The Many Faces of India: A Photo Story

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As we prepare to leave India we thought it only fitting to show you the many faces of this country. We hope you enjoy them!

Digging for mussles on the beach in Goa

A friendly face on the Ghats of Udaipur

A wise gaze from a wise man

A Shilpgram Musician shows his talent

The innocence of a child

Our proud camel guide Bilal

Laughter all around at Holi

A true craftsman

A saddhu collects money!

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Holiday Gifts for the Adventure Traveler

There are common traits between adventure travelers, luxury travelers, green travelers and budget travelers except when it comes to holiday gift ideas.
While the world is slowly coming out of a recession, it’s really the thought that counts when giving travel-related gifts this year.
In order to help you find a great gift, we’ve worked with popular travel websites, based on their niche and expertise, to put together a holiday travel gift guide.
We encourage you to visit the other participating travel blogs for even more gift ideas – you’re sure to find a few ideas that will be perfect for the traveler on your gift list!

Please check out these other great blogs that are running their targeted holiday gift campaigns:

Some blogs have their gifts scheduled and may not be up and running yet, but come on back and check them out later once they are published.

Holiday Gifts for the Guy Traveler
Holiday Gifts for Women Travelers
Holiday Gifts for the Sports Traveler
Holiday Gifts for the Budget Traveler
Holiday Gifts for the Green Traveler
Holiday Gifts for the Travel Writer

Holiday Gifts for Adventure Travelers

The Holiday’s are fast approaching and it is time look for some gifts for those adventure travelers and adventurers at heart.  Wondering what to get for those friends and family members on your list that always tend do push the envelope a little more than others?  Check out this list below.  These holiday gift items will be sure to satisfy travelers and adventurers alike.

Adventure Travel Stocking Stuffers Under $25

Klean Kanteen Stainless Steel Water Bottle Shoulder Sling (40-Ounce Bottles)

$6.50

When going on a trek or any adventure, you don’t want to have to carry your water bottle in your hand. Sling it over your shoulder freeing up your hands, but having it readily available rather than stuffed in your pack. Perfect for the Inca Trail to climbing Kilimanjaro.

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Belkin BZ103050vTVL Mini Surge Protector/Dual USB Charger

$16.99

Even the most adventurous of travelers carry computers and iphones with them into the wilderness.  We have many electronics today. Protect from surges as you charge your computer, camera, and ipod all at the same time! Any traveler would thank you for this gift!

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Lightload Towels Beach Towel (36″ x 60″)

$9.50
Light weight and fast drying, this is the towel we use.  This towel doesn’t take up a lot of space and doesn’t add a lot of weight to your packs. You will never bring a regular towel with you abroad again.

Travel Laundry Clothesline – Flexoline

$10.00
No need to carry clothes pegs or worry about tying rope. This elastic line is easy to hang and holds all of your clothes. When hiking or trekking on long expeditions, you may need to rinse or wash your clothing. Clothes pegs can be lost easily. You won’t need to worry about that with this flexoline.

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Adventure Travel Gifts Under $200

Pacsafe PacSafe 55 (Wire)

$59-$93

Worried about having your pack stolen on a train? What about unsecured hostels and guesthouses?  Put your pack inside the pacsafe wire protector and lock it to a bedpost and feel at ease leaving your belongings behind or rest easy on the overnight train. Don’t let your adventure be ruined by having everything stolen.

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Petzl Tikka Plus 2 Headlamp

$34.95 – $36.95
You will be amazed how much you need this gift idea. Having your hands free is important. LED gives better light with longer battery life and this headlamp allows you to focus your light. The long lasting bulbs keep your packs light by having to carry less batteries.

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Motorola Talkabout Em1000r Rechargeable Radio

$69.99

These radios are perfect for snowboarding in the Alps or any back country adventures.  They will help you keep in touch to plan your lunch rendevous or save your life in an emergency situation.  An excellent gift idea for your extreme adventure friends.

These radios have a range of 20 km.

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CamelBak Mini-M.U.L.E. 50-Ounce Hydration Pack

$27.99-$49.99

This pack is a perfect holiday gift for the adventure traveler. Whether you are a cyclist, mountain biker, hiker or mounaineer, you will use this pack regularly.  Drink your water hands free and carry several litres comfortably as it contours to your body.

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Therm-a-Rest Trail Lite

$49.95-$69.95

Needing to sleep outside or camp?  The Therma-a-Rest Trail Lite is essential.  It compresses down, taking up very little space and is light weight.  Easy to inflate with a few breaths, it instantly becomes a comfortable mattress for the adventure traveler.

Adventure Travel Splurge Gifts Under $500

Lowepro DryZone 200 Camera Backpack (Yellow)

$235.00

For any adventure traveler that finds themselves in a wet or damp situation, the dry zone is a must to protect your camera gear and electronics. It well laid out like any lowepro bag and easy to organize with its velcro compartments.  You won’t have to worry if your dump your kayak or are caught in a torrential downpour. Everything will stay dry and safe.

Garmin GPS 60CSx Handheld GPS Navigator

$277

If you are planning on cycling or trekking through a country and want to track your route this is the GPS for you.  Want to know your maximum altitude? How far you traveled or just where you are and where you came from? This GPS will tell you all the details that you need.  It is a dream gift for us.

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The North Face Roadrunner 33 Tent – 2009 Model

$214.95

We swear by the North Face Tent. The Roadrunner 2 survived our most extreme adventure to date. 120 days in Africa through the most gruelling conditions that you can imagine. Blowing sands, monsoon rains, mud and wind. We never had a problem.  Durability is not even a factor. The North Face Roadrunner 33 is larger and that is why we recommend it.

Brunton 26 Watt Foldable Solar Array

$286.50

If you are caught on a trek for several days at a time, you will be away from  outlets and civilization. There is nothing worse than having the batteries of your camera run out before you reach the summit or the pinnacle of your trek.  A solar charger will make sure that your electronics are charged and ready to go.  It will ensure that those important moments are not lost forever.

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These are our top holiday gift recommendations for adventure travel.

We  have used everyone of of the products listed above for one or more of our adventures around the world and find them invaluable.  So give the gift of adventure this holiday season, you may just kick start a whole new life for one of your loved ones.

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In the spirit of early compliance with the new FTC rules concerning disclosure by bloggers of content that is in any way remunerated, the above links do earn a small amount of money if you click on them and make a purchase. Not much, maybe enough for a cup of coffee or a beer, but every little bit helps keep this site going and helps us continue to provide you with great information, so we deeply appreciate your support!
~Deb and Dave

Do you have some suggestions for adventure travel gift ideas for the holidays? Share your thoughts!

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What is Happening at ThePlanetD and Building our Blog; an Overview

The Planetd is finally at that point where we are no longer spending half of our time working on code or figuring out the layout. It has become a more relaxing place where we only really have to worry about posting each day.

While we are not traveling for another 2 months, we have found the past 5 months to be very rewarding learning the ins and outs of running a travel blog and we are feeling confident that things are going to be very exciting once we start to travel.

We have read that to make money, you must have more than one site. We originally wanted to have 3 on the go before we left, but we soon realized that we needed to concentrate on making one blog informative and interesting before we could even think about launching other sites.  We wanted to make sure that we had quality content and we wanted to establish ourselves as authorities in travel before we spread ourselves too thin.  This has worked for us.

We feel that we would have let the content at ThePlanetD suffer had we tried to build too much too soon.

But it is definitely going to be our goal during our world travels however to launch more sites.

Dave is going to concentrate on his photography website writing about his insider tips that he learns out there and I am going to be working on another site that we started a couple of months ago, but is not nearly ready for a a launch.  We have already linked Dave’s site as our photo gallery, but it is definitely not ready to be used as a full blown photography site. This may have been a mistake to have our photos linked to another site but we wanted to start Dave’s photography blog and we found the gallery to be much nicer than what we could do with this template.

The good news is that we are now understanding the importance of having subscribers, the use of affiliates and the importance of the community.  We stumbled around for the first couple of months here at this website, but in time we built a bit of a niche market and made some very good friends.

It has been difficult to focus on Adventure Travel while we were living and working here in Canada, but once we start traveling, it is going to be one big Around the World Adventure and we can’t wait to share it with you!

Now on to business.

We are thrilled to have a guest post at TheTravelTart it is certainly a very fun website filled with excellent information and humour.  When he put out the call for guest posts, we jumped on the chance to be a part of it and are so happy to have been humorous enough to make the cut. So check it out and see what you think.

We have found that having guest posts ourselves has been a very rewarding experience. We have started the series Giving Back, Travel the World and Make a difference.  We have been touched and inspired by the stories that we have recieved from VelvetEscape, TheTravelExperta and ALittleAdrift. This series is happening every Tuesday for the next little while and stay tuned for tomorrow’s installment.

We are still looking for guest contributors, so if you have any experiences volunteering, teaching English, raising money or awareness for a cause, have you visited any projects, wildlife sanctuary’s or even written articles about a community in need, we would love to hear from you. We are looking for all of the different ways that travelers can help change the world.   Drop us an email if you have some ideas  at theplanetd@gmail.com

The past few weeks we have decided to organize the website a little. Not traveling means that we must come up with interesting content every week.  This is where we have sort of come up with theme days.

• Tuesdays are our guest contributors series,
• Wednesdays are our World Wildlife articles
• Fridays we have come up with a bit of an advice day
• Mondays have become our week in Review.
• We fill out the other days with destination pieces or we take the day off.

We don’t want to bore our readers with content just for the sake of having content, so if I can’t come up with an article that doesn’t excite me or interest me on a certain day, than I would rather not post.

Plus at this point, since we are leaving soon…we are trying to enjoy our weekends with family and friends so I have to admit we have been neglecting the internet on these days a little bit:)

So that is our week in review for ThePlanetD on this last Day of August. We have given our 60 days notice at our apartment, we have decided that we will be flying into Kerala India in November and then the adventure will begin!

You may be wondering about the Vantastic Adventure. Well, we have given up thinking that we have any chance whatsoever. There are some great videos on the site and although we haven’t lost all hope, we have to start making our plans. We are going to hold off buying our tickets and getting our Visa’s until this legs winner is announced at the end of the week, but to actually win a contest is pretty slim so we are focusing on our upcoming travels instead.

Thanks to all of the people that joined the group and voted for us your support means a great deal to us!

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10 Least Romantic Situations Traveling Together

When most people think of a vacation together, they envision tropical islands and places for romance relaxing in paradise.  Tahiti, the Bahama’s, Hawaii that is where most sane couples go to rejuvenate and bring that spark back to their relationship.

Well, Dave and I aren’t most people and when we go away, we always seem to wind up doing trips that are the exact opposite of romance.  Sure, we have been to resorts and 5 star hotels, but it is always the suffering that stands out in our minds when we reminisce. When we truly test our relationship and survive the insane and ridiculous, that is when we know that we are meant to be together forever.

Here is a list of some of our least romantic situations we have encountered during our travels of the world so far.

1. Slathering butt butter, Chamois Cream, Bag Balm…whatever you want to call it on our bums every morning for the first 2 months of cycling Africa. In our little 2 man North Face Tent, we would lay in the dark and cool mornings dressing and getting ready for a 100+ km day of riding. It wasn’t a good morning, or a lets snuggle and keep warm kind of morning. It was lets get up, lather up and pack up our tent and see you in a few hours at the next camp. (you don’t get a picture of that sorry, only us sitting at our tent:)

Now that's romantic

2. Relieving ourselves in tandem on both Mount Kilimanjaro and Mount Kinabalu. I don’t know what it is, but Dave and I always seem to be in sync with our bowel movements when we are at altitude.  We both walk side by side for hours on end, and then we both have the need to go to the bathroom at the same time.  Thank God we always summit in the dark, I couldn’t imagine trying to squat on a sheer face in broad day light.

You try finding some privacy here!

3. Having roaches crawl all over us during a trek to the pinnacles.  We thought that we were staying in pretty good digs when we saw our vynal matts lined up along a raised wooden platform.  We settled in for the night with 7 other people and thought that we would be well rested for our climb the next day. That is until the creepy crawlies came out.  I didn’t turn on my flashlight to see what it was, I thought it better that I don’t know.  But in the morning everyone was talking about the cockroaches crawling all over.  I thought, well, it could have been worse, it could have been something poisonous.

3b Being eaten alive by bed bugs on more than one occasion.

4. Getting in a motorcycle accident together in Ko Samui and laying side by side in the hospital as they cleaned our wounds.  Dave’s was worse than mine and he had it scraped with a razor blade as he bit on a towel. We then spent the next 4 days in Paradise limping around and getting our dressings changed daily.

First time renting a motorbike, not a good idea

4. Sharing a single bed in a room with another couple that was in the other single bed. In Kuala Lumpur, we were too cheap and tired to find a place in our budget after returning from the Cameron Highlands.  We had to leave early for  Borneo the next morning anyway, so 4 of us crammed into a tiny room with 2 single beds and set our alarms for 5 am. We didn’t get a lot of sleep that night.

5. Anytime we stayed in a dorm room.  As a couple, we don’t often stay in dorms or hostels. But every once in a while be it during a trek, a climb or an excursion, that is the only option that there is.  I snore by the way, luckily Dave sleeps like a log, I feel bad for anyone else that is stuck in a room with me.

There is a pattern here that always has to do with sleeping arrangements.

Sleeping anywhere we can

6. Staying in a bungalow in Kao Sok National Park. It was a pristine setting with and pretty little huts. Unfortunately, every night just as we were about to turn in, the cock fights began and we had to listen to the screaming and wailing chickens all night long. My heart broke.

7. Rubbing the bottom raw during a horse back ride in the Dominican does not make for the most romantic moments. It was 1997 and Dave and I were on our honeymoon.  We decided to ride horses on the beach in sweat pants might I add.  Dave did not have a good time, and for the next 2 days he could not sit down or get in the water to get relief from the warm Caribbean air. We have both since learned how to ride.

Look at that Hair, it was 1997

8. Our time in Mui Ne Vietnam should have been the most romantic part of our trip.  A cabana on the beach, beautiful scenery and perfect weather.  Well, I had terrible ulcers in my mouth and throat from my Doxycylin (malaria medication) and Dave had enjoyed too many Vietnamese Iced Teas in Saigon. On our way out of the city, we saw a man dragging a giant blog of ice on a burlap sack down the road, and right then, we knew that Dave was going to be in trouble.  Sure enough, we was sick for 3 days. Neither of us could eat. Dave couldn’t keep anything down, and I was way too sore to swallow. So we layed in our bed under the ceiling fan and prayed for relief to finally come.

Waiting to go to the airport, not well

10. Our Last 2 Days in Lima before flying out. We splurged on a nice hotel and even ate at Tony Roma’s overlooking the water for lunch. After lunch I didn’t even make it back to the hotel before I started vomiting. Diarreah followed and we missed our last day of sightseeing as I puked and crapped all day and night. I can’t even look at Tony Roma’s ever again.

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