Taking a Gap Year is the buzz around Europe.  What’s all the noise about?  Gap Year is a year (or some increment of time) a person takes off to travel before going to college, into a career or in between jobs.  This time off is Europe’s answer to riding out the college/work unfriendly times of [...]

Let’s be honest with ourselves for a minute:  we all love animals (sometimes more than humans) and when they get hurt (especially baby ones) we get choked up inside.  Something about little furry baby animals brings out our emotional side.  You can’t avoid getting a fuzzy, warm feeling when looking at this koala for instance. [...]

When bringing your own bag to the supermarket, sorting your plastics and biking to work isn’t enough, green volunteering is your answer to making a real eco-difference.  As much as we are doing our part in contributing to world conservation efforts, so much more is out there.  Step it up by doing just a little [...]

Wwoofing – Not barking but World Wide Opportunities On Organic Farms-ing. What’s the deally?  This network was developed to link volunteers to organic farms with available volunteer opportunities.  You volunteer on an international farm for an agreed amount of hours and they feed and house you.  Pretty fair deal.  Nothing extravagant here but given the [...]

Madagascar… Mostly known from the Pixar movie by the same title, Madagascar is an insanely beautiful African island that is home to some of the wildest animals and most interesting tribal people (to illustrate: this is a statute on a tomb). Two animals, the lemur and the fossa, are ONLY found in Madagascar and their numbers [...]

You may sympathize with those signs and banners that read “Free Tibet”; maybe you even went out and bought the T-shirt. As much as we commend your attempts to spread the word (and be fashionable), here is a chance for you to actually do something to help Tibetans living in exile: A brief history: Tibet [...]

Lets see, what can you do in a week? Get a great tan laying on the beach, organize your closet, maybe build a tree house? OR-you can change your life (and the lives of countless needy others) forever. Cross Cultural Solutions, a well-established volunteer network, is currently offering week-long volunteer programs in the following locations [...]

Revolutionary Renegades! Hopeless Hooligans! Dudes of Do-Good-ers! Even on a budget, traveling is a luxury. As a tourist, all evidence of poverty is usually hidden from sight and overpowered by Holiday Inns and Grand this-or-that hotels. As a backpacker, your travels are much closer to the ground floor. Along with famous sights, tastes and sounds, [...]

Couchsurfing.com is hiring! Those clever couch-lovers have come up with new and interesting ways to improve their couchsurfing community. Every year, for roughly six month stretches, they set up a collective in some part of the world (the current collective is in Costa Rica). These collectives (really like a temporary office) are made up of [...]