Browse the Featured Clips below, or navigate/zoom the map above for more stories.
LATEST DISPATCH FROM THE GLOBAL TRIP BLOG:
Forget “Africa”
From the trip blog: "The Global Trip: Monkeying Around"
Posted January 23, 2012
DAYS 17-18: “Are you talking about Akabanga?” asked the man waiting in the queue for Business Class check-in at Kigali International Airport, next to where I was waiting for Economy. He noticed I was talking about a certain Rwandan hot sauce to Gearoid, a fellow former guest of the Hotel des Mille Collines that I had shared the complimentary airport taxi with. I was describing the size of the hot sauce’s small eye dropper bottle with my fingers.
“Yeah,” I answered the man in Business Class, smiling at our apparent shared appreciation of Akabanga. “You know it?”
“I have twelve [bottles],” he announced proudly.
I told him I had over two dozen myself, packed in my checked luggage bound for New York via Amsterdam.
FEATURED CLIPS
How to Quit Your Job and Travel the World
Discovery.com, December 2011
A step by step guide on how to tell your boss to “take this job and shove it” so you can follow your dream of traveling the world.
Along The Trail Of Brotherhood
Travelers' Tales: Best Travel Writing, March 2008
A gripping tale of survival on the Everest trail is the Adventure Travel—Silver Certificate Winner in The 2008 Solas Awards, sponsored by Travelers’ Tales, an annual competition to honor excellence in travel writing.
Meet The Maharaja
Destination Elsewhere, April 2007
Landing a one-on-one interview with the Maharaja of Jaipur doesn’t necessarily give you the exclusive you’d hoped for.
City Shorts: New York
National Geographic Traveler, April 2007
Spring time in New York spawns the arrival of retro Central Park Skate Circle, an outdoor throwback to the hey-day of the roller disco.
Mistaken Identities
Filipinas, April 2006
When traveling around the world as a Filipino-American with an indeterminable ethnic appearance, blending in as a local of over thirty nationalities can be both a blessing and curse.
The Season For Lookin’ Good On The Gauley
Chicago Tribune, September 4, 2005
When rafting the Gauley River in West Virginia, USA, surviving the raging whitewater rapids isn’t as nearly as important as looking good while doing so.
Pretty In Pink
Travelers' Tales The Flying Carpet Editor's Choice, August 2003
At Montreal’s annual “Just For Laughs” comedy festival, slipping into a bra in public for comic value isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be.
Growling Not Laughing
Travelmag, August 2003
With gruesome stories of hyena attacks on the brain, overcoming hyenaphobia is the hardest part of a safari through Botswana’s Moremi Game Reserve and Chobe National Park.
Wipe Out!
New York Post, December 10, 2002
At the Mountain Creek ski resort in Vernon, New Jersey, USA, catching air from a big snowboard jump can impress the spectators—but landing is a different story.
When You Wish Upon A Star (Altitude Sickness Will Flee Far)
GlobeTrekkerTV.com, October 2002
With the undulating high altitudes of Peru’s Inca Trail, altitude sickness is an inevitable—but beatable—obstacle for some trekkers.
ABOUT THE TRAVELER
When he’s not making a living as an interactive designer or playing with his food, Erik R. Trinidad is a Contributing Writer for Discovery Channel’s Adventure blog whose work has also been featured in National Geographic Traveler, the New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Arthur Frommer’s Budget Travel magazine, Pilot Guides’ GlobeTrekkerTV.com, and BootsnAll.com. His short story “Disbelief of Wonder” 
appears in the best-of-travel-humor anthology, Hyenas Laughed at Me and Now I Know Why, which also includes the work of Tim Cahill, Doug Lansky, Jennifer Leo and Rolf Potts.
For over ten years, Erik has traveled to the seven continents of the world — from Timbuktu to Kalamazoo— with a curiosity for exotic foods and a thirst for adventure (and writing material). In his travels, he has been mugged at knifepoint in Cape Town, extorted by corrupt Russian police on the Trans-Siberian Railway, stranded in tornadic storms in the American midwest, and air-lifted off the Everest Trail by a helicopter that was thankfully paid for by his travel insurance. But it hasn’t been all fun; he has also donned a tuxedo amidst the penguins of Antarctica, paraded with Carnival-winning samba school Beija Flor in Rio, run for his life at Pamplona’s “Running of the Bulls,” cage-dived with great white sharks, gotten shot point-blank in the stomach in Colombia (while wearing a bulletproof jacket), and above all, encountered many people around the world, including some Peruvian musicians in Cuzco who learned and played “Y.M.C.A.” at his request. He loves the irony that, after everywhere he’s been, he has never been to Mexico.
From October 2003 to March 2005, Erik traveled on a continuous sixteen-month trip around the world, blogging each day with his unique style of storytelling. The blog originally began as a small on-line journal for a few family and friends, but evolved into an Internet phenomenon (over 75,000 unique hits) within the travel communities of BootsnAll.com and Lonely Planet’s Thorn Tree, and has been recommended by RickSteves.com, USA Today, and Travelocity’s IgoUgo travel network. 
In Spring 2005, it was selected by the editors of PC Magazine as one of the year’s “Top 100 Sites You Didn’t Know You Couldn’t Live Without,” in the travel category.
Erik writes stories and articles when he is at his base camp in New York City, and continues his blog when he is on the road — provided he’s not occupied tracking down lost luggage.
See Erik talk about travel in an American Express commercial ("$200 airline credit fee").
To read about Erik from a real third person (as opposed to Erik writing this sidebar about himself in the third person), check out this feature article from Filipinas magazine by National Geographic Traveler‘s Amy Alipio.
