TripDingo

What is a Dingo?

The dingo is a wild dog native to Australia, thought to have originated from Asian and Middle Eastern wolves 3500-4000 years ago. It is the largest native carnivorous animal in Australia and is generally an all-around kick-ass animal.

Why am I Dingo?

I like kangaroos and wallabies.

What is TripDingo.com?

This blog is about my adventures and misadventures, mostly throughout Asia. Why? Because Asia is like the Wild Wild West…except further West and without all the rugged cowboys and stuff. Oh, and I live here. You see, to me, life is a lot more interesting when one’s willing to deal with the consequences. This is about the choices we have, the decisions we make, and what sort of shit hits the fan afterwards. These are my questions, my observations, my insights, my triumphs, my defeats, my embarassments, and my experiences.

I am sponsored by Kango.com, which promotes itself on its front page with:

Our mission is to help you find options that fit your trip goals and interests. We bring together advice and choices from travelers and sites across the web, so you can make more informed decisions - then head off to your favorite booking source. Leave cookie-cutter vacations behind! Kango shows you more relevant options for romance getaways, outdoor adventures, family fun and more.  

It was also recently covered by TechCrunch as a new start-up working on travel-specific semantic search. If you don’t understand what that means, don’t worry about it. If you do, it all sound pretty nifty, right?

Yeah, well, the problem I have with Kango is that it’s too happy. I mean, look at the front page. Jeebus, they have pictures splashed all over the place featuring cheery little kids, a man with a dog in nature, and over-the-hill retirees smiling from their tropical getaway. This place hardly looks like the right place for me to search for “wild, alcoholic, debaucherous, good time” and expect to get some really exciting leads that will guarantee that my next vacation is going to be full of unforgettable memories I can cherish for the rest of my life.

And I will need them for the rest of my life because when I’m aging into obscurity and senility, these are the experiences and memories I want to recall to remind myself of how utterly awesome life was during my prime. These are the experiences and memories I want to recount to my children as I usher them into adulthood so they too can savor the fearlessness and freedom of youth before they get saddled down with careers, marriages, mortgages, children, insurance, retirement accounts, and all the terrible things Ewan McGregor warned us about in Trainspotting.  (Choose life!)

Look, all of that is important, but sometimes we need to put aside the pretention, don’t take ourselves too seriously, and admit that we’re animals (dingoes!) with brains big enough to repress our natural tendencies.

But damn, those natural tendencies are pretty damn fantastic.

So this is my attempt at injecting a more youthful, adventurous slant to Kango. I know there are others like me out there, those who know that their youth is a time of both exploration and experimentation. It is a time to open your mind before it cements, break your comfort zones, embrace different cultures and moralities that accompany them, meet people, make friends (or enemies, your choice), and experience what you can of this enormous wild world before life settles into a seemingly endless stream of the mundane.

I don’t begrudge the familes or the old couples or the active-lifestylers or the tree-huggers. I just want to make sure people like me get some relevant results when they search Kango.