LATEST DISPATCH
The Wild, Wild West Bank
Posted July 02, 2009
DAY 12 (PART 1): “What did he say?” I asked my new friend and traveling companion Sarit, who was fluent enough in Hebrew to understand what the bus driver was telling us. She had asked him where we should be dropped off on the side of the road in order to hike the Wadi Qelt trek between Jerusalem and Jericho, through the untamed desert of the Palestinian West Bank.
“He said that he’ll drop us off at the [Jewish] settlement and that it’s a far walk and it’s unsafe and that we shouldn’t be heroes for doing it,” Sarit informed me. “But he’ll take us.”
FEATURED CLIPS
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, former Lycos travel columnist Erik R. Trinidad is a freelance travel writer whose work has been featured in the New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Arthur Frommer’s Budget Travel magazine, Pilot Guides’ GlobeTrekkerTV.com, and BootsnAll.com. He is a member of the National Geographic Society and has contributed news to National Geographic Traveler. 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. Currently he is putting together a travel anthology/guide about travel scams with World Swirl Press.
From Timbuktu to Kalamazoo, Erik has traveled to the seven continents of the world with a curiosity for exotic foods and a thirst for adventure (and writing material). In his travels, the ethnically ambiguous-looking thirty-something 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. While some believe he has an iron stomach, he is not invulnerable to traveler’s diarrhea.
From October 2003 to March 2005, Erik traveled on a continuous sixteen-month trip around the world, blogging each day with his detailed and sometimes humorous style of storytelling. The blog, which has received over 75,000 unique hits from a global audience, originally began as a small on-line journal for a few family and friends, but evolved into an internet phenomenon 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. His travel writing is also a journey, one that has evolved from his early days writing personal travel journals to his published articles tailored to publication style. His travel and literary journeys will continually develop the more he travels and writes—provided he’s not occupied tracking down lost luggage.
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 Amy Alipio, Assistant Editor at National Geographic Traveler.