There are plenty of beautiful and astonishing places around the world. Nevertheless, in my opinion, Norway has the highest concentration of these sensational and inspiring places and landscapes. Huge waterfalls, extensive mountains and gorges, natural diversity are just unbelievable. To reveal the nature beauty of this country, we have collected photos of the most beautiful landscapes from Norway.

Check out incredible pictures — here.

Via Catinwater

If you’ve traveled at all, chances are you’ve either fallen for a travel scam, or have had someone try to pull one on you.  Going on a vacation or traveling shouldn’t be a scary experience.  If you know about the scams that are out there, you should be able to avoid them. Here are seven tricky travel scams that you should know about before you take that trip.   

2.  Wi-Fi Scams
When you travel, be very careful before hooking up to just any hotspot.  Especially, be very careful of ones that say “free wi-fi.”  You can actually be connecting directly to a hacker’s computer without even knowing it.  The hacker will be able to see your passwords, financial information and anything else that is stored on your computer.  Always look at a description of the network that you are connecting to.  If it says “computer to computer” rather than “wireless network”, than you are connecting to someone else’s computer and not to a real network.  Also, make sure you turn file sharing off on your computer if you aren’t connecting to a secured network.  Avoid identity theft and pay attention to what you are connecting to.

To read about six other travel scams click — here

Via Eye and Pen

Image via Google Commons

Ryan sent this link to me yesterday — while the sun was coming up in Hawaii. Explore.org is really, really cool.

What an amazing meditation tool.

Enjoy the views — here.

Image via Dan Shabbaton

Clayton Cornell and The Huffington Post present an interesting list of 20 things he learned while traveling around the world:

Most places are as safe (or safer) than home.

I remember confessing to my mother recently that I had a big night out in Budapest and stumbled back to my apartment at dawn. Her reaction was: “But don’t you worry about being drunk in a foreign country?”

Ha ha, not at all mom! I’ve never felt so safe!

The only place I’ve been violently mugged was in my home city of San Francisco. Many of the people I know there have been robbed at gunpoint, and on more than one occasion there were shootings in my neighborhood.

In one incident just a block away from my apartment (Dolores Park), a man was shot five times and somehow escaped, only to collapse about 10 meters from our front door. You can still see the blood stains on the sidewalk.

Turns out we actually live in a pretty dangerous country.

In over 365 days on the road, staying mostly in dormitory-style hostels and traveling through several countries considered ‘high-risk,’ the only incident I had was an iPhone stolen out of my pocket on the metro in Medellin, Colombia. I didn’t even notice and deserved it for waiving the damn thing around in the wrong part of town. Most people think that in a place like Colombia you’ll still get kidnapped or knocked off by a motorcycle assassin, but that’s not true. According to the locals I talked to (who grew up there), things have been safer there for at least 10 years.

Caveat: This doesn’t give you a license to be stupid, and some places really warrant respect. Guatemala and Honduras, where there are major drug wars going on (and the Peace Corps recently pulled all of their volunteers), or Quito, Ecuador, where everyone I talked to had been robbed, are reasonably dangerous (I had no trouble in any of them).

In reality, based on the sort of mindless binge-drinking that happens in most travel hot spots, you’d expect travelers to get knocked off a lot more often. But if you pay attention and don’t do anything stupid, you’ll be fine.

To read more  click — here 

Via Huffington Post

Drive Nacho Drive wrote an awesome piece about their experience at Angkor Wat.

To say the least, we shared some of the same emotions when arriving at the magical site.

Read more — here.

Image via Drive Nacho Drive

My girlfriend and I had a chance to hike a nice 4 mile trail on Wednesday morning. It was a crisp morning with 40 degree weather. It was so nice to be able to walk, listen to nature, see nature and enjoy the time together.

Iargo Springs provides a spectacular panoramic view of the AuSable River. The site includes includes large natural springs and is on the banks of the AuSable River. Two of the springs have dams. There is varied flora that includes riparian wildflowers and old growth hardwood.

Here are some of our pictures.

A view from the bottom of the springs

Again, a view from the bottom of the springs

Me and Kate

A view from the hike

Rewards cards are a great way to earn free cash and travel, provided you don’t carry a balance or pay a big annual fee. But it can take a while to see a significant return: If your card earns a standard 1 percent cash back, spending $10,000 on the card gets you just $100. And the last thing you want to do is spend more money than you normally would just to get points.

So Brad Wilson, founder of deal site BradsDeals, hit on a solution: Why not just use his rewards cards to buy money?

As he explains in his book “Do More, Spend Less,” the scheme was made possible by the U.S. government. The Presidential $1 Coin Act of 2005 sought to put dollar coins into circulation by allowing citizens to buy the coins directly from the Mint’s website at face value. Shipping was free, and the website accepted credit cards.

So Wilson pulled out his rewards card and bought nearly $3 million in coins.

Not all at once, of course. But over the course of eight months, he would have thousands of dollars in coins delivered at a time, then walk them into the bank and deposit them into his account. Then he would use the money to pay off his credit card bill in full. He was essentially moving money in a circle: putting thousands of dollars in charges at a time on his card, then using the cash he “bought” to pay the bills. 

These strategies are great for mitigating some of the costs for “round the world” trips. Read more at Daily Finance — here. 

We have talked before about Jim Rogers as a person who is not afraid to “think differently.”

As a young adult he co-founded the Quantum Fund with George Soros. After a few years of living in New York City, he realized that  he wanted more out of his life and went on his first trip around the world. He wrote about that trip in the book Investment Biker (he did the first trip via boat and motorcycle). He has since gone on three trips around the world that have each lasted over three years.

He had an interesting quote today about “moving to Asia.”

“When I was selling my New York house, I almost backed out; I just couldn’t bear the thought of leaving. But now I’m very happy here. I fly to New York and I realize I’m in a Third World airport. Then I get into a Third World taxi onto a Third World highway. The difference now just slaps me in the face. New York is a wonderful place, with the people and the vibrancy, but I can find the same vibrancy, if not more, in Asia.”

This is not to point out negative aspects of New York, its to highlight his interesting thesis:

“If you were smart in 1807 you moved to London, if you were smart in 1907 you moved to New York City, and if you are smart in 2007 you move to Asia.”