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.

Paris, France

The Eiffel Tower at sunset.

*   The “a-ok” sign has positive meaning in Britain and in the USA. It’s also the internationally-recognised way that scuba divers say to each other “I’m just dandy, thanks for asking.” But in France, the very same hand shape refers to “zero” or “worthlessness”, and in Brazil it refers to a part of the body that the sun doesn’t often shine upon.

*   You’re in a restaurant in China. It’s heavy going. You’re pausing for a rest, so you stand up your chopsticks in a lump of rice and take a breather. Mistake! Vertical chopsticks in a bowl will remind your fellow diners of a funeral ritual, so would be a major faux pas.

*   In Islamic countries and parts of Asia there is a notion that bodily functions should be attended to with the left hand, which is therefore deemed “unclean”, however well you’ve washed it. Therefore it’s considered wrong to shake hands or present gifts with your left hand.

The majority of the American people in the run-up to this election said they believe that the next president, one of his most important priorities should be restoring America’s position in the world. That to me says it all: That means that there is an openness, that there is a desire, a hunger to know about the world, and to know about where America is and fits into the world.

                                                          - Christiane Amanpour, quoted in a recent news story

What do you think? Are Americans more interested and engaged in the world?

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.

I’d like to explore some out of the box ideas in this blog, and what better time to begin than when we are on the cusp of a new U.S. presidential administration that embodies new thinking? After all, were it not for the Obama campaign’s innovative use of social networking as a campaign tool there may not be an Obama administration, so there is at least the hope that this same team will utilize out of the box thinking when constructing policy in the years ahead.

So here is my first nominee for an out of the box idea in government: to reconsider the need for an agricultural department and instead focus on the more broad issue of food policy as it relates to any number of issues. Full details are in this blog entry by Ezra Klein. He first quotes Michael Pollan, the originator of this idea.

But as important as USDA is, we also need someone in the White House, a food policy advisor, to help coordinate policy across the Cabinet departments, so that health impacts are considered when write USDA rules, or food safety when writing trade rules, or climate change impacts when drawing the farm bill, etc etc. You need someone who can connect the dots between agriculture and health and energy and climate.

Klein then takes up the issue and argues it in more depth himself:

There’s an argument to be made that the Department of Agriculture is an anachronism. It was first established by Abraham Lincoln, in 1862…the domestic agricultural industry was rather different in the 1800s than it is in 2008. It was, for one thing, larger. In 1862, farm products made up 82 percent of American exports. And we had a lot more farms…

Meanwhile, back then, what people ate came out of the agricultural sector. Food essentially equaled agriculture. Today, what we eat is considerably more complicated than what we grow and what we raise. Which is all to say, the Department of Agriculture was built when agriculture was a major employment sector, our primary export, and synonymous with our diets. As an industry, it was integral to our economy and our lives. Today, it’s an interest group. It begs subsidies and mainly supports massive corporations…

Our country once needed an agricultural policy. Today, it needs a food policy. The agricultural industry no more deserves a cabinet-level agency than the automotive industry or computing industry. But food is a different issue. An array of federal programs deal with nutrition and food security. Given the federal share of health costs, there’s a compelling national interest in aligning public policy with public health. Supply chain safety is a relevant national security concern. Coordination among those competing priorities is important. Agriculture is a part of the equation. But in 2008, it’s not the whole of it.

Not a sexy idea, perhaps, but a compelling one. More importantly, it goes to the heart of what we need to do more of in this country. Connect the dots. We’ve become a nation of specialists, and of special interests. It’s time for policies that address the broad, interconnected realities of our world.

Cairo is a city of about 18 million people that is layered with history stretching back to the birth of civilization. The ubiquitous nature of antiquities - stick a shovel in the ground almost anywhere, and it is difficult not to find something - has helped mold a collective consciousness, a national identity, that is uniquely Egyptian…

Egyptians, as a group, are extremely patient, though given the growing pressure of daily life, a bit less than they used to be. Their it-is-what-it-is attitude is often attributed to a strong religious faith and a conviction that all events are God’s will.

Yet growing up and living amid so much history has something to do with that view, too; the abundant antiquities in everyday life are a constant reminder of one’s place in time.

People come and go, pharaohs come and go, even President Hosni Mubarak, who has ruled Egypt for 27 years, will go, too (though talk of that certainty is discouraged).

No need to worry.

Or as Egyptians like to say, “Maalesh,” which, depending on the circumstance, means “Never mind” or “Oh, well.”

“When other people talk about hoping to see something happen soon, they probably mean within the next few months,” said Aly Salem, an Egyptian playwright. “For an Egyptian, it could mean in the next 50 or 60 years. An Egyptian has a particular pace. His pace is different than an American’s. And a long history can do this.”

Record numbers of American students are studying abroad, with especially strong growth in educational exchanges with China, the annual report by the Institute on International Education found.

The number of Americans studying in China increased by 25 percent, and the number of Chinese students studying at American universities increased by 20 percent last year, according to the report, “Open Doors 2008.”

“Interest in China is growing dramatically, and I think we’ll see even sharper increases in next year’s report,” said Allan E. Goodman, president of the institute. “People used to go to China to study the history and language, and many still do, but with China looming so large in all our futures, there’s been a real shift, and more students go for an understanding of what’s happening economically and politically.”

Nadine Rubin wanted to give her daughter the trip of a lifetime for her 21st birthday. They were planning to visit Hong Kong because her daughter was interested in fashion. “But I wanted to do something else,” Ms. Rubin said. “I’d heard Vietnam was beautiful, but I had mixed feelings about it because I knew people involved with the war.”

But then Ms. Rubin, who lives in Westport, Conn., talked with Lydia Dean, president of GoPhilanthropic (www.gophilanthropic.com), a philanthropic travel company formed about a year ago. “I caught the bug,” Ms. Rubin said.

Ms. Rubin and her daughter, Bryce, decided to experience Vietnam through the lens of the Global Village Foundation, a nonprofit organization run by a humanitarian, Le Ly Hayslip, that distributes portable libraries — wooden boxes with shelving and room for 250 books — to Vietnamese communities. Ms. Rubin and her daughter bought and delivered a library to a village and met the students who would benefit from the books. “Going there and seeing those kids, to say I bawled my eyes out is an understatement,” Nadine Rubin said.

Philanthropic travel — which introduces tourists to local outfits working to better their communities — is on the rise…

“Travel philanthropy is now core to sustainability,” said David Krantz, program director for the Center on Ecotourism and Sustainable Development (www.ecotourismcesd.org). “In terms of responsible practices, originally companies were following more of a charity model. It was a lot of, ‘I give a check, take a picture and walk away.’ ”  …

“Philanthropic travel is about traveling with an intention, with an open heart,” said David Chamberlain, president of Exquisite Safaris. “We need people to visit, connect at the heart and go home and talk about it and try to raise money. That’s philanthropic travel.”

One of her key insights into Korean culture:

ACT YOUR AGE: “Korean etiquette is highly focused on age and rank. Often the first question out of someone’s mouth (after ‘what’s your name?’) is ‘how old are you?’ One habit I had to acquire (other than taking off your shoes when you enter a house and several restaurants or eating rice with a spoon) was the style of interacting with elders, like serving them with both hands, or with one’s free hand on the arm if only one hand is required.”