When we rehashed what happened after experiencing an attempted robbery in Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay, the two of us realized just how differently we perceived the same set of events. Rather than try to meld it into one story, we’ve created another edition of our She Said, She Said series. We’ll let Jess start.

Jess said:

Of all the lessons I have learned in the past three years,  learning to trust my gut sits right at the top. The problem is all the second-guessing that happens just after that sharp pang of a gut feeling happens.

On our first night in Montevideo, the street Dani and I were walking down had become increasingly dark and uninhabited, but we were just a few blocks from our posada, in the heart of the Ciudad Vieja area of the capital. What could go wrong?

After ‘the incident’, when we compared stories, it turned out that Dani and I both had a bad feeling at the exact same moment on the street. About to turn right onto the street of the hotel, a group of three boys, one on a bike and two just standing around, stood huddled up on the corner and immediately I felt vulnerable, aware of how empty the street was, and these three were just too stereotypical – hoodies, baggy pants, BMX bike. It was because they fit the idea of a hoodlum so well that I convinced myself they wouldn’t do a thing. After all, we’ve been in all sorts of shady situations and almost nothing has ever happened to us.

Until that night, that is. We turned the corner, our backs now to the boys and with just one and a half blocks to go, I turned my head to make sure we weren’t being followed. In that moment, one of the boys was right behind us, reaching for Dani’s backpack, which she had securely on both shoulders. He yanked so hard that he pulled her down to the ground; she landed right on her back on the top of the backpack, making it impossible for him to grab it. Then, Dani started screaming bloody murder. Scared, frustrated and honestly quite pissed off at having to deal with this obviously amateur robbery attempt, I too started screaming, just screaming. Startled, he turned to run and any fear I had turned into anger. I ran after him, chasing him down the street where his other two, less bold, friends had been waiting for him.

The ‘crime’ scene

‘Hijo de puta!’ I screamed after him, repeatedly, running down the street. Son of a bitch, asshole, and any other Spanish swear word I’ve ever used came flooding out of my mouth. After two eternity filled minutes, lights in upstairs apartments flipped on, and local residents padded barefoot downstairs to see what all the commotion was about. I screamed that they tried to rob us, that I had seen their faces and knew what they looked like. I screamed and yelled like a crazy lady. Then I turned to look at Dani who was crying and staring at me, shocked. Jess, I am scared. I just want to go back to our place now, please?

It was hearing the whimper in her voice that I realized she had not reacted the same way, and that I had left her, in the street, having just had someone pull her down to the ground. I felt terrible, and I still don’t know what came over me. But the way Dani tells the story now, I feature nicely as a bit of a hero, so I’ll take that over feeling like a crazy lady any day!

Dani said:

We have been traveling for nearly three years now and feel incredibly lucky to have avoided major incidents or mishaps so far. The worst that has happened was a woman on a chicken bus in Guatemala who attempted to slice Jess’ bag open with a knife – Jess realized what was going on before the woman could get anything – and of course when we fell hard for a scam in Bangkok- our egos are still bruised from this.

The scam taught us to keep our defenses up and stay vigilant, but now sometimes we are extra paranoid, such as when we see a group of teenagers and make them out to be big, bad robbers. Time has taught us that this paranoia is often completely off the mark.

That’s why, on our way back to our guesthouse from dinner in Montevideo when three boys started to walk behind us as we turned the corner into our street, I tried to talk down the feeling that they would try to rob us. I said to myself, ‘Dani, not everyone is after you, don’t be so paranoid all the time’.

I honestly felt guilty for presuming the worst in people, when the next thing I knew, someone was trying to rip my backpack from my back, pulling so hard on it that I fell to the ground. I started screaming uncontrollably. I was imagining knives or worse, a steel wire rope around my neck – though we had possibly been watching way too much Dexter at that point.

The attacker must have let go when I started to scream, but I couldn’t be sure. There I was, paralyzed with fear on the ground, and I see Jess yelling after them. Somehow they were already far away, and running further by the minute. I can’t believe how tough Jess is, while I am cowardly sitting on the floor, she is driving these thieves back.

My heart beat like crazy in my chest and I still couldn’t believe that had actually happened, even though when I saw the boys, I felt that they would rob us. Luckily, my backpack survived, my dSLR camera and my second lens were inside, undamaged, and we didn’t even have to hand over our long-expired debit card we carry around just for possible cases of being mugged.

Ciudad Vieja, Montevideo

All I wanted was to get back to the guest house. I felt sick to my stomach and was shaking uncontrollably. This could have ended so much worse, I was thinking, and I didn’t want to ruin our ‘good fortune’. Later in the posada, one of the co-op owners tells Jess how lucky we were. “North of the border in Brazil,” she warned, “people get stabbed or shot for backpacks everyday.” Hearing that made us happy to be in Uruguay, of course, but for the next few days we didn’t leave after dark. Ciudad Vieja is a charming old part of town during the day, but even then I was too worried about taking out my camera unless Jess acted like my bodyguard for each picture I would try to snap.

The reality:

Is Montevideo unsafe? Not entirely, but increasingly so. Uruguay is a small country that has traditionally relied heavily on both tourism and business from neighboring Argentina. The 2001 economic crash there hit Uruguay hard, and things are slipping back into a serious recession yet again. InternationalMan.com, a website based in Uruguay, put it best: ‘When Argentina sneezes, Uruguay catches a cold’.

The truth is we had always pictured getting an apartment there for a month or two, and if you keep your eyes peeled for Dani’s Montevideo photo essay later this week, you’ll see the beauty that had always attracted us to the idea of an extended stay here.

However, now we might only recommend a few days in a nice hotel and then moving on to the quieter parts of the country, both on the coast in places like Punta del Diablo or Punta del Este, the popular Colonia del Sacramento just across the river from Buenos Aires, or head inland to experience the estancias and gaucho culture of rural Uruguay. What we wouldn’t recommend is running after thieves, no matter how deluded you are at the time to think you are tough! Nothing in your bag is worth getting hurt for, or worse!

Wondering about travel safety in other countries? You might like our posts Travel in Mexico, safe or not? and Travel in Honduras, safe or not?.

She said, She said: Perspectives on an attempted robbery in Montevideo is a post from: GlobetrotterGirls.com

On Sesssion 4 of the Break Free podcast, Jess talked to Nicky Nole, a Yale graduate who broke free from the corporate world in 2009 and founded not one but two businesses. Bear Native, her marketing and cultural consultancy, brings her all over the world, especially Asia, to work with major clients such as Toyota to find out what makes their customers tick using guerrilla style cultural tactics, while her smaller company, Holistic Health, sees her using her skills as a certified nutritionist and Feng Shui master in order to help people around the world live their best life.

Based in Singapore but looking to move her business full time back to the U.S., Nicky will be in Ghana volunteering for two weeks when this podcast first airs! She doesn’t quit! As the quintessential GlobetrotterGirl, we know you’re going to love this latest edition of the Break Free podcast.

1. Bear Native

2. Holistic Health at Nickynole.com

3. Live and Work in Singapore

4. What is Vinyasa Yoga

5. What is Feng Shui

Break Free Podcast 004: How Nicky Nole runs two businesses & travels the world before the age of 30 is a post from: GlobetrotterGirls.com

35 days. That’s how long it took Dani and I to make our way through Chile’s Lake District and pass back and forth through Argentine and Chilean Patagonia to arrive in Ushuaia, the southernmost city in the world.

We crossed the Andes four times, stood on giant glaciers, saw penguins, guanacos, emus, ñandus, crossed the Straight of Magellan and hitchhiked across Tierra del Fuego.

Sure we could have flown here from anywhere, joining the thousands of cruisers and other international tourists at the airport, but arriving to the 60,000 inhabitant city could never have felt as good as it did to go the long way down.

After a few minutes in solitude watching thousands of birds glide by under the imposingly low gray clouds, I joined the other 20 passengers, including Dani, down below inside the warm cabin to learn about the adventurers who had come and ‘conquered’ various spots along the coast over the centuries. Sure, we were being served tea and cookies on board and were never going to be seafaring journey women, but it still felt mystical to be connected even in this way to the globetrotting explorers of the past with only 1,000 kilometers of water separating us from Antarctica. In fact, we were closer there than Buenos Aires, 3,000 km to the north.

Ushuaia was also of particular interest as the spot where the first same-sex marriage in all of Latin America took place on 29 December 2009, which paved the way for nationwide legalization in Argentina just six months later.

The proximity to Antarctica makes Ushuaia the jumping off point for Antarctic cruises, but while there are possible last minute deals, these trips still cost $5,000 and up (and up, and up) per person. Plus, arriving on The Ice involves sailing through the infamous Drake Passage, some of the roughest seas in the world (watch a video here) in order to spend a week in some of the coldest weather on Earth. Ushuaia was already freezing cold for the two of us summer chasers, and while several stores have warm clothes to rent out to the cruisers, we were almost ready to rent a few things ourselves and it was 6 C / 42F during our stay.

After the fast-paced trip southward to get here, we opted to relax for a few days rather than add a 5^th and freezing cold continent to the list. There is plenty to entertain everyone for a few days. Ushuaia is a popular ski destination for South Americans during the winter months, hiking to Martial Glacier in Tierra Del Fuego National Park is also popular, but pictures we saw made it seem as though it paled in comparison to our trips to Perito Moreno Glacier or Glaciar Grande. The park is just 12km west of Ushuaia, however, and supposed to have great hiking trails with beautiful bay and mountain views. Our blogging buddy Alexandra was much more active then were in Ushuaia and wrote about her hikes in the Tierra Del Fuego National Park and to Laguna Esmeralda.

We decided that we wanted to see more of the wildlife that is indigenous to this part of the world, like penguins, seals, orcas and local birds, which is how we ended up on the boat to tour the Beagle Channel.

Choosing the tours seemed fairly arbitrary, as a number of huts right outside the port offer a variety of tours at similar prices. Shop around a bit as some include trips to see penguins, others take passengers out to the even more isolated H Island. Some tours have catamarans, others motorboats. We went with Patagonia Adventures (ARS300/~US$56 for a 4-hour trip incl. coffee and snacks).

The scenery here was intense and rough, empty islands previously populated by indigenous populations who rubbed sea lion and whale blubber on their skin year round to stay warm. The boat stopped at various points to admire sea lion colonies and hundreds of cormorants, and a scenic hike across a deserted island reminded us of northern Scotland.

Make no mistake, however, there is no mistaking where you are, and the Les Eclaireurs lighthouse is not only the southernmost lighthouse in the world, but also the point where the Pacific and the Atlantic Ocean meet, which made us realize once again just how far south we were!

If you are looking for some activities in warmer surroundings, there are a number of interesting museums in town for at or under US$10, including the Prison Museum (Presidio) which housed some of the worst criminals of Argentina until its closing in 1947), the Yámana Museum, where you can learn about the indigenous Yámana people to first inhabit Tierra del Fuego or the Museo del fin del mundo, or ‘end of the world museum’, which educates about the history, wildlife and settlement of the area.

Tips for your visit to Ushuaia:

1. Book accommodation in advance No matter if it is high or low season, hotels are astronomically expensive ($200 for a basic double room), meaning relatively economical guesthouses and hostels are always booked. We walked around for over an hour before deciding to pay through the nose for a hostel we would never recommend to anyone.

2. Cruisers – don’t book Ushuaia tours with your cruise operators For any South American cruisers stopping in Ushuaia – your cruise will dock in the center of town and tours can be booked right on the shore for a fraction of what you will pay by booking on the ship. Cruisers on our Beagle Channel tour paid more than double than what we did, and could have just booked it that morning like we did.

3. Where to eat Since it is a popular tourist destination, there are plenty of places to eat on the main tourist drag, Avenida San Martin, and the side streets around there. We had decent pizza at BarDPizza (Av San Martin 753) and loved El Almacen de Ramos General (Maipu 749), an over 100-year old traditional, old-fashioned grocery store-turned-restaurant with delicious pastries and good wi-fi. Café Expresso (Av San Martin and Lasterre) was another great place to work at, with lots of plugs and free wi-fi.

4. Bring US Dollars and find a place with a Blue Dollar rate
This will save you a lot of money, since Ushuaia is generally not cheap due to its isolated location.

5. Dress warmer than we did – Even in the Argentine summer (December – March), temperatures rarely rise above 12°C/54°F. (

Take a look at our gallery for more pictures of cute sea lions and the stunning scenery around Ushuaia:

Arriving to the end of the world | Ushuaia, Argentina is a post from: GlobetrotterGirls.com

Dedicated entirely to street art, 5 Pointz: The Institute of Higher Burnin’ is an open air street art gallery in an abandoned factory out in Long Island City, a neighborhood in the southwest of Queens. Street Art and graffiti is illegal in New York, even today, but in the early 1990s, an organization called Graffiti Terminators aimed to discourage ‘vandalism’ and encourage artists to paint here, on a formal showcase instead. In 2002, street artist Meres took over in the role of curator who selected street artists to fill the walls with their work in a rotating exhibition.

Now, 5Pointz is well-known around the world and aspiring as well as established street artists from all over the world come here to paint graffiti. However, even though this five-story building and its 200,000 sq feet of surface is completely covered in murals and tags, this is much more for street artists than for admirers. On our visit we saw many more artists than ‘tourists’, and even the tourists were, like us, street art fanatics rather than random passersby.

Unfortunately, there are some rumors that this space will be demolished to make room for a condominium tower, so if you are a lover of street art and in New York, make sure to head there sooner rather than later or this New York City Street Art Mecca might not exist the next time you get to the city.

Polaroid Of The Week: 5 Pointz, New York City’s Street Art Mecca is a post from: GlobetrotterGirls.com

When hitchhiking across one of the most barren, isolated landscapes in the world (you can watch our hitchhiking video here), we felt that smiling and nodding was the best way to handle this macho Argentine. I sat in the passenger seat, Dani was in the middle separating us. I imagined what I would do if he started to touch her leg, but instead he bragged about his 29 year old wife in the Dominican Republic. Handing us each a lollipop (gag!), we kept them wrapped and let him talk as we passed groups of guanacos grazing on the vast Patagonian steppe.

Though repulsive and sexist, he was not the mass murdering criminal I half-expected to pick us up when we discovered in Porvenir we would have to ‘viajar a dedo’, travel by thumb, to Ushuaia, the southernmost city in the world.

Porvenir, and the future of our trip 

For 35 days we had traversed the continent southward by bus, criss-crossing the Andes between Argentina and Chile several times before taking a ferry from the southern Chilean city of Puntarenas across the Straight of Magellan to Porvenir, a small Chilean town and possibly least used entry point to the island of Tierra del Fuego.

Porvenir means ‘future’ in Spanish, but this barren 5,000 person town feels timeless in a nothing-ever-changes way. The guesthouse owners in Puntarenas discouraged our trip here. “A visitor can do nothing there,” the warned, but for some reason it had become a pressing goal to see what a small town so far south felt like. Most people take a bus the long way up and around from Puntarenas, crossing onto Tierra del Fuego by a more well-traveled route, but we decided we would go straight across Tierra del Fuego instead.

When we hopped in the taxi from the ferry to our wonderful Bed and Breakfast Hosteria Yendegaia (which we reviewed here), we causally asked the the driver where we could catch the bus to Ushuaia from here.

“No bus”, he said. “Not to Ushuaia, not to anywhere,” he emphasized. In other words, there are no buses running into or out of Porvenir – ever.

We began to worry, but when we asked Vincente, the trustworthy hotel owner, he replied as though it were so obvious:

“Just hitchhike. It’s the way to do it here on Tierra del Fuego.”

Hitchhike, I thought, Yeah, right.

What two women would jump into the cars of strangers to drive across hundreds of miles of nothingness? We could be killed or left to die in the middle of nowhere, grazed upon by evil llamas…

Ever so slowly I swiveled my head in Dani’s direction, suddenly knowing the adventurous spirit that would surely be beaming from her eyes.

“It’s going to be fine,” she assured me, with a skip in her voice. “We’re safer in a place like this than hitchhiking in the U.S. or even Europe.”

By 9am the next morning we had our packs loaded up and walked down a few blocks to the main intersection in town. Dani proudly stuck her thumb in the air while I kicked rocks half-hoping not to get picked up at all. Not five minutes later, a pick-up truck stopped and a stocky farmer’s daughter and her little brother encouraged us to get in.

The farmer’s daughter and our first stop in the middle of nowhere

I went to toss our bags in the back, but it was filled with beets and loads of sheep poop. This is going to be so harmless, I reassured myself, if my only concerns are not squishing beets or getting our packs dirty.

Little did I know the adventure we were about to embark on.

“Bags stay with you,” she said matter-of-factly. “First we stop at my house to pick up the dogs, then on to the estancia. It’s on your way.”

By ‘estancia’ she clearly meant working farm, not vineyard or fancy farm house.

We sped up a gravel road for 30 minutes, making polite small talk until pulling in to a plot of land covered in rusty cars, old tires and tin shacks. Cats crawled near our feet, one with eyes covered in mucous. Three dogs were released from what seemed like several packs of canines. They hopped right up into the back of the pick-up and a man tied a metal chain through their collars and around the spare tire to hold them down. Although we imagined the worst, once we set off, they were smiling and howling, tongues wagging in the wind.

The farmer’s daughter sped like a bat out of hell around hills and along lakes that few non-locals probably ever get the chance to see. She sang loudly and made a bit more small talk until we sped up to a dilapidated old semi-truck.

“When I drop you off, wait for him,” she said, barely slowing down to pass the truck. “He’ll take you next.”

She said the same when we swerved passed another, newer white truck.

After flying through the incredible countryside, our bliss was abruptly disrupted when we stopped at a driveway that led over a hill. “We’re here.”

We hopped out and suddenly, as her taillights disappeared over the hill, we were arranging our backpacks on the side of an unpaved road, no idea where in the world we were.

Would the trucks actually stop?

Would these trucks really stop for us? Worse question: What if they didn’t? What would we do then? How did the farmer’s daughter know they would stop at all?

The white truck, the one in slightly better condition, didn’t even slow down as he passed ten minutes later. He waved his finger at us, No no no, and our enthusiastic thumbs wilted.

One more chance, the powder blue truck lumbered up the road. We were sure he would stop. Why? Because the farmer’s daughter said so.

He didn’t stop.

We were now who knew how many miles from Porvenir, hundreds more from the border crossing at least. In that moment of feeling so totally exposed, I had a vision of an entire horse skeleton we once saw on the side of the road in Honduras and thought how we would look, laying on the side of the road, our skeleton arms looped through our faded backpacks…

Suddenly, the truck stopped and started to back up. He had reconsidered and we ran toward him, so incredibly thankful to be out of the wind. He tied our packs up outside on the empty truck bed and we hopped in the cab.

“You ladies would had been stuck out there,” he explained in his mumbled country Chilean accent and though he didn’t smile, he was friendly, stoic and reserved. I looked at a sticker on the passenger door and it said the truck was Made in the USA, For Export Only, and I thought how, held up to an infrared light, you might find the same sign on me.

For over an hour we bounced in near silence until reaching the cross roads, where he headed south, staying in Chile, while we would head east toward Argentina with whoever would pick us up next.

This landscape was flat, nothing to stop the wind from gaining speed. As I peeled carrots to snack on, the wind blew the peels off into the distance. We ate inside the wind shelter, which reeked of urine and was covered in pithy quotes and graphic pictures. Dani ran out to chase cars every time one passed, and we imagined sleeping inside the shelter.

Would we ever reach the border that day?

In the distance we saw a bright flashing light, streaming right at us. The sun reflected off an extra-long semi-truck lumbering down the road right toward us, transporting over a dozen cars. Rather than turn the corner, this truck slowed down and stopped right in front of us and went to work detaching the massive car trailer. Clearly not local, the truck’s cab was brand new and looked like a Smart car – until it pulled up right in front of us and the driver motioned for us to climb the three steps to the door and hop in.

And there he was, the sexist, macho husband of an unsuspecting woman in the Dominican Republic. He came off friendly at first, giving us a tour. He had a twin bed with colorful sheets wedged right behind the seats, a small fridge, microwave and cabinets, where he pulled the lollipops out of.

Despite referring to Dani constantly as his future wife, he served his purpose and we crossed through the Chilean border and onward to the official Argentine entry point.

Homeless at the end of our journey

We felt quite adventurous, but the border patrol’s indifference to our ‘mode of transportation’ (hitchhiking) made us realize with a yawn and wave through, this happens here every day.

Happy to be away from our sleazy ‘friend’ we now stuck our thumbs out again right in front of the border patrol, and a young Argentine in his late 20s picked us up right away. Only 88 kilometers separated us now from Rio Grande, a large yet unremarkable city with buses running every hour to Ushuaia and he sped so fast down the paved road that even Dani, my pedal-to-the-metal German autobahn lover was gulping.

He dropped us off at an office where we bought tickets for the remaining three hours to the end of the world. The brand new van was spotless, organized and no one talked to us, which felt strangely sterile and boring after spending the entire day in such intimate quarters with strangers.

We were the last ones out of the van, left to spend the next hour traipsing up and down the hilly streets searching for a hostel at 8pm on a Saturday night at the end of the world, but it felt great that finally, ten hours after we began, we arrived to Ushuaia, Argentina, just 1,000 miles from Antarctica and over 4,000 miles from Santiago, where this six-week adventure began.

If you enjoyed this bit of storytelling, you might enjoy others like The Day We Became Cave Explorers in Belize, The Day I Became A Solo Hiker in Patagonia, and The Day We Became Mountaineers.

The day we hitchhiked to the end of the world is a post from: GlobetrotterGirls.com

Polaroid of the week: The best views of Manhattan are from above is a post from: GlobetrotterGirls.com

Travel is the greatest of all teachers, but this is often far beyond the lessons you knowingly spread when you return home and speak exuberantly about all you have learned. The lessons you have taught others while abroad are often overlooked in favor of those you share with your own people about the world at large. While all travelers are ambassadors for their country and culture, as an LGBT traveler, you are a representative of an oft-hidden group of people who rely on exposure to their community in order to gain worldwide acceptance.

On the Camino de Santiago – no sharing a bed for love or budget 

Let’s say you and your girlfriend, the lovely Katie, travel on $10 a day, ($3,650 per year) is an exercise in frugality. It teaches you to seek value—quality, not quantity. It teaches you to be creative, to adapt, and to always think about how to make something possible.

Don’t misunderstand. No one would ever describe you as “fringe” or “hippie” or “bohemian.” You’re a pair of very organized, dedicated, and goal-oriented twenty-somethings who decided to invest a couple years of post-collegiate youth into an activity that reached far beyond traditional curriculum.

The budget, being what it is, seldom permits you to check into a hotel room, which makes the LGBT-awkward one bed or two dilema completely irrelevant. Your hosts — be they from work exchanges, couchsurfing, or hitchhiking—never have two beds to offer. Two traveling girls share a sleeping surface all the time. This innocuous little habit among girls has probably been every lesbian couple’s get-out-of-jail-free card at one time or another — for double beds, at least.

Your travel method includes a broad mixture of couchsurfing, work exchanges, stealth camping, and talking yourselves into people’s homes; your transportation is predominantly hitchhiking, with a smattering of planes, trains, and paid-for automobiles, when the budget permits. Sometimes you move frequently, every day or so. Other times, you stay put for a couple weeks and tile a floor, weed a garden, or organize a workshop in exchange for a bed and food — if only to catch your breath from being on the move all the time.

So what about it when you decided to walk Camino de Santiago, a 780-km traditionally Catholic pilgrimage, in which you found yourselves checking into cheap €5 refuges nearly every night?

“Is it possible to share a bed?” you asked, budget it mind. It had nothing to do with being a lesbian. It had everything to do with being cheap. The Spanish hosts had all looked at you, bewildered. How on earth could you even suggest such a thing? A twin bunk bed is impossibly small.

“Don’t worry about that! These two girls can share a park bench!” your friend chimed in on your behalf.

No dice. Every night, you bought two beds; and every night, you crammed into one, if only to keep warm in those old monasteries. People stared at you. The Catholic Spaniards, especially, with wide, snoopy, unblinking eyes.

You ignored them all, feeling safe in the numbers of your little walking group. As a couple, your public displays of affection were limited to sleeping bag “caterpillar cuddling,” zealous hugging in front of the camera, and occasional hand holding while walking; and when properly insulated by your friendly walking group, you and Katie were as affectionate as any couple.

“Do you ever feel weird doing such a religious walk as two lesbians? Did you ever talk about how to be with each other?” one of your French-Canadian walking buddies asked. “Like, do you ever wonder what other people might think?”

How ‘Out’ should you be?  

Katie was quick to respond. “Knowing how Christians think and behave—you know, because I used to be really involved in the church—if I were walking this walk for religious reasons, and I encountered two lesbians, I would think it was some kind of sign or challenge that I was meant to deal with on the trip. Not a lot of devout Christians knowingly encounter gay people in their daily lives.”

Your buddy made a few disclaimers about not wanting to be offensive — after all, he is religious himself. “I have to admit, I don’t really know any homosexual couples. And I’m just struck by how normal you girls are. I mean, you act and behave just like any normal couple. You hold hands, you kiss each other, you’re playful the way that I’m playful with my own girlfriend. And you do it so naturally. It’s not like you’re thinking about it. I just think it’s really cool. You show others how natural it really is. I think it’s a good thing, that you are walking The Camino in this way.”

This made you think.  Generally speaking, you’re an out-and-proud, flag-waving lesbian, resilient enough to absorb a few prejudicial darts thrown your way now and again from folks who haven’t stepped onto the curve of gay acceptance.  You’d never really considered the darts you might have tossed at others with your gayness; this was a religious pilgrimage in Spain, after all, and you were no longer on your own turf.

Your friend made you realize that you and Katie were like ambassadors, representing not just Americans, but lesbians, and that your out-ness was a positive acceleration of a movement slower to gain ground in more conservative environments. This realization flooded you with warm-and-fuzzies, as well as with an urgent desire to publicly hold Katie’s hand as often as possible.

Exposure: sexuality is only a ‘private matter’ if you’re gay

As a result, many people on The Camino were exposed to their first lesbian couple, and (you hope) experienced you as nothing other than sweet, polite, considerate women, albeit odd for squishing into a twin bed together.

In order to perpetuate the LGBT equality cause, it is not enough to explain that queers exist, for this does not lead others past the point of awareness. The newly aware person will politely say, “I don’t care what people do in their bedrooms. His sexual preferences are a private matter.”

Here’s your correction: sexual orientation is only a private matter if you’re gay. To everyone else, it’s public.  The proof?  Nobody says to a newly engaged young woman: “Whoa, whoa, now. Wait just a second. I don’t really want to hear about how you plan to spend the rest of your life with some young man. That’s nobody’s business but yours!” That kind of thing just doesn’t happen in straight discourse.

When they say it is a “private matter” person actually said was, “I don’t want exposure to gay culture.”

Through exposure, you can help nudge people from awareness to acceptance. It’s far more difficult to be written off by others when they know you—when they’ve just walked several hundred kilometers with you, or hosted you, or helped you in some way already. Covering is cautious, and every queer person has done it; but it is important to take controlled social risks at home and especially abroad.  In other words, it’s important to first make some friends and then to out yourself.

Think of it this way: how many people have formed an entirely new opinion about a certain race, culture, or minority group once they finally got exposure to it? Isn’t that the point of exposure: to open your mind, to open to experience, to learn, and to see what is and what isn’t for yourself?  The world needs to learn just as much as the traveler does, and fortunately, the LGBT traveler is in a unique position to teach the rest of the world how to move from tolerance to acceptance.

What to do when your sexuality is a crime?

Take a country like Morocco, for example, where being gay is still illegal. Moroccan culture leaves absolutely no space and has not an ounce of forgiveness for homosexuality. Certainly, it sounds foolhardy to go there and start outing yourself in the name of Pride. But if you don’t do your part to nudge things along, who will?

Admittedly, you and Katie were biting your nails about Morocco as you tried to understand the social pressures faced not only by queer individuals, but also by women. But you went there, to a place that scared you. The point was to see the culture, learn about it, and to understand the religion.

On the streets of Tangier, you were cat-called, sucked at, kissed at, hissed at, winked at, and intimidated to no end. The culture is sexually segregated, traditional, and largely conservative. In traditional Morocco, a woman’s domain is in the home, and her role is wife to a man, and mother to children. Outside, she is considered very vulnerable, and should usually be accompanied by a male family member—especially when she is traveling.

It was a very tall cultural order for you and Katie, being that you were independent women, unmarried, childless, traveling, and lesbians. Nothing about that paradigm applied. You and Katie answered questions with selective honesty like a contortionist slipping from his bounds. “Are you married? Do you have boyfriends? Why don’t you want children?” Each question, each cat-call, each greedy-looking stare had you backing towards the closet door. You were learning lessons from your travels faster than you could count them.

At times, you were worn thin by the gender inequality. You wanted to scream in their faces, shove them, hit them, insult them. You wanted to drill a lesson home with force. But you didn’t. What would it accomplish? All it would do is paint a bad portrait of Americans.

“Which one of you is the man?” is a first step, at least

You are an ambassador. The question remained: how could you teach?

It started with honesty; you had to out yourselves to your hosts. Some found out from Facebook or Couchsurfing after-the-fact; others found out in person. “So you’re a couple?” Pause. “Which one of you is the man?”

It’s a common enough question, even back at home. People try to superimpose models. What you found delightful, though, was the opportunity to teach your hosts things beyond gay or straight—things like gender dynamics, gender expression, sexual independence, and how your own partnership works.

One of your hosts, a younger, more liberal guy with a taste for Western culture said to you, “I really don’t have a problem with the idea of two women together. But two men together… I don’t like that. It feels wrong.” You spent ample time helping him unwrap his statement from layers of cultural prejudice and hetero-normative assumptions that men cannot be on the “receiving end” of things. You suppose that in a country absent sex shops, such a discussion might have required considerable mental acrobatics.

At the end of the day, your host learned a few new things about how some men relate to men, and some women (like yourselves) relate to women, and what it all meant within the context of his own society. In return, you learned a great many things, such as what you used to take for granted as a lesbian in America—your freedom to transcend most traditional boundaries of expression for women. The value of travel doesn’t flow merely in one direction.

It teaches everyone involved. You know this, and you embrace the opportunity to participate with great honesty and diplomacy as an LGBT traveler whenever possible.

Are you an LGBT traveler on the road? Do you have a story to share? We welcome guest posts highlighting what life on the road is like for gay and lesbian travelers. We would love to feature your story here on GlobetrotterGirls.com!

Whether we like it or not, LGBT travelers are ambassadors around the world is a post from: GlobetrotterGirls.com

A clothing store named Beyonce in Battambang, Cambodia

You may have heard of a little song called Gangnam Style, by a South Korean singer, Psy. Although never intended for a global audience, Psy’s video was the first one ever to reach one billion views (currently at 1.6 billion) on YouTube, beating even Justin Bieber to this incredible feat.

If you’ve watched the video, and odds are that you have, then odds are also good that you do not understand more than a few words or understand the background or cultural references. Psy himself might come off as cartoonish.

Justin Bieber is also cartoonish, you say? True, but there is little question as to how the Beebs catapulted to global fame. It is something deeply primal, spanning all cultures. It was the hormones of teenage girls, beating in unison to Baby, Baby, Baby, that lifted the Canadian to the top.

But Psy is a middle-aged entertainer who is not even part of Korea’s K-Pop scene. So what is the connection that we all felt to Psy?

I ask because as we traveled this past year, this song followed us everywhere, but also because Gangnam Style is not the first song to make us stop and wonder about how people across cultures connect to the same music. Neither of us will ever forget, for example, that in the tiny remote village of Todos Santos, in Guatemala, the incidence of Eminem fans is literally off the charts. Em’s face is on t-shirts worn under their open shirts, and I distinctly remember watching a group of boys rap ‘Lose Yourself’ at a park next to a bench where their grandparents and parents sat with their younger brothers and sisters, all dressed in traditional indigenous attire.

Like teenage boys anywhere in the world, these Todos Santos boys were playing videos games and rapping to Eminem.

What is their connection to Eminem, a white rapper from the U.S. whose struggles are entirely other than their own?

Just writing that makes me feel like a hypocrite, if I’m honest, as I remember my best friend and I at 14 years old rapping through the entire Doggystyle CD in front of the living room mirror in my suburban neighborhood outside of Chicago. Just what we connected to with Snoop’s song Lodi Dodi, about low-level hookers looking to score drugs or Murder Was The Case, about Snoop being on trial for murder, I’ll never know.

Years later, after the East Coast / West Coast wars died down with the loss of Tupac and the Notorious B.I.G., a friend in the peace corps in Africa told me that several shacks in their rural village had Tupac and Biggie forever scrawled on the outside. How did Africans connect to the messages and images that these two African-Americans rappers were projecting? Stories of their struggle, race identification, drugs, violence were the first ideas to come to mind, but then I quickly realized that much of America, not just black America, had strong feelings not only about their deaths, but by that time, had connected to their music in life. Maybe that is what makes rap so fascinating, that so many people connect to stories like Tupac’s tribute to the struggle of the single mother in Brenda’s Got a Baby or blaming his mother for turning his brother into a crack baby in Keep Ya Head Up.

This was the period of my life when a deep interest in intercultural communication and media studies awoke inside me, a passion that only grows as we travel the world.

The Tip of the Iceberg 

Gangnam Style in particular makes me think of what is understood by intercultural academics and international business owners as the tip of the iceberg. The iceberg model illustrates that only the 10% of a culture that pops out above water is easily understand, and that 90% of it is hidden underwater. With YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, global blogs and news of the online world, we are more aware than ever before of that top 10% of cultures around the world – this includes language, music, food, gestures, clothing and rituals. Under the surface, within that 90%, lie more ingrained parts of culture including values, beliefs and attitudes which are intangible, hard to articulate, and because they are almost invisible, they are dangerously easy to ignore. yet they form the majority of each of our culture.

I often wonder if this means that we are all developing a false sense of connectedness from what we can glean from YouTube, or if, as in reality, the iceberg model is also melting into a flood of  a new world order?

Hmong girls in bumper cars at Laos carnival. Likely song playing: Danza Kudoro, by Don Omar.

Like Psy – what is it that has made him the most famous South Korean ever? His own countrymen, while proud, are also puzzled and this article in the Wall Street Journal highlights that Koreans themselves wonder if those of us on the outside who do not understand the background and the subtext are laughing with him (as they are) or if they are laughing at him? In reality, Psy is the black sheep son of a wealthy, well-connected Korean family who is very much involved in the style of the Gangnam area of Seoul he is poking fun at. Koreans are worried that the global audience is celebrating him because he confirms a deep, but quiet stereotype of a goofy, quirky Asian aesthetic?

Whatever the case, his follow-up hit has proven to be a huge success and I desperately hope that he does not change to fit a more transnational (read: bland) style.

He can leave that to Shakira as far as I’m concerned.

A move toward trans-nationality

Man, I used to love Shakira – like listen to her albums on repeat for hours.  In fact, I’d say that belting out super fast, hard to pronounce lyrics like ‘torpe traste testaruda‘ (from her song Ciega, Sordomunda) kicked my Spanish up to near native levels.

That’s right kids, Shakira used to speak Spanish! She was an indie, creative, dark-haired Lebanese-Colombian singer celebrating her multicultural roots. Her bare feet, guitar and still pop-friendly vibe is what attracted us all back then. Today, she is a blond, English-speaking Latina caricature and while her hips most certainly don’t lie, I wonder whether Shakira gained worldwide success by appealing to that top 10% of the iceberg, fitting into an easily recognizable sexy Latina stereotype that is easier for Malaysians or Thais to wrap their heads around? Because no matter her current success, nothing in recent years has come close to topping her 1998 Donde Estan Los Ladrones album.

Street Art in Buenos Aires, Argentina of Cuban singer Omara Portuondo, part of Buena Vista Social Club

Her blond hair and thinning Spanish accent even has some American academics interested in Media, Culture and Latino Studies studying Shakira’s role in  the changing representation of the Latin American immigrant in U.S. society, rather than her role as a Colombian ambassador. Is becoming  transnational in music the only way to reach the coveted global audience?

A niche ending – Country Roads 

I’ll end all of this pondering by revealing a little known secret about Germans. If I asked you to name an American singer oddly popular in Germany, you’d probably all say, in unison, David Hasselhof. But they don’t love The Hoff the way other countries think they do. They just don’t spit on him or make too much fun of him, and because he played a song about looking for freedom the day the Berlin Wall fell, they’ll continue to tolerate him. There is more room in European music and pop culture for minor celebrities to enjoy steady, if low-level, notoriety than in his native United States.

But what you probably don’t know is this: Germans have connected and incorporated Take Me Home, Country Roads, by John Denver, into their culture. Almost any German under the age of 70, even if they don’t speak much English at all, can at least sing the chorus to Country Roads. Need proof? Check out this footage of Country Roads being sung at Oktoberfest in 2010.

No matter my decade-plus close contact with the German folk or that I feel I understand a huge chunk of the 90% of submerged iceberg, I can’t understand what makes them belt out at the top of their lungs – WEST VIRGINIA! as though their ancestors came from there, and not the other way around. Ironically, John Denver had never even been to the state, quoted as saying the song should refer to somewhere ‘exotic’ and West Virginia might as well have been in Europe, it seemed so foreign.

Street Art in Buenos Aires by No Rules Corp crew

How does the world experience music differently?

What I wonder as I wander and listen to the same music around the world is about the connection that each culture makes to these global hits and their singers. When Rihanna tours in Russia, do they love her and her music in a different way to the way her fans do when she is in the Philippines? What connection do fans in Tokyo make with Jay-Z and is it any more or less authentic or real than for those listening in Brooklyn’s Marcy Projects, where Jay was born and raised? Do Lady Gaga’s Little Monsters in different parts of the world have anything in common except for being Gaga fans?

And yet, pop stars, along with actors and other celebrities, star in the soap operas of our lives, splashed across magazines and in videos online. We all share them in common. No matter where you are in the world, you can strike up a conversation about about Gangnam Style now. We all have that in common.

Does music unite us, or does it actually give a false sense of connection in a global world?

What I Wonder When I Wander: When a song is a global hit, are we all really dancing to the same tune? is a post from: GlobetrotterGirls.com

The first time we noticed them was in Cinque Terre, when we walked the Via dell ‘amore (The Path Of Love) between the picturesque coastal villages of Monterosso and Manarola. Now bridges from Cologne to Prague to Paris, and even as far as China and Taiwan, are locked with love. We even stumbled across an entire fountain covered in love padlocks in Montevideo, Uruguay a couple of months ago.

We might just add a lock of our own to the Brooklyn Bridge, a symbol of our love, love of New York and this incredible spring, so look out for a lock with our names on it next time you’re in the Big Apple.

Polaroid of the week: Love padlocks on the Brooklyn Bridge is a post from: GlobetrotterGirls.com

Her story is so inspiring, not only because of how successful the book has become, but because of the fears Torre had to confront in order to get on the boat and create this story in the first place. The biggest lesson, especially for those of you who are seriously itching to start a new life, is that the first step is the hardest – deciding to get on that boat and sail away.

Meet Torre

Torre is the author of Love with a Chance of Drowning – here’s a quick synopsis in the trailer below:

Where are you from?
I was born in Melbourne, Australia. My parents are American, so I’m a dual citizen. That makes me an Aussyankie, or perhaps a Yankstralian. (Or maybe not.)

Where are you currently based? Last I had heard you were living between Australia and Thailand?
I spent the last year living in Thailand in a tiny $5-a-night cottage set in the palms at the top of a lush hill. The cottage has the most stunning view of the Gulf of Thailand, which sounds idyllic, but it’s awfully hard to get anything done with a sweeping view of the ocean violating your workspace.

I’m in Melbourne right now getting work done for the launch of my book.

Our theme for 2013 is to celebrating Breaking Free. You first ‘broke free’ by moving from Australia to California – what sparked that initial decision to leave home and move abroad? 
I was bored with life in Melbourne. I’d followed a sensible path: high school, university, boyfriend, rental property, career, car, sleep, work, sleep, work… It was unfulfilling, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on why.

My relationship of five years was coming to an unceremonious end, so I decided to get on a plane and go somewhere new to see what else life had to offer. Everything unfolded from there…

The next adventure began when you decided to sail away with Ivan. How long were you two together before you decided to join him? Was it only for love, or also for the adventure? 
We were together for about eight months before I moved onto the boat.Love was a part of it, yes. But I also wanted to see the remote islands in the South Pacific, many of which can only be reached by boat. The adventure itself was very alluring, if terrifying.

What was your route, roughly? How long did it take to sail all the way?
Our plan was to sail from Los Angeles to Australia via a string of South Pacific islands. We left the itinerary open so that we could be impulsive and make discoveries along the way. The journey took us from the Marquesas Islands, to the Tuamotu Archipelago, to the Society Islands, to the Cook Islands, to Niue, Tonga, and Fiji.

We spent two years on the Pacific, but we weren’t sailing the whole time. We’d anchor in beautiful places for weeks or months before moving on to the next place by boat.

I remember being particularly attracted to how you described certain stops in the South Pacific. What were some of the highlights on the route you took?
The most incredible destination was inside a stunning, turquoise lagoon in a place called Toau. It’s an isolated spot in the Tuamotu Archipelago in French Polynesia that can only be reached by boat. Just two families live there. The family welcomed us in like adopted children, and we were taken fishing and exploring every day for three weeks. There were tears when we left…

Did you always want to be a writer?
The passion for writing was there from early on, but I pursued graphic design and illustration because it seemed like a more linear and lucrative creative career path. While I love certain aspects of design, it’s not fulfilling on a deep creative level.

While living out this incredible adventure, I began writing. I loved the challenge of creating imagery with words. It’s just like painting, only you have so much more than a square canvas to say what you want to say. It’s satisfying in a way that design is not.

Did you start your blog, FearfulAdventurer.com before, during or after the trip?
While sailing I kept a blog called valiantvoyage.com for family and friends. It was a tiny blog, but the content became the foundation for my book. I didn’t keep up that blog after the sailing trip was over. However, once I’d written my manuscript, I read that publishers want authors with big platforms, so I registered fearfuladventurer.com and began blogging there in order to sell my book.

It worked. Thanks to the blog, I gained the attention of a Hollywood producer and a UK publisher.

How long after self-publishing were you approached?
Two weeks. I received a Twitter direct message from a Hollywood producer.

On success: Can you explain what that buzz was like? How many companies approached you, how did you choose? 
It was totally bizarre. It still is! There is a long story that goes along with that. I’ll let you read about it here.

On taking risks: You spent the first bit down to the Mexican coast violently seasick. You were not a born sailor and scared of the ocean, but you went anyway. Why?
I was on the fence about going up until the very last second, right before we left the American continent behind. But really, deep in my heart, I think I knew I was going to go from the moment that Ivan invited me along. It was an incredible opportunity, and I knew that if I didn’t take it, I would’ve had regrets. The regrets scared me more than anything else. So even though I appeared to be on the fence, the indecision was probably just procrastination.

In addition to the seasickness, there were a few dramatic events along the way. Can you talk about the scariest moments on your journey?
Our old boat started to develop a lot of problems mid-voyage. On a passage between the Society Islands and the Cook Islands, the boat began filling up with water from two separate sources. At the same time, the engine broke, the autopilot broke, and the wind died. In the middle of nowhere, we found ourselves becalmed and sinking…

On overcoming fear:Your blog is fearfuladventurer, but you live a big, brave life. How do you manage your fear? 
I used to believe that adventurers are fearless, or that you had to consider yourself as fearless in order to do anything adventurous. What I discovered through my journey, and through meeting many other sailors along the way, is that we all experience fear. Fear is a dirty word, and yet we all feel it. So by being open about fear, I wanted to set the record straight: that adventurous are not always fearless. I suppose I’m hoping to take the shame away from that. It’s okay to be afraid. We’re all afraid. But that’s no reason not to do it.

Do you think having already taken a step like moving to California made taking such a risk easier?
Yes, absolutely. It was very empowering. I’ve always been a risk-taker, though—I’m attracted to challenges because they offer opportunities for growth. The risk of heading out to sea on a small boat and facing my fear in such a severe way was a challenge that was terrifying but also incredibly exciting. I wanted to find out how something like that would change me.

On the finances: How did you fund your adventure? Are you secretly a millionaire?
The boat is the biggest cost of sailing. Once that is paid for, it’s actually a cheap way to see the world. There’s a misconception that sailing is only accessible to the grotesquely wealthy, but Ivan had to work extremely hard from a place of disadvantage to save enough money to fund the voyage. He immigrated to the US when he was 17 and he could hardly speak any English. He worked at Starbucks full-time and, while putting himself through university and paying for rent and food, he also managed to save enough money to buy his first boat. After he got his degree, he worked his way up in an IT job and put away all his earnings for a bigger boat and a sailing kitty. Ivan had been preparing to sail solo before I met him, so he had already bought the boat and fitted it out for the trip.

I was very lucky to be invited along on his ready-to-go voyage.

Now that you are working with big publishers with equally big advertising budgets, how does it feel to see giant ads and billboards of Love With a Fear of Drowning in airports and around town?
I never saw those in person, unfortunately! But seeing a photograph was pretty thrilling. It feels surreal. It’s hard to own it, to say: That’s mine! It feels like someone else’s story, someone else’s book.

Inspiration station

Do you have a mentor? Someone you look to emulate their success?
My mentor is an imaginary beast that has been collaged in my head from many different people. It has the creative success and humility of my dad, the warmth and generosity of my mum, the stark-naked honesty of Lena Dunham, the humor of Tina Fey.

What books inspire you?
Anything by Roald Dahl, David Sedaris, Augusten Burroughs, Bill Bryson, Paul Theroux, Douglas Kennedy, Jon Krakauer, Patrick Süskind, Elizabeth Gilbert, Suzanne Morrison, Sara Gruen, Jennifer Egan, Wally Lamb, Jean M. Auel, Nikki Gemmell, or Cheryl Strayed. Friend me on Goodreads for my full list of favorites.

What websites do you read on the daily?
I don’t read any websites on a regular basis. I tend to consume a scattered range of content, from travel blogs, to humor blogs, to YouTube videos of Louis C.K. talking about childrearing, domesticity, and divorce. I like my inspiration to come serendipitously.

I avoid reading news. This was something I decided to do after returning from two glorious, news-free years on the ocean.

What music do you listen to while writing or working? What music pumps you up?
I listened to music that captured the emotion of the scene I was writing. I had a whole soundtrack of sailing / adventure / love inspired songs to do this for me. Gamble Everything For Love by Ben Lee was great for the upbeat, lighthearted scenes in the beginning. Falling Slowly by Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova was perfect for writing heartbreaking scenes towards the end.

Do you have a mantra or motto that you live your life by?
My parents raised me with the mantra, “You’re here for a good time, not for a long time.” I try to keep that in mind when I’m making decisions.

Is there still one place you haven’t yet visited that is still a dream destination?
Europe! All of it. I would also love to sail the Mediterranean.

Where can people connect with you online?
People can find me on my blog, Facebook, or Twitter.

Where can people buy your book?
Love with a Chance of Drowning is available on Amazon.com and in any place that sells books in the US, Canada, Australia and NZ. It will be launching in the UK on July 1.

GlobetrotterGirl of the Month May 2013: Torre DeRoche, author, blogger and sailor is a post from: GlobetrotterGirls.com