051 – Being a great guest from before you arrive
February 22, 2008 in Travel
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In this edition of the Indie Travel Podcast, Craig and Linda talk about being a guest – an important part of world travel. If you manage to do a RTW trip without staying in someone’s house, something is very wrong; experience the people as well as the places! In this show we talk about approaching friends and acquaintances to ask if you can stay with them; preparing to get there; arriving (both expectedly and unexpectedly!); courtesy and helping in the home; leaving gifts; and following up after you’ve left.
If you don’t have any friends in the areas you are travelling to, sign up to Couchsurfing or the Hospitality Club and meet some new people. You can also network with fellow travellers on sites like Matador Travel.
Craig writes for a site called The Traveler’s Notebook. There’s a post on spending special events with foreign families which is a good follow-up to this episode where he talks more about their German Christmas.
If you’re in the mood for a visitor horror story check out listener-post ‘About travelling’.
Congratulations to our prize winners!. It’s our birthday this month and some companies have been really generous. This week we have a Bed Bug Central Bud Bug Travel Guide to give to Sinclair and Travoholic. We drew the prize from the subscribers to our bi-monthly newsletter. We have two more ebooks to give away next week, so join now:
We also had a Joby Gorillapod to give away thanks to the lovely people at Joby.com. Congratulations to Jeff who picked that up. We have two more competitions running, so check out the competitions page for more information.
Listener links for this week go out to Gary who is in Melbourne at the moment and to Jessica who is spending a year in a car. Really. She lives in the back of a van and is travelling around America. We also want to thank Fadly for her kind review.
Things are going well in our quest for 50,000 downloads before the end of the month. As of tonight we have 49,200! We’re certain that we’ll hit 50,000 well before the 29th: thanks so much to everyone who has supported us by spreading the word. After next week we’re going to back off on talking about stats and “meta” so much (thank God!). We have added a stat counter to the sidebar though: this shows how many people retrieve the feed each day. You can see it’s at 667 today and it tends to fluctuate up and down by about 20 a day. Why don’t you help us to push it up above 700?
Photo thanks to the Futuristics.
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This article was written by Craig and Linda
Craig and Linda Martin have been living on the road since February 2006. Both born and raised in Auckland, New Zealand they are ... somewhere in the world! Craig and Linda host the Indie Travel Podcast - you can get in touch with them here.
Since November 2006 the Indie Travel Podcast has evolved into an independent travel hub with regular audio and video podcasts along with articles by travellers from all over the world. 
Hosts Craig and Linda Martin started travelling in February 2006 and have been to over 50 countries. They were 
Paddy Wallbouncer said on February 23, 2008
Great Website. I listened to a little bit of your podcast, and it sounds great. I lived in your kneck of the woods for a couple of years maybe Katoomba, Mt. Arapiles, Elie de Beumont, Piahia sound familiar? Good luck with your travels. (entrecard visitor btw)
Robyn Sinclair said on February 25, 2008
One of my friends from high school sent me a text message and asked if he could come stay, deliberately avoiding the “how long for?” question. Turns out he was immigrating to Sydney and stayed on our couch in our tiny one-bedroom flat for 3 weeks! We are still great friends, despite it
Craig and Linda said on February 29, 2008
Hey Paddy. Paihia is certainly familiar and Katoomba is vaugely so, but the others pass me by. Still a lot of the world to see!
Robyn, what a great trick by your friend – probably carefully premeditated. I’m glad it worked out for you though, if I tried it I’d probably destroy any friendship I touched. I promise I’ll give you an exact duration when I come to Sydney (three months is okay, right?)
Vince said on June 19, 2008
This site is really superb!!! Thank you for you work! Good Luckp
bkayn said on December 3, 2008
What health i can buy in UK?,
Craig and Linda said on December 3, 2008
Now that’s a question that has me stumped.