Welcome readers of The Daily Iowan and The World-Herald to Noboundaries.org. If this is your first time here, I’d like to welcome you and point you in a couple of directions.

Special thanks to World-Herald columnist Michael Kelly and Daily Iowan reporter Josie Jones for interest in the story.

• You can read more of my bio here.
• If you’d like to see my route around the world, check out the map page.
• Like photos?  Follow my journey and see some of the wacky things I’ve done around the globe in a short photo essay or check out the photo galleries.
• Learn more about the Iowa-raised Noboundaries.org Cow and check out the cow’s photos from around-the-world or ‘fan’ him on Facebook.
• Want to hear a story?  There’s a lot of travel stories to explore, but if you can’t decide where to start, check out some of my favorites.
• Want to hear more stories and get tips on how you can travel around-the-world?  There is tons and tons of new stories, videos, photos, travel tips and more coming from my travels in The Middle East, the former Soviet Union, Africa, Asia, Australia and The South Pacific in the coming months.  You can follow along on Facebook, Twitter or subscribe to get Noboundaries.org posts via email or RSS.
• Follow me on Twitter @noboundariesorg for all travel related tweets or @andystoll for all non-travel related things.
• Want to connect with me?  Add me on Facebook.
• If you are interested in having me speak at your school, business, club, conference or event, please send me more details.
• Do you have some questions for me or wish to take a similar trip of your own?  First check out the FAQ’s and see if you can find your answers there,. If not, post it in the comment box below, Tweet me your question or contact me via email.

Thanks for your interest!
Andy Stoll

Greetings friends, its been a while.

It’s been quite around my travelogue lately, please don’t take it personally.  After a crazy four week race across Thailand and India in April/May filming a TV show, I’ve taken a short-term job as a cook on a 750-square mile cattle station in the central outback of Australia (in the Northern Territory).  There’s 1 million stars (the best starry skies I’ve seen in the world…even better than Mozambique), 5,000 head of cattle (20,000 legs to hold them up), a few thousand miles of barbed wire fences, a few hundred kangaroos, a handful of cowboys and no internet or cell phone service.

With no internet or SMS’ing, it’s a bit challenging to post travelogue and Twitter updates, except when I’m allowed to come into town for a hot shower and a cold beer.  So please bear with me, as I spend my days grilling steaks, wrestling pigs and trying to figure out where the clutch is on this horse.

In the mean time, I figure this might be a good opportunity to let all the new readers (and remind the noboundaries.org veterans ’round here), that http://www.noboundaries.org is the heart of my 3-year around-the-world travelogue, where you can always find the latest stories and visuals from my travels, my current location, travel map and contact information.

Come back regularly, or even better, subscribe with your RSS reader to keep up on the latest posts, stories, photos, videos and more.  You can also keep track of me (and become my friend) via Facebook.  If you want super regular updates, full of day-to-day minutia, you can also follow me on my noboundaries.org Twitter account in 140 character snippets of a day-in-the-life of an average guy on a trip around-the world.

If you’re a more visual person check out my ‘photo-a-day-ish’ (hosted by Posterous) which is splashed on a regular basis with a potpourri of photos I’ve snapped along the way.  Or, if I’ve failed to interest you with any of that, grab a horse, a swag and a billy can of tea and come out and visit me on the station—its 1533 kms/ 952 miles due south of Darwin.  I’ll cook you up a mean scotch steak, veggies and an ice cold stubby of beer under a million star sky that will take your breath away (the jury’s still out on what the cooking will do to you though).

I sincerely appreciate all of you who’ve come along these past few years for this around-the-world adventure, and I promise you the best is yet to come on this travelogue.  In the next 6-months you’re in for stories from Kazakhstan, The Czech Republic, Germany, Switzerland, The Middle East, Africa and points in between!

Hope you’ve enjoy the ride so far, and hope you stay tuned.

May the road rise to meet you,
Andy

Playing soccer with a group of random kids near Gangste, Tibet

Holy Cow! My Three Year Trip Around The World an around the world photo exhibition

Automata Museum at Heyri Art Valley
Paju, South Korea (45 minutes by express bus from Hapjeong Station, Seoul*)
Opening February 14, 2009 running until March 14, 2009 (with possible extension)
Admission 7,000 KRW, opening hours Tuesday-Sunday 10:30am to 6pm
(한국/Korean: http://tinyurl.com/aeptsa)

Join the cow as he exhibits the best of his photos from his 30 month trip around-the-world through 33 countries on 5 continents.  He is currently seeking additional galleries worldwide for future exhibits.  I’ll post some videos and photos from the gallery opening soon.

Korean National News Service: http://tinyurl.com/ctfzgz

* Directions from Seoul:  Take Express Bus 2200 from outside Hapjeong Station Exit 2.  Get off the bus at ‘Heyri Art Valley, Gate 4.’  Walk into Gate 4, take the first left and walk to the ticket booth at the top of the hill and turn right.  The Automata Museum is located directly in front of you at the bottom of the small hill.

• Leave a comment in the box below
• Read more about The Cow’s Story
• See photos of The Cow

When I set out on this journey, I thought an online travelogue would be sufficient, but soon my mom requested I join Facebook, and now it seems, even Buddha is  implying it’s time to get with the technology program and get my trip updates on Twitter.

From what I’ve read, Twitter is a new, fandangled ’social media tool’ invented by some people who were apparently bored with the only ‘hourly’ updates that Facebook/MySpace typically provides.  So they invented Twitter, through which one can send minute-by-minute (even second-by-second) updates answering one question: “What are you doing now?” (Which also happens to be the most frequent question I get via email, after “When are you coming home?” and “When am I going to get my money?”)

As I think about it more, it makes sense as a great tool for the three of you out there (my mom, my hair stylist and that one guy) who are now reguarly following along with my trip.  Since one minute I may be in China eating snakes and the next in Indonesia being eaten by snakes, it seems like a cool way to give you more of a play-by-play of where my travels have taken me, in somewhat real time.

So, if you’re a Twitterer (is that a noun?) then I invite you to follow along.

You can subscribe by adding my Twitter account (’noboundariesorg‘) to yours or by checking out the Twitter update box on the right-hand side of the homepage of my travelogue. (as a small aside, if you wish to follow my non-travel related Tweets you can add my personal Twitter account as well.)

photo courtesy Juicyrai

• Visit Twitter and either add @noboundairesorg, and/or get your own account.
• Follow me on Facebook.
• Sit back, relax and meditate, cause you’d rather watch the technology game from the sidelines.

When I started out, it was pretty typical that when you met new friends on the road, you eventually exchanged emails and promise to keep in touch.

But, in the past five or six months, now all people say is, “Are you on Facebook? Ok, I’ll find you there.”

Is email going out of style?

I think I knew Facebook was going to be a big thing, when I was sitting in an internet cafe in the middle of Cambodia (a place where all computers are of the Pentium and sometimes 486 variety). In between ‘tagging’ photos and ‘poking’ my friends, I looked up to see that 12 of the 15 people in the room were on Facebook…in Cambodia…and half the room was locals.

So, months later I’ve finally figured out the controls at the fandangled Facebook, and created a little group for you all to join. So, if you’re a Facebooker, please Facebook me, as I’ll be also Facebooking some exclusive content to that group as well. If you have friends that have been Facebookized as well, ‘poke’ them and tell them to join too (see there is a purpose for that tool).

For those that have not been swept up in the Facebook craze, don’t worry, this NoBoundaries.org is still the main source for all my travel posts—-and ALL of its content is EXCLUSIVE.

As always, keep it tuned here for more to come.

• Leave a comment to this post below.
• Join the NoBoundaries.org Facebook group “Andy Goes Around The World.”
• Laugh yourself silly, by seeing our Guest Traveler post on Davey “Dance” Fishel
• Read about my regretful search for The Best Sushi In The World in Japan

My thoughts and prayers go out to my friends and the people in and around Szechuan Province in China. A friend of a friend of mine who lives in Chengdu captured the moment the earthquake struck on video, while in the mountains outside Chengdu, and the BBC is now showing the footage here.

It is a terrible tragedy in a very beautiful part of the world. Please consider making a donation to the Red Cross to assist the victims of this disaster.

Interested in planning your own trip around-the-world, or part of the way around? I’ve added a new travel links section to the website that includes links to some of the best resources on the net in around-the-world travel and other adventures–all of which I’ve used. More will be added overtime. See under the About menu above or click here to go directly.

So, if you subscribed to the RSS feed on this site prior to November 1st, 2007, then you’re going to have to update your RSS subscription (in Google Reader, Yahoo Reader, etc) to the new address: www.noboundaries.org/feed

No idea what an RSS feed is? It’s like a bookmark for my travelogue that instead of you having to surf over here every single day to see if there something new (cause I know you do), it comes and knocks on your door to tell you, “There’s something NEW!”

How does it work? You need to setup an RSS feed reader program (like Google Reader) and then simply subscribe to the feed address www.noboundaries.org/rss. Then, every time I post here, you’ll automatically be notified that there’s new content. It’s that easy! (See the Google Reader Tour to learn more about how RSS works.)

I’ve been getting a lot of email requests that begin “So there was this quote on your website…” and end with “but it disappeared before I could write it down…” So, today we introduce a new feature on the presently “under construction” redesign of the noboundaries.org site: a single page containing all the quotes that have ever appeared in the quote section of the front page.

It can be found under the Photo & Media menu above, there you will now find a “travel quotes” section.

Feel free to share you own travel quotes in the comment box provided below, the best of which I will add to the rotating stock of quotes.

Here are few of my favorites:

(The two quotes that inspired the the name for this website.)

“As you pass from sunlight into darkness and back again every hour and a half, you become startlingly aware how artificial are thousands of boundaries we’ve created to separate and define. And for the first time in your life you feel in your gut the precious unity of the Earth and all the living things it supports.” -Russell Schweickart, Apollo 9 astronaut

“If one advances confidently in the directions of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind and will pass an invisible boundary, new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him” -Henry David Thoreau in Walden

And a few others….

“Don’t sell all your time.” -Dick Gregory

“You’re not going to see people like this again for a long time, he said & I said I always saw people like this & he looked at me for a moment & said, You’re not from around here, are you?” -Brian Andreas, StoryPeople

“If I had my life to live over I’d like to make more mistakes next time. I’d relax. I would limber up. I would be sillier than I have been this trip. I would take fewer things seriously.

I would take more chances. I would climb more mountains and swim more rivers. I would eat more ice cream and less beans. I would perhaps have more actual trouble, but I’d have fewer imaginary ones.

You see, I’m one of those people who live sensibly and sanely hour after hour, day after day. Oh, I’ve had my moments, and if I had to do it over again, I’d have more of them. In fact, I’d try to have nothing else. Just moments, one after another, instead of living so many years ahead of each day.

I’ve been one of those persons who never goes anywhere without a thermometer, a hot water bottle, a raincoat, and a parachute. If I had to do it again, I would travel lighter than I have.

If I had my life to live over, I would start barefoot earlier in the spring and stay that way later in the fall. I would go to more dances. I would ride more merry-go-rounds. I’d pick more daisies.” -Nadine Stair

Got any good quotes you think I should add to the list? Please post them in the comment section below.

• Post a comment, a quote, or suggest a new feature for the website in the comment box below.
• View the gallery of travel quotes.
• Need some more inspiration to travel? Read Andy’s #1 recommendation (and a MUST READ excerpt from) a book that will definitely inspire to travel around-the-world: Vagabonding by Rolf Potts.
• Read a funny travel story about Andy’s search for The Best Sushi In The World in Japan.

If you’re a regular reader here at noboundaries.org, you have probably figured out, I’m posting stuff in chronological order, following along the path of my trip, which began in August of 2006.

There are a couple of reason why there is a lag between when I visit a place and when I actually post about it: 1) it takes me time to write and edit the stories, process the photos, and caption the videos, as I am constantly traveling on trains, planes, cars, buses and boats, in addition to the fact that 2) its often hard to find a fast enough (and reliable) internet connection in much of the world to do such things.

To help minimize a bit of this lag, and due to popular demand (including a request from my mom) I’ve added a new ever-growing gallery onto the travelogue called Around-The-World In Photos. This is, and will continue to be, a collection of self-portraits (which I have a tendency to shy away from) of me on my trip, in which I’m doing interesting things in interesting places.

That way (mom), you can get a sense of the place I am currently in, and you can confirm that I am breathing and alive. Although you might have to wait a bit for the story about the pictures, it’ll at least show you a bit about what I am doing presently.

Bookmark the gallery (and bookmark this travelogue or add our RSS Feed if you haven’t already) and check back often, as I’ll try to add photos to this gallery regularly.

Thanks for coming along,
Andy

Key to the mosaic above: 1. Yau Ma Tei, Hong Kong, China, 2. Hong Kong Island, Hong Kong, China, 3. North Point, Hong Kong, China, 4. Shatin, Hong Kong, China., 5. Victoria Harbor, Hong Kong, China, 6. Central, Hong Kong, China, 7. Central, Hong Kong, China, 8. Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong, China, 9. Beijing, China, 10. Bandling, China, 11. Tokyo, Japan, 12. Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan, 13. Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan, 14. Kyoto, Japan, 15. Hakone, Japan, 16. Sai Kung, Hong Kong, China, 17. China, 18. Family Photo, 19. Macau, China, 20. Xun Zhou, China, 21. Xun Zhou, China, 22. Singapore, 23. Angkor Wat, Cambodia, 24. Angkor Wat, Cambodia, 25. Near Saigon, Vietnam., 26. Near Saigon, Vietnam., 27. Vietnam, 28. Danang, Vietnam, 29. Hui An, Vietnam, 30. Hui An, Vietnam, 31. Vietnam, 32. Hue, Vietnam, 33. Hue, Vietnam, 34. Hue, Vietnam, 35. Halong Bay, Vietnam, 36. Zhongdian, China

• Leave a comment in the box below.
• View the entire Around-The-World In Photos collection in an interactive slideshow (click the photos to read the captions).
• View all my photo galleries.
• See a map of what countries my trip has already taken me through, so you can get excited for the upcoming stories!
• See the cool web tool I used to make the above Mosaic automatically from my Flickr gallery.

Welcome Inside Traveler readers! I hope you bookmark\rss\write down this site and come back to read more about a solo around-the-world trip, travel stories, advice, and tips and trick on how you too could (and should) travel around the world. I’m six months on the road, 18 months to go.

Thank you MB and Inside Traveler, I’m appreciative of the attention and the link. Come visit, I owe you all a beer.

Best Photography on a Travel Blog: Exposed Planet
Best Single-Author Travel Blog & Best Informative/Practical Travel Blog: The Cranky Flier
Best Group-Written Travel Blog: The Lost Girls
Best Destination Blog: Newyorkology
Best Travel Blog: National Geographic Inside Traveler

Since I am going to be away from the internet for the next 3-4 days, I’m going to leave you with this link to the nominees list to give you some reading for the next few days.

NoBoundaries.org didn’t make the top 15,000, so we’ll shoot for the nomination next year. But, if you’re planning on voting, may I suggest, if you’re unsure, my friend and fellow UI graduate, Mary Beth LaRue is one of the contributors to “National Geographic Inside Traveler” which in nominated for the Best Overall Travel Blog. So let’s put our support there, if you don’t mind.

I’ll post again when I return to the internet hopefully on Monday or Tuesday, and I promise then to continue the story (and share pictures) from Beijing. Then onto stories, photos, and commentary from Japan.

So, thus I’ve fixed it. But at the expense of that nifty little ’share this’ option on each post. So, my web programming division and I (or is it: “I, the web programming division”) will have to to get PHP scripting today and fix that!
In the meantime, let’s reopen the comment flood gates and you can go to the previous post (A ‘Cute’ Story) and define “Geek” for me. (One rule, you can not use my name or the word ‘PHP’ in the definition.) Thanks for your patience.

(Comments are really appreciated and highly encouraged.)