Blogging and traveling, a golden combination

Written on 24th November 2008                                                                                                              2 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

As you might have noticed, I wrote a post last week about my three-week stay in Kathmandu, Nepal. After describing the beautiful country and its not so beautiful political problems, I invited every reader to drop me a line if he or she knew somebody in Kathmandu. Two people did.

Kathmandu Koding

One of them was Mark Townsend. He introduced me to Ayush Bajracharya, a 26-year old PHP developer from Patan, a gorgeous satellite city of Kathmandu. Ayush works for Samma Ajiva Limited, a company involved in several outsourcing projects. When I told Ayush about my Dutch nationality, he told me he functions as a cupid in my country since he developed a dating site called Zullenwij.nl.

Alternative to India and China

After spending a week here I got to know a lot of people like Ayush who are working on outsourcing projects. So while Tim Ferriss advises you to give your developer work a spin in India and Chinese companies desperately try to catch up with the outsourcing giant – Nepal might be an interesting alternative. One minor side note, it seems like the best way of finding a developer is actually visiting the country (which is no punishment at all).

Meeting locals through blogging

If outsourcing doesn’t concern you, then please learn one thing from this post. Traveling and blogging is one fine combination. When I went to Berlin earlier this year, I met up with some great music 2.0 fellows thanks to a post on this blog. And now it turns out that this strategy also works in more exotic places like Nepal. I realized this when drinking tea with Ayush and his younger brother Raz in a house that doesn’t even look a bit like mine. Our languages, habits, and religious beliefs are all different, but it was blogging that connected us. Pretty cool, eh?

[Photo credit: Sacha Post]