Travels in the Riel World

Ladakh is a fascinating place. A Tibetan Buddhist culture in northern India, it has more in common with such neighbors as Bhutan and Nepal than it does with the country to which it belongs. David Desjardins and his family recently discovered that the Ladakhi landscape is also spectacular and the people are friendly and welcoming. He, his wife and their 12-year-old son recently went trekking in Ladakh, an adventure that David recounted in a story for the Boston Globe.

A high desert plateau pitched between the autonomous Chinese region of Tibet to the east and Pakistan to the west, Ladakh (”Land of High Passes”) is part of India, but has more in common with its neighbors. It is the meeting place of two mountain ranges - the Karakoram and the Himalaya - and of two cultures, Buddhist and Muslim. For centuries, it was an important stop along the ancient Silk Road, but today political tensions to the east and west ensure that most visitors to Ladakh approach it from the south.

Surrounded by mountains, Ladakh was for centuries inaccessible for much of the year, its high passes choked with snow from October through May, often longer. Air travel has changed that, but even today flights are frequently canceled because of bad weather. The region’s high paths and roads are open in July and August. When the throngs arrive, they flock to Leh, Ladakh’s ancient capital and the center of its tourist trade.

Nestled along the Indus River valley at an altitude of 11,500 feet, Leh is where visitors catch their breath. The need to acclimatize, and to organize a trek, usually keeps newcomers in Ladakh’s biggest town for a few days - and for most, that’s more than enough. Leh’s narrow streets and alleys are choked with traffic, shops, and meandering dogs and cattle. Although it had its charms, we were soon eager to strike out for the wide-open country…

So began our journey into the backcountry of Ladakh, where all traffic is foot traffic and life is lived at a slower pace. Our daily routine - rising, eating, walking, eating, sleeping - helped us slow down too, and let us experience the rhythms of Ladakhi life. Passing fields, we heard farmers singing as they worked. Atop mountain passes, we paused as our guides strung up prayer flags and lighted incense. Descending, we picked our way through herds of grazing sheep and dzos, the Ladakhis’ hybrid of yak and domesticated cow. Visiting a town’s temple, we turned the prayer wheels that lined its walls and rested in the presence of centuries-old Buddhist sculptures, gilded in riotous colors that contrasted with the gray-brown terrain outside.

The landscape we walked through was a slideshow of wild, tortured peaks and ravines, mostly tan and gray, interrupted occasionally by purple funneled hoodoos and reddish slashes raked into the hillside. Glaciers sprawled below snow-capped mountains, feeding streams that carved the deep gorges we hiked through.

If you’d like to read a sample of my own experiences in Ladakh, you can check out this section from my travel memoir, Two Laps Around the World.

Mexico seems to have caught the attention of the New York Times. In the past week, the newspaper has published two in-depth feature stories about the country. Luckily, this enables us to vicariously explore two distinct regions of that nation.

First, the travel section published a story on travel in Chiapas as part of its Frugal Traveler series.

In Chiapas, the southernmost state in Mexico, green is never simply green. From the air, green rolls over the unending mountains, intense and damp where there are forests and nubbly like rough felt when the trees end. In the streets of San Cristóbal de las Casas, the hill town in the middle of Chiapas’s central plateau, it’s a shiny layer of Kelly spread thickly across the facade of a Spanish colonial home. In the church of San Juan de Chamula, it’s the toasted green of pine needles strewn across the floor, and it’s the thin threads woven almost invisibly into the white wool tunics of indigenous Chamulan men.

Chiapas green is the golden green of fair-trade coffee beans ready for roasting, and the translucent olive drab of banana leaves wrapped around steaming tamales, and a Day-Glo pear growing in a backyard orchard. Nowhere have I seen so many variations of Kermit the Frog’s uneasy color, and yet there was one place in Chiapas, which I visited over 10 days in October, where green served little to no purpose: my wallet.

Yes, Chiapas is cheap — as is much of Mexico, where the exchange rate has, since September, zoomed from 10 to 13 pesos to the dollar. But Chiapas’s affordability is compounded by its relative obscurity. Apart from the packs of post-collegiate backpackers experimenting with Maya mysticism and awkward hairstyles, few American tourists venture there. Perhaps it’s a fear of the Zapatista rebels, whose 1994 seizure of five Chiapas towns gained them worldwide headlines. Or maybe it’s simply the state’s inaccessibility — at least 12 hours by bus from Cancun, Oaxaca or Mexico City, and about the same by air from the New York area.

Either way, the lack of crowds means that, for not much more than $50 a day, mildly adventurous travelers have unfettered access to lovely colonial towns and indigenous cultures (Indians make up a fifth of the state’s 4.3 million people), to the ancient Maya ruins at Palenque, Bonampak and beyond, to lush, isolated rain forests, to good coffee, to quirky and affordable hotels and even to the shadowy Zapatistas themselves.

Then, the Escapes section of the Times published a story on the charming town of San Miguel de Allende, which happens to house a fair number of American expatriates.

It had been four years since I last saw San Miguel de Allende, the 16th-century colonial Mexican hill town that shelters a happy crowd of American retirees and part-time residents. I was curious about what time, trendiness and progress had done to this place beloved for its preserved Spanish colonial architecture and aura of timeless charm. Now, sitting in the jardín — the loud, leafy central plaza — I began to deduce a complex answer.

A few weeks before my recent visit, San Miguel had been named a Unesco World Heritage Site, and at a nearby table, a group of Americans were buzzing about that success. Yet from the park bench where I sat, I could see something else that was new: on the facade of one of the carefully preserved old downtown buildings was the unmistakable logo of Starbucks.

This, in a nutshell, is San Miguel these days: balancing in a moment of almost exquisite equilibrium between new and old…

While my wife and I were in San Miguel, an international short-film festival occupied half a dozen venues, the play “Shimmer” was in town on tour, a new bistro opened and there was a gala for a local charity. There was a time when Americans retired to San Miguel for its glacial pace and tranquillity. These days, it’s more like a high-end summer camp for aging boomers.

“It’s like Berkeley for retired people,” said Sally Osbon, 55, who, with her husband, Jim, 64, lives half the year in San Francisco and half in San Miguel. The Osbons, whose three-bedroom, 4,000-square-foot house is at the edge of the centro, enjoy not only the climate and the golf, but also what Ms. Osbon called the town’s “bohemian feel.”

When I first heard about San Miguel in the mid-’90s, the knowledge was shared by a friend as a precious secret. Soon afterward, on our first morning there, my wife and I ambled through the most guileless and sweet-natured place we’d ever seen, authentic right down to the donkey-drawn carts carrying water and firewood. Its appearance of being unaffected by its own beauty gave it a quality that was irresistible.

Lots to explore in Mexico, as even the NY Times has apparently discovered.

For most Westerners, any mention of Kenya as a tourist destination will spark images of safaris. But for those who know of Lamu, Kenya is a very different place. A small island off the Kenyan coast, Lamu contains a quaint old town and miles of deserted beaches that have enchanted many a traveler. In this article, Sophie Lam writes of her own captivating experience on Lamu.

Omar beckoned with a sweep of his arm: “Come, come!” And with that he disappeared around a corner and out of sight again. I trailed him as quickly as I could, but he had vanished. Left or right? The tangled alleyways of Lamu Town served only to confuse and disorient me. The town had looked as small as its transport inventory implies (one car, one donkey ambulance, no roads) when our boat pulled up at the docking jetty of the island’s main port that morning. Yet, like a hall of mirrors, once I ventured into the web of passages it seemed to expand with every corner I turned.

As I stopped to compose myself in an airless alley, my guide Omar’s beaming face reappeared and we continued on our way, deep into the heart of the town. Some passages were barely wide enough for overtaking people; add the town’s itinerant donkeys to the equation and you can imagine the tailbacks. On either side of us, thick-walled, lime-plastered houses soared towards a ribbon of blue sky above. These 600-year-old coral stone buildings form East Africa’s oldest and best preserved Swahili settlement, now part of the Unesco-recognised maze.

Like the shell of a pearl oyster, the rough but resilient exteriors conceal beautifully ornate interiors. A step beyond a wooden door might lead you through to a sun-drenched inner courtyard, hung with jasmine and frangipani, or splashed with tropical fronds.

Bolivia is a fascinating nation - one of the highest altitude countries in the world and a place where past and present co-exist in various interesting ways. That’s what Patrick Symmes discovered during a recent visit, which he wrote about for the NY Times travel magazine.

Bolivia is the poorest and highest country in South America, and La Paz is its lively, fermenting main city of 1.5 million, stuck into a cleft in the Andean plateau. High and low, La Paz throngs with a slightly feudal aura, where clothing trends of the 1890s and the 1980s mingle, and politics seamlessly blends the 1960s with the 1690s.

The exotic is right at the end of the block, where at dawn, checking into my hotel, I encountered the end of an overnight festival, with wealthy women in bowler hats knocking back beers and dancing to a brass band. Then a man walked by carrying 10 mattresses on his back. There was a fistfight. Someone emptied a chamber pot from a second-floor window. Todo normal here means 17th-century cathedrals and 21st-century lodgings, witchcraft markets selling disenchantments, eco-tourists packing telephotos and storefront ‘‘mentalists’’ peddling lottery predictions to the hopeful…

There is no doubt that Bolivia is still a hard place, physically, emotionally, aromatically. Compared with the Europeanized societies of neighboring Chile and Argentina, it’s a step back in time, a rustic patchwork quilt of cultures and environments, with large swaths of the country accessible only by beaten tracks and mud roads. (Travel is what Bolivians call imprevisible, unforeseeable.)

But things are getting easier, and today’s visitor is admitted to a particularly sweet spot in Bolivia’s history, a moment when the roads are new but the ways are still old. I’ve had the classic Andean destinations of Isla del Sol, in Lake Titicaca, and the mountain town of Sorata on my to-do list for a dozen years. Yet only now have Bolivia’s stars aligned to make them not just possible, but possible with the surprising ease and unexpected rewards that mark the best days of travel in a difficult place.

The city of Fes, Morocco, has enchanted many a traveler. Tahir Shah was spellbound by the medieval magic of Fes and wrote about the city for the U.K. Guardian.

Walk through the bustle of Fes’s medina and it’s impossible not to be catapulted back in time. It is as if the old city is on a frequency of its own, set apart from the frenzied world of internet and iPods and all the techno clutter that fills our daily lives. Abdul-Lateef and his magic-medicinal stall are a fragment of a healing system that stretches back through centuries, to a time when Fes was itself at the cutting edge of science, linked by the pilgrimage routes to Cairo, Damascus and Samarkand.

These days the low-cost airlines shuttle the curious back and forth to Europe. And everyone they bring is tantalised by what they find. Fes is the only medieval Arab city that’s still absolutely intact. It’s as if a shroud has covered it for centuries, the corner now lifted a little so we can peek in. Once the capital of Morocco, Fes is one of those rare destinations that’s bigger than mass tourism, a city that’s so self-assured, so grounded in its own identity, that it hardly seems to care whether the tourists come or not. Moroccans will tell you that it’s the dark heart of their kingdom, that its medina has a kind of sacred soul.

Wander the labyrinth of narrow streets and you can feel it. It’s all around you - in the meat bazaar, where shanks of mutton nestle on fragrant beds of mint, and it’s down in the most ancient quarter, at er-Rsif, where the seed of Fes fell more than a thousand years ago.

Eritrea is not a well-touristed place, nor even a very well known country. But Jeffrey Gettleman went there recently with his wife and found it to be a rather interesting destination, with a taste of old Italy mixed with Africa. He wrote about his trip for the NY Times.

Eritrea, for better and for worse, is a nation locked in a time capsule. Visiting here is like spending your vacation in a vintage shop. Old men in dapper Fedora hats and antique Italian shades haunt Harnet Avenue, the palm-studded main drag in Asmara, the capital. The city itself is a showcase for some of the world’s boldest, most whimsical examples of 1930s Art Deco architecture, perfectly preserved by the thin desert air…

Asmara the architectural marvel is not so much the purposeful result of a hard-fought preservation battle. No. There were battles, real ones, and it was Eritrea’s bloody history of conflict and civil war that has kept this little-known sliver of a country along the Red Sea hermetically sealed to the outside world. The result is a surreal, out-of-body tourist experience, where you feel dislocated from just about everywhere else, but euphoric and inspired by what is in front of you. Africa? The Mediterranean? The Middle East? South Beach? It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what Eritrea feels like.

One of the most impressive but least known sites in the world is the Indonesian monument of Borobudur. The Wall Street Journal recently reported on this stunning edifice, which is considered the largest Buddhist monument in existence.

Making lists of the world’s most impressive monuments is an irrational and ultimately pointless enterprise: Who has seen all the wonders of the world? And what would the criteria be? Yet scribblers have been at it since the second century B.C., when a Greek poet named Antipater of Sidon came up with his canonical seven, now all gone or reduced to rubble except the pyramids of Giza.

If Antipater had lived a millennium later, he would surely have put Borobudur, the astonishing stone mountain of exquisitely wrought sculpture in Central Java, on his list. No construction of the preindustrial era makes a more wondrous impression…

Borobudur rises to a height of 400 feet, nearly as tall as Cheops’ pyramid, in a series of concentric terraces. Its walls are lined with exquisitely carved bas-reliefs illustrating episodes from the life of the Buddha and his teachings, amounting to more than a mile of continuous sculpture — and that doesn’t include 504 life-size statues of the Buddha…

Like its Egyptian predecessors, Borobudur poses many enigmas to archaeologists. One visionary, slightly mad aspect of its design is that the ground plan, visible only from an aerial perspective, is a perfect mandala, a symbolic schema of Buddhist cosmology that serves as an aid to meditation. Or perhaps the monument represents a lotus blossom, a nearly universal image in Buddhist art. In 1931, a Dutch artist named W.O.J. Nieuwenkamp proposed the whimsical theory that the plain surrounding Borobudur was once a lake, and the monument was conceived as a lotus flower floating on it. His hypothesis became less fanciful in 2000, when archaeologists found stratigraphical evidence of a paleolake in the area.

When one thinks of ancient civilizations in the Americas, it tends to be of those societies that left behind spectacular ruins. The Incas of Peru, the Mayans of Mexico and Central America, or even the Pueblo people of the U.S. Southwest who built the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde. Not many minds conjure up images of advanced Indian civilizations in the Midwestern United States.

In fact, though, archaeologists continue to produce evidence that large societies not only inhabited this region, but also built large edifices in the form of mounds that are only now being understood and appreciated. Check out this article for an in-depth tour of some of these sites.

The earthworks left behind by the long vanished civilizations of the Midwest are harder to spot than the pueblos and kivas of Arizona and New Mexico. For a long time many of them were hidden in plain sight or dismissed as little more than heaps of soil. But the more today’s archaeologists learn about the Midwestern mounds, the more intriguing is the picture that emerges from 1,000 or more years ago: a city with thousands of people just a few miles from present-day St. Louis, a 1,348-foot earthen serpent that points to the summer solstice, artifacts made of materials that could only have arrived over lengthy trade routes.

The mound builders lived over a wide area. But on a road trip of a few days in Illinois, Indiana and Ohio, you can get a sampling of their work — and, along the way, find some modern-day diversions. Start from St. Louis, which early European settlers called Mound City because of the Indian constructions that were soon flattened to build the modern city.

The southwestern African country of Namibia may not be well-known as a tourist destination, but travelers who have been there often return home raving about the desolate beauty of the place. Elinor Burkett is one of those travelers and she wrote about her Namibian experiences for a recent NY Times story.

As the first rays of the sun pierce the thick darkness of the Namibian desert, sinuous ridges of quartz sand ignite in a firestorm of seared orange. Then the sky lightens to the new day, revealing the sea of sand mountains, their crisp edges and perfect curves wrought and polished by the expert chisel of the Kalahari and Atlantic winds.

With the tracks of yesterday’s visitors to the Sossusvlei dunes burnished by the breeze, you can’t resist trudging — perhaps plodding or crawling — up at least one of the pristine hills, some towering to 1,000 feet, instinctively looking for shimmers of water. But from the top, there’s no sign of the sea; it retreated millions of years ago, back when continents were drifting wildly.

What’s left is a dazzling geological display of possibly the world’s highest sand dunes, extending for 400 miles along the coast and more than 80 miles inland. Those naive enough to believe that a dune is a dune is a dune are faced with a dizzying array of sand configurations: parabolic dunes with dynamic slip faces, long and narrow transverse dunes, dunes petrified by ancient climate change, and star dunes formed by winds that buffet them from all sides…

Such a forbidding panorama hardly seems the stuff of a compelling journey. But Namibia, a country of stark beauty and riveting contradictions, should be at the top of any serious traveler’s want-to-visit list.

The landscape is otherworldly, from the ocean of blood red crests along Dune Alley at Sossusvlei … to the gravity-defying rock formations and petrified forest of Damaraland, in the country’s center. Even beside the main highway, there are enough elephants, giraffes and springbok to satisfy those who can’t imagine a southern African trip without big game.

The Chicago Tribune has been asking their foreign correspondents for travel tips and for lists of their favorite destinations. One recent installment focused on places in the Middle East and Africa. An excerpt:

Liz Sly on the Middle East:

My favorite place: The Old City of Damascus, Syria, a warren of ancient cobbled streets, mosques and churches that evokes the Orient of the imagination.

Don’t miss: Petra, the majestic, rose-red city carved 8,000 years ago out of inaccessible mountains in the Jordanian desert. It’s too breathtaking for words and too old to wrap your head around.

Joel Greenberg on Israel:

When friends come to visit I always take them to … The beach, either in Tel Aviv or the beautiful strand at Beit Yanai near Netanya. The Mediterranean is warm and inviting most of the year, and there is ample opportunity for long strolls on the sand and viewing brilliant sunsets.

Best photo-op: The stunning view of Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives, or, from another angle, at the Sherover Promenade, preferably a little before sunset.

Laurie Goering on Africa:

My favorite place: It’s nearly impossible to choose just one place in a continent so diverse and wonderful, but Madagascar’s lemur-filled forests, Namibia’s silent deserts and Chapman’s Peak scenic drive in Cape Town, South Africa, are contenders.

Best place no one knows about: The Matapos Hills outside of Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, a conservation area that is home to some impressive cave paintings by the ancient San people. The hike to the paintings, through gorgeous bushland, can’t be beat either.

If you’re searching for a more authentic and less glitzy destination by the sea, Sarah Wildman recommends Costa Brava - the sparsely populated coastal region of Catalonia in northeastern Spain. She wrote about a recent trip there for the International Herald Tribune.

On the small roads between Cantallops and Llançà - two names that were barely dots on our map of Catalonia in northeastern Spain - the lush mountain greenery turned quickly to farmland rolling out for miles around us and filled with sunflowers and bales of hay.

We were traveling from the interior mountains of this Spanish autonomous region to the Mediterranean. Again and again, rising up in the near distance, came fantastic, if dusty, terra-cotta-colored medieval hamlets and equally ancient churches and farmhouses. On the streets everywhere the lingua franca was Catalan, not Spanish, and amid all the tourists that descend from France and elsewhere, a local pride seemed to pervade the scene, against a backdrop that fell away suddenly, breathtakingly, into the sea.

In Llançà we stopped at Platja Grifeu, one of the village’s perfect beaches, with clear tropical-looking water to swim in. At the beachside restaurant, I ordered a tortilla española, the ubiquitous potato omelet of Spain. It was, improbably, the best tortilla I had ever tasted. I savored it, facing the sea and the local families sunning themselves, in this tiny village about 10 miles from the French-Spanish border on a road that looked like nothing more than a scribble on the map.

By some small miracle - and preservation efforts that have helped to control development in Catalonia - the Costa Brava has maintained an authenticity and a refreshing resistance to change that keeps this stretch of the Mediterranean radically different from the southern coasts of Spain. Fishing villages still feel like fishing villages, medieval mountain towns are still hushed at siesta, and artists still paint on the streets of Cadaqués.

The Southeast Asian nation of Laos is still a fairly untraveled destination, especially compared to its neighbor, Thailand. But the word is getting out about the charms of the Laotian town of Luang Prabang. Gayle Keck went there recently with her husband and wrote about their experiences for the Washington Post.

Strangers talk to one another here, people who’d never strike up a conversation when touring London or Rome. It’s one of those clues that tell you this Mekong River town in northern Laos is an outpost. The atmosphere is part “Star Wars” bar, part “Casablanca.” Backpackers descend from the surrounding mountains or step ashore off slow boats, clutching tattered Lonely Planet guides. Europeans, Australians, Thais and a few Americans wing in on prop planes. Members of ethnic hill tribes, particularly the Hmong, appear at sunset, spreading their wares along the street. And everywhere you turn there are Buddhist monks in blazing-orange robes…

From our balcony, lazing against triangular bolsters, we shamelessly gaze down on our neighbors across the river with that fascination modern urbanites have for the simple life. The far bank is patchworked with small plots. Men hoe vegetables, women scrub laundry in the dingy water, a fisherman checks his bamboo traps, kids turn a washbasin into an impromptu boat and skid away from their soap-wielding mom.

The vast majority of Laos’s population is rural, but 10 minutes away by tuk-tuk, the bargain-priced motorcycle-powered open trucks, Luang Prabang bustles. In 1988, the year Laos reopened to tourists, only 600 of them visited the entire country; there are probably that many trolling Luang Prabang’s streets today alone. We see bamboo scaffolding where repairs are being made to colonial-era stuccoed homes with mossy tiled roofs and sagging shutters, efforts to meet the growing demand for guesthouses.

There was an interesting recent article about Tel Aviv in the New York Times travel section. It’s interesting because it not only gives the typical tourist overview of a destination, but it gets into the culture and the psyche of Tel Aviv and Israel. An excerpt:

Tel Aviv is “half Iran, half California; it’s a synagogue meets a sushi bar,” says the writer and lifelong Tel Aviv resident Etgar Keret… “This is a country that on the one hand is so conservative that we don’t have public transportation on Saturdays, but on the other hand is so open that we sent a transsexual to the Eurovision Song Contest,” says Mr. Keret. “Israel is full of contradiction. In Jerusalem, this contradiction means separation. But it doesn’t in Tel Aviv.”

For Israelis, the 45 minutes that separate Jerusalem from Tel Aviv are a fitting metaphor for the cultural gulf they see between, on the one hand, the hidebound, pious cradle of world religion and, on the other, the libertine, nightclub-filled Mediterranean idyll. But for us visitors, the proximity of the two cities is a huge boon — it’s rare that you can pair a beach vacation with 5,000 years of history…

Tel Avivans are quick to point out that their city is less suffused with history than Jerusalem, and that that is what makes their city so hospitable to newcomers and to people who don’t fit in elsewhere. Perhaps, like others in the Middle East, Tel Avivans must perforce set their gaze on the present.

Along with the story there is a slide show about Tel Aviv, titled ”The Capital of Mediterranean Cool.” 

It’s all too easy sometimes to focus on all of the interesting travel destinations abroad and to miss some of the equally interesting locations in our own country. That point was driven home by two recent travel features in different newspapers.

First, the Boston Globe raved about West Coast beaches in this article. Or, specifically, about Laguna Beach outside of Los Angeles.

Sapphire sky, car windows open, radio blasting top-10 hits from the ’60s. Turning off the freeway from Los Angeles - where the road stretches endless and flat - the hills of Laguna Canyon rise up so green and vibrant I have to take off my sunglasses to see whether the color is real. It is.

Eventually, wildflowers and boulders give way to civilization as houses appear atop sandstone ridges. The air grows cooler and before I can sing another chorus of “California Dreamin’ ” there it is, the great Pacific, wide and muscular and dazzling in the midday sun.

I’m certainly not the first traveler to be seduced by Laguna Beach’s charms. Since the late 1800s this 7-mile stretch of sandy coastline resting below rolling cliffs about 50 miles south of Los Angeles has attracted tourists and travelers, including many artists who made the town their home.

Today, besides the landscape’s raw beauty, and the town’s well-preserved architecture and independent shops, Laguna Beach hosts an arts community that imparts a funky, if upscale, authenticity that’s getting harder to find in a homogenized world.

Then, the Los Angeles Times explored a different region of the country in this story about the wonders of train rides through Alaska.

The Alaska Railroad slices up the middle of the state like a bolt of blue and yellow lightning, into the belly of a place that is camera-ready and bountiful beyond belief.

The rail line begins in the little seaport of Seward, chug-a-lugs up to Anchorage, past Denali National Park and Preserve and finally to Fairbanks, an almost 500-mile jaunt of day trips throughout Alaska’s short, short summer.

Why the train? Because, unless you’re a moose or have moose tendencies, parts of the 49th state are accessible only by rail.

Why the train? Well, does your rental car come with a bartender? Or a fresh-faced young tour guide? The train is also an affordable throwback — comfy, almost clubby, with way more wiggle room than a 737 and none of the flight crew psychosis.

Rick Steves became famous for his European travel advice, but he recently journeyed to Iran in order to produce a documentary about that country and its people. A photo essay about the trip was then published in Yes! magazine. The experience was described by Abdi Sami, who accompanied Rick on his travels.

Over the years, Rick had introduced so many travelers to European destinations through travel books, television programs, and travel blogs. Friends asked him to consider how he could increase understanding between Iran and the United States. Rick realized that the most powerful thing would be to produce a television show introducing Americans to the true Iran … the people, their extraordinary hospitality, their beautiful country, and ancient history.

Everywhere we went, we came across people young and old, teachers, students, artists, business people, soldiers, and farmers and we were always, always received with warmest welcomes and with smiling faces.

The photo essay begins here.

The Portuguese city of Lisbon has often been an afterthought when considering the great capitals of Europe, but that seems to be changing. Lisbon is getting increasingly good press of late, culminating in this nice profile in the travel section of Sunday NY Times, which focuses on the city’s vibrant arts scene.

After all, this wasn’t a metropolis with a well-established avant-garde tradition like Paris or Berlin, but dowdy old Lisbon, a small Catholic city that is best known for inexpensive seafood meals, throwback cable cars and faded colonial architecture from Portugal’s long-vanished international empire.

But on a balmy night in March, the throngs filing into the complex made it clear that the city was more than ready for a bit of progressive bohemia in their remote corner of the Continent. Looking like the assembled listenership of some Portuguese version of National Public Radio, a buzzing crowd of tweedy academics, tattooed cool kids, bourgeois couples and bespectacled grad-student types fanned out to sample Fábrica Braço de Prata’s typically diverse offerings: a jazz combo, a reggae outfit, a Leonard Cohen documentary and a 1 a.m. after-party featuring D.J.’s and alternative bands.

“It’s creative in all areas — theater, art, music, dance,” Mr. de Roubaix said of the venue’s appeal, clearly pleased by its unexpected success. “There’s a fast turnover of events and shows that keeps the place very dynamic.”

The same could be said for 21st-century Lisbon…

Portugal languished for much of the 20th century on Europe’s geographic and cultural margins. From the 1920s until the 1970s, a repressive dictatorship smothered the nation, sending the creative classes fleeing to London and Paris and severely stunting any potential arts scene. The economy also slumped. Once the center of a global trade empire, Portugal sunk into notoriety as Western Europe’s poorest nation.

As dust collected on Lisbon’s monuments — Roman theaters, Moorish edifices, Gothic churches, Baroque squares — the city became the Miss Havisham of Western Europe: a relic, forgotten and forlorn.

The last of the Western European capitals to experience a cultural bloom, Lisbon is avidly making up for lost time. All over the city, an upstart generation is laying waste to the sepia-toned stereotypes and gleefully constructing edgy and forward-looking ventures amid the time-worn monuments and quaint cobbled lanes.

Everyone knows about the Cancuns and Cabos of coastal Mexico. But there are still a few small Mexican villages strung along the country’s coastline where in-the-know travelers go to find a quiet slice of paradise. One of these places is the Baja town of Mulege, which Meredith May recently visited. She wrote about her experiences for the San Francisco Chronicle.

About two-thirds the way down the Baja peninsula on the Sea of Cortez side, Mulegé (moo-luh-HAY) is an eight-street town with no stoplights, few tourists and dozens of empty beaches in stunning coves. It’s the kind of place where the car radio will scan fruitlessly for a station, where drivers on the two-lane Mexico Highway 1 into town must stop for donkeys and snakes, and where it’s still possible to find sun-bleached cow bones among the saguaro cactus.

Mulegé still feels authentic, but the same can’t be said for many of the sleepy mission towns that are transforming into mini-Cabo carnivals, as development inexorably creeps along virtually every stretch of Mexico’s coastline…Travelers trying to stay one step ahead can find their palapa paradise in Mulegé - but perhaps not forever…

Many visitors gather to swap fish tales at El Candil, a Canadian-owned restaurant that serves burgers and chili along with a full Mexican menu. They are often joined by Mulegé’s nouveau locals - Californians who kept visiting so many times they finally bought a place and settled in Mulegé.

“It’s the sweetest little town in the world,” said fisherman Larry Deakyne from the town of Cool, near Auburn (Placer County). “It’s how I imagine Hawaii was before it got overrun with tourists.”

Few people think of Bulgaria when contemplating a European vacation, but Tim Jones found the country to be an intriguing mixture of the old and the new. He reported on his experiences for the Chicago Tribune.

This is a dark, fascinating and, unfortunately, forgotten country, an Iowa-sized Balkan beauty with snow-capped mountains and lush green fields. It is here that the undeniable forces of the New World order meet a stubborn Old World speed bump defined by donkey carts, shepherds, a sclerotic and often corrupt governing bureaucracy and an economy that, for the most part, lags behind its old Eastern Bloc brethren.

Don’t come to Bulgaria if you’re looking for some glossy European elegance interspersed with Starbucks and all those Western, touristy accouterments that make travel so comfortable and reassuring.

But do come if you’re up for something a little wild and pretty rough around the edges. Come if you’re interested in watching the noisy, tectonic shifts of a former communist satellite in awkward transition to wherever it is it’s going. Come if you’d like to see the Old World, before it’s gone.