https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Y1tLXUVRdA
I want to review one of my favorite books of all time and it’s called Not Your Typical Backpacker Story: Naughty Nomad by Mark Zolo. He has his own website, naughtynomad.com. He’s traveled all over the world, to all sorts of countries, basically looking to get laid and smoke weed and just go on adventures and this book is about some of his very first adventures in the first year of his life.
I’ve read this like 5 or 6 years ago. It’s been a while. I don’t remember all the details but I can tell you that it’s very fast paced. It jumps right into things. It’s very entertaining. You’re never bored. It’s always interesting. It’s very fascinating.
It’s a good book to read if you want to psyche yourself up to go on a trip on like a big adventure or if you’re just on the airplane or in the bus and you want to entertain yourself. It’s very entertaining. It’s very fun to read.
Basically the Naughty Nomad Mark Zolo meets up with some of his friends. They go on a tour through Africa. They take a train across Siberia, through Russia. They go to Thailand, Cambodia. They go to a bunch of very exotic places and they get into all sorts of trouble.
They get hammered. They get robbed. They smuggled drugs across international borders. They almost get arrested. He almost gets girls pregnant. They have lots of sex, and it just moves.
It just goes boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, and it’s all based on a true story.
It’s actually just the plain true story. This guy is really crazy.
Since then he’s kind of settled down for a while. He went to live in New York City for a couple of years and now he’s living out in the Mediterranean. He’s not traveling as much. He’s not doing the crazy wild adventures that he was doing when he was younger but you can always go to naughtynomad.com and check up on how the guy is doing.
That’s kind one of the interesting things about the book is that once you read this book and you want to see what he’s done since, you can certainly do so.
I’m just going to read a little excerpt of the book. This is actually the last chapter. You know it’s a very well written book by the way. Even from the very first page, it grabs you. It throws you in the midst of the adventure and you can really feel what the characters are feeling. You can really see it through their own eyes, actually a particularly well written book.
This is one of the last little bits.
“So, there you have it, amigo. Now you know my version. I guess this is the part of the book where I offer some sort of wisdom or reflect on some shit like that. The truth is I didn’t learn much of anything from my first years of travel. Instead I’ve only unlearned what I’ve been taught. My views of right and wrong, purpose, morality, and values all have been left open to question. I’ve come to realize that there are no absolutes. Everything is relative, and the world is mostly gray for prisoners of our conditioning and cultural indoctrination within our respective societies and only when you break free from those shackles and take a walk outside you start the smell the bullshit. Of those who venture out into the wild, most will find their own path, but sadly some will get lost along the way.”
You know and he talks about some of the problems of travelling like he has a friend, Paddy, who falls in love with a Cambodian girl but he has you know maybe psychological problems, maybe a little bit of mental instability and how he got lost in the traveling experience.
This is can actually be you know you could pick up a couple of pickup tips in here how to get girls, how to keep your sanity while you’re traveling, how not to get into trouble.
There’s actually some lessons that can be drawn from this book, but also just the lesson of going out and taking that adventure, going out and pushing yourself a little bit, taking action, not being so scared, not just trying to be so comfortable all the time but pushing your comfort zone. That is one of the big lessons about this book that you can really draw from.
Again I recommend it. It’s on Amazon.com. Just do a search for The Naughty Nomad and you will find this title pop up.