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Again, that's longangle.com. Hello, and welcome to another bonus episode of All The Hacks, a show about upgrading your life, money, and travel. If this is your first time listening to the show, you are welcome to stick around for some travel inspiration for your next trip. However, you may first want to check out the last episode of the show a couple of days ago, where prolific travel journalist, Sebastian Modak, and I talked all about travel from planning the trip to tracking your lost bags, to having amazing local experiences and a lot more.

Towards the end of that conversation, I thought it would be fun to offer up some inspiration to all of you by going continent by continent and sharing some of our favorite places we've traveled around the world. So I decided to pull that part of the conversation out to make this episode.

It left me so excited to travel to a few new places I've never considered. So I really hope you enjoy it. Let's jump in. I get a lot of emails from listeners saying, "Hey, what are your favorite places to go? Where should I go? I've been to 60 some odd countries, not the 80 some odd you've been." And so I thought, "I'd love to run through continents.

You've lived on four of them, but I also know I think you've hit all of them and even Antarctica, which I have not. We don't need to go too deep, but just to give people some inspiration." At the very beginning, we talked about how might you get some inspiration for places, maybe we just throw some inspiration out, give a line or two about why some could be places that are obvious, right?

Like I can already tell you I'm going to include Japan and there's no secret that Japan is like a travel destination. Were you up for it? Yeah, let's do it. Okay, so I say we start at home. I'm going to make you go first. Start in North America. Okay, I'll go first with North America.

I got to do it. And listen, I know people are going to be like, "Yeah, duh." But I'm going to say New Orleans, but I'm going to say not the New Orleans you think of when you think of visiting New Orleans. I think you need to go to New Orleans and never step foot onto Bourbon Street, barely even enter the French Quarter and experience New Orleans like someone who lives in New Orleans.

And that means, yeah, sure, go for Mardi Gras, but go for the actual parades and the parties and the stuff that happens in people's backyards. Go for all the other festivals that happened after Mardi Gras and the other fairs. I think it is a magical, magical city that's unlike anywhere else, not just in North America, but the world.

I think geographically, Central America is in North America, if we're talking continents. Is that correct? Sure. Cool. So my whole family took a trip to El Salvador, and we found this small family run eight room hotel on the beach. It was almost like a bed and breakfast, but it was kind of operated a little bit more like a resort, but definitely run by a family.

I'll try to put the name of the place on the show notes. Surfing was interesting. We'd walk down the beach to the little town right near there. It was awesome. And then after, I can't remember how we ended up getting to Nicaragua and just staying in the rainforest and exploring.

And everyone always says go to Costa Rica. That seems to be like the primary destination, but I would recommend either of those countries. We had a great experience just exploring around where we were staying and kind of a local, I mean, I don't even know what to call this place because it's like you could call it a resort, but you could also call it like a plot of land someone built a few houses on and the family operates it.

Love that. Anything else outside of the US in that area? I know we've got a lot to get through, but you know, you've also seen a lot. Yeah. This was one of the 52 places, actually. Actually, no, not specifically because I, Panama was on the 52 places list, but there's a little town called Santa Catalina on the Pacific coast of Panama on the West coast.

It's about a six hour drive, maybe from Panama city. When you think of the bohemian surfer paradise, this is it hidden away. Tons of locals living there too. So it's not the kind of place that's been colonized by foreign surfers. Place where just like time slows down. I spent just hours just sitting on this huge beach.

Also happens to be right off of Coiba, which is a national park with some of the best scuba diving in the world. So after days and days of just hanging on this beach, eating fresh fish every day, I went for a dive in Coiba and at the end of our second dive, I look up and there's just a giant whale shark just circling right above us.

One of the most incredible experiences I've ever had. And it was all in this place that just felt like a place that had been hidden from the rest of the world forever. I hope it's still like that after I wrote about it, but I think it is because it felt like I entered a portal into another dimension, honestly.

In college, so like a long time ago for me, I went to Tamarindo in Costa Rica and it felt like that. It was one of the fondest memories of travel I have, but I don't want to go back because I've heard it is not like that anymore. I've heard it's not like that either.

Yeah. Okay. So South America, I'll kick off because I don't have a lot. South America is one of the places I haven't traveled a lot, but I enjoyed Cartagena, I thought it was like an incredibly fascinating city. Full disclosure, I went on my bachelor party. However, it was a city where you just feel like you're in a different place.

We didn't just do bachelor party things, right? Like we went and explored the castle. We took a boat out to a random island. We just hopped around the island. It was awesome. And I would recommend it to anyone. Yeah. So I'm half Colombian. So full disclosure, my mother's from Colombia.

I second that recommendation, but I would also encourage people to explore beyond Cartagena too. Cartagena is great, especially for a first timer. There's a lot of tourism infrastructure there and stuff too, but check out some of the other cities. Medellin, which is where my family's from, is not the Medellin of the eighties that people associate with Escobar and everything else.

It's a incredibly dynamic, fast growing, super fun city with incredible nightlife and has the energy of a city on the move. You really feel it. It's also just physically beautiful. There's also parts on the coast of Colombia, the Pacific coast that for a long time were largely off limits because of conflict that are now kind of opening up to tourists for the first time.

There's just so much to see in Colombia. I second that recommendation. To have something different though, I'm going to go actually a little bit into the Caribbean for this one. I think there's a lot on mainland South America that I could recommend. Ecuador is incredible. City of Quito is worth spending a lot of time in if you can, but I'm going to go actually right off the coast to the island of Bonaire, which is one of the Dutch Antilles, Aruba, and then Bonaire is there as well.

And Bonaire is another place that I feel like has slipped under the radar for a lot of people for a long time. And I think no matter how much I talk about it, at least I'm not going to ruin it because there's something special about it. Just another place where you can really slow down, beautiful beaches, some of the best scuba diving in the world, if that's what you're into.

And just like also a very fascinating cultural milieu of African influence, Dutch influence, mainland South American influence, really cool place to just like rent a house on the beach and hang out for a week and pick up fish from the market every morning, cook it in the evening. Good place to unplug for that.

It might be right next to Aruba, but I had the exact opposite experience in Aruba. I felt like it's just become the most commercialized, Americanized. So it could not be more different. It's literally like two sides of a coin. It's really interesting that and I think differences at Bonaire, while having nice beaches, it doesn't have those like huge sandy beaches that make for a great setting for huge resorts.

Right here, it's more rocky beaches. It's a little more rugged. And because of that, it hasn't had and hopefully never does kind of infrastructure boom that Aruba has had. I feel like if we don't speed up, we're not going to get through this. So I'm going to encourage us to do a more rapid version in Europe.

OK, let me go first for Europe. Yeah, I'm going to say the town of Plovdiv, Bulgaria. It's the second biggest city in Bulgaria, one of the coolest towns I've ever been to, just like full of creative energy, young people. There's an area called Kapana or something in Bulgarian, but it means the trap because once you get into it, it's like very hard to find your way around.

It's like this very densely packed cluster of buildings, but it's like full of bars and cafes and cool bookstores, a lot of creative people, a lot of creative energy. They call it the other city of seven hills. So if Rome has seven hills, so does Plovdiv. But these hills are like smack in the middle of town.

So you can go on a hike through the woods in the middle of the city, come out the other side and be in the second biggest city in Bulgaria. Such a cool place. I like can't wait to go back. It was one of the places on my 52 places trip, actually, that I was like walking around and I was constantly thinking like I could rent a place here for like six months or a year, just hang out, just read and go to the local coffee shop in the morning and right in the evening and had that kind of a Plovdiv.

I felt that way about Budapest, like being there. I was like, we could just move here and it would be amazing, but I'm not going to go there. I'm going to go to Bosnia. There are two things that we were in Croatia and we thought, why don't we just rent a car and drive across the border and just see what happens?

And we drove up to Mostar, which is this like wild city that just feels like amalgamation of like every culture in the world. Almost the food was amazing. There's the most fascinating people watching because there's this bridge that is famous for jumping off of and you can just relax and sit by the water and you watch these people trying to get people to join the Mostar bridge jumping club, which I was just close to doing.

It didn't do it. If I go back, I'm like, I'm doing it. I'm doing it. This is my plan. But the one thing I will suggest people do. So there is this famous general from the Soviet Union, Tito. He built this bunker and I think it's probably the largest.

I mean, I could be wrong, but it might be one of the, if not the largest bunker in the world. It's gigantic and it's set inside just a random like neighborhood kind of experience. You go into this neighborhood, you go into this house and in the garage, there's just this false fake door.

You go in the door and all of a sudden you're inside this gigantic bunker that they've kind of turned into an art gallery. I don't even know how to explain the experience. We had heard about it and we just basically asked every local we could to figure out how it worked.

And someone knew someone who had a tour. I think it's slightly a little easier to go on now than it was at the time. But that is my recommendation is to go explore that. In today's dollars, the bunker would have cost over $4 billion to build. It's literally one of the most gigantic things.

I think the hundreds of rooms. I wish I had more of the information about it off the top of my head. But that tour and experience was just so fascinating and the kinds of people were on it. We had conversations about why they were there, how they learned about it, because it didn't feel like a tourist experience, though.

I would put it as a tourist experience. Thanks. Getting the crew together isn't as easy as it used to be. I get it. Life comes at you fast. But trust me, your friends are probably desperate for a good hang. So kick 2024 off right by finally hosting that event.

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That's D-R-I-Z-L-Y dot com today. Must be 21 plus, not available in all locations. All right, Africa. I guess a lot of options here. I'm going to go with the city of Dakar in Senegal, another city that within a few days I was like I could live here for sure.

Music everywhere. Just another city where you just feel the energy of it the moment you step off the plane. People are so friendly, so hospitable. So many little places to get a whole fish grilled up on the beach. I think the whole grilled fish is a common thread between all my choices so far.

It's a great universal of travel is the whole fish just grilled to perfection. And in Senegal, you get that, too. Yeah, like music everywhere. Amazing history, both tragic and not in terms of the history. Really cool nightlife with live music everywhere. Just a really amazing, dynamic, modern city that I think a lot of people, I think people overlook African cities in general.

If people are traveling to Africa, they're thinking nature, they're thinking safari, they're thinking all these things, which is true. It's a reason for it. It's spectacular in terms of nature. But I think the cities have a lot to offer. This is like one of the youngest populations in the world that are on that continent.

Right. So there's just an incredible energy and incredible forward momentum. And you really feel it in a city like Dakar. So that would be my pick. I like it. I'm going to go a little off the rails here or actually on the rails. That was not supposed to be a joke, but it just happened and suggest people check out the Tazara train.

So it's a train between Tanzania and Zambia. We took this, my wife and I, almost a decade ago, a little longer. And it was like a three day train ride. And almost every person I've ever heard says the train breaks down a little bit every time. You usually end up stopping in a random village.

Everyone can go explore and you get back on. You meet the most fascinating people on the train because people that take a train for three days in Africa have some interesting story to tell. Flights in Africa are really expensive, so it's a really affordable way to get around. And if at the end of that experience you want a little bit something different, that's maybe a little bit more relaxing.

You end up in Dar es Salaam and you can take a ferry to Zanzibar, which is kind of this otherworldly, cool island with a lot of both sad and interesting history as well. And Zanzibar, I think, has. Not the some of the best beaches I've ever seen in my life.

Yeah. Zanzibar just unreal. It's wild. So that's what I've got. Obviously, if you haven't taken a safari somewhere in Africa, it's an amazing experience. But I assume that's not something someone needs to be told about. Right. This is gonna be the hardest one because it encompasses so many places.

What are your one to two hot spots in Asia? Oh, yeah, it is really hard, especially because I grew up there for the most part. I'm going to skip over Indonesia because that's like an obvious choice for me because that's where I spent my formative years. But I'll say plainly, Indonesia, it's endless in terms of the places you can go.

Literally, there's 20,000 islands or whatever. That's a good place to start looking beyond Bali and other things like that. I'm gonna say Vietnam. I think the cities especially I'm thinking. Playing from north to south, Hanoi, Da Nang and Saigon, I think all offer very different things, and I think the cities are just incredible.

You'll eat maybe the best you've ever eaten in your life on plastic stools on the side of the road. That's just a attention to detail with the food universally that you don't get in a lot of places. And for next to nothing, just a huge part of the culture.

And I think it's incredible to witness. I think you haven't lived till you've tried to cross a road in Hanoi during rush hour and felt the adrenaline rush of that. The trick is to keep moving and don't make any sudden movements. The motorcycles will go around you. Yeah, it's just I mean, again, another common thread, I think, between some of these places I'm picking is just cities that feel so alive and you like can't help but get caught up in that feeling and the current of the place and kind of places where you can just sit down on a plastic stool and sip a coffee and watch the world go by.

And it's incredible to witness. So that would be one. Trying to think of something maybe nature based for the other one, I'm going to say Siberia. I think now, obviously, is not the time to go for geopolitical reasons. But if things with Russia ever change, the area around Lake Baikal, which is the deepest lake in the world, is otherworldly.

There's an island called Olkhon Island, absolutely otherworldly place. You feel like you're in a dream, especially if you go in the fall. When I went, all the trees are bright yellow because of the changing foliage, wild horses in random corners, long stretches with no humans in sight. Just really feels like you've died and gone somewhere else.

I struggled with this. And then I was like, oh, well, I guess the Middle East is in Asia. So I have two. One is like your Siberia. Syria was one of my most memorable places to travel, would also probably not go there right now, though there are reports of people traveling there.

But we also went to Lebanon, which I thought was just. A wild, interesting place that both felt like it had the longest history. We went up to the mountains, we went hiking in the mountains, we went to a ski resort in the summer and hung out there. There's all of these, I think they're like monasteries surrounding this valley.

You could basically see every season, every style of architecture, every style of experience from the mountains to the beaches, all in a very small country. We drove around the entire country. We drove to the south. We got calls from our friends in Beirut saying, you're not supposed to drive that far as an American tourist.

That's not a good idea. We never actually felt unsafe as much as people told us we were. And then the most interesting thing to me is that there's this weird amalgamation of French and English and Arabic that exists in the country. And you'll hear people using all three languages in one sentence.

Which is something that you just don't hear it that often. And I only speak two of the three languages. I could understand two thirds of what's going on. It seems like they get combined in the calmest and the most aggressive circumstances. So it's what people are just saying. Hi, it's hi, how are you?

And then when people are angry on the street, cursing out of their car windows, you catch like bits of every language also. But it's a beautiful country. It has modern size. It has lots of remnants of wars and buildings. Your common theme was whole fish. I was like, gosh, I went to Bosnia.

There's lots of buildings that have been bombed. I went to Lebanon. And so it's amazing to see places that bounce back after those situations. You know, so Lebanon was amazing. And then mentioned Japan a million times. But I think it deserves to be on the list and is probably going to be the place I will travel to more than anywhere else in the world, just because we always keep wanting to go back.

Yeah, I agree with that for sure. But maybe I'll ask you this. You've been to Japan. You know, as we expand Japan every time, we're like, let's go to a new place. Let's go to new place. Any suggestions? I mean, I loved the area around like Kanazawa and Shirakawago, I think is that little village in the mountains in the Japanese Alps that looks like it's out of a fairy tale with the sloped roofs.

It's unreal. We went there in the summer and it was just like dream world. And I think the trick there is it gets touristy during the day because a lot of people come on day trips, but hardly anyone spends the night. So if you spend a night there, you really feel this village that feels like it's from another time.

And I also loved I went to the area around the Seto Inland Sea. So like Setouchi around Takamatsu for the art triennial that happens there. I wonder if they've postponed it again. I don't know, because the last one was 2019 when I was there. And that's just very cool because you have these little islands and each island becomes basically an outdoor art gallery.

And so you take the ferries around from island to island and you're just like in this alternate reality where there's sculptures everywhere and everything's a museum, basically really special, special art event that happens in that area. So those would be my outside of the common path recommendations. But all that being said is I think I've only been to Japan twice.

So I've got a lot more to see in the years ahead. We had another travel journalist, Brandon Presseron, who actually wrote The Lonely Planet Japan Guide. And so go back and check that episode out or reach out to him. He has like every tip on Earth for Japan. I feel like there's just more like Taiwan needs to be on the list.

India, more than half the world, right? Yeah, I loved Cambodia. I could just go through this long list and there's just the food and the people. It's just incredible. And I feel like half the world goes to Lebanon and half the world ends up going on a similar experience in Israel.

And I've done both and they're both fantastic. I think go to Lebanon first because I don't think you want the Israeli stamp in your passport going into Lebanon. I don't think that works well. So if you're debating between the two, I would start in Lebanon and do Israel next or just make sure you don't get the stamp in your passport.

Most of the time, they won't stamp your passport these days because they know in Israel. But someone we were with had the sticker on the back of their passport. It's like they didn't stamp the passport, but they had like a little security sticker. Yeah. And it was not a fun border crossing for them.

The food is like the highlight of the Middle East for me and the people. So eating with strangers is like my favorite thing to do there. Yeah. I'm going to let you take. I don't know whether to call it Oceania or Australia feels very biased to call the continent Australia, though.

I think that's what I grew up learning and Antarctica, because my experience in that whole area is just like a one week city tour of Australia. So I'll let you take both. So for Australasia, Oceania, whatever we want to call it, I'm going to say South Island of New Zealand.

It's not news to anyone that it's one of the most beautiful places in the world. But I would encourage people to look at the Great Walks, which are a collection of different trails that New Zealand has created over the past however many years. And there's new ones being added every few years.

But they're basically like multi day treks you can do. And I would look for those in the South Island. I can't think of a better way to see that nature than by foot. Some of them are pretty rugged in terms of backcountry backpacking, but a lot of them also have huts along the way that you can reserve.

So you're not fully exposed to the elements. I've only done sections of them and never overnight. I've only explored them as part of a story when I was looking around at different trails. But I would love to go back and do one of the Great Walks multi day treks.

So that would be my tip. But anywhere on the South Island, especially along the West Coast of the South Island is just. It's in one day you go from rainforest to glaciers, to alpine terrain, and it's mind boggling. You don't even understand how a place like that exists. So that would be my tip for Oceania.

And then, I mean, Antarctica, there's not a ton of options. My advice for Antarctica would be the smaller ship, the better. You're getting there by ship unless you're Elon Musk trying to get a private jet to the South Pole or whatever, but you're probably getting there by ship. So smaller ship, the better.

And I think part of that is understanding the rules around tourism to Antarctica, the environmental rules, including the fact that only 100 people are allowed on land at any one time in terms of like landing sites. So what that means is if you're on a ship with 700 people, you're not going to be able to go out on every landing because they can only have 100 people at a time.

If you're on a ship with 100 people, you're getting to go out every time. So that would be my tip. The smaller ship, the better. You just have a better experience that way. And my other tip would be like, don't even look at the luxury amenities offered on the ship because you're in Antarctica.

And if you want to spend that time face down on a massage table, you're missing the point of being in Antarctica. So go for the operator that you think is going to give you the best actual experience on the ground, maximizing your time and interaction with a place that is the closest I think I'll ever get, at least to being on another planet, because it is just unreal.

I don't have words and my job is words. But actually, I wrote like 3000 words on it. So you can read about it at LonelyPlanet.com. I'll link to that in the show notes. All right. Thank you so much for joining me for this bonus episode. I have a Q&A episode coming up soon.

So if you have any questions you'd like me to tackle about travel, credit cards, points or miles, please send them my way. Or feedback, guest suggestions, or even if you just want to say hi. I'm Chris at AllTheHacks.com. You can also DM me on social. Thank you so much.

See you next week.