Taken by the Wind

The Six Best Travel-Themed Tattoos

Reannon Muth — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 20:46:41 +0000

Maybe you consider yourself a life-long travel-enthusiast because you have a passport stamp collection and an active Couchsurfing profile. But until you’ve taken your love for the road to the next level and gotten a travel tat, you can’t truly consider yourself a lifer. Because nothing says ‘travel addict’ like scarring a treasure map onto your bicep or permanently inking an aircraft emergency evacuation pamplet onto your calf. Or you could be like this dude and get a tattoo of a United Airlines Boeing 727. Everyone might think your plane crazy, but they won’t be laughing when your travel tat scores you a free upgrade on your next United flight.

Here’s a collection of some of the best travel-inspired tattoos the world wide web has to offer. What do you think? Would you get one of these?

The World Map

Sam's World by Thomas Hawk

The Paper Plane

Adventureland by Beast Love

Footprints

Photo by Neon Buggle

The Sailboat

Photo by Timoni

The Pirate Ship

Photo by Hustle Roses

The Compass

Photo by Sheriff Mitchell

My personal favorite is the world map tatoo. ‘Course I’m kinda biased being that I have a similar one on my ankle and all…

Big News: I Have My Own Column!

Reannon Muth — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 17:49:29 +0000

Before Nicaragua or Guatemala, before I got a job with an airline or lived in Japan and before this blog existed or I even knew what the word ‘blog’ meant, there was India. And the four months I spent hauling my sweaty self up and down mountains and away from stampeding elephants and spitting camels.

Here are a few pictures from that fascinating experience.

Don't eat me!

Snakes, Me and a Crazy Holy Man

Baby Elephant and Me...He kept trying to push me over. Aw, that's love.

Camel Safari

What's scarier...the food or my hair?

Would you eat this?

Are you captivated yet?

Well, I’ve recently been hired by Rumbum.com to write about all of my adventures, starting with when I left NYC and flew to India, all the way through to Nicaragua (and beyond?). It’s a weekly column and you can check back every Monday to read the latest installment or subscribe to it’s RSS feed and receive updates in your email inbox.

It’s called ‘Hello, Big Adventure’ and here’s the link to the first post in the series:

http://rumbum.com/1282-goodbye-big-apple-hello-big-adventure#continue_post

What do you think?

PS Most of these photos were taken by my cousin Anderson. He was nice enough to let me steal borrow them. If you’d like to read about his RTW trip or about the time he cycled through SE Asia, you can check out his blog, Watch Out World.

Future Travel Plans: USA

Reannon Muth — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 16:19:49 +0000

New York City, December 2009

I’ve decided not to take that job in Nicaragua.

After I’d made a list of all the things that I hoped to accomplish over the next couple of years, I realized that a good 90 percent of them I wouldn’t be able to do living in a village in the mountains of Central America.

But that doesn’t mean that I won’t move there at some later date. The job has a high turn-over rate and most of the volunteer coordinators only stay in the position a year. So who knows, maybe if I’ve finished by novel, found a husband, bought a house, started my own company (more about that plan later) and discovered my purpose in life (well, I can dream) I could be in Nicaragua by next summer.

But in all seriousness, I’m going to give life in the US a shot. This doesn’t mean I’ll live here forever (God, I hope not) or that I’m by any means ‘settling down’, but it does mean that I’ll be here for a while.

Well. Now that I’ve just revealed that my life is going to be taking a turn for the ordinary, I hope you’ll still want to read this blog. It’ll be tough trying to beat adventures involving scorpions or erupting volcanoes, but I’ll try to keep things interesting.

Stay tuned…

If I’d had 1,000 dollars…

Reannon Muth — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 18:34:39 +0000

I would have bought this blue Volkswagen bus and driven it back to California.

I very nearly did. My roommates in Guatemala and I talked a lot about buying a VW van (they were for sale everywhere in Central in America and for as little as USD 600) and then driving it up through Mexico and into California. They needed to get to Los Angeles and I needed to go back to San Francisco and making the journey overland seemed like it’d be a fun adventure. I’d met quite a few people on the road who’d done it (one of my roommate’s in Antigua had driven there from New York on her motorcycle) and from all accounts, the journey seemed fairly safe and super affordable.

And I would have gone through with it too, if it weren’t for the fact that I wasn’t sure the van would have survived the trip. Neither my roommates nor myself knew enough about cars to know which one to buy or what questions to ask. We’d have probably made it only half-way to Mexico city before the radiator fell out or something and then we’d be car-less and stranded in the desert somewhere. And although that could have been interesting, I didn’t have the funds to buy a bus or plane ticket if something like that went wrong (a planet ticket from Mexico is double the price of a plane ticket from Guatemala).

My dreams of owning a Volkeswagon were therefore temporarily put on hold. But one day when I have the money and have found a mechanic with a lot of time on his hands, I’d love to give it a try.

So. Who’s up for the idea?

Home Again

Reannon Muth — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 15:38:35 +0000

I’ve been back on US soil for six days now and so far I haven’t felt even one ounce of reverse culture shock. And I gotta say, I’m a little disappointed. After my experience returning to New York from Tokyo and after reading this article on Vagabondish, I was actually looking forward to it.

Reverse culture shock is a little like walking around your neighborhood at dusk. All the houses, lawn-mowers and mailboxes are exactly how you remembered them, except the edges are all a little blurry and everything that was once familiar takes on this magical, twilight-y vibe. Nothing feels quite real. It’s trippy. And freakin’ awesome.

But the only sign of reverse culture shock I’ve experienced and about the only reminder I have that I was even in Central America at all, is that I have to continually remember to flush the toilet paper (and not dispose of it in the trash). When I first arrived into the airport in Miami, I actually forgot and absentmindedly stuffed it into the small waste receptacle that’s reserved for discarding feminine hygiene products. Oops.

But besides that and the one time I slipped and muttered ‘Lo siento’ instead of ‘I’m sorry’, after I whacked a man with my hammock while I was trying to peel it off the baggage claim, I’ve found it pretty easy to readjust back again. It’s like I never left.

Maybe it’s because I wasn’t gone for very long (only four and a half months) or maybe it’s because I’ve left and returned home again so many times in the past that I’ve grown immune to it.

After all, something can only be a ‘shock’ if it’s unexpected. When your life is consistently lived between cultures and you’re forever in a state of limbo, that stage of readjustment stops being a stage and just becomes a barely noticed fact of life.