Modern technology is a wonderful thing for the avid traveller.
With video calls and the internet it is easy to keep in touch with loved ones back home. Even when spending months (or even years) away from home as you adventure the globe, it can feel like you never even left. In the eradicating-homesickness-and-getting-on-with-the-good-stuff kind of way, I mean. And if you're savvy with these things, you can even record your conversations for posterity, or for the internet to have a good, amazed, laugh.

While on a round-the-world trip this past December in Australia, Roger Ryan decided to Skype his parents at home in Ireland. He's lucky they answered.

​They thought he was on a bus.

He was definitely not.

Ever since I was a young boy, my grandfather used to take me haggling at many of the swap meets and farmers markets in and around the areas of Mississippi and New Orleans, where I grew up. It was early childhood exposure to this odd and electrifying culture of buyers and sellers that’s stayed with me throughout my life. Not to mention that it’s helped me to save a ton of cash.
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Over the past few years, travelling the globe, I can’t help but be drawn to these same places of trade. Flea markets and bazaars, thrift stores and farmers markets. There is no better way, in my opinion, to view the best a culture has to offer, than by seeing what the locals literally have to offer... for sale.
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These can be intensely personal experiences with their own set of rules and expectations; each different culture has a set of their own. So let me give a few words of advice to help you get a bearing no matter where in the world you want to haggle.
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Lake Hillier, or as  most people know it, 'oh my god that lake is freaking pink, that's insane', is a pink-coloured lake on Middle Island, in Western Australia, off the coast of Esperance.

From above, the lake water looks bubble gum pink, with a strip of vegetation, dunes and glorious golden sands separating it from the blue Southern Ocean.

But wait – did you think there was only one pink lake? Why, no! There is in fact a second pink lake in the vicinity, with the aptly (though not very creatively) named Pink Lake being seven kilometres from Esperance.​
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