Go camping anywhere. Fresh air. Silence. Money goes far when you don't have to pay rent.
Ask HN: I am a depressed student, looking to travel + just be, please advice.
21–26 of 26 posts
Re: Ask HN: I am a depressed student, looking to travel + just be, please advice.
#22I paid $850 for a round trip to the Philippines and what you would have left over is easily enough to live here for 6 weeks.
Re: Ask HN: I am a depressed student, looking to travel + just be, please advice.
#23Do you speak Spanish? Costa Rica should be high on your list - you can get cheap flights from Atlanta to San Jose and live decently for ~$25-35/day when there. It's a great place to explore - There are volcanoes and beaches. If interested in staying on a private island and doing some work, consider http://www.cocovivo.com/ It's run by a friend of mine. He would probably host you for really cheap and would like someon…
Upvoted for the private island idea.
If you're anywhere NYC, you could perhaps check out the Adirondacks. The camping season isn't open up there yet, but if you're looking for peaceful tranquility, peace, time to reflect, and the inspiration of a glorious nature scene, then I highly recommend the private island campsites on Lower Saranac Lake.
They're muni-run camp sites, so the costs are very low -- I think we paid $22 a day. The one catch is that they fill up quickly, and they're hard to get.
There are island camps with single occupancy, which is to say that there is only one camp site on it. And there are larger islands that are multiple occupancy, though we did the math, and even on the most crowded of them, the campsites are spaced quite far apart, and you will have at least an acre to yourself (approximately). We chose the single occupancy, and loved every second of it.
It's made much better if you own your own canoe or fishing kayak, otherwise boat rentals are fairly high. You CAN take a taxi out to the island and have them pick you up, but I wouldn't do this at the very start of the season or the very end. There isn't enough traffic there until peak season starts to ensure that somebody would be around if you got hurt, or were mauled by a bear or something.
This link has plenty of detail: http://www.dec.ny.gov/outdoor/24496.html
Re: Ask HN: I am a depressed student, looking to travel + just be, please advice.
#24The best advice I can give you is use www.couchsurfing.org - it will save you on housing, often get you free tour guides and make you friends.
couchsurfing is always an amazing experience. not only because it's a free stay somewhere but because you get to know many interesting people you wouldn't meet otherwise.
Re: Ask HN: I am a depressed student, looking to travel + just be, please advice.
#25I would highly recommend the book : "Learned Optimism" by Martin Seligman. It's a great book about understanding depression and the steps you can take to fix it.
It helped me a lot, and still does, when I find myself spiraling down.
Re: Ask HN: I am a depressed student, looking to travel + just be, please advice.
#26Travelling alone can be depressing. Don't just run from your current lifestyle, add something to it. Travel with a purpose. Stuff like 'Homes for humanity' and many other travel related charities can be quite expensive. But you can travel and work. Not travel and hack, just work. I'm not sure what is near Atlanta, and what's available. But you already have fairly nice weather. No matter where you go, $2000 isn't goin…
Running from my current lifestyle is sort of what I am trying to do. I really can't think of anything else in the short term that would help, though I am open to suggestions. I did look into non-profits, but they want you to work for free, pay them application fees for stuff, which really sucks, if they had been nicer, I would have offered to re:design their website, but I really didn't want to offer any webwork upfr…
I got hired as a ski instructor at Breckenridge in Colorado after having been on skis 4 times in my life, 3 of them on the mountains of North Carolina.
There were two reasons I was able to get a job.
1. I had been a white water raft guide the two previous summers, which I also had only done a few times before getting a job. I got into this because I paid $250 to attend a raft guide school, which as long as you make it thru they will offer you a job.
2. Mainly, because I was courteous and clean cut during my interview. I told them flat out that I was not the best skier but I would show up on time everyday and that I knew they would likely train the heck out of me. Plus I knew they would stick me with people that had never skied before. So I just had to be a little bit better than them.
That was about 3 years ago. I can tell you know it would probably be even easier as most resorts depend heavily on foreign workers for everything, not just low paid jobs, and visas have become very hard to come by. I would say a third of my fellow instructors were from another country.