1. A water village outside of Kota Kinabalu.

2. Sunday market, Kota Kinabalu.

3.Green pit viper, Bako National Park.

4.Filipino fish market, Kota Kinabalu.

5.Proboscis Monkey jumping from tree to tree, Bako National Park.

6.Dragon screen, Kuching.

7.Mangroves, Bako National Park.

8.Kuching Violinist.

9.Orangutan and monkey, Poring Hot Springs.

10.View from Sapi Island.

11.Shop, Kota Kinabalu.

12.Pitcher plant, Bako National Park.

13.Soccer on the beach, Bako National Park.

Feature Photo: sara~’s Photo: marmouzet

According to an overview of the 14 most popular language course offerings in the U.S, the U.S state department groups languages into three categories:

Category 1: The Latin and Germanic languages, the former requiring approximately 600 hours of study, the latter 750. Grammar and structures are similar to English.

Category 2: Slavic, Turkic, Indo-European languages such as Persian, and a handful of others including Hebrew and some African languages. Around 1,100 hours of coursework.

Category 3: Arabic, Japanese, Korean, and the Chinese languages. 2,200 hours of coursework.

The difficulty of a language here is established according to several factors: linguistic complexity and similarity to English, accessibility (meaning, do you have to go to a tiny town in the middle of Tanzania to practice it, or can you find somebody on the next block to have a conversation with you?) and cultural factors (for example, in Japanese and Korean honorific language can be confusing and strange to learners coming from cultures that do not have separate terms to distinguish social, economic and/or cultural hierarchies).

el monstrito

I learned Spanish with only three weeks of formal study; the rest of the time I was piecing it all together on the road, on buses with Argentinians, in apartments with Colombian roommates, hiking mountains with Ecuadorian friends. I already spoke French and the grammar between the two languages was so similar that Spanish seemed to come naturally. I attributed learning Spanish so quickly to already being familiar with how to learn a language – sure, once you learn one, you’ve got the skills, right?

Ha! Try picking up Chinese on the road. It’s virtually impossible. A year in China and it was still a minor miracle when a waitress understood my order for cold beer. Granted, I could’ve studied a lot more, but the enormous learning curve for tonal languages can be disheartening, and for as much as I studied and practiced, studied and practiced, I still seemed to be staring dumbly at the summit of a distant peak. I found Japanese much, much easier, with characters that correspond to pronunciation and many words adapted from French, Spanish and English.

And you, Matadorians? What languages have you studied, and which do you find most difficult, easiest, most rewarding? Please share your thoughts and tips below.

Community Connection

If you need to get out of the grammar box, check out five metaphors for language learning and find out why you should get motivated. If you’re willing to take on the major challenge, get some tips from Matador on how to learn a tonal language.

FEEL IT ALL AROUND from Northern Lights on Vimeo.

Feature Photo: D’Arcy Norman
Video: Feel It All Around
Travelers: Chase Heavener, Jovanna Sayan, Matt Staker, Chris Heavener
Music: Washed Out, “Feel It All Around”
Produced by: Fiction

Photo: wili

1. The further “off the beaten track” you go, the more authentic a place becomes.

Japan isn’t Tokyo, Thailand isn’t Bangkok, New York isn’t the U.S…to this refrain I say: what? Sure, U.S culture can’t be summed up by New York nor can Japanese culture be summed up entirely by Tokyo; but these places are as integral to their country’s culture as any tiny town in the backwoods.

And while it can be much harder to navigate cities and find local haunts amidst all the big, glittering tourist destinations, cities are by no means cultural voids.

Even Starbucks, the easiest global corporation to hate for sucking all the local rootedness out of coffee culture, is inevitably local. Japanese Starbucks serve Coffee Jelly Frappucinos, and have four different trashcans for sorting garbage.

This is obviously not a grand cultural revelation every traveler to Japan should experience—but it does go to show that local culture creeps up in a variety of places, from the apartment blocks taking over downtown Beijing to the ramshackle villages in the far reaches of Hebei province.

2. It’s always better to go independent.

This is a given truth for many travelers. However, there are times when a tour will give you access you couldn’t have as a solo traveler.

Photo: philliecasablanca

Be it a bike ride around Paris with a well-informed guide, a trek through the Ecuadorian Amazon to a village swallowed up by jungle, or a neighborhood tour of a Brazilian favela, it could offer views and insights which are difficult to come by independently.

This is particularly true when time is an issue. Sometimes, it’s simply not possible to spend the weeks or even months that might be necessary to get to know people and get a feel for the realities of life in a certain place.

Strong-willed travelers raised on the Lonely Planet’s how-to-go-it-alone philosophy often have an instantaneous, negative gut reaction to tours. I know I do. But sometimes it’s pretentious and blinding to think that it’s possible to really learn about a place on one’s own.

Well-designed, respectful tours run with the participation of and for the benefit of local people can be worth it.

3. Everyone who travels shares a certain sense of enlightenment.

There is undeniably a lot to be learned from travel, and in my opinion most of it is learned unconsciously and drifts to the surface only after the traveling is done.

However, travel does not inherently bring on some new way of seeing, and can in fact do just the opposite. Anthropologists have long noted how traveling frequently reinforces the same prejudices, fears, and biases travelers had before leaving home.

It all depends on the person traveling, his/her attitude, and the degree to which he/her is willing to alter assumptions and beliefs.

4. Travelers stay in hostels, tourists stay in hotels.

Putting aside the bundle of issues behind the supposed tourist/traveler dichotomy, this is just plain B.S. If getting wasted at the hostel bar with a couple cute British girls and an Australian surfer is your idea of a quality traveler experience, good on ya (as the Australians would say) but don’t lord it above hotel dwellers.

I’d rather stay in a crappy budget hotel in a second than come back to a dorm room full of backpacks and lonely planets and horny, hungover twenty-somethings.

Photo: idalodiskho

Full disclosure: haven’t stayed in a hostel since I studied abroad seven years ago, and believe me, I haven’t been earning any more money than I was then. I’ve just gotten smarter about choosing budget accommodation.

5. There is some sort of almighty List Of Things To Do (as in, “have you done the rainforest walk yet?”) that all travelers must uncover and dutifully check off.

The best part of Kota Kinabalu, in the Sabah region of Malaysian Borneo, was sitting on the corner of the same beaten down coffee shop every morning. Kota Kinabalu is the essence of unspectacular—boring architecture, tame seafront, tired-looking markets, laid-back restaurants that all serve the same things.

We went to the tourist office. We found out what there was to do. Giant flower here, mountain there, orangutans there. It sounded interesting.

But we went back to the same coffee shop every morning. Met a Filipino fisherman who took us to the water village where the Filipino immigrants lived, where kids jumped off wooden planks into the water and women cooked in tiny barren rooms suspended above the ocean.

Photo: Jorge Santiago

I went running on the hillside behind the city until its geography became so familiar that I felt the rush of having a pseudo-home on the road.

We ate durian at a night market underneath a pedestrian bridge.

We went back to the same Filipino fish market every night, to the same woman’s picnic tables, and ate cuttlefish with fern salad.

That was one of the first times I’ve traveled list-free, and Kota Kinabalu remains one of the favorite places I’ve been.

Surely these preconceptions are the tip of the iceberg—travel has become so widespread, and so picked apart and analyzed, that travelers hit the road now with a whole bundle of beliefs packed up in their head.

What are yours? How have your preconceptions changed the more you travel? Please share below!

Community Connection

Interested in the way people think about travel? Explore inner travel, read up on persistent travel myths and debate the nature of “real travel.”

Photo above by MikeBaird _____Feature photo by muha.

The recession is global, which means trips are cheap and local economies around the world need your support.

A recent article in TIME magazine takes a close look at the effect on local economies as people shy away from travel.

It’s hard to blame anyone for staying home — when you’re made redundant at work and looking at mortgage payments how could you possible justify a vacation?

However, if it’s in your means to get away for a while, maybe you should consider taking a nice long vacation. Traveling now is a win-win situation — you get to take your mind off all this recession business, and you just might be helping someone feed their family.

Let’s look at the numbers.

According to TIME, the world’s tourism industry accounts for a mind-numbing $5.5 trillion dollars in global income and employs around 220 million people. The World Travel and Tourism Council estimates a contraction of 3.5% in the travel industry this year, and a loss of 10 million jobs by the time 2011 rolls around.

That’s a lot of food that won’t be making it to dinner tables.

Travel is more affordable than ever.

There are now more airlines competing for your dollar. Couple this with the economic crunch and you can find unbelievable deals out there.

Cheap flights aside, governments are helping themselves out by helping you out — countries like Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam have scaled back their visa fees.

I’ve seen 10-day package tours of China (from Los Angeles) going for as little as $999 US — this includes round-trip flight, inter-China flights, on-ground transportation, first-class hotels, meals, entrance fees and English speaking tour guide. I’m not a fan of package tours, but that’s just an example of how desperate the times are getting.

TIME also points out that Elite Island Resorts in the Caribbean is accepting stocks for payment. They take the value of the stock based on last October’s prices and will sell them when the markets recover. These are interesting times indeed.

Photo by Oldtasty

Think globally, act locally.

My favorite part of the article is that China has been doling out vouchers to their citizens for travel around their home country.

To me this policy makes a hell of a lot more sense than the local government handing out thousands in cash and encouraging everyone to spend it in the local economy. This is what is happening in Australia, and while I’m happy to take the money, I’m not convinced it’s a good idea.

Instead of spending the money in the community, people here have been gambling it away on pokies (poker machines), stashing it away for a rainy day, or taking it out of the country to vacation in overseas destinations.

Ride out the storm.

Carlo and his wife.

If you ever had a notion to travel, this may just be the perfect time to turn dreams into reality. Take that redundancy offer, severance package, and your savings and hit the road.

Ride out the worst of the economic storm while taking advantage of the deals and aiding the tourism industries of local and foreign economies.

This is what my wife and I plan on doing. Being the good little global citizens that we are, come next year we’ll be on the road.

First we’ll go help out the European economy and then the Brazilian economy; then we’ll help lift the Canadian and American economies before returning to the land down under to inject some life into the Australian and New Zealand economies.

It feels good to help out when needed.

COMMUNITY CONNECTION

Matador Community member Filmgal has some excellent tips on how to travel during a recession.

Americans, scared your dollar won’t get you as far in your travels during these hard times? Fear not – here are 17 places your Benjamins’ value won’t change anytime soon.

If it’s not the recession that’s stopping you, but the swine-flu “threat”, Sarah Menkedick tells us why we should travel despite the media hype.

Worldhum.com recently republished one of my favorite essays – Why We Travel by Pico Iyer – as part of their 8th anniversary celebration.

The essay is an absolute masterwork.

Why We Travel elucidates the inner journey of travel in Iyer’s classic style of lyrical juxtaposition.

Where There Be Dragons

Here’s an excerpt:

The sovereign freedom of traveling comes from the fact that it whirls you around and turns you upside down, and stands everything you took for granted on its head. If a diploma can famously be a passport (to a journey through hard realism), a passport can be a diploma (for a crash course in cultural relativism). And the first lesson we learn on the road, whether we like it or not, is how provisional and provincial are the things we imagine to be universal.

Isn’t that a fabulous quote? The whole essay is even better.

For years, some Where There Be Dragons programs have used Why We Travel as the first reading assignment, simply because it captures the magic of exploration so well.

If you haven’t read Why We Travel yet, read it now. If you have read it, read it again.

And while you’re at Worldhum, make sure to say congrats to Jim and Mike for eight – !!! 8 !!! – years of publishing fantastic travel stories.

Photo: satbir

I’ll be honest.

For a long time – over a year – I received e-mail updates from Glimpse.org and archived each and every one of them without going to the website.

Tonight, jet-lagged and on fast internet for the first time in months, I decided to give Glimpse another look, and I’ve got one word for you:

Wow.

OK, here are a few more words about Glimpse.

The site layout is clean, attractive and much easier to navigate than it was the last time I visited.

I was pleasantly surprised to see a feature article by Matador Abroad co-editor Sarah Menkedick on the front page. Since the article was originally published back in 2007, it shows that Glimpse is doing a good job of dredging the best content from their archives and placing it where you can easily find it.

Read: Alan the Afrikaner (Who May Not Be The Racist Pig I Took Him For)

Student Travel (Mostly)

Glimpse was originally geared towards young people with interest in study abroad. Although it’s still geared towards students, travelers of any age can appreciate the feature articles and social aspects of the community. In fact, it seems like the new Glimpse, with its emphasis on user-generated and professionally edited content, is a lot like Matador.

Correspondents Program

Now this is cool. The Glimpse Correspondents Program is a $600 grant that any North American between 18 and 30 who is traveling abroad for more than 10 weeks can apply for. Along with the money comes a professional editor who will work with you to produce top-quality articles and multi-media – a great platform for launching a travel writing career.

National Geographic Approved

When I see the National Geographic logo, I know I’m looking at quality. Glimpse is supported by National Geographic. ‘Nuf said.

Have you checked out Glimpse recently?

What do you think of the site? Please leave a comment below.