I have written and had accepted a couple of guest posts in the past week or so. The first, 11 Cheap Places to Volunteer in South America, is a long promised follow up to a similar post I did a while back on Central America.
The South American piece covers all the countries in South America except Suriname and French Guiana and suggests inexpensive ways backpackers can hook up with local organisations to both save money and do some good.
We have finally decided to come out to play with the rest of the planet and got ourselves a Facebook page.
I’m not sure why I put this off for so long but I’m glad we have beaten some members of the world’s more remote tribes in signing up for the social medium. Even this family – who less than a year ago were pointing to the sky and wondering just where the hell that big metal bird came from – have a Facebook page and are wondering whether to bother with G+.
Even they got on Facebook before us
I was recently interviewed by Shane of National RV Parks where I reveal, among other things, how The Working Traveller first came into being as a small press magazine, how backpacking with a photocopier is really tricky and why I threatened to give a three wheeled motorcycle a damned good thrashing.
National RV Parks aims to provide RVers and world travellers with the information required to make their travels experience a positive one. Along with articles on RVing and camp cooking tips the site carries hundreds of interviews with world travellers.
Read the full interview at National RV Parks
In a way this post is for me. You can take a day off from reading this blog if you like because as I am going to explain below I may take some days off from writing it.
I rarely set goals but 2012 will be the year I hope that our overall plan for The Working Traveller and our other volunteer work and jobs abroad sites start to come together.
Last year, trying to write something Christmassy while putting as little effort into the task as possible, I came up with the inspired idea of writing about things I had already written about.
‘Repeats’ I shouted, metaphorically jumping out of the bath. ‘What could be more Christmassy than that?’
This year, devoid of any pretence to do anything different, I have resolved to do the same and repeat the repeats idea.
We have added a new name to our slowly expanding little group of websites. Free (or Cheap) Volunteer Work Abroad joins the Overseas Job Centre and the Jobs Abroad Bulletin in providing ways to travel longer by working abroad and volunteering.
As the name suggests this site is aimed at those looking to find volunteer programmes but do not want to pay large sums of money to get involved in helping others, the environment or even themselves by acquiring new skills and ideas.
Sitting at my desk a month or so after our return it seems almost like we haven’t been away and that there hadn’t been a seven month gap since I last sat in this chair.
I haven’t forgotten that in those seven months we followed Moses’s footsteps up Mount Sinai, walked in the desert, swam over coral reefs, waited out the Egyptian revolution, swore at numerous taxi drivers in Beirut, stayed in a cave, walked around the Byzantine walls of Diyabakir and crossed the Tigris under an orange sky in Iraq. Those things happened to Traveller Shane, not to Home Shane.
For the next two to three months The Working Traveller is going to be concentrating on the Middle East. Why? Because that’s where we are now.
We left our home in Turkey in October and, after spending three months visiting family in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, eating cheese and shouting at our sub dial up internet connection, reached Egypt in the beginning of January.
We are in Dahab, in the Sinai peninsula, and not really doing a great deal. This town is like that. We are travel slugs at the best of times but Dahab has made us worse than usual, restricting our routine to eating, drinking a beer or two and puffing on sheeshas.
Posted in Cairo to (almost) Istanbul, Our Travels, Site News, Travelling 
Tags: dahab, egypt, travel blogging 
6 Comments »I have been trying to think of something Christmassy for our first post on the day Jesus was born. I didn’t want to put too much effort into it though. After all it is Christmas and who wants to work stuffed full of mince pies and sherry when there’s Top Gear and Doctor Who on the telly?
The initial plan of just saying ‘Merry Christmas’ is going to make for a very short post, exactly two words short, so I needed something more.
There’s a gun in the room where I’m staying but fortunately it’s locked away or I would have shot my pathetic internet connection by now. The past month has been spent swearing and throwing the stupid dongle around the kitchen (it’s resilient, I’ll give it that) in between doing a fraction of the work I could be doing. Fortunately the email is not too bad but when it comes to writing an article or putting up a new job it would be quicker to write everything on a piece of paper, lure a monkey into the house, shove the paper up its bum and release it randomly into the wild to find our own Wordpress back end.
Latest Jobs Abroad @ JAB
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