“I can do this,” I tell myself firmly as I squint at the Basel street map. Husband Tom is usually with me on my travels, the map in his hand, while I trail several steps behind, like the Duke of Edinburgh in the wake of her majesty – or in my case, his majesty. But this time I’m traveling tout seul. I gaze around anxiously, searching out a street name; then turn my map upside down. “Got it.” Leaving the railway station, I follow Elizabethenstrasse into the heart of the city. I shiver and pull my coat closer to me. Basel is bracing itself for winter. The summer sun has thrown a final kiss of warming rays. Autumn has nipped in and he is setting the city’s foliage alight. Gold, russet and burnt-orange is spreading across town like wildfire. Manuela, long-time Swiss friend, texts me: Stuck @ work. Go 2…

I’ll be the first to admit that my 12 years of living in the Middle East has overly sensitized me to skin issues.  There are numerous elements to consider when dressing to go out and about.  There is, of course, the Sun-Safety Factor: living in a desert inspires certain cancer prevention precautions.  The Comfort Factor is an important one: through trial and error I’ve learned that covering up is actually cooler than baring it all.  And then there’s the Eyeball Factor:  how much of a reaction do you wish to garner over the course of the day?  Egypt is one of the more liberal Middle Eastern countries, but for the male population low cut necklines are the equivalent of a birdfeeder to a squirrel.  So when I arrived in Albania’s capital city, Tirana, in the middle of a sweltering July, I was a bit taken aback by the quantity of…

Broken down, engine sizzling, black smoke billowing, I wearily repeated the name of the town and confirmed, not for the first time, we were definitely in France and yes, the town definitely existed! As luck would have it, we had broken down 500m from the road sign bearing the town’s name and road number.  My patience was stretched to the breaking point when my English based breakdown company informed me once again that neither the road nor town was listed on their database. At this point, and not for the first time in the trip, I realized that although a road trip through rural France in a vintage camper van may be romantic in theory; the reality was somewhat more frustrating. Our decision to go on a road trip came about quickly. At number two on my “ten things to do before I’m thirty” list was to buy a classic…

      There is nothing than can prepare you for the experience of a Ukrainian circus. .           My first and only performance was a matinee in Dnepropetrovsk. Unlike traveling circuses back home, the circus in Dnepropetrovsk runs from early spring through early fall. Ukraine, and to a larger extent, Russia, is a hot bed of circus talent. In fact, a great deal of circus performers in the U.S. hail from the former Soviet Union.       After purchasing the tickets, Olya, my Ukrainian fiancé and I headed to a nearby market to purchase snacks and beer.. We entered the Soviet-era lobby, which included a pet store for some odd reason. Various souvenirs were sold in the lobby, but the vendors were dressed as clowns. The fact that they spoke Russian somehow made them even more horrifying. As somebody who has a complete and utter fear towards these sinister spawns of…

"Moshi moshi". I step off the plane and clear the refreshingly friendly Japanese immigration control, amongst Japanese donning clinical face masks, and sharply attired businessmen spilling into the Starbucks equipped arrivals hall of Narita airport. I watch them answer their unfamiliar brands of mobile phone with "moshi moshi"; it's evident that Tokyo is going to be different, but yet familiar. The unmistakably welcoming hospitality of Japan is perhaps the main principle of this country that feeds my adoration for Tokyo. I have yet to purchase so much as a chocolate bar that wasn't delivered with a bow, and a very sincere looking smile. This is true of pretty much every transaction, even when I ask where to find the toilet in the labyrinthine Tokyo metro. This custom doesn't seem to be particularly bonded to either the older or younger generation. It sticks throughout. After a lengthy but very comfortable transfer from Narita…

I’ve always hated technology, at least I used to. During my adult life, my adaptation to technological changes goes something like this: I hate it. I hate most of it. I hate it except for these particular instances. I think it has its good and bad points. I like it some of the time. I like it. I really like it. You should like it. You must get one of these. But the journey through these various stages is always a painful one. And as smart as I am about a number of things, I have no insight that allows me to apply my experiences with prior technologies to current ones. That is, as each new technology bobs to the surface, I hate it, and am convinced that I will hate it forever. So I am surprised to be referring to myself as a techno-voyageuse, albeit an initially reluctant one,…

Rio de Janeiro was the city where I ended my seven month trip, and perhaps that is why I feel I have unfinished business with the place: I didn’t feel like it was really time to leave. Or, maybe it was any of these reasons: 1. When booking our ticket we thought “Great! August! Summer!”.... This was in the Southern Hemisphere; it was winter when we got there. Yes, we didn’t really think about that whole tricky hemisphere thing. I mean, you’d just assume Brazil would be warm, wouldn’t you? Well, it’s not. We had two days of sun during which we sat on the beach sipping coconuts and praying we’d get tans (we didn’t) so that we wouldn’t have the embarrassment of returning home after our epic journey with the same pasty skin we left with (we did). Also most of the major sights in Rio (going up Sugarloaf…

Learning a language is never easy. One’s head gets filled with foreign words and sounds, some of which are correct and others which are just nonsensical noise. The challenge of language acquisition is even more exacerbated in times of stress. I just spent the past four days in San Andres, Colombia putting myself through the most difficult of tests--a vacation with my Peruvian girlfriend’s family.

When moving to Central America for nine months, you need to make certain sacrifices. It begins when you pack – forced to squint into that humid future while sucking on a Jamba Juice is a difficult task. Then, once you arrive, you are forced into even tougher decisions. You know, the ones that may or may not haunt you for your entire trip, and even affect your life afterward. Knowing this to be the case, I did some soul searching our first week in Costa Rica and finally decided what had to be done. I approached my wife hesitantly, unsure about how to drop such a bomb on her.

You arrive in the surprisingly bustling city of Tena, Ecuador after an incredible week spent in the Galapagos Islands. Tena is the last major outpost before a hundred or so miles of jungle and then Peru. Bisected by rivers, the town hosts five different Adventure Travel Operators offering tours that all seem to be interesting and perfectly fun. You: A) Sign up for one of these tours. B) Decide to go a different direction by renting a bike and trying to find a lagoon along the Rio Anzu (recommended by a local), using a map drawn on a napkin.

There are only slight differences in driving techniques employed by the average Mexican driver and those by the professional auto racing circuit. The similarities far outweigh the differences. Everyone is driving as fast as possible in an attempt to gain the pole position. It is only a relative pole position, because there is still always someone in front of you, but you get internal points for every car you pass.

My birthday found me mid-jungle at the border of Burma and Thailand. I had a bit of a party, with native monkeys and various vermin celebrating with me. I was just a girl and a backpack, trying to forget about things like passing birthdays. Gning and Gnung, my two Thai tour guides warned me about the "tiny buffalo" or what the hill tribes termed the “tiny beasts” one must grapple with in order to get from place to place; the masses of slimy black jungle leeches.

If my first three weeks in the Thai jungle taught me one thing, it was this: I was not prepared, mentally or emotionally, to be a guide. There was nothing I could really do about that, and while it’s never stopped me from doing anything before (and it certainly wasn’t going to stop me now), I figured the least I could do was be better equipped.

“Where are you going this time?” Family and friends asked. “Well, I can’t exactly pronounce it,” I confessed. “But I can spell it: H-L-A-B-I-S-A.” “Where?” they chorused. “It’s a rural area in north-western Kwa Zulu Natal, South Africa.” Blank looks followed by further questioning: “But where in South Africa? I mean which country? Zimbabwe? Zambia?”

As with all trips in my experience, the journey is just as eventful as the trip itself. I believe this is because I have a tendency of just going with the flow. However, the “flow” is never just a forward-flowing river in my case—it’s more like several little winding streams that always take me in unexpected directions.

Some things don’t require planning: life’s surprises, in fact, often trump schedules. Or at least that is the philosophy that has pervaded my existence thus far. I inherited impulsiveness from my family: we arranged vacations two days before we took them, and bought our Christmas trees on December 24th.

I need to clarify something up front. I suffer from the affliction of Attention Deficit Disorder. That means at times my mind flies from one activity to another with a reckless abandon akin to a wrecking ball being swung to and fro by an intoxicated construction worker dabbling at the helm. It’s not that I can’t concentrate at all. When there’s something important happening, about 4% of the time I act quite normal and get things done in a reasonable way. The other – slightly higher percentage of the time – I flail wildly upon the task at hand. So when I heard Marrakech was an exotic, bustling, fast-paced city with much to explore my mind began to rev its engines, craving the fuel of multiple simultaneous endless distractions. This was right down my alley.

I have a fairly haphazard approach to traveling: I like to drop myself in the middle of some locale with no plan as to what I'm going to do – and occasionally no viable way of getting out – just to see what happens. I tell myself that this is a good way to test my mettle. If I can make it out of some of these scrapes alive, the argument goes, then I must be a tough one indeed. The truth is, I’m probably just a bit lazy and can’t be bothered with stuff like arranging accommodations before I arrive in a place, or finding transport more than a day or two in advance.

Six months ago my girlfriend and I went to South America. Her convincing me to go was quite a feat considering my fear of flying was no match for a trip that involved eleven plane rides. But after successive journeys from Boston, New York, Miami, and Buenos Aires, my screaming mechanism malfunctioned and for the first time in my life I was speechless. For her, this made for quite a relaxing trip to our first destination: Mendoza, Argentina. A small city close to the Chilean border, Mendoza’s outskirts consist mainly of wine country, boasting some of the best Malbec grapes in the region.

The problem was, I had written down the address, but I didn’t have it on me. I thought I did. I was sure I knew where I was going. That’s the strange thing about all of this. One can feel so confidently on target, yet one is lost. Maybe it’s hard for you to believe that on my first trip to Europe I lost my destination.