About the Author and this website
Hi, I’m Loren, a US-native, London-resident singer-songwriter, travel junkie and semi-retired management consultant.
As a kid, my career aspiration was to get paid to travel. My motto was “Carpe per Diem” (“Seize the Expense Account”). I foolishly went into debt for a degree in Political Science and Russian, hoping to join the US Foreign Service. I passed the written exam, which few people do. Then after my full-day interview in Washington I received a letter saying “We have scarcely met anyone less temperamentally suited for a career in diplomacy. Please don’t waste your time or ours by re-applying.” I soon discovered that you cannot cover a student loan debt on the menial jobs that you can get with a useless liberal arts degree.
Fortunately, Russian fluency was useful in the early 1990s, and helped get me into a prestigious MBA programme despite my lousy resume (which meant more loans, but for a salary that can actually cover them). I then made a series of poor career choices that led to me working in very many countries and making decent money but doing little other than wordsmithing Powerpoint slides, usually in support of dreadfully bad business decisions that fortunately were almost never implemented.
Wherever I travelled, my acoustic guitar usually went with me. I’ve been playing since age 13, and it’s a fantastic way to meet people — play a tune or two, then pass it around to others. I’ve also written nine of my own tunes, which are available on the “Music” page of this website.
One of the songs is called “Muang Ngoi”. I had first visited Laos on a friend’s recommendation for two weeks in 2006, and completely fell in love with the place – this song came out of that.
After retirement, I grabbed my backpack and went back to Laos from January-March 2023 to see it end-to-end, from the 4,000 Islands to Phongsali and (almost) everywhere in between. It’s still wonderful, still largely unknown, and still dirt cheap.
If you’ve been travelling anywhere recently, you’ve noticed that listings in any guidebook written pre-Covid are useless. And in Laos, asking your hotel desk clerk or tour manager can be hard because they often speak little English.
The great thing about this absence of information is that Laos is a heaven for solo travelers. Every backpacker needs information, so they all want to meet each other. If you ever eat dinner alone in Laos, it can only be by choice.
But the lack of information is such a big problem that I decided to create this website.
Above, the places I’ve been — the 11 green pins in the US, UK Germany, and Russia are where I’ve lived, the red pins (in the America and Europe) and the purple pins (in Russia, Asia and Africa) are where I have visited. Places that I just passed through and never really saw aren’t included.
Below, the bucket list — the places I haven’t yet visited and still want to see:
I would love to hear from you! Tell me you liked this website, or that you thought it was shit.
Most usefully, if you think that something I have written is out of date or otherwise bullshit, tell me!
I’m not a professional blogger, I am not sponsored by anyone, I don’t get any click-through revenue if you do something I recommend. I’ve written the Travel website and the CD purely as labours of love. I am delighted at how many people have found at least some of the information useful.