Given that today’s Chewing the Fat interviewees have been taking the travel blogging world by storm over the past year with their epic adventures through Asia, Europe and South & Central America, I assume everyone’s familiar with them. In case you’re not, however, a little introduction: Dan and Casey are two lovebirds, world travelers, and […]
It’s hard to think of a place that we could have started our time in Europe that wallops your budget harder than London does. Regardless of where in the world you’re coming from, London is expensive, plain and simple. From the cost of a “cozy hotel room” (read: cramped) in a “local neighborhood with character” […]
Every long-term traveler has a different catalyst that starts them on their journey and that keeps them excited out there on the road. Some want to hop from one beautiful beach to the next chasing perpetual summer (an idea that doesn’t sound so bad as I sit here writing this in chilly Toronto!), whereas others […]
London calls to me. London enraptures me. London ties my tongue—and my heart—up into knots. It’s always been this way. For as long as I can remember, England has felt like the center of the universe, exerting a gravitational pull on me. Ever since I was a teenager, I have loved its writers, its musicians, […]
You guys! Can it really be that we have not Chewed the Fat with someone for months now? That hardly seems possible, but scanning our archives, I see that it is (sadly) true. I have no excuse because the response to this series has really been excellent (I mean, really, who doesn’t love reading about […]
After years of fantasizing about Sri Lanka, there was a lot riding on our visit. In fact, given our past experiences with heightened expectations, my repeated mantra on the flight over was “Don’t expect too much. Sri Lanka probably won’t be that great.” I was certain my hopes and dreams for the country would prove […]
If I’m being perfectly candid, we have seen and done some pretty adventurous things during our journey around the world. We’ve trekked in the mountains of Nepal, and over-landed on scooters through the back-country of Laos. We took a tiny boat along some of the wildest and most beautiful coastline in the Philippines, and went scuba diving in some of the world’s best waters. We’ve met real Geisha in Gion, and tried the foul-smelling “king of fruit”, durian, not once but THREE times! We’ve done some epic things, many of them things we never expected that we would ever do.
There are few places I have rolled into with a heart as full of as much dread as I did the western coastal resort city of Negombo. Throughout our three weeks exploring Sri Lanka, we had been won over by every place we had visited (in most cases quite easily), but I knew things would […]
A terrible pun, I know, but one that was too good to resist. Obviously. Our penultimate stop in Sri Lanka was the former capital, the city of Kandy. One of the final holdouts against colonialists and conquerors, Kandy was the last stronghold of the Sinhalese empire when it finally fell to the British in 1815. […]
It’s no secret that I consider our decision to start 20YH one of the best choices we made before leaving on our Big Trip. The site hasn’t always been easy to maintain and has lent itself to frustration and become a source of stress on more than one occasion, but on the whole, it’s been […]
I’m not entirely sure why we decided to go to Arugam Bay in the first place. Sri Lanka’s east coast is not nearly as well traveled as its west, but Arugam Bay is the exception: known for its phenomenal breakers, it is a world-class surf destination and attracts surfers from all over the globe. However, […]
It’s been a week of milestones here at 20 Years Hence: Thursday marked six weeks back home following our Big Trip (How did that happen???), and today is the two year anniversary of the date we first left on our travels (How did that happen?!?). Given that we’re celebrating the latter concurrent with the former, […]
We knew the rains would come for us, it was only a matter of time. Though there are plenty of perks to traveling in shoulder season, the weather (which is notoriously fickle in Sri Lanka at any time of year) is generally not one of them. With each passing day as we puttered along the […]
Like every traveler to Tissamaharma (a name that trips up the tongue rather than rolls off of it, resulting in it being more frequently referred to by its diminutive, Tissa), we trundled into town to see about some cats. Positioned such as it is, Tissa acts as the staging post and gateway to Yala National […]
In case we have not been clear in our previous posts, Sri Lanka has some really beautiful beaches. By which I mean, literally every beach we visited in Sri Lanka was the most beautiful beach we had ever seen in our lives in the entire world. Weeks later when we were in Paris and had […]