How to Travel as a Vegan

Video Transcript

"Hello, I'm Robert Cheeke, president of Vegan Bodybuilding and Fitness based here in Portland, Oregon. And today on behalf of Expert Village, I'm going to do a tutorial all about being vegan. In this clip, I'm going to talk about traveling as a vegan. Now traveling as a vegan can be difficult, but it doesn't have to be. It can be really easy, all you need is your vegan passport. You can also visit websites like happycow.net, and other traveling websites that will tell you exactly what vegan restaurants, stores and groups are in that community. And of course you can do things on your own planning ahead, as far as bringing things. If you want to bring your own soap for example, a lot of hotels you could be staying at are going to have soap that's tested on animals or could contain animal byproducts possibly, and so you can bring your own vegan soap not tested on animals. And that goes for shampoo, deodorant, and everything else to get ahead of time because you don't know what's going to be available in the community you'll be visiting. And also, something that's very important to remember is that anything that's a fruit, vegetable, nut, grain, or seed is vegan and that can be found at any grocery store pretty much anywhere on the planet. So it doesn't have to be as hard as people make it out to be. I have personally travelled to thirty different countries, and thirty different states within the US, and have been vegan for thirteen years, including that entire time and it was just fine, so no challenges there. Just plan ahead, research what's available there and bring some of your own supplies, and you'll be good to go and happy travels. What I have here is a vegan passport, and basically this is full of lots of different phrases in different languages to explain to a waitress, or waiter, or your host family or something certain expressions like "no dairy please", or "no meat", or "I'm vegan which means this". So something like this, this vegan passport that someone put together is a good resource for that, so you can say in different languages, basically I don't want to cause harm to animals, and I don't want to eat them, and this tells you how to do that."