Finding Meaning In Travel with Zach Balle, Pres of ‘Hug It Forward’.

Find out how Hug It Forward is building schools from bottles and trash in Guatemala - and how travelers can take part. Zach Balle, pres and co-founder, explains all about this important work for children in underdeveloped places. He also shares his personal travel strategies as a small footprint traveler. Plus, our hosts - some would call them experts on eating - talk about how meals and cuisine can elevate an authentic travel experience. Hear them share food stories and restaurant recommendations from around the world.

Introduction and Guest Welcome

Mike Putman: Welcome to No Tourists Allowed, a podcast where two recognized travel industry executives with a combined 69 years on the inside of travel and technology give up their secrets to the thing everyone wants to do: travel better, pay less, and see more of the world. Enjoy today's episode.

James Ferrara: Welcome, listeners. This is Mike Putman and James Ferrara. And welcome to episode ten or eleven. I've lost track now, but one of the two. We've got a really exciting guest for our listeners today. I'd like to welcome Mr. Zach Balle, who is the president of Hug It Forward. Welcome, Zach.

Zach Balle: Hey, thanks for having me here, Mike and James.

Mike Putman: Great. Thanks for joining us. We tried to get Zach on last week, but he was caught in a hurricane. Do you want to share a little bit about that?

Zach Balle: I was in one of my secret spots in Baja doing a little surfing and living off-grid. Hurricane Kay pushed us out. I thought I was going to be able to get the interview done the day before the hurricane, but the satellite internet was not working. So, I had to delay. Here we are.

Rapid-Fire Travel Questions

James Ferrara: We really appreciate you joining. One of the first things we do with all of our guests is go through a few rapid-fire questions. Just give us one word or a short phrase to answer these because our listeners want to learn more about you and how you like to travel. Zach, let's start out with: what's your favorite destination in the world?

Zach Balle: Good question. I would say Baja.

James Ferrara: I'm not surprised. Zach is a big surfer and spends a lot of time down there. Thinking about your other travel outside of Baja, what is your favorite hotel chain or independent property?

Zach Balle: I'm not really a guy that stays in hotels. I'm usually living off-grid. I'm living in a 25-foot trailer that we park right on the beach in Mexico and just do a lot of surfing and hanging out.

Mike Putman: Hotel Zach—that would be your favorite brand. Zach has been a good friend and is a really cool guy. We're going to skip the normal question about your favorite cruise line, but I am going to ask you this: what do you do for food when you're traveling?

Zach Balle: I am a spear fisherman and a rod-and-reel fisherman. I spend a lot of time on the water. If there are no waves, then I'm fishing or spear fishing. We eat a lot of fish and rice and usually whatever vegetables we can get our hands on.

The Origins of Hug It Forward

Mike Putman: That sounds great. We really had you on here to talk about your organization, Hug It Forward, for which you are president. Can you share with our listeners your journey, how Hug It Forward was started, and the good that comes as a result of those actions?

Zach Balle: I'm from the great state of Ohio and I studied business at Ohio State University. I wanted to go out in the world, make a bunch of money, retire one day, and give money to philanthropy. I came from a mentality that you had to make a bunch of money first, then you could go help people.

Zach Balle: I went out to Phoenix, Arizona, and bought and sold a bunch of real estate during the 2006 market. Then I found myself in Vegas with a bunch of my buddies. To me, I had made it. I was making more money than any of the guys I went to college with. When I was in Vegas, I had this realization at a nightclub. If our founding fathers walked into this club, they'd be like, "Okay, what are you guys doing with all your freedoms?" It really shook me because I thought I was happy with what I was accumulating, the wealth and the results. I went to bed feeling really discouraged.

Zach Balle: I woke up in the morning and I had this realization that the only thing that made me feel fulfilled was travel. Travel was a way that I could feel my way through life and have different introductions with people. God or the universe would place certain people in front of me and there would be certain conversations that would be really profound.

Zach Balle: The only thing that really makes me feel fulfilled is traveling. I walked into the office the next week and I quit. They were all questioning me and really confused by my decision. I decided to get on a website called findacrew.net and I found a guy that had a sailboat that wanted to circumnavigate the world.

Mike Putman: So you just went cold turkey from Las Vegas to quitting your job in Arizona and then straight on to trying to get a spot on a sailing ship around the globe?

Zach Balle: I got on a boat in Florida and went through the Bahamas, ended up in Cuba, and I met a buddy who wanted to make a difference in the world. We got back to the States and we started a nonprofit called Hug It Forward. It was originally started to go around the world hugging people; it had nothing to do with schools.

Zach Balle: In the first world, in the United States, we feel like we have all the material possessions but we're lacking connection. We felt that if we could bring hugs around the world, we could bring connection back. We quickly realized that idea was very idealistic and it's very difficult to track the results of that program.

Zach Balle: We found ourselves in Guatemala traveling, giving free hugs, and we found an unsafe school for kids. We thought this could be really interesting. We could raise some money to help build this school. I quickly found out that I didn't study development work, I didn't speak Spanish, and I really had no clue what I was doing.

Zach Balle: I leaned on a buddy of mine that I went to college with that was in the Peace Corps. He told me about this girl in Granados, Guatemala, who wanted to build a school out of bottles and was lacking the funding and final details to make the project work.

Zach Balle: We went up there and participated in trying to figure out how this was going to work. I went back and raised the money. We built our first school out of trash in 2009.

The Mechanics of Bottle Schools

Zach Balle: What that means is we have the community pick up all the inorganic trash—all the soda bottles and chip packets. We have them stuff the chip packets inside the bottles, and the bottles are used inside the walls for insulation. More importantly, it's a way to upcycle and to have trash management.

Zach Balle: In most of these communities, there is no trash management. It's either burned or just littered throughout the community. One of the main things we do is bring awareness to the environment. When you drink a soda, the bottle doesn't say it takes 600 years to decompose if you just throw it out. Our job was to help educate the communities about what the plastic is going to do to the environment.

Mike Putman: Zach, I know our listeners would be really interested in the construction process of how you build schools out of bottles. Can you take our listeners through that?

Zach Balle: We have a really awesome video on hugitforward.org, but I can try to explain it. First, there's an environmental program that talks about the plastics and what they are doing to the environment. That awareness is the first step.

Zach Balle: The second step is we ask every man, woman, and child to participate by collecting all of the soda bottles and trash in the community. Then we ask them to stuff all of the inorganic trash into the bottles, making them super solid.

Zach Balle: To give our listeners an idea, you take a plastic bottle and fill it full of gum wrappers, candy wrappers, and chips. Then you take a piece of rebar and pound that in there. It takes about fifteen or twenty minutes to make one bottle full of trash.

Mike Putman: And it takes ten thousand bottles to build a school, if I remember correctly.

Zach Balle: That's correct, Mike. Each bottle is labor-intensive because we want every person in the community to have ownership in the project. All ten thousand bottles need to be collected and stuffed before they get any funding.

Zach Balle: This is to ensure ownership that they actually want the school. It's not a bunch of Americans coming down and saying, "Oh, you need a school, let's build a school." This is blood, sweat, and tears ownership. Hug It Forward provides all of the funding for the materials: the concrete, rebar, the roof, doors, and windows.

Zach Balle: We also provide the head albañiles, which are the head masons, to make sure that everything is built correctly. We use a standard post-and-beam construction and then website where there would be concrete cinder blocks, we fill that with the bottles.

Zach Balle: You would not know that they're built out of trash unless we left a little circle or a heart on the outside of one of the walls to see that the inside is full of bottles. These schools are designed to be exactly the same dimensions as the government-certified schools.

Zach Balle: They have to be government certified because if they're not, then the government won't provide the teachers, books, and curriculum necessary. I encourage everyone to check out the website or the video to see more specifics.

Zach Balle: We also put out a manual called the Bottleschool Manual at bottleschools.org. It's a full manual from start to finish on how to build a school. Any nonprofit or group around the world that wants to build a school out of trash can do that without any type of bureaucracy in their way.

Impact and Long-Term Ownership

James Ferrara: Zach, how many schools have you built this way?

Zach Balle: We’ve built 136 schools since our first one in 2009. We’ve built schools anywhere from two classrooms to four. Depending on the community, you're looking at anywhere from fifteen to twenty-five kids per classroom.

Mike Putman: My experience when I went to Guatemala on a Hug It Forward trip was that these kids did have a teacher, at least in the village that I went to, but they met under an old oak tree. When it would rain, they couldn't have school because they didn't have a roof over their head. Is that typical in Guatemala, Zach?

Zach Balle: It’s typical in the areas that we're working in. That's where the motivation comes for every man, woman, and child to participate in collecting trash. Some of them do have roofs, but a lot of them do not have flooring. If it rains, the inside of the classroom is muddy and the desk is sitting in mud.

Zach Balle: This is a real motivation. We are really encouraged to see a community put together something for their kids. I think it's a universal desire for every parent to provide an opportunity for their child. It’s bittersweet; it’s sad and happy to see some of these dilapidated infrastructures used to provide education.

Zach Balle: When we come in and say we’d like to work side-by-side with you to have a school that's safer for your children, they're ecstatic. We ask for a lot of man-hours because we want to make sure that after we leave, there's ownership. The people that participated with blood, sweat, and tears are hedged more in taking care of the project.

Voluntourism and the Trip Experience

James Ferrara: Mike, you've gone to participate. Zach, how does that intersect with the travel space?

Zach Balle: In the early days, we got contacted by a businessman who was working with Mike. He wanted to make a big donation. I said that the easiest thing is to write a check, but it’s very difficult to make the time to go down and see where your money is going. I think it's the responsibility of the donor to know where their money is going.

Zach Balle: There are a lot of nonprofits out there that do great work and others that are just marketing engines to raise capital. I wanted to share this experience with Mike and have his family come down to see it and ask questions. For seven days, we take care of all the logistics, food, and transportation so you can work side-by-side with the community.

Zach Balle: During that time, certain perspectives come up. I talked about how travel brings the most fulfillment to me. On one of the first trips, I thought about the definition of happiness. I was raised with the condition that happiness was a direct correlation with material wealth and what I had on the outside world.

Zach Balle: Traveling to Guatemala, I see that wealth accumulation is very limited, but this smile and radiance of happiness is very bold and big. You can feel it. It's about bringing people into a new context to feel a different energy and see what life is like when we're not in wealth accumulation.

Zach Balle: Wealth accumulation in Guatemala is family. It's having enough food and resources to provide for the community. It's about working together to build a school for future generations. Witnessing this sends people back to the United States scratching their heads, thinking about the meaning of happiness.

Zach Balle: It's not about not having resources or living off-grid, but I believe bringing the world closer and having these conversations is what's going to get us out of this disconnected time. Hug It Forward has done a phenomenal job with our team members having safe trips for people to come down and have this experience.

Zach Balle: The community is blown away that a bunch of people from the United States care enough to stop their busy lives to get on a plane, come down, and get their hands dirty. Mike, I’m curious if you can share a little bit about what the trip was like for you and your family. Did it change you in any way?

Mike Putman: Happy to share. You actually stay in Antigua, which is a really beautiful colonial village in Guatemala. You learn a little bit more about the culture and then you go closer to the village where you're building the school and you actually go to work. All your meals are taken care of and you're building a bond with the people you're traveling with. My son, who was about 14 at the time, was hauling bags of cement around. I was taking a piece of rebar and bending it to make the right structure.

Mike Putman: It was a joy because not only are you working with your team, but you're also working side-by-side with the Guatemalans who live in that village. Hug It Forward does an excellent job with the trip. Generally, the children put on a little play for you. The binding that you get with the children and the experience is just overwhelming. There are a couple of days off, so it’s not slave labor for six days. There's one day where you go see Mayan ruins and another day where you experience other nonprofits and learn about them as well as pick coffee. I got an opportunity to see coffee being produced and roasted by a small grower, which was really enjoyable.

Mike Putman: From a personal perspective, the takeaway for my kids to see how other people who are not as fortunate materially live, but how happy they are, was a big takeaway. It was a life-changing experience. It really did change my kids' lives in a positive way. It was a great space to be in.

How to Get Involved

James Ferrara: Zach, what incredible work and what a way to use your life to better other people's lives. Thank you for that. Mike, for your support and participation as well. What if our listeners want to know more or get involved?

Zach Balle: Go to hugitforward.org. There are opportunities to take these trips or help in some other meaningful way.

Mike Putman: I know you've gotten a lot of publicity in the past. What were some of the news outlets that picked up on your story?

Zach Balle: We were on World News Tonight with Diane Sawyer for Earth Day. We were published in Oprah Magazine, and we've been on the White House website and in the Peace Corps. We have a bunch of articles on hugitforward.org that you guys can check out.

Zach Balle: I will just say one more thing about the travel aspect. We don't do any marketing. I've never done a podcast interview before. I decided to do this because I really love Mike and I'm really excited to meet James and hopefully have his family come to Guatemala. When people come down and experience the trip, they go home and talk to somebody about it, and it grows organically. We've also found that corporations are trying to figure out this retention issue. A lot of millennials and younger people want to travel and serve. This is a very safe and organized trip for a group to have an experience.

Zach Balle: We've had organizations like Lush Cosmetics fund a school and then send down 20 of their employees and managers. When those people went back, they would rave about their experiences in the stores. It's authentic. Employees are grateful to the organization they work for to care enough about building schools or sending them on a trip to help open up their awareness.

James Ferrara: I look forward to getting more personally involved myself. I'm sure we have a bunch of listeners who feel the same way.

Zach Balle: I'd love to get James down there to get some calluses on his hands, which he has probably never had before.

James Ferrara: I will bring my machete from Flores in Guatemala that I bought thirty years ago. I'll bring it with me.

Zach Balle: Very cool. I would love that. I appreciate both of you. Thank you so much for having me and I can't wait to see you guys in Guatemala.

The Role of Food in the Travel Journey

Mike Putman: That was great information from Zach Balle. What a great institution; they've done so much good for so many people in Guatemala. I'm happy to have been part of his journey and really look forward to seeing them continue to grow. Well, let's talk about food and travel, James.

James Ferrara: Food—what an alien subject for you and I! I get this question a lot because I post photos of going out to eat. People make fun of me as if it's not part of my travel work. But what is the role of food, cuisine, and those experiences in the travel journey?

Mike Putman: When I think about traveling, it's not just to see sites and visit cities. Part of it is: what kind of food scene do they have? Is their food interesting to me? It's all about experiencing another culture. We want to drive home the idea on this podcast: don't do what you do at home. The whole point of traveling is to have new experiences and to expand your mind and your understanding of the world. Food plays a big role in that.

James Ferrara: For me, it's about local flavor and authenticity. Nothing drives me crazier than when I see tourists eating in the hotel. I understand convenience, maybe for breakfast, but whenever you can, please get outside the hotel and experience the real food and culture of where you're visiting.

Michelin Stars and Fine Dining

Mike Putman: I think my greatest food experience took place over a couple of years, meeting a chef in the South of France. A host took me to this beautiful restaurant and I had a wonderful meal. The gentleman was Philippe Da Silva. He was a two-star Michelin chef in Paris and then he bought his own place in the South of France, which was a charming thirteen or fourteen-bedroom hotel. It was inland near Cannes, Monte Carlo, and Saint-Tropez. People would come up from those areas to have dinner with him because he was a renowned chef.

Mike Putman: I came back to the States and wanted to do something extraordinary for our executive team in San Diego. I called and asked if he would come and present a gastronomical meal for our team. He said he'd be glad to. He came over for a week, brought a sous-chef, and prepared a nine or ten-course meal. We actually sold tickets to this event and used the money for Hug It Forward. It was a great experience. The thing that made it special was being able to share that level of dining with a lot of people who had never had that opportunity.

James Ferrara: That is very special. Choosing a favorite restaurant for me is like choosing a favorite child. A really good tip is to ask your hotel concierge, although if you're in a big tourist hotel, you may fall trapped to a financial arrangement between the concierge and the restaurant. I look for local newspapers or publications so that I'm not just Googling. If you Google the best restaurants in Chicago, you're going to get advertorial things and built-up promotions. Look for a non-promotional source like a local newspaper for articles on the best new restaurants.

James Ferrara: My wife and I once went to Paris and did a tour of the oldest restaurants. We ate at Tour d'Argent, overlooking the Notre Dame, famous for its pressed duck made in a contraption that looks like a medieval torture device to make an incredible jus. We also ate at Le Grand Véfour, which was so old that my wife could not get comfortable. She said the cushions felt two hundred years old. It was very beautiful to look at but not modern comfortable.

James Ferrara: If you're going to the Bahamas, a lot of people wind up in Nassau. Unfortunately, in a lot of ports there, the tourist trade has turned them into jewelry and t-shirt shops. They don't have a lot of sense of place anymore. 20,000 cruisers come off ships into these little villages. You have to look a little harder to find local color. In Nassau is Graycliff, which has been a source of hospitality for several hundred years. It was built as a mansion and has a spectacular restaurant. It has one of the oldest wine cellars in the hemisphere.

James Ferrara: There are bottles in the Graycliff wine cellar that date to the 1700s. I saw one where the limestone from the walls had bled out and enveloped the bottle, trapping it inside the wall. You can have dinner in this incredibly atmospheric wine cellar in a port where some people think there isn't much interesting left. You just have to look for it.

Mike Putman: I never even knew that place existed and I've been to Nassau dozens of times. James, you're a fan of the Michelin Guide, right? It's really based on professional evaluations.

James Ferrara: Absolutely. It's very different from the populist surveys we have here in the US.

Mike Putman: Michelin is a tire company first. Early on, to promote the sale of their tires, they created these guides in France and then expanded. They have very secretive undercover eaters who rate restaurants. You don't know they've been there until after they have left. It keeps the restaurants on their toes and gives an unbiased rating. I purposefully look for Michelin restaurants when I travel. They have a scoring system where three stars is the top. It is very hard to get a Michelin three-star rating; I think there are only five or six in the entire United States.

Authentic Street Food and Local Finds

Mike Putman: I love going to Singapore. My good friend, Cynthia Koh, who is an actress and a model, would often take me to hawker stands. This is street food, like an outdoor food court. You sit in the middle and walk around to different vendor stalls that specialize in one dish. You don't order anything directly from the stall, but you sit down and waiters come over. You say you want spicy crab or fried squid, and they go around to the different stalls to get the best food and bring it back. You pay one fee at the end and they disperse the money.

Mike Putman: About seven years ago, Michelin rated a hawker stand with one star. This blew things up because a one-star restaurant is usually very expensive. One star sounds low, but a Michelin one-star is among the best in the world. On one of my trips to Singapore, I made it a point to go. It was phenomenal food for seven or eight dollars.

James Ferrara: I was in Naples and I really wanted rabbit. It’s part of my family's culture. I can say rabbit in ten different languages. It’s famous in Naples, slow-braised in red wine and tomatoes. We were walking around and came across a restaurant that was highly rated. The owner was standing outside and asked me what I wanted. I said "coniglio"—rabbit. He called a kid off the street, handed him some money, said something quick in Italian, and the kid went running. He sent him off to buy a rabbit! He told us to come back in a couple of hours, and I ate a rabbit that put me into orbit.

Mike Putman: The seafood in the Edinburgh area is also some of the best in the world. They export about ninety percent of it to Italy and Spain. They have fantastic cold-water lobster and oysters. James, what is the strangest thing you've eaten off the streets?

James Ferrara: I have had grasshoppers and ants in Mexico City. It took my most brave attempts to eat. It's a bit crunchy, and I can't say that I highly recommend it, but I'm glad I tried it.

Mike Putman: I was in Pattaya, Thailand, and had deep-fried scorpion after a couple of Tiger beers. It was just crunchy and didn't have a lot of taste. It didn't taste like chicken; it just tasted like something deep-fried.

James Ferrara: One of my best times was in the countryside of Italy. We met up with relatives of friends of mine. It turned out they owned a restaurant. They closed it for us so we could have a private lunch. There were twenty of us, and they made all of their favorite foods. If you can hook up with locals or take advantage of programs where you can eat with locals, it’s a great experience. Just look out for tourist traps on the beach or water where they present a ridiculous bill. Always be smart. Look at the menu first and make sure you understand the prices.

Consumer Advocacy and Industry News

James Ferrara: Our motto is: Don't be a tourist. I want to remind our listeners that we really like your feedback. Please go to no-tourists-allowed.com and register your questions or topics you would like us to cover.

Mike Putman: We also have a really cool contest coming up. We're going to be giving away some really nice trips. Tell your friends to subscribe and we'll be rolling out more details next week.

James Ferrara: I want to mention the Department of Transportation's new resource. We’ve seen tough weekends with delays and cancellations. Threats from the government are not going to fix those things. However, the DOT came up with a smart idea. They launched a new online resource for travelers that allows us to look up and compare each airline's policies. It shows what happens if your flight is delayed or canceled and what your rights are. Instead of threats, they threw the airlines into heavy competition. The Airline Customer Service Dashboard is now at transportation.gov. Look under the Aviation Consumer Protection section. Know your rights and compensation.

Mike Putman: There was also a discussion in the Washington Post about whether passengers should give flight attendants gifts. I've done it. As an Executive Platinum member, I get small cards to hand out for exceptional service. If you don't have status, another thing you could do is offer a small gift like individually wrapped candy. It shouldn't be over-the-top or expensive. One flight attendant said the best gift she ever got was a handwritten note from a little kid.

James Ferrara: It's one of the toughest jobs there is. I appreciate those people who take it on, especially with some of the ugliness from the last couple of years.

Closing Remarks

Mike Putman: Our deal guru, Jessica, is on vacation this week, but we look forward to having her back next week. I think that's going to wrap up this week's session of No Tourists Allowed.

James Ferrara: Check back with us next week for big guests and the new contest.

Mike Putman: Thank you for listening to No Tourists Allowed.