I spent a lot of my first trip around the world partying. I was twenty-five and ready to cut loose after a quarter century of living a fairly sheltered, middle-class life. In my mind, a lot of backpacking was about meeting fellow travelers, partying, and saying yes to anything that came your way. And that often lead to some outrageous experiences.

Like getting into a boxing ring in Ko Phi Phi, Thailand.

Before I began that trip in 2006, I used the website MySpace to meet travelers in advance, since, as an introvert, I was very worried that I wouldn’t make any friends on the road. MySpace had a lot of travel groups, so I reached out to people in hopes of meeting up with them on the trip. (I was early to using the web as a social tool: I had a blog in 2001, and I met my first girlfriend on Friendster back when meeting people online was taboo.)

After landing in Bangkok at the end of that year, I happened to run into Lindsay in the airport, a Brit I was scheduled to meet later that week in Krabi. She was with her friends John and Stephanie. As luck would have it, we were on the same flight to Phuket, so we decided to start our trip together early.

In Phuket, we had booked lodging at the hostel made famous by the movie The Beach. It was as terrible as the film made it out to be, with thin walls, dirty bathrooms, and hard beds. We stayed one night.

From there, we went to Ko Phi Phi, where we planned to spend three nights. The island was still reeling from the tsunami that had devastated it two years before, a cacophony of noise as it tried to rebuild itself. There was debris and construction everywhere, and many businesses were still closed and homes abandoned.

We found a cheap room on the far end of the main town, bunking together to save money, a traveler’s most precious commodity.

That night, we did what backpackers do on the island: we partied. We ate cheap food in the bustling night market, with vendors selling overpriced pad thai to travelers who didn’t know better. From there, went from bar to bar, getting progressively drunker, before ending up at the Reggae Bar, which is famous for two reasons: buckets of cheap booze and a boxing ring in the center.

But the ring isn’t for watching professional Thai boxers. No, it’s there so backpackers can watch other backpackers beat the shit out of each other for free buckets of booze. (A “bucket” is Thai whiskey, Red Bull, and Coke in a child’s beach pail. It gets you very smashed.)

As we got drunker and drunker, James dared me to go box in the ring. “Come on! We need more booze,” he said egging me on.

As the night wore on and the alcohol did its thing, I decided to say fuck it. “Fine, I’ll do it,” I agreed, giving in to the desire to say yes to anything and impress my new friends.

I ended up in the ring with an oversized German guy who was about as drunk as I was.

“Go easy on me,” I said. “I’ve never been in a fight.”

“No problem. This is just for fun anyway,” he replied in a slurred, accented voice.

Being drunk, I got a bit overzealous and didn’t “go easy” on him. I got aggressive, landing blows where I could, and the first round was called in my favor.

In the second, he fought back, not wanting to lose to an American who was half his size. His blows hurt, even in my drunken state.

That round was called for him.

In the final round, we both got a little aggressive. He easily defeated me, as the ref, not wanting me to get too pummeled, quickly called the round — and match — for him.

But everyone loves an underdog, so boos erupted from the audience.

Aiming to please the crowd, the bar also ended up giving me a free bucket, and the German guy and I cheered each other. His friends joined mine, and we partied the night away.

The next morning, when I woke up, I was stiff as a board and had a terrible hangover. Though just lightly bruised, I could barely move. Every part of my body ached.

“Why is everything sore? What did we do last night?”

It took a few minutes, and then it hit me (so to speak).

“Ohhh, yeah, I boxed someone last night!”

While I was not thinking of the repercussions to my body the night before, I was well attuned to them now. It was like a truck had backed up and down my body multiple times as I laid flat in bed.

My friends and I laughed and joked about how stupid it was to box someone double my size for some alcohol. I lay there aching as my friends got ready, until I finally had to get dressed myself. We headed to the beach to soak up the sun on the sand and get some breakfast.

Boxing in that ring was one of the more spontaneous things I did on that trip and, while I won’t ever do it again, it’s one of those “fuck yes” moments that brought me closer to my friends and made for a good memory.

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The post That One Time I Went Boxing on Ko Phi Phi appeared first on Nomadic Matt's Travel Site.

After I graduated from college, my friends and I got really into poker. Every Sunday night, we would meet at our buddy Joe’s apartment and play for a couple hundred bucks total. It was our weekly ritual. With the HBO show Entourage in the background, we’d order food and, huddled around a small table, catch up before getting ready to go to our boring post-college office jobs the following day.

Joe was the most enthusiastic of us all (to this day, he still plays professionally), and his passion for the game spilled over to me (though not his skills). While I was never a top-tier player, I loved the challenge it provided, and trying to figure out the probability of the cards and how to read people’s tells. I read books on poker and did everything I could to get better. Poker was — and still is — an intellectual challenge to me.

On the US road trip that started my round-the-world adventure in 2006, I stopped frequently at casinos to play — and won enough to pay for a lot of my trip.

Eventually, when I arrived in Amsterdam later that year, I grew bored of the constant weed smoking that was so prominent among my fellow travelers. As much as I loved getting high, I wasn’t traveling to sit in coffee shops all day and get baked. There was a whole city out there to see and explore.

So (slightly stoned) I would often embark on long solitary walks around town. (To this day, I walked more during that visit than I did in all my subsequent ones.)

One day, I passed a casino. I didn’t even know there was a casino.

“I wonder if they play poker here,” I said to myself. Though I was on a traveler’s budget and hadn’t played in months, I thought it might be fun to indulge a little bit in a foreign country.

I sat down at a full table of locals playing 2-5 No Limit (that means the first bets are 2 and 5 EUR). The stakes were higher than I wanted, but that was all that was available, so I bought in for the minimum.

When I finally decided to join a hand, the dealer said something to me in Dutch. “I’m sorry, can you repeat that in English?” I asked.

I had outed myself as a foreigner — and this created a lot of curiosity among the other players. I was young and clearly a backpacker, and they wanted to know how I ended up at the poker table and not in the coffee shops, where the other tourists seemed to go.

So I told them: Smoking endless amounts of pot had lost its luster, and so I was wandering each day, exploring the districts and museums. And, as a poker lover, I also wanted to do something different.

Two of the players and I really hit it off. Greg was older gentleman with a great sense of fashion who was always cracking jokes. The other, Lennart, was closer to my age and tall, and had a shaved head. He drank like a fish and smoked like a chimney.

Along with the other players at our table, they made me feel like I was part of something more. So I kept coming back. Poker was our bond, and for those brief hours we were together each night, I felt like I too was a local, not just a backpacker getting high in hostel bars and walking around taking pictures of museums. I was a traveler, getting below the surface of the place and getting to know the people who lived there.

After all, I was traveling the world in order to learn about it. As much as I loved seeing museums, taking walking tours, and having short conversations with people I crossed paths with, none of that really gave me a deep understanding of any stop on my journey.

But these players were my guides. They told me about life in the city and restaurants and bars that tourists didn’t know about that I should go to. I felt like I had learned more about Amsterdam in those first nights than I had for all of the first week I’d been in town.

As a tourist, you don’t often interact in deep ways with locals. You see them briefly and then off you go to the next destination. Getting to know a place — and the people in it — requires spending a lot of time not traveling.

As the days passed, I kept delaying my departure in order to go back to the poker table. Greg and Lennart often offered to take me out, but I was naturally suspicious of two guys who wanted to hang out after the casino closed and were asking probing questions. I was young. I was in a place I didn’t know. And the area was always dark and empty when we left. I was worried they would try to rob me.

So I declined their offers to hang out the first few times. As a natural introvert, this was my first experience with nontravelers, and I was a little cautious.

But, eventually, I agreed, as they wore me down and turned out to be regular people who just wanted to show a visitor some hospitality.

They showed me Oosterpark, on the eastern side of town. It was a small, quiet, and lined with willow trees, featuring small ponds with ducks, which seniors sat around feeding. It was a place locals liked, because they could avoid all the tourists and stoners who litter Vondelpark.

They introduced me to bitterballen, the bite-sized, deep-fried Dutch meatball snack that looks like falafel on the outside but tastes like Sunday pot roast on the inside.

And, when I eventually did go to Spain for a week, I missed Amsterdam so much, I just flew back. They were shocked when I came back to the poker table.

“I thought you were gone,” they said.

“I was but I missed Amsterdam too much so I came back,” I replied.

Weeks passed. I fell into a routine. I learned basic Dutch phrases from the other players at the casino, slept late, and used my winnings to finance an endless supply of nice meals, museum trips, and cannabis. I walked for hours upon hours, reaching the city’s fringes, trying to get lost on the canals and narrow streets that make Amsterdam so famous — the kind of thing you might do when, in the back of your head, you keep saying, “I could live here,” and you suddenly find yourself comparing neighborhoods.

But all good things come to an end, including my European visa, and it was soon time to head to Southeast Asia. After close to two months in Amsterdam, I couldn’t stay in Europe any longer.

On my last night in town, my no-longer-new friends and I went out for dinner, played some poker, and then went for a final round of drinks. I told them where I was headed and how much longer I planned to be on the road. We reminisced — something you can’t really do when you don’t spend more than a couple days in one place, or with one group of people.

They recognized that fact too. They appreciated that Amsterdam is more than the Red Light District and tulips and windmills and coffee shops. That’s all tourists and backpackers think of when they come to Amsterdam, they said.

Though, by their own admission, they were only guessing. They’d never actually met a backpacker, let alone had conversations with one. And why would they have? Backpackers never strayed this far off the beaten path, and locals are busy leading their day-to-day life, which doesn’t create a lot of opportunities to meet tourists.

When we parted ways at the end of the night, they invited me down to Utrecht on my next trip through the continent. Amsterdam is great, they said, but it’s not the real Netherlands. There is so much more to the country than that.

One knows that intellectually. All it takes is one look at a map to know that Amsterdam is just a small part of the Netherlands. But as a traveler, you can often get tunnel vision about a destination, the walls of which are defined by the material in your guidebook and the tips from fellow travelers who came before you.

Only the locals know what the real story is — and until you get to know one, you will never learn it.

But, more than anything, Greg and Lennart taught me to trust in strangers.

Because I was so guarded, I almost missed that chance. My newish nature on the road almost cost me two friendships.

Since then, I’ve remembered to give people the benefit of the doubt and trust them more.

Especially, because, a few months later, while I was in Vietnam, Lennart called me to tell me Greg had been killed in a robbery. Greg used to have a lot of people over after the casino closed as a way to keep the night going and, when word of this got out, other people came over to rob everyone, knowing that they would have lots of money. In an ensuing scuffle, Greg was shot and died at the scene.

I think of Greg often, especially his warm smile, funny jokes, and gregarious nature. He was never afraid to make a friend. He taught me not to be either.

And it’s because of him that I’ve learned to be more outgoing and trusting on the road. Whenever I’m in doubt, I just think to myself, “What would Greg do here?”

The answer is always: “He’d say hello.”

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A few years ago, one night over dinner with some friends with whom I shared a love of gourmet food, sushi, great cocktails, politics, and movies, we realized that in all the years we’d known each other, we had never taken a trip together.

As we all had lots of points and miles saved, we thought about how fun it would be to go somewhere spontaneously.

“Let’s do it,” we all declared. So we found award tickets to Hong Kong for the following week.

Halfway around the world, we arrived at our hotel late in the evening. After a late dinner, we went back to the hotel, where I decided to go to sleep. As fun as Hong Kong is at night (and it is very wild), I wanted to try to adjust to the local time zone, so I could make the most of the rest of our trip.

My friends had other ideas: they were going to party. So I said good night and off they went.

When I woke up, it was still dark out. I looked at the time. It was 5:30am. I found two of my friends asleep; the third was apparently still out partying.

Letting them rest, I got ready and headed out to enjoy the city before the commuters rose and it became a maelstrom of noise, chaos, and crowds. Hong Kong is one of my favorite cities, and I love its peaceful calm in the morning. It’s all grandmothers and grandfathers out for walks, doing tai chi in parks, and eating dim sum.

With so much to do (and eat), I didn’t want to waste any time. After an early breakfast of dim sum, I wandered around, grabbed some tea, read a book, and took photos of empty streets.

It was midday when I finally heard from my friends. We met for lunch at a noodle shop and plotted our day.

Before we booked our trip, I had asked them what they wanted to do. Knowing them, I knew it would involve fancy dinners (Hong Kong has some really fine dining), but I emphasized that as a backpacker at heart, what I really love are hole-in-the-wall restaurants, cheap activities, wandering around, and just enjoying the day-to-day life of a place.

“No problem,” they said. They were travelers too, and they also wanted to get below the surface. The idea of dim sum, markets, and fun local bars appealed to them as much as it did to me.

But that was not what happened.

My friends stayed out late partying every night, slept in late, only wanted to eat at expensive restaurants, and didn’t want to do any sightseeing.

As the days ticked by, we were like ships in the night. Outside a few dinners, I didn’t see too much of them. But, being used to traveling alone, that was fine with me. I can make my own fun. But it was disappointing not to have time with my friends. It defeated the purpose of the trip.

On the way back to the airport, they talked about doing it all again someday. But not me. I thought to myself, “We’re never doing this again.”

The trip taught me that, while people might like a certain travel style in theory, the reality is often very different. In fact, over the years, I’ve traveled with many friends who have completely different styles than I do.

As Mark Twain said, “I have found out there ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.” I couldn’t agree more. It’s important to be cautious when traveling with anyone, even your closest friends. It’s a very personal experience, and you’re going to want to make sure their style matches yours.

After many successful — and not so successful — trips with friends (some of whom I count as my closest), I’ve come up a list of questions that I think are important to ask people (of course, you know your friends, but I’ve found this still helpful):

• What activities do you want to do?
• I like [activity]. I’ll probably see/do lots of this/these on our trip. Would you come with me?
• How do you feel about [activity]?
• Are you okay doing things alone, or do you want to do everything together?
• I don’t eat a lot of expensive food on the road. How do you feel about that?
• Are you okay with eating street food?
• I like to be out the door by 9am each morning. Do you? (Or: I’m a night person. Are you okay with a late start?)
• Do you plan to stay out late?

It’s fine if you all aren’t on the same page, so long as you are comfortable with spending time apart. If you have different travel styles but aren’t okay being an independent traveler (or vice versa), that’s going to cause a problem. I’ve had plenty of trips with friends where we only overlap on some stuff, but that was not a problem. No one cared when any of us went off to do our own stuff, and it gave us things to talk about when we came back together later.

The more trips I’ve taken with friends, the more I’ve gotten smarter about which I take trips with. But sometimes you just never know ahead of time. What people say and what they do can be two different things. They may say they want to travel the same way or do the same things — and then you get on the road and it’s the opposite.

But, ever since that big spontaneous trip with friends, I’ve learned that asking the right questions in advance can really reduce the likelihood that you’ll run into these kinds of conflicts.

Use my list — or come up with your own — but don’t go on a trip with a friend who isn’t at least 60% aligned with your style and interests!

The post Traveling with Friends: How to Avoid Disaster appeared first on Nomadic Matt's Travel Site.

Hello there! It’s been a while since I’ve written a real blog. Sure, there have been lots of how-to posts, itineraries, where-to-stay suggestions, and old-post updates to keep helping you travel on a budget. But it’s been over a year since I wrote anything personal — and it’s been even longer since I shared a story from the road.

In the beginning of 2022, I wrote that I felt I didn’t really have much to say anymore. Sure, there are always new destinations to write about, but in terms of thoughts and advice, after over 14 years writing about travel, I was tapped out. There are only so many posts you can write about “how to find a cheap flight” or on how to make friends or how to overcome your fears.

Which is why, in the past 2.5 years, I’ve only posted three articles that weren’t “the best hostels in London” or something like that.

But I always left the door open to coming back if the desire hit me.

And the desire has finally hit me.

A lot has happened in the last year. Business-wise, I closed our community and tour company, scaled back my other projects, and spent a lot of time working on some new books. At the end of May, I finished the next update to my book, How to Travel the World on $50 per Day. The new, inflation-adjusted, post-COVID edition comes out in March 2025.

This last year has seen a lot of personal changes too. I moved back to New York City and absolutely love it here. I’m a city guy, and I really enjoy being in a place where I don’t need a car. Plus, there’s tons of things to see and do, more people around, and no kind of food I can’t get. I have a great group of friends here, I’ve found a bunch of hobbies I enjoy, and I have struck a good work/life balance. This is truly home.

But it hasn’t all been rainbows and unicorns.

Last summer, I got tuberculosis, which, while caught early and curable with antibiotics, still forced me to be quarantined and on meds for a long time. Then I’ve had some muscle issues related to just getting old and some gut issues I’m working on now.

But, with the book and most of my heath stuff behind me, I feel like I’m entering a new chapter in my life.

I’m in Europe now for the rest of the summer. Though I’ve been to the continent countless times, my goal here is to visit regions I’ve never been to before. I’m currently in Barcelona before heading to Provence and then Germany. After that, who knows! I don’t get my book edits back until the end of the month, so I’m just enjoying the road!

All of which is my long-winded way of saying I’ve decided to get back into blogging and will be posting again. I have some stories to share and new thoughts on the nature of travel, the creator economy, and AI.

I still feel like my schedule is all over the place, and I definitely want to work on that when I get back home to NYC. I always bite off more than I can chew — but those are fall problems! Right now, the road beckons, and I am answering its call.

Expect this blog to come back to life shortly!

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