- With the exception of Frisbees, feminine products and antibiotic ointments for ferociously itchy insect bites, jock itch and stinging bugs, you can often buy basic items cheaper en route. (Japan and Scandinavia are exceptions.)

- Unless you’re scheming to ice climb or practice naked yoga above the tree line, hold off on buying boot crampons.

- Honor your gift-purchase impulse on the road. An $8 Balinese woodcarving makes a bigger impression than another T-shirt.

- With considerate tact and a keen eye, you canunearth and purchase marvelous souvenirs that are not officially“for sale”—at a fair price. The story behind procuring travel souvenirs often outshines the actual artifact. And the odyssey of hauling them home usually inspires yet another tale.

- The best places to locate interesting gifts are usually workplaces: factories, fish markets and home-based craft workshops. Look for handmade tools, hunting paraphernalia and whatever you deem art.

- Be sensitive to taking advantage of locals. Make sure economically stressed people, especially aboriginals, are parting with possessions they can replace easily with your payment. Don’t be swayed by politeness regarding an item they will really miss. Acquiring gems necessitates culture-sensitive compromise; bargain with the correct individual.

- Remember that sometimes packages shipped from abroad (did someone say Turkish carpet?) never make it home. The tactics for negotiating fragile or “oversized” souvenirs onto your homebound flights and through customs also demand diplomacy. Always declare souvenirs as gifts on customs forms. My northern Thailand fish trap combines lobster-trap ingenuity and jungle art. It consists of one section of bamboo aggrandized into a conical shell that houses an internal DNA-like bamboo stick helix. I knew the trap, tied to the outside of my backpack while transiting Bangkok, was a winner when scores of elderly men accosted me, admiring the artwork that recalled their youth, not to mention the perplexed stares it earned on the subway ride home from JFK Airport.

Not all who bargain are poor.

Have a secret pocket sewn into your travel trousers and shirts to balance out the goods in your money belt—that thing that wraps around your waist, under your clothes. The point is to minimize material injury in the event of loss. Don’t carry it all with you unless you must.

Go where the locals go.
Cops and bartenders know their terrain better than the local chamber of commerce—and they work nights. Cordially interview them when you roll into town. Inquire about the best meal deals, zones of peril, inviting accommodations, safe strolling, camping, worthwhile attractions and colorful hangouts.

Don’t shake hands lefty.
In many parts of the world, latrine flushing and personal cleansing are done with the left hand using a few splashes of rainwater held in a nearby vessel inside of a very small room without a toilet bowl. Never offer your left hand to someone in such places.

Spend More Time in Fewer Places
For extended journeys, I recommend an around-the-world airline ticket consolidator. Spending more time in fewer destinations allows you to find the local groove and save money—it always takes a few days in a new place to figure out the bargains. Use your plane and train transit stopovers for at least an overnight look around.

Take a media sabbatical.
If you haven’t circled the globe yet, maybe there’s an umbilical cord attached to your TV convincing you the world is an unfriendly place. It’s not. The “news” is 95 percent hyped, manipulated ghoul. You can do it!

While you ride the rails CONCOCT A MISSION. The best way to comprehend a culture and candidly harmonizing with the locals is to devise a hobby-inspired crusade. Birding, animal-powered transport riding, attending religious services, festival hopping, learning a massage technique from the local healer or watching musical instrument makers at work. Invent a quest and find out where the local guru hangs out.

This strategy moves you past the other skulking, bumbling tourists who wait to be fleeced by the gratuity-crazed bevy of con artists that plague many destinations. You’ll save money by discovering the heart of the region’s honest people.

THE FIRST THING YOU PACK IS YOURSELF. And that should be an open, positive thinking, compassionate person.

Pack a literary masterpiece or two and pack to give away. Clothes, footwear, bungee cords, safety pins. Someone you meet may need them more than you do. Bring balloons for the kids. Photos of friends and family also create a buzz. Pack a cassette mix fave or three – music is THE international language and an even better Americana-Euro exchange than a Snickers for a Ricola.

Airline giveaway paraphernalia (slippers, eye shades, toothbrushes) make great gifts in undeveloped countries. Business class travelers always leave these gifts behind, so collect them as you deplane.

Protect your ears. Aside from safeguarding snore-stressed marriages, earplugs are protection against blaring buses, trains and obnoxious human beings.

Choose Guidebooks that will support your “mission.” Whatever it may be. Experiment by comparing what several different guidebooks detail about a locale with which you are already familiar.

Think about your backpack. Before stuffing your pack, recognize that the real essentials are what’s in a globetrotter’s head – background knowledge, resourcefulness and sensitivity. The most important feature of a backpack is the zippers. When zippers fail, a backpack it is not. Darker colors hide dirt. Thieves, like bugs, are lured to bright colors.

Yes it is hurricane season, but in the last several years, we have seen deals on 4 and 5 star hotels below $200 per night. The best time to book these fantastic deals is early June, as that is when rates are set for the off season.

We will update this page with the best deals in the coming weeks. Check back often for updates.

The Middle Fork of the Salmon is the jewel of the nation’s longest undammed river system. The vast, roadless terrain still belongs to black bear, circling golden eagles, and bighorn sheep families who peacefully return your astonished gaze. Each day is more awe-inspiring.

The conservation-minded, highly trained guides patiently walk (raft) you through every aspect of river navigation. After a float plane ride from Stanley, Idaho to riverside at Indian Creek, you choose one of three river running options. Everyone in the paddle boat (up to 8) partakes in navigation using paddles. Guides independently maneuver the group raft “oar boats,” making them supreme vessels to hypothesize with your newfound comrades. The autonomous are drawn to the inflatable kayaks that are designed for one or two people. Nicknamed “duckies,” these small, bouncy canoe-shaped crafts have a forgiving margin for error, like colliding with rocks. Our group usually opted for two or three vessel change-ups per day.

The campsites are epic — one of the many aspects that truly sets ROW apart from other outfitters. Tents are set up and the kitchen is simmering something hearty when you make each days final landfall around 4pm — set up by crew who float ahead of the posse on a supply “sweep boat.” Imagine 10 tents circling a fine-sandy, three-acre riverside meadow surrounded by Ponderosa Pines and sage-brushed hillsides; sublime moments to reflect or read before dinner. After perfect sleep -under the stars optional – your desired breakfast beverage is delivered to your tent in the morning, an affable “alarm clock.”

A can of pork and beans it isn’t. Each night the dinner seating arrangement varied from one long table to separate four person setups to a large circle. Happy hour hoerdoerves are complemented by spirits (included in package price). Entrees are spectacular and inordinately vegetarian friendly -”would you like dairy or non-dairy mashed potatoes?” …Baked squash, Chilean tomato salad, halibut, shrimp scampi, chocolate cake with pecan frosting. Steak lovers needn’t worry either.

There’s one guide per three or four guests. The guides, who literally spend half of their lives in tents, morph into civilized waiters at dinner. It’s significantly indulgent to be attended by a guide cum waiter checking on your four-star ration in the open breeze, inquiring, “more wine with dinner?” Vogue, tablecloth dining as you bond with a rampaging river that completely ignores time; an eventful reprieve from the eternal cavalcade of fire trucks wailing outside my Manhattan apartment window.

Each day there’s ample time to fish from boats or near the campsites. The excursion includes numerous day hikes that visit riverside hot springs, both nomadic and migrant Indian petroglyph art sites, abandoned pioneer homesteads, and my favorite, Veil Falls — A stadium-sized bandshell-like grotto (hangar) creating a 300′ waterfall braving a 10-second plunge. The misty, freefalling splash-point sways back and forth across a lush, acre-sized basin as the wind wishes. I lied down with the falls above and behind me for a reverse angle and participated in the fluid mirage, millions of miles away from auto congestion, snug in the deepest wilderness in the Lower 48.

Up north, Chang Mai is abundantly-equipped with dozens of theme bars, trekking outfitters and motorcycle rental shops. The Beer Bar is a medley of twenty personalized, round-the-clock watering holes, linked beneath a mammoth palm-leaf thatched roof. Travelers from around the world gather there, strategizing, or sharing stories about their hill-tribe treks. Chang Mai is the optimum launch point for treks into the Golden Triangle and also through the remarkable villages of Pai or Mae Hong Song. Find yourself an informed guide to lead your group, or, rent a motorbike and hit the trail on your own. Also, consider becoming certified in Thai massage at one of Chang Mai’s training centers.

Even the uninspired can find merriment along southern Thailand’s palm-lined beaches. Chaweng Beach on Koh Samui Island features both quiet, romantic, resort style accommodations and a full-blown party scene (indulging a broad entertainment spectrum ranging from sports bars to transvestite fashion shows). The Reggae Bar, a colossal, all-night rave complex, is the preferred haunt to wind up a cafe crawl along Chaweng’s inland and beachfront “strips”.

* From Bangkok’s Koh Sarn Rd (the information mecca for off-beat travellers), inexpensive, overnight buses run to both Chang Mai and Koh Samui Island. A morning ferry ride connects from the night bus to the island. Any travel agent or your airline consolidator can arrange these domestic flights in advance.

The Shore Bar on Anjuna Beach is a lived-in, bamboo-thatched dancing hut where earthy, western expatriate mothers move lavishly to the rhythm while simultaneously breast-feeding their babies. It’s also the place to get the low-down on the techno-music dance-a-thons. These untamed cotillions last all night, either under a full moon on the beach, or, in large houses (hidden somewhere in the jungle) where multiple rooms ablaze in psychedelic light reflecting on surreal-painted walls. Partygoers, wearing minimal clothing and glow-in-the-dark face paint, undulate within the techno-sensurround. Great exercise. Not a typical day in the office…

Wednesday in Goa is market day, an eccentric flea-market featuring merchandise crafted by Gujaranti tribal women and traders from Kashmir and Tibet. Enjoy the sights, snacks and 60’s-style western drop-outs, but beware of the infamous ear cleaners — These peculiar, self-proclaimed doctors will sneak up on you, aspiring to probe a long, thin device into your ear canal and then demand a payment of fifty cents. Their slight-of-hand might convince you that you had a pound of wax lurking within your skull.

Visit Chapora Fort in Vagator, an immense Portuguese outpost. Further north take in the medieval, hand-labor boat building yards along the Chapora River. Those sour on any pattern of tourism can find isolation even farther north in Arambol. It’s possible to rent a private house in Goa on a monthly basis, real cheap.

Diverse images from India pervade in my mind. While visiting a “hospital” in Delhi, India I observed a mother carrying her dead infant down a long dim hallway, out the front door of the hospital, and into her gruesomely impoverished neighborhood. Her face was like stone.

India has a lighter side, especially in Goa, but streets in most Indian towns and cities are overflowing with cars, bicycles, motor scooters, pedal-rickshaws, pushcarts, monkeys, sacred cows, water-buffalo, elephants and other animal-driven carts. Auto drivers on two lane roads without dividers play unending games of chicken and accidents are common. Since there is no unleaded gasoline in India, trucks and buses belch black smoke.

“For ever and ever the memory of my distant first glimpse of the Taj will compensate me for creeping around the globe to have that great privilege.”
- Mark Twain on the Taj Mahal

* Overland transportation in India can be a hassle, unless your without time constraints. Fly to Goa from Delhi or Bombay or take a train or bus from Bombay to Mapusa. You can also take a coastal boat tour there from Bombay.

This bargain hunter’s paradise, sharing borders with Guyana, Brazil and Columbia, has more opportunities for adventure than California. If taken by the metropolitan allure of Caraqueno flair, ramble into the Gran Parrillada El Rosal (a gut-level dance hall, 1/5 mile south of the Chacaito Metro station on Avenida Pichincha). Not exactly a blueprint of 1950’s Happy Day’s nostalgia replica, but there’s plenty of live Salsa, Meringue, Ballenato, Gaita, and Rook music blasting. An icy bottle of Polar Beer (Venezuela’s national brew) costs under a buck (170 Bs).

Usually, the higher up on the socio-economic ladder one travels, the likelihood of meeting an English-speaking acquaintance increases. In local, easy-going joints, like the Gran Parrillada El Rosal, your chances of encountering an amigo capable of speaking English are slim. No worry, lacking Spanish skills makes your search for a dance partner a bona fide challenge. One option is to persuade one of the more senior senoritas to familiarize you with the hand and foot placements. Even a language-impaired visitor soon realizes that dancing, like eating, is routine here, a national sport, where everyone’s clued in! Albeit exciting, dancing faces remain expressionless, as dreamy eyes hover calmly aloft dimly-lit torsos, slyly meshing their mid-sections. Somewhat like a thriving high school gymnasium dance, minus the U.S.-style cotillion theatrics…

Once you understand the dance-partner search strategy (approaching a table-full of people and extending your open hand with a smile), finding a partner is easy. Four out of five women accept these extended hand, dance-floor invitations, not bad compared to North America’s woesome one for six average… On the dance floor, your gringo status goes undetected, unless you open your mouth (habit for many Statesfolk). So hush, treasure the sundry dances, many featuring close-up, little baby-stepping intimacy, right off the bat. A majority of the differing dance modes seem to inspire either entrancing, locked-at-the-mid-section gyrating, or, earnest, pelvic-bone collision/grinds. In any case, you’ll be in close quarters, try watching other couple’s hands and feet out of the corner of your eye until you get the hang of it all.

Venezuelan charm truly hit me listening to music performed by a familial trio on the renowned, downtown pedestrian stroll-mall, Boulevard de Sabana Grande. An adorable five-year old girl played maracas in front of two men, one finger-picking an Arpa (harp with attached sound-cabin), the other singing while playing a Cuatro (a small, four-string guitar). The vibrant tone and mesmerizing vision was Latin symphony at its best.

Irish Crystal – Wexford and Waterford are not the final names in Irish Crystal. Consider visiting an independent house and moving beyond centerpiece bowls and candlesticks. A commissioned visual art interpretation of your family crest or a sculpture of the family dog? Independent crystal makers website?

Vintage wine – Link your kids birth year to your investment/collection of French wines… then give those bottles of wine to your kids on their wedding day. Don’t forget to tell your kids to honor their children in the same way. PS, Now is the time to go hunt for eventually priceless European wines since 2003 was a severe drought year – which, ironically, means the grapes that survived made fantastic wine … French Islands (New Caledonia, Tahiti) are also great places to unearth collectable wines.

Antique British Furniture – Britian’s auctions houses, large and small, are the American travelers chance to recover something connected to your lineage. India is a swell place to hunt for British furniture – though there is a law against taking items more than 75 years old out of the country unless purchased via auction.

A Relic from an Ancestors Journey – Retrace the steps of your grandparents, whether it be fighting in Normandy or occupying Japan after WWII, and collect relics (sand, wood, stone) and combine it with locally commissioned jewelry, painting or sculpture.

Recipes – A foreign recipe, inherited in country, is something you can share with friends and family forever. Asking to meet the restaurant chef and jot down the recipe of the dish you’ve just enjoyed is atypical in American restaurants – but not in most other parts of the world. Plus, when traveling you’re allowed to bring your passport to be nosy.

Local gourmet take-home items – Including spices, mushrooms and wine – make great souvenirs, with an expiration date… a special date to commemorate the journey and the special people you invite to the feast or wine tasting.

Replant! – While traveling within the states, consider transplanting trees or plants into your backyard or fire escape garden. While traveling abroad, acquiring seeds and planting them at your (or your friend’s) home creates a lasting memory.

Antiques/Texties/Fixtures – Fabric is cheap and easy to pack. Laos is known for colorful, hand-woven blankets … also consider buying fabric to be used to create pillows or a garment once your home. Cambodian silk never goes out of style.

Tiles can be shipped home – by sea – for your bathroom or kitchen. Door and sink hardware (old and new) makes a neat story. Anywhere in the world colonized by Europeans are great places to hunt antiques.

Art/Heirloom Additions – Building your family heirloom while traveling in undeveloped countries is much easier on the ATM card. But be careful of jewelry and gem scams, especially in less developed countries.

Bail, Indonesia has an incredible market for woodcarvings, paintings, silver jewelry, and wind chimes. Burma and India (especially hill station towns) are great for British and Dutch antiquers … China – etchings, jade / Africa – diamonds

Shock Value – A souvenir’s whoa factor – I don’t mean the rabbits’ foot exclaim – can stimulate conversation until the cows come home (note, those little toys that moo don’t count).

Deep in Irian Jaya, Indonesia’s rugged highlands, I encountered the Dani tribe and taught them how to play the Frisbee I carried in my backpack (example of letting your hobby create introductions). The black Melanesian aboriginal men still wear only penis gourds, an early-model jockstrap made from petrified yellow squash shells fitted over the genitalia and fastened skyward by thin strings tied around the waist. Wearing one is akin to sporting only a small, curved wiffleball bat sheath. In this case, exchanging the Frisbee for a gourd was a fair trade that pays huge dividends when I show-and-tell it at home. My brother’s Tibetan ceremonial prayer bowl – the top half of a human skull – is also a crowd pleaser.

Hobby-Inspired – A way to encounter dazzling souvenirs is devising a hobby-inspired crusade. Pick a hobby (existing or new) to help you concoct a souvenir finding mission … while birding, attending religious services, festival-hopping, tracking literary landmarks, learning a massage technique from the local healer, watching musical instrument makers at work or riding animal-powered transport (joke) – the quest you invent means the souvenirs will find you. You’ll save money too… this strategy moves you past the other skulking, bumbling tourists who wait to be fleeced by the gratuity-crazed bevy of con artists plaguing many destinations.

Souvenir acquisition via concocting a travel mission that syncs with your hobby is an excellent way to meet like-minded people too.

Sometimes, to tune in to our inner shepherd we must point the compass toward curiosity. America is full of people marching to their own rhythm – and that drummer isn’t always in the band. Historic California Route 101 – the 935-mile artery rolling through 16 counties and spanning California’s northern and southern borders – played a vital role in the state’s 20th century evolution. At the dawn of the 21st century this lifeline continues to thrive … I drove the length of it in travel writer mode (which permits nosiness) to hunt route 101 moments.” The idea of road-tripping on a major thoroughfare took a new form – you don’t have to take the backroads to get real. Route 66, move over – 66 gets all the glory but California’s Highway 101 is America’s most multidimensional primary thoroughfare.

101 is a diverse slice of state, and life. Redwood lined, billboard rimmed, fog, desert, rainforests, major cities, Americana strip malls, epic coastal drives, mountain passes, and many middle of nowheres. Often, within 10 miles, it shifts from 1 to 3 lanes … you have a chance to drive through a redwood (and Los Angeles) … Astounding climate shifts: afternoon in Eureka barely breaking 60-degrees, 150 miles down the road in Ukiah it’s 112-degrees … stayed in every grade of accommodation from RV Parks to five-star inns on the national historic register… because America and its people needs to be celebrated, again.

I roamed up and down California Highway 101 for a month and rediscovered a territory overflowing with authentic characters streaming with counsel for people (possibly on academic and workaholic binges) who would take the time to listen. These road-tested lessons aren’t taught in classrooms, they are relayed by freelancing, unsung heroes … Originality, squared.

I cruised the whole road from north to south. While rolling down California Highway 101 discovering these unsung sages I was struck by how some of them and their lessons reminded me of similar lessons learned around the world. I was inspired to write this article to show how strong the heart of our country is and how the basic truths of life are universal. California has many personalities: myriad cultures that are worlds apart – yet connected by the 101.

At the core, the things that matter are the same. Our state-of-the-art breakaway nation was, and continues to be, built on self-expression. People energy. American ends with “I Can”.