Middle of Somewhere, United Arab Emirates (click photo to enlarge)

Andy Stoll is a media producer and social entrepreneur  from the heartland of America. In August 2006, he set out on what become a 4-year unscripted, solo, independent trip around the globe, in an effort to better understand how people live in this world. His stories, his discoveries and the people he meets along the way, are documented on this travelogue with new content posted regularly. Along with entertaining stories and personal insights into the world, he’ll share the lessons learned about independent, long-term around-the-world travel in hopes of inspiring you to set out on an adventure of your own.

While traveling Andy is in search of experiences that would give him a better first person understanding of how the world works. Among many things, he handed out microloans in China, fired a machine gun in Vietnam, played a 19th Century British soldier in a Bollywood movie, worked in a dress factory for 60 cents an hour in Bangkok and lived with monks in a Buddhist temple in Korea. He shared beers with nomadic Tibetan herders, drank gluwein with German engineers, sipped vodka with Russian grandmas and cooked apple pie on Armenian national television. He learned to snowboard in the Swiss Alps, stepped off the world’s highest bungee jump in South Africa, dipped his feet in the Persian Gulf, slept in a capsule hotel in Tokyo, threw a Halloween party for school kids in the rural steppe of Kazakhstan and celebrated the holiest of Hindu festivals in Rajasthan. He lived the life of a maize farmer in Zambia, a fisherman in China and a cowboy in the Australian Outback. (See map.)

Learn more about how my around-the-world trip came to be, see a map of my travels, meet my traveling cow-panion, and get answers to some of the most frequently asked questions.  You can read more about me and my work outside of this website at www.andystoll.net.

I welcome your comments, questions and thoughts throughout this website or via email, or follow along on Facebook and Twitter as the adventures continue.