Before the Eat Pray Love craze swept the nation (and this blog) there was Tales of a Female Nomad. In her moving travelogue of her 15 year journey across numerous continents and countries Rita Gelmans captures the dream of many armchair and part-time travelers as she wanders aimlessly without a plan through cultures and societies very different from her own. A children’s writer who earns enough to get by while on her journey by publishing new books and living frugally, her ability to make things happen is truly inspiring.

A confessed bibliophile, I always read multiple books at once. Reading Tales while I was reading Eat, Pray, Love was an interesting experience. I picked up both books when I was in Claremont, CA recently, and commenced to read them both immediately – one in the mornings and one at night. I was afraid I would get them confused during the reading, but found their voices so different that it never was a problem. These two writers, very different in style, age and locations (except Bali) address something universal that comes from traveling. Namely, the discovery of self. And this got me to thinking, isn’t that why we travel in the first place?

Even for those of us who are part time or armchair travelers, travel breaks us out of the daily grind, the ruts our wheels are stuck in, the practices which have become so easy to loose consciousness in. When we travel our routines are necessarily broken, our habits are forced to change and our lives are re-arranged. This is, I think, why we treasure travel and stories of travel so much. During those times when the ruts get so deep that we can’t break out of them, great travel writing gives us glimpses of the sunlight and reminds us that there is another way to live. Those chances we do get to break out of the everyday are when we can break into our very selves. I firmly believe that you never know who you are unless you’ve experienced cultures very different from your own, cultures that challenge the things you assume. This is both the gift and challenge of travel.

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Reprinted from http://blogs.bootsnall.com/Kango+Suz/ with permission.
One of the companies I work for, Kango.com, is about to go beta! Ok, so this might not be particularly exciting for you, but it is for me and for all of the team in the Palo Alto offices. Lucky buggers, out there in the beautiful Northern California weather. I stomp my snow-covered boots lovingly at them.

Ok, so back to the big announcement, Kango is going beta. Which is very, very, very exciting. Why? Because it is going to change the way you think about searching for your next trip. Kango is like a cross between Mahalo (the human-powered search engine), TripAdvisor (the travel review site), and StumbleUpon (the social networking tool). Actually, it isn’t ‘like’ that cross, it IS that cross. Their enormous database has pulled information from the far corners of the net to create a huge conglomeration of travel information and reviews. Then, like a big Sunday for us travel geeks, they top it off with the cherry of unusual search terms! Instead of having to search for what you want by location, you can search by ‘feeling.’

What does this mean for you and me? Ok, well for me it means my company is going live, which is very rewarding and exciting. For you though dear reader (and for me as well) it means you can now search for ‘family vacations or ‘romantic things to do in Los Angeles’ and come up with more than just Disney travel and The Rumba Room. No longer do you have to know what exactly it is that you want to do before you begin to search, you can search to get ideas of what to do.

It’s not beta yet but as the song goes “soon and very soon” it will be. In the meantime you can still use it! You just have to sign up for the pre-beta release. Tell ‘em Kango Suz sent you, they’ll be happy to have your feed back on their new site. See you round!

Read the full press release here.

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Are you reading with us?  There are still two weeks left to jump on the band wagon and read our book of the month, Eat Pray Love before we spill the beans and ask the questions about the book.  Make sure you’re reading with us!

Me?  I’m about half way through.  I was going to go to the bookstore and buy the book after I posted the announcement but the next day at my Aunt’s house she handed it to me.  Make that officially 5 people who told me “YOU JUST HAVE TO READ THIS!”  I wonder if they are all secretly hoping that since I’m around the same age as the writer of the book I’ll have a break down like her and go off traveling the world so they can live vicariously.

Hummm… perhaps it’s not a half-bad idea.  

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