front of a computer ...