The journey to Napo Wildlife Center started in Quito, Ecuador’s capital city. From the national airport the flight took an approximately 30 minutes. While we were waiting at the airport we could not help but notice the heavy clouds that were on top of the Andes Mountains. We learned that our flight would take us over the cloudy looking Eastern Andes Mountain Range mountains. It was a bumpy flight but fun knowing we were crossing over the equator and when we reached the peak we were looking into snow capped volcanoes over 18,999 above sea level. When we arrived we were at the headwaters of the Amazon Basin near the Napo River at 820 feet above sea level. After landing at the Puerto Francisco de Orellana town airport, locally known as Coca, Napo Wildlife Center staff greeted us. They escorted us to waiting cars for a short 5-7 minute transfer to embark on the covered motorized canoe. The boat was long and thin and each row had two large comfortable office type chairs to sit in. They gave us each a brown bag lunch that was very good and we were off. We enjoyed the comfortable breeze because it was very warm when we landed in Coca. We were told we would be traveling up the river for an approximate 2 hours boat ride, 50 miles downstream the largest Ecuadorian tributary of the Amazon: the Napo River. During this trip a good number of birds were spotted along the way. We saw herons, kingfishers, ospreys, and many others as one travels away from civilization and into a more pristine and remote area.

About an hour into the boat ride we could see a dark storm up ahead. The guides quickly handed out very thick rain ponchos and told us to put the ponchos on and pull your feet up on your seat because the water will rush down the floor and drain out the back. Quickly doing as were told and being very excited about what we were about to encounter was fun. Looking at the kids with wide eyes and see the guides sit down like it was normal for them to be engulfed by a monsoon was exciting. The rain came like waterfall over the boat. We really enjoyed the torrential rain because we were dry and comfortable inside our heavy duty rain ponchos. As we continued to speed up the river we were headed to one of the most remote areas of the Amazon.

The storm lasted only about half and hour and we returned the ponchos and enjoyed the rest of the trip. Two hours quietly went by and we arrived at the northwest boundary of the Yasuni Biosphere Reserve where Napo Wildlife Center is located by the Anangucocha lake. To access the lodge we had to take one more boat. The midway point was someone’s home and we were able to fill our canteen’s up for what was going to be another two hours. We soon discovered that this part of the trip was for us was life changing. To think in your head your are in the middle of the Amazon jungle and you live in Newport Beach was surreal. Boarding our dugout canoe our guides paddled and maneuvered the quiet creek with dense flooded palm forest. Following any route, as you get deeper into this preserved area, are first site of Amazon wildlife was an Anaconda snake. Yup, a yellow snake. While the guides paddled us up the river we heard sounds from birds that sounded unreal. The birds were loud and they were beautiful. We saw monkeys of several species, colorful birds that made sounds that I have never heard and we saw so much wildlife that our guides said he would teach us about all that we are seeing later. The sounds of the paddle cutting through the water hearing the sounds of wildlife during the day was simply over the top amazing. I will be using this word a lot.

We came around a bend in the river and before us was a site I will never forget. The green houses up on stilts was all that we could see. It was beautiful. The grounds were lush and each house was surrounded by heavy green vegetation. When we arrived at the Napo Wildlife Center we were welcomed with cold juice and give the number of our home for the next 6 nights. The sounds of the birds was a sound that I hope to record to share with you. It was so different I could not begin to tell you what the sound was. They told us to meet everyone at the dining hall at 7 pm and to make sure that we use the observation tower next to the dining hall to see the birds in the treetops. Each house had a view of the Anangu lake. The hammocks on the porch was perfect for discovering wildlife right next to the lodge. The dock area is a nice spot to receive that equatorial tropical sun or the base for a nice dip into the lake. Without fear you can swim around the dock and have a refreshing time, guides of course will jump in first and eliminate any doubts you may have in spite of the black caimans and piranha inhabitants! Yes! I said piranha. I had a really hard time believing it was safe to swim with piranha. But they said after a long day of exploring the jungle that you will enjoy the rewarding cool water. The kids and I just watched as others quickly got in the water and out. No one was bit but maybe it was just the black water from the lake that made it scary. The food at the NWC was carefully prepared to delight the variety of tastes and desires of the international visitor, including traditional Ecuadorian dishes. Our meals were served family style with the other guests and your guide at the table. Everyone had so many questions and the conversation was interesting every night. We found the food to be very good and filling. We wondered more about the eco system of the NWC and found the was from reverse osmosis water filtration system and is used in the kitchen (very safe). Our showers were filtered lake water. They said they invested in an environmentally sustainable sewage system, best and unique on the Napo region and probably best in the Amazon. All waste water is treated to the highest standards in order to keep the swamps clean of human activity. Quality of effluent water is higher than the lake environment!!. Power is generated by a top of the line hybrid system featuring solar panels, industrial batteries and noiseless generators. An efficient system that generates energy with almost no impact.

ACTIVITIES

Visitors were divided up into small groups, and lead by a native Anangu guide, who is also an official Yasuni Park Ranger, expert on the forest’s secrets about medicinal plants and other useful items of the rain forest, and an excellent bilingual naturalist guide with great deal of knowledge in tropical forest biology. Each group had three guides and they created informative enjoyable excursions every day providing an educative fun experience. Groups and guides discussed each night and they tailored their excursions while taking advantage of the highest peaks of activity and weather conditions in the forest. Every morning we departed our cabin for breakfast at 4:30 am. This maximized wildlife observation and of course each group decided with their guides how extreme and intense they take their Amazon excursion, this applies for afternoon excursions and night outings, when an overwhelming concert of natural sounds will flooded the atmosphere. Don’t worry about the schedule. We took a nap every day after lunch, if the sound of the wildlife was not too loud. When we sat outside it was fun to follow the leaf carrying ants carry gigantic leafs compared to their body size around the grounds of the NWC.

The first night before dinner in the beautiful open air dining room the guides presented a video of what we would experiencing for the next six days. My goal was to learn about what plants were used for medicine. Our guides were Juan Carlos, Remi and the head guide Poncho. Poncho was the guide that walked the forest ahead of us with a machete in hand. The last day the guides to the kids and I out piranha fishing. The teeth of a piranha are sharp. I am glad I did not go swimming in the lake.

All the rooms were large, comfortable, and clean. The bath had hot water and was spacious. The meals were ample, hearty, and tasty. Potable water was accessible 24/7 from a dispenser in the dining room; we drank it with absolutely no ill effect. The dining room–a beautiful, open-air area–had a bar stocked with beer and wine for sale. The service–by everyone from the tour guides to canoe paddlers–was friendly and went as far as necessary to meet your needs. The organization and administration were efficient and impressive. Everything that anyone said he or she was going to do got done. The descriptions of the place, what to bring, how to dress–all on the money. The heat was nowhere near as bad as we’d expected; nor were the insects. The best part is that Napo is owned and operated by the native peoples in the preserve. They benefit financially, culturally, and individually. The turistas have a wonderful place to visit, part of the Amazon is being preserved, and the native peoples are better off. I really want to recommend this place. I worked out hard before this trip because you walk in rain boots better known as Wellies. The hikes I choose with the kids were long and hard and I was ready and able to keep up without any problems. The bugs were amazing. These hardworking people deserve the recommendation.

Wales- Laverbread and cockles

Laverbread is a type of edible seaweed that can be found on the rocks of the ever nearby coastline in Wales. Cockles are a kind of mollusk and are most often served fried.

Spain- Churros con Chocolate

Churros are a kind of long, thick doughnut that are often served with hot chocolate (for dipping purposes).

Russia- Buckwheat Porridge

This porridge is called “kasha” and is usually made of buckwheat and topped with sour cream

Japan- asa-gohan

The literal translation for “asa gohan” is ‘morning rice’. This platter also consists of the very colourful pickled ume fruits, which are meant to be really good for balancing the digestive system.

Vietnam- Xoi

Xoi is a kind of sweet sticky rice wrapped in banana leaves that is eaten all throughout rural Vietnam for breakfast.

Turkey- A bit of everything!

Breakfast is a real feast in Turkey. This platter features olives, feta and havarti cheese, grape leaf dolmas, tomato, cucumber and hard-boiled egg, side by side withpastries, fresh bread and coffee.

Thanks to (in order of images) Mikey Swales…fish related tales, nette1274, sweetbeatandgreenbean, gbSK, mckaysavage and jhritz

Asia

China

When it comes to the Chinese breakfast, the sheer number of regional variations can be intimidating; but regardless of where you are, the steamer is an essential tool. For chawanmushi, eggs are beaten with chicken broth, soy, and sake then steamed until silky, while buns are filled with barbecued pork before hitting the steamer. A typical Shanghai breakfast is youtiao, a deep-fried doughnut shaped like a hot dog; Taiwanese fritters and sesame-seed cakes come wrapped in paper and are to be eaten with your fingers. Dim sum, a hallmark of Cantonese cuisine, always includes shu mai dumplings. It’s considered more “modern” to eat congee with a ceramic spoon rather than slurped from a bowl; one of the most unusual condiments for this rice porridge is “century eggs” that have been “cooked” in an alkaline mix of clay, ash, lime, and salt.

Japan

The classic bento box meal includes miso soup, grilled fish, a rolled omelette, rice, Japanese pickles, and green tea. You may scoop squares of tofu with a metal utensil that looks like a miniature gardening tool, and sheets of nori (seaweed) stay crisp in sheer tissue packaging.

Korea

The palate-awakening sensation of kimchi starts early, when it’s served alongside porridge with shredded chicken or various soups made with dried pollack, beef ribs, or seaweed.

Vietnam

The centerpiece here is pho, the fragrant (and nearly impossible to pronounce) noodle soup with star anise, cinnamon, cardamom, and basil. A spicier variation is bun bo hue, with lemongrass, banana blossoms, shrimp paste, and—wait for it—chiles. Locals also favor banh mi sandwiches: baguettes filled with various meats, meatballs, and pâtés. Vietnamese coffee is high-octane, mixed with sweetened condensed milk and often poured over ice.

Thailand

Rice noodles (flatter and wider than those in pad thai) appear with mouth-tingling condiments such as fresh or preserved chiles in vinegar. In Bangkok, jasmine rice is boiled as khao tom or fried as khao pat, with shrimp, pork, or chicken.

Indonesia and Malaysia

The morning meal in Bali, Jakarta, and Kuala Lumpur reflects the hegemony of rice. Variations include nasi goreng (fried rice with prawns, chicken, and egg), nasi lemak (coconut-infused rice with crisp anchovies), and bubur ayam (rice porridge with chicken, egg, and shallots). For the sweet tooth there’s pisang goreng (banana fritters with palm sugar).

Singapore

Another soup-for-breakfast culture, with offerings that include floating fish balls or wontons. Tau suan (mung-bean soup) topped with slices of fried dough is a morning dessert. Toast is slathered with kaya, a coconut-egg jam that may be shockingly green from the addition of vanilla-scented pandan leaves.

India

Traditional South Indian breakfast means masala dosa (lacy crêpes filled with spiced potato and turmeric), idli (steamed lentil dumplings), and sambar, a tamarind-scented vegetarian soup. In Mumbai, you’ll find pohe (beaten rice flakes with aromatic spices); in Goa, egg curry; and in Rajasthan, puffy kachoris stuffed with beans or lentils, then fried in hot oil and served with assorted chutneys such as mint or coriander. The legendary breads of India include fluffy puris, flaky parathas, and soft buns called pao bhaji, served with a vegetable curry. The drink of choice is yogurt lassi, either sweet or salted.

Europe

Great Britain and Ireland

If you’re feeling adventurous, the British Isles may be the ticket. Irish black pudding is made of curdled and boiled pig’s blood, mixed with chunks of pork fat and stuffed into a sausage casing. The Scots have an equally formidable tradition: haggis—sheep’s liver, heart, and lungs mixed with oatmeal and suet, then simmered in the sheep’s intestines. Tamer palates might prefer the classic English breakfast, with eggs, bangers (sausages) or streaky bacon, tomatoes, and mushrooms. It’s often called a fry-up for good reason: just about everything on the plate is fried, including the toast. The Brits may add baked beans or bubble and squeak (potatoes mashed with cabbage).

Scandinavia

Filmjölk tastes something like a peace accord between sour cream and buttermilk, but it’s eaten like yogurt, in a bowl with cereal. The champion of the Nordic bread basket is knäckebröd, or crispbread, and Swedes start the day with fish roe (smoked or not), made into a spreadable paste with mashed potatoes, according to a centuries-old recipe (also sold in tubes by IKEA stores all over the world).

Central Europe

The Czech “Bohemian” breakfast (similar to those in Austria and Hungary) may include cold cuts, terrines, and hermelin, a soft cheese sometimes pickled with oil and herbs. If you’re lucky, you’ll find palacinka, the local version of crêpes.

Southern Europe

Aside from the requisite caffè, an Italian breakfast spread might include cured meats (Parma ham; mortadella from Bologna) and cheeses (pecorino in Rome; smoked scamorza in Puglia). In Spain, potatoes, onions, and eggs are cooked in olive oil and formed into a fat, round tortilla española, from which slices are cut all day long. The slightly more decadent Spanish breakfast is deep-fried churros dunked in bittersweet hot chocolate. In Greece, one look at the contented sheep and goats grazing on any mountain tells you there will be great feta. Breakfast pies are made with phyllo dough and cheese and spinach or wild greens.

My Favorite

Russia

The morning porridge has kasha (buckwheat groats) as its base. But that’s breakfast for the hoi polloi. To eat like the czars, choose syrniki (fried cheese pancakes) with sour cream and honey or blini with red caviar.

For many tourists, Ecuador travel means only one thing: the Galapagos Islands. They say the island are being overrun with people. I being one of them. But the time that I was on the islands I did not see many people because all the rules that you must be with a certified guide has truly made the Galapagos an experience that should be on every ones list of places to see. I will talk more about the Galapagos later. The rest of the country really deserves more than a quick stopover on the way in or out and I wanted to see why this county has a two UNESCO World Heritage Sites. The cultural heritage of Quito was so important that it was the first city in the world to be declared World Heritage Cultural Site by UNESCO in 1978. The other UNESCO World Heritage Site is of course is the Galapagos.  It was during Christmas vacation that we visited and I am glad we came during this time the city churches, hotels and squares were beautifully decorated. When we arrived late in the evening we were greeted by the worst rain the city has experienced in many years and to our surprise it was very cold. Even though Quito is on the equator, it can get quite chilly. If you are headed to Quito, don’t forget to bring a jacket! Many Quiteños brag that you can experience all four seasons in one day! We were freezing and our minds were thinking that place was supposed to be warm. I was relieved to see our luggage and as we went through customs is was also nice to see our driver with our name on a sign.. Whenever I am in a foreign country I always hire someone to greet us and take us to our hotel. The people who I booked our Galapagos trip through was the Red Mangrove Hotel Group. This company took care of everything. But they also want you to be able to personalize your trip and I picked the Hotel LeParc in Quito for our first night. The first night you must stay in Quito to be up early for the flight to the Galapagos. The LeParc was a very edgy, upscale boutique hotel. This hotel is ultra-modern and extremely comfortable. The lobby bathroom was filled with roses! It was just me and my two kids traveling and we each wanted our own bed. When they took us to our room it was very nice to see a huge room with three beds. The beds were super comfortable. The hotel itself could easily be in SoHo NY. More later about my trip to the Galapagos.

Ecuador is the home of the Panama Hat, impressive Andean peaks, quiet beaches, a dense jungle and a city worth the time to explore. Quito is the capital of Ecuador and of Pichincha Province. The city is situated on the lower slopes of Pichincha volcano in a narrow, fertile valley of the Andes Mountains at an elevation of 2850m (9350 ft) above sea level. I was surprised to know how high we were. We did not notice the altitude I guess we were too excited just to be here. The city is divided in two parts. The amazing historical center is called The Old City and is located in the North. In the South, The New City boasts with modern buildings, broad avenues and urban parks. Both parts live together in perfect harmony. The old city offers the must see historical buildings, the new city displays an array of restaurants, language schools, movie theaters and discotheques. I found the city to be very clean. Ecuador is blessed with an impressive variety of natural attractions. Massive mountains and volcanoes that attract casual hikers and here you will find one of the highest concentrations of volcanoes in the world. Near by the Amazonian jungle and rainforest attract a different kind of explorer. (more about our trip to the Amazon later) Ecuador is a Spanish-speaking country about the size of Colorado. What I enjoyed is being able to use the my American dollar.  Ecuador has used the U.S. dollar as its official currency since 2000. Both U.S. coins and Ecuadorian coins, which are equivalent to the value of the U.S. coins. This made purchasing items very simple. On one of our tourist days in Quito we went to the Equatorial Monument (LaMitad del Mundo)( meaing center of the earth) straddling the Equator and located approximately fifteen miles north of Quito, this monument marks the exact line dividing the northern and southern hemispheres. This trip to us was a must see if you want to Quito, Ecuador. We took some really fun photos. 

Although Quito is a vibrant city with plenty of attractions, I wanted to see this city but my main goal was to explore the city and to get an in-depth overview of the town and experience gourmet dining and see what type of fine boutique hotels they had to offer. I hired a guide to drive us to all the must see’s of Ecuador. Juan Fernando Rueda was quite a character.  Tall and lean, he seems to tower over most of the locals.  But with his sparkling greens eyes, gentle manner and impish smile he wins everybody over quickly.  Dubbed the “flying cat” by his friends in the Galapagos.  A native of Ecuador, his background is a chef and historian. He was a wealth of information.

I also wanted to journey out to the rural markets of Otovolo and see the swirl of color and varying costumes and to watch the beautiful people of Ecuador making handicrafts. Apart from a trip to the Galapagos Islands, almost everything you would spend money on in Ecuador is a terrific value.  Ecuador doesn’t get all that much press as a place to retire or live abroad for a while, but it offers one of the best payoffs on the planet in terms of what you can get for your money as a resident. We found the city to be inexpensive. Juan was able to take us places that he likes to go to as a local. Time to go to the Galapagos.

Most of the travel to that island is self-contained: there are (thankfully) no large hotels on the islands that would suck up lots of resources and add to the already worrisome degradation. For now, the top hotels and lodges are all focused in the two largest cities and the jungle. On my trip to the Galapagos I choose not to be on a yacht. I am traveling to three islands and staying at different eco lodges and taking boats out for day trips. I wanted to explore the islands at the end of the day and not be on a rocking boat. I wanted to wake up to the animals on the land.

Established in 1959, the Galapagos National Park is the oldest National Park in Ecuador. About 97% of the entire area of the Galapagos Islands are part of the National Park system and remain uninhabited. The other 3% of the Islands are the inhabited areas of Santa Cruz Island,San Cristobal Island, Isabela Islandand Floreana Island. In 1967, the first park service was created, but it took about 4 years for the Galapagos National Park to assign its first Superintendent and first set of park rangers as part of the National Park System. Today the Park has a complex management system and hundreds of Park Rangers.
In 1979, the Galapagos National Park was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site. This meant that the Park’s management and staff were responsible for performing permanent conservation efforts and guarding the islands according to UNESCO’s standards and regulations. However, in 2007, as a result of the fast growing human development and poorly controlled immigration, tourism and trade, UNESCO added the Galapagos to its List of World Heritage Sites in Danger. Since 2007, strict measures were put in place by the Galapagos National Park to control tourism, immigration and the development of existing communities in Galapagos.

Since its existence, the Galapagos National Park has developed a series of rules and regulations to protect the Islands and minimize the impact of tourists on the Islands. All tourists who visit the islands on a cruise, or who take daily tours out to the islands, must be accompanied by Galapagos National Park certified guide on every visit.
In addition, the Galapagos National Park collects an entrance fee of $100 per person from all those who wish to visit the Galapagos Park and the Galapagos Marine Reserve either by staying at a hotel in the islands or by taking a Galapagos Cruise. I am really glad I read about this cost before I left. The ATM was out of money when I was in line to pay my fee.

We were met at the airport by our guide who would stay with us the entire time we were on the islands. We took a 10 minute ferry ride to get to Santa Cruz Island. We arrived at our first hotel Red Mangrove Aventura Lodge (Santa Cruz Island). It was beautiful we were greeted at the desk and told to have lunch. The organic vegetables and fresh caught fish was excellent. Our table outside overlooked the swimming Iguanas and seals. It was a beautiful moment to know that we had made the right decision to stay at a hotel then on a boat. Watching the wildlife was the reason we came here and the variety of people that would come and go was great to. We were never without conversation of, ” where are you from”?. After lunch they gave us each a bag of snorkel gear, a fanny pack with a metal bottle to fill with water for the hikes. Our luggage was already in the room and the room was huge and very nice. The view was of the bay and a great place to sit after a day of exploring. Our first tour was to a cove where we snorkeled. When we got in the water we noticed the ocean floor had a lot of sleeping sharks. I was told they were not the man eating kind but still the word shark is scary. I must say the water was not clear and it was uneventful but I was in the water, in the Galapagos and I was happy. After swimming we took a short hike to the marine iguana nesting site. The walk back was through a prickly pear forest. All the time the guide was telling us any and everything about what we were looking at. It was fascinating.

We enjoyed going back to our hotel room to shower and go explore around the hotel. Dinner was magnificent with choices for any palette.

Up early for breakfast to get a start on our adventures. We went to the lava chambers a breath taking visual reminder of the power of nature. The vegetation was thick and it was green. Next stop was the 600 acre private reserve where the giant Galapagos tortoises freely roam, graze, and sleep. These gigantic creatures were amazing. Back to the hotel for lunch and then a two hour boat ride to our next island Floreana.

The trip was fast and fun. When we arrived to the island it was not inhabited at all. We saw no one around. We were taken to a beach to swim with the Giant Sea Turtles. The water was freezing but the kids and I had brought our own wetsuits and we were glad we did the water took are breath away but we were going in no matter what. When you hit the water you look under and there were Sea Turtles everywhere. The water was not clear but to see these huge turtles up close was surreal. The guide wanted him to follow him to the area they were all located. Then he told us to take our heads out of the water and look at our hotel that we are going to swim to. This was so much fun. It was in the evening and the sun was going down while we were in the water. It was beautiful. Then while I was swimming with my camera in my hands a seal came to look at me. The seal came up from my chest to my face within inches. It scared me until I realized you’re in the Galapagos it’s ok the seal is friendly. Then I sat back and just enjoyed them swimming around me. Time to go in and we swam to the black beach. We arrived to our really cute small cabins to stay the night. For dinner we took an open air bus to a local restaurant to enjoy Galapagos food and visit with one of the first families to live on Florena.

It was a nice evening with new friends. This part of the trip was a total of 12 people, just enough! Back to are cabin for an evening of fun. We all sat around a fire and the guides made really good drinks with sugar lime and for the adventures local liquor. Mine was just lime, sugar and lemonade with a sprig of local mint. YUM! We went to sleep to the sound of the waves pounding and it was glorious.

Breakfast at a local restaurant and a day full of exploring the highlands of Floreana. Our Naturalist Guide tells us stories of pirates, whalers, and settlers of Floreana. We explore another turtle habitat and see why this is the best place for these slow-moving huge animals to live their slow-moving life.

Next island, Isabela Lodge this is where we saw the blue-footed boobies and Galapagos penguins sharing the same rocks with the huge iguanas. We hiked on a smooth path over a over a jagged lava field. Between the lava fields were shallow pools full of white-tipped reef sharks. I am glad I was on the land even if they are not dangerous. The views from here are something you will take with you for the rest of your life! The black, treacherous lava field, the emerald green sea, the forest green mangrove, and the cloud-capped volcanoes of Isla Isabela create a postcard in your mind to take home. In the water we saw turtles mating in the water. It was interesting see them stacked on top of each other floating in the water. The rest of the afternoon our guide took us to a snorkel spot in the middle of the lagoon. The water was warm in the lagoon. While we were swimming with the turtles and see a lot of fish. Annie grabs my camera, grabs by arm and says LOOOOOKKKKK through her snorkel real loud. Right over Michael’s shoulder was a very large great white that swims by very slowly. Annie snaps a photo of it swimming over Michael. Our guide said to us in a very calm voice, “it is time to get out of the water now”, ” OK”, we said. Back to our hotel to shower. When we arrived at the hotel they had cups of hot chocolate for us. A nice touch. Another wonderful meal with a new group that just came in. We again had the wonderful sound of the ocean to put us to sleep after an amazing day in the Galapagos.

We had a tour of the beaches where we saw wild flamingos. The beaches were full of lizards, iguanas and seals. Tonight we go back to the main island. The boat ride was perfect. We went through a huge school of dolphin and they swam with the boat for quite a while. Back to the exquisite Aventura Lodge on Santa Cruz to take a guided tour of the fascinating Charles Darwin Research Station and meet one of the oldest turtles Old Lonesome George who used to live at the San Diego Zoo and was sent to the Charles Darwin research center to live out his life as an extinct Pinta Island tortoise. Charles Darwin, visited the islands in 1835, saw that the tortoises on each island were different although they had obviously descended from a common stock which was now extinct on the mainland. This observation formed part of his world-changing Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection. The Charles Darwin Research Station was opened on Santa Cruz Island in 1962 with the objective of protecting the remaining animals. After our tour of the Charles Darwin research center we went downtown. The fishing boats were cleaning fish on the docks and the docks had huge hungry pelicans eating anything they could get in their mouth. This was fascinating to see. After our time in the town we knew it was time to go on to our next adventure. Back to Quito and then on to the Amazon. Five days 4 nights IS NOT ENOUGH!

I really enjoyed the Red Mangrove lodges on the islands.  The hotels each boast unrivalled locations perched overlooking the sea. Rooms vary in style and standard and all are equipped with private bathrooms and ceiling fans. The waterfront terrace is the perfect place to soak up some sun, and the hotel also offer a range of day trips to keep you fully occupied. So if you go to all the islands or just one I recommend the Red Mangrove hotels in the Galapagos.

I am very happy to say I have only had my bags not go with me on vacation one time. They came a few days later but not until I spent money on clothes to wear and toiletries. Make sure you get a signed document to be reimbursed or you will not get your money back.

I found this article By Mark Orwoll in the September issue of Travel and Leisure. 

How could an airline lose my suitcase—on a nonstop flight to Zurich for which I had arrived early? By the time my luggage was found, I had taken a train to Bern. And when the suitcase reached Bern, I was in St. Moritz. I finally got my bag a few days later, but it sure made a lousy start to my Swiss travels.

Lost-luggage reports have declined by almost 21 percent in the past year, but some airlines are better abut keeping track of bags than others.  So what happens to luggage that never finds its owner, at least in the U.S.? I recently decided to find out. So I went to Scottsboro, AL, to the privately run Unclaimed Baggage Center (unclaimedbaggage.com), which has exclusive contracts with all the major U.S. airlines to buy luggage declared lost after 90 days.

From the outside, the nondescript store looks not unlike a mail-sorting facility in a largish suburb. Inside, think Wal-Mart with slightly used merchandise. When lost luggage arrives, much of the contents are thrown away or donated to charities, but the rest is placed on the store’s retail shelves: diamond rings, designer shoes, surfboards, even wedding gowns. The center has been processing more than one million such pieces annually since it opened in 1970.

“We once had a metallic fire suit, like a firefighter would wear,” says Brenda Cantrell, director of marketing. “In our jewelry department we had a 40.95-carat emerald, a loose stone. We appraised it for $35,000 and sold it for $17,000. We also had a 5.8-carat diamond ring appraised for $46,000. We sold it to a couple in Tennessee. The man had cash on hand and bought it for $23,000.”

Occasionally travelers will phone the store in the hopes that a missing article has turned up, but Cantrell says the center can’t assist with such requests because of the sheer volume of lost luggage it receives. There is, however, at least one instance of someone finding a missing item on the shelves of the Unclaimed Baggage Center.

“In 1998 a man came in and picked out a pair of ski boots for his wife in the size and color she would like,” recalls Cantrell. “It turned out her name was written on the tongue of the boot, and they were hers. That’s the only documented case of someone finding their own lost luggage.”

Under Department of Transportation (DOT) rules, if your checked belongings are lost, damaged, or delayed, you may qualify for up to $3,300 in compensation on domestic flights. (At press time, it was about $1,700 for international flights, which operate under a global treaty.)

It’s far better, though, to avoid losing your luggage in the first place, or at least to be prepared for the eventuality. Here’s what you can do.

Before You Leave

• Book a direct or nonstop flight, which will minimize the chance of losing a bag.
• Choose an airline that has a good baggage record. Compare online at airconsumer.dot.gov.
• Pack your carry-on wisely so that you can live out of it for a few days—toiletries, medications, a change of clothes—in the event that you have to.
• Remove old luggage tags to avoid confusion.
• Label your suitcase well (I always tuck a business card inside). Lack of ID tags is one reason that luggage ends up in Scottsboro.

At the Airport

• Don’t check in late, or your bags might not make it onto the plane in time for takeoff.
• Make sure the desk agent places a destination tag on your suitcase.
• Hang on to your baggage claim ticket. It’s often attached to your boarding pass, which many people leave on the plane.

After Landing

• Be at the carousel when bags are off-loaded.
• If your bag is lost or delayed, file a report immediately at the airport and get a copy.
• Ask at the lost-luggage counter for the airline’s contract of carriage, which spells out your rights.
• The DOT recommends following up with a certified letter to the airline’s customer service department restating the details of the incident.

I’ve learned from experience: fly with carry-on luggage only, when possible. The airlines haven’t found a way to lose that. Yet.

Here, a detailed guide to choosing the perfect present to bring to friends and colleagues overseas.

Plus: How best to receive—and refuse—a gift. I found this guide while reading Condé Nast Traveler Articles : November 2010. Enjoy

The giving of gifts is a language of symbols, and there are those who speak it like poetry. They see balance in pairs, endings in clocks, doom in the most innocent of flowers. Then there are the rest of us. We are the ones who had to ask ourselves why President Obama’s gift to Prime Minister Gordon Brown—a collection of American movie hits—constituted a gift-giving gaffe. Should the president have picked better movies? Included a DVD player? Thrown in some popcorn and a microwave?

The problem, as our British friends were quick to point out, was that the president’s gift lacked eloquence. What, exactly, was he trying to say? Maybe he didn’t know. “Not very inspired” was the verdict from Vogue.

What to say and how to convey the message in the form of a gift are conundrums that have absorbed cultural emissaries since the beginning of time.

China’s panda diplomacy goes back more than a thousand years and was a huge success when Chairman Mao revived it in the 1950s. Americans fell in love with Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing, the two giant pandas that came to live in the National Zoo after Nixon’s famous visit to China in 1972, and we easily adopted them as symbols of friendship and peace. But whatever happened to Matilda and Milton, the pair of musk oxen that served as America’s ambassadors in the exchange? They quickly fell ill, unaccustomed to the Beijing heat, and though they recovered their health, the shaggy duo never achieved the level of popularity enjoyed by their adorable counterparts. When they died without procreating, the world did not mourn.

“In our abundant culture, where everybody has so much, gifts don’t mean as much as they do elsewhere in the world,” says Robert Hickey, deputy director of the Protocol School of Washington. “A gift should be a distilled symbol of your relationship.” In exchange for his gift to Brown, the president scored a first-edition biography of Winston Churchill in seven volumes, a framed commission for the H.M.S. Resolute, and a penholder. The penholder was only the latest artifact in a story going back to 1855, when the Resolute was rescued by an American whaler and later returned to England. A desk made from its timbers was presented to President Rutherford B. Hayes by Queen Victoria and has been used by American presidents ever since. The gift to Obama was crafted from the wood of the Resolute‘s sister ship, the Gannet, which once went on anti-slavery missions off Africa. The symbolism here is indeed exquisite. “It was only a penholder, but it was infused with meaning,” says Hickey. “That was a brilliant gift.”

Dr. Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist who has studied how gifts strengthen social ties, says that to give a really good gift, “you must ask yourself, What do I want the gift to convey, what are the various ways to convey it, and how might I be misunderstood?”

There are so many possible missteps in a gift that must bridge cultural gaps that it pays to be conservative until you know somebody’s particular likes and dislikes. In general, people meeting you for the first time will expect a gift from America. “It’s important to take something that reflects your culture,” says Lisa Mirza Grotts, a travel-etiquette consultant based in San Francisco and author of A Traveler’s Passport to Etiquette. That’s why etiquette and travel books stress photographs (as in coffee table books of your town or region), handicrafts, music, and art, as well as food, wine, and spirits. “A distilled spirit from your home state says warmth and hospitality,” says Sally Van Winkle Campbell, whose book But Always Fine Bourbon recounts the story of her family’s Kentucky distillery. “It implies you want to sit with that person over a meal or in front of a fire and get to know him or her better.”

Pens, key rings, paperweights, and T-shirts are also routinely recommended as business gifts. So are candles and chocolate. But what we often forget is what makes the pen, the T-shirt, or the chocolate special. When Grotts traveled to China with a state delegation, she brought small boxes carved from California redwood and designer scarves emblazoned with the Golden Gate Bridge—knowing, of course, that her hosts were likely to appreciate scarves and wooden boxes. As First Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy presented visiting dignitaries with one-of-a-kind paperweights designed by David Webb and made from gems and minerals mined in the United States. Handmade Moonstruck truffles embody the flavors of Oregon, Lake Champlain chocolates the taste of Vermont. A Beanpod candle not only smells good and looks pretty but the wax is actually made in Iowa from American soy. In places where chocolate and candles are desirable gifts, these would be extra special.

Langer points out that the purpose of a gift is to demonstrate that you care, and for your gift to do that, you must find out what caring means to the other person. That requires learning as much as you can about what he or she likes and dislikes. “There’s value in the process,” she says. “You end up feeling more connected to the person, so it’s not an empty gesture.” On that score, if a Brazilian friend’s favorite drink is Johnnie Walker, don’t bring Kentucky bourbon, and if a Russian friend has a passion for Chanel, don’t treat her to your favorite brand. “If you bring me a book of French poems and I don’t like French poems, that’s worse than worthless,” says Langer, “because it tells me I’m unseen and unlistened to and unknown by you.

“Some people like only the finest,” she adds. “If you can’t afford the best champagne, give them the finest of something you can afford. Don’t give them a second-rate champagne.”

On the other hand, never doubt the power inherent in the most humble of gifts. The first public sign of warming relations between China and the United States was not Nixon’s 1972 visit but the moment at the 1971 World Table Tennis Championships in Nagoya, Japan, when Chinese player Zhuang Zedong spontaneously offered a gift of friendship—a brocaded tapestry—to Glenn Cowan, a member of the U.S. team. Cowan, in turn, presented Zhuang with a T-shirt printed with an American flag, a peace symbol, and the words “Let It Be.” Photographers caught the moment, and within days, Mao invited Cowan and 14 others to become the first non-Communist Americans to visit the People’s Republic of China since 1949.

The Four Golden Rules of Gift Giving

What not to give is as important as what to give. Each country has its own religious and cultural taboos. Certain numbers tend to be either lucky or unlucky, and flowers are fraught with peril. Knives, scissors, and other sharp objects commonly signify the severing of ties. And don’t give a Coach bag in Argentina (known for its leather), a case of Dogfish Head imperial stout in Germany (proud of its beer), or a Tiffany silver bookmark in Mexico (a world silver capital). It’s a matter of national pride.

Gift giving is inherently reciprocal. Know what’s expected in exchange. In some countries, it’s fairly specific. When a Chinese New Year’s guest presents his host with two mandarin oranges, he receives two different mandarin oranges when he leaves. Japanese women who give boxes of dark chocolate to their male coworkers on Valentine’s Day typically receive higher-priced boxes of white chocolate a month later, on White Day. In many countries, the rules are so specific that when U.S. companies send a business delegation, the chiefs of protocol confer in advance to find out what gifts will be exchanged, who will receive them, what rank they hold within the company, whether the event will be photographed, and so on. A business faux pas in this regard may prove fatal. One rule of thumb: Never give the same gift to people of unequal rank. And when travelers are told to bring “small” or “modest” gifts, the advice should be taken seriously.

Don’t leave anybody out. Never give a gift in front of others unless you have something for everyone. Bring an ample supply of gifts, just in case. If you’re invited to dinner and you’re not sure who will be present, take something that can be easily shared, such as baklava or cherries. And don’t forget the kids.

Presentation matters. Commodore Matthew C. Perry gave Japanese rulers technological wonders housed in rough crates and was presented in turn with commonplace objects (brooms, charcoal) packaged with exquisite care. In The World of the Gift, author Jacques T. Godbout points out that wrapping allows the gift to be received without judgment: “The receiver of the gift only knows that a nice gesture is being made. His or her thoughts are not yet focused on the material or sentimental value of the gift.” In many countries, gifts are not opened in front of the giver so that nobody loses face in an uneven exchange. But there’s another reason. Paper and ribbons, Godbout observes, “add mystery and suspense to the gift and signify the spirit of the gift-giving action.” Tricia Post, of the Emily Post Institute, reminds us to pay attention to that small but exquisite interval when a gift is passed from one to another: “When you present a gift, do it respectfully. Make it look nice, give it with two hands, and enjoy that moment.”

ASIA

Hidden meanings are everywhere in East Asia. In general, uneven numbers have negative connotations, and pairs—whether pandas or pomelos—have positive ones. So if you’re bringing wine to a dinner party, two bottles are better than one. When you’re planning a business trip, call and check whether gifts will be exchanged. Don’t be surprised if your host seems reluctant to accept your gift. In many countries, etiquette requires that he modestly reject it up to three times. “Keep politely insisting,” advises Makiko Itoh, a Japanese blogger who lives in Europe. “It’s a ritualistic dance.”

China (including Hong Kong)

The Skinny: Protocol in China is very specific, and anyone serious about doing business there will want to be well briefed—not only to avoid a faux pas, but to keep on the right side of the law. Chinese efforts to curtail corruption make business gifts “a sensitive issue,” according to Terri Morrison and Wayne A. Conaway, authors of Kiss, Bow, or Shake Hands. The practice, they concede, is nevertheless widespread. In general, company-to-company presents are okay, and so is a banquet. For the leisure traveler, a little knowledge will help smooth social transactions.

When to Give: A good way to show appreciation for a home-cooked meal is with an invitation to a restaurant. At the conclusion of business negotiations, present small tokens of gratitude to all members of a delegation and something a little nicer to the boss. Individual colleagues may exchange gifts of friendship after they’ve established a close relationship, but to do so in front of others (or in front of a camera) is bad form. If you’re invited to a wedding (a common practice among business associates, whether you know the wedding couple or not), give crisp new bills tucked in a red envelope bearing your name. About $30 is standard for a new acquaintance; more will be expected if you already have an established friendship with the couple. Avoid denominations of four.

The Presentation: Even simple gifts should be nicely wrapped in plain red, pink, yellow, or gold paper (black, white, gray, and blue carry mournful connotations). Present a gift to your host on arrival, using both hands, and say something about “a modest token of my appreciation.” Never give a gift unwrapped. (“It’s considered rude, rude, rude,” says Grotts.)

For a Colleague: ”The Chinese like logos,” says Grotts. “It’s important to them that items have that official touch.” Acknowledge seniority with a gift that’s a cut above, and make sure nobody gets left out (pack plenty of extras). An elegantly wrapped food that can be shared can take the place of individual gifts.

The Gaffe: Odd numbers are ominous, and so is the number four, which is associated with death. Also funereal are cut flowers, straw sandals, and white objects. Fans, handkerchiefs, and umbrellas denote sorrow and tears. Green hats are for cuckolds. The word for clock, zhong, is a homonym for “the end,” which makes any timepiece a bad idea. In general, avoid giving anything beyond the receiver’s means to reciprocate, thus causing him to lose face.

The Foolproof Gift: ”The Chinese are huge into stamp collecting,” says Grotts. “They also like nice pens.” Gerald Hatherly, a travel specialist with Abercrombie Kent, recommends oranges (symbols of wealth) and strawberries (newly popular in China and easily shared). Fruit should be nicely wrapped and not given in sets of four. Grotts recommends steaks and other gourmet foods. “But food isn’t an acceptable gift to bring to a dinner party,” she warns. “Send it after.”

India

The Skinny: While predominantly Hindu, India has the second-largest Muslim population in the world, so you’ll need to guard against offending either culture. In general, gifts tend to be modest and are not expected in a business context.

When to Give: Bring a gift when invited to someone’s home but not to a first business meeting.

The Presentation: No black or white paper. The standard recommendation is red, green, or yellow. Offer your gift with both hands or the right hand, never with the left only. Gifts are not opened in front of the giver.

For a Colleague: Something small—nothing expensive or flashy—that reflects pride in your home country.

The Gaffe: Observe both Hindu and Muslim food restrictions (see “Keeping the Faith”), avoid leather, and give alcohol only if you know for sure that it will be appreciated. Avoid animal motifs—especially pigs and dogs, which are considered unclean. An exotic American sweet, such as maple candy, may be regarded with suspicion—as in, “Are you sure it doesn’t contain eggs?”

The Foolproof Gift: ”Indians have such a sweet tooth, that’s really the best way to go,” says Lucy Davison of Banyan Tours. American-made designer chocolate is a good choice. Sanjay Saxena, of Destination Himalaya, likes to give Ghirardelli chocolates made in his hometown of San Francisco. Also appropriate: brightly colored flowers, such as red or yellow roses (but not frangipani, which is reserved for funerals).

Japan

The Skinny: The Japanese are prolific gift-givers, to a degree that overwhelms Westerners and even the Japanese themselves. Tales are told of executive closets packed with unopened gifts, and of locals hiding holiday plans from friends and coworkers so they won’t be expected to shop for souvenirs. Blogger Makiko Itoh says that because Japanese houses are small, you should bring something consumable, like food or alcohol (she herself brings chocolate).

When to Give: Gifts—both business and social—are exchanged in midsummer (the gift is called ochugen) and at year’s end (oseibo), and when visiting a corporate office for the first time. They should be presented at the end of your meeting, says Grotts. “Rushing into it is a sign of ending a relationship before it begins.”

The Presentation: In Japan, the variety of handmade paper used, the color of the cord, and even the way the paper is folded has meaning. The standard advice is to let the experts do it. The store or your hotel will oblige.

For a Colleague: ”The Japanese are very label-conscious but not showy,” says Grotts. Expensive business gifts will not be seen as bribes, but striking the right balance can prove tricky—a too costly gift imposes unwanted social debt, an overly modest one insults. Take your cue from your Japanese hosts, and do as they do. Cognac, whiskey, and wine are reliable choices. Well-known luxury brands are preferred. Also good are expensive-label scarves for women and ties for men.

The Gaffe: Avoid as funereal: green tea, lilies, lotus blossoms, camellias, and anything white. Company logos are viewed as promotional (read: cheap). Four or nine of anything is a bad omen.

The Foolproof Gift: You’ll find gift fruit in department stores, where it comes elegantly boxed and carries a hefty price tag. If there are kids in the household, bring small toys or something that can be shared, like cookies or candy.

Singapore

Singapore represents a mix of ethnicities, primarily Chinese, Malay (most of whom are Muslim), and Indian. Adapt your behavior accordingly. Because of anti-corruption laws, business gifts should be modest and given in company-to-company exchanges. Never present them to government officials.

Thailand

The Skinny: In Thailand, a Buddhist country, gifts are typically modest—flowers, for example, or a memento from home, such as a book of photographs. Three is a lucky number; six is unlucky.

When to Give: If you’re invited to a wedding, give about $30 in an envelope. At New Year’s, baskets of fruit and other food items are often presented as gifts from one company to another.

The Presentation: Thai’s love bright colors (especially yellow and gold) and ribbons; avoid green, black, and blue.

For a Colleague: Company T-shirts, calendars, pens.

The Gaffe: Because Buddhists consider the foot the least sacred part of the body, do not give shoes, slippers, or socks. Marigolds and carnations are for funerals.

The Foolproof Gift: Fruit, flowers, or candy.

CENTRAL AND SOUTH AMERICA

In countries whose citizens have little faith in impersonal institutions or are particularly mistrustful of foreigners, building relationships can be a lengthy process. Gifts, which are essentially about creating and maintaining relationships, play an important role.

“When you are invited to someone’s home, you never talk about business,” says Elena Brouwer, an etiquette specialist who lives in Florida and travels often to Latin American countries. “Never, ever.”

The Skinny: Flowers are typically sent before a dinner party, or the day after. Avoid purple (reserved for funerals) and 13 of anything. Also avoid items carrying your business logo. “That is not a gift,” says Brouwer. “That is the company promoting itself. People think it’s very tacky.”

When to Give: Always bring a gift when you’re invited to someone’s home, and include any children in the household.

The Presentation: Wrapping has fewer rules than it merits in many Asian countries. Generally, avoid purple and black, the colors of mourning. Beyond that, just make sure your gift is nicely wrapped and that you include a card. A gift bag is acceptable.

For a Colleague: Offer gifts only in a social setting. Don’t be in a rush; give the relationship a chance to develop.

Argentina

The Gaffe: Showing up for a dinner party empty-handed. In a pinch, bring flowers.

The Foolproof Gift: High import taxes make iPods a popular gift. Personalize them with your choice of music and videos. (President Obama loaded the one he gave Queen Elizabeth with a souvenir of her Williamsburg trip.)

Brazil

The Skinny: The online magazine of the Ethisphere Institute, an international think tank, advises that while business gifts are “not expected” in Brazil, “a traditional gift from the person’s home country is considered an appropriate gesture. The exception is when you are invited to someone’s house. Always bring a gift such as flowers for the hostess—orchids are recommended.”

When to Give: ”A business gift is usually given at the end of the year to important clients and their partners,” says Martin Frankenberg, a travel specialist based in São Paulo. “It’s also common when visiting someone for the first time, or anytime you’re coming from another country, but it shouldn’t be too expensive.” Paul Irvine of Dehouche Land, a South American-based real estate company, advises business travelers to call the secretary of the person you will be meeting to see if presents will be exchanged. “It’s usual for someone coming from abroad to want a little souvenir of Brazil, in which case you’d reciprocate with one from your country.”

The Gaffe: Brazil has recently made efforts to clamp down on bribery; avoid any gift that might be construed as such.

The Foolproof Gift: Brouwer says that Brazilian kids like T-shirts depicting American icons—”but no flags.” She brings ones with Disney World and Miami Beach logos (she lives in Florida). For the grown-ups, something for the home.

Chile

The Gaffe: As in Argentina and Brazil, it is rude to come to a dinner party empty-handed. Bring luxury chocolates or send flowers in advance. Wrapping paper and an enclosed card are mandatory.

The Foolproof Gift: According to Brouwer, a bottle of fine whiskey makes “an excellent gift.” Birds of paradise are the preferred bloom.

Mexico

The Gaffe: Don’t bring silver; Mexicans are justly proud of their own.

The Foolproof Gift: For flowers, the safest is an all-white bouquet, sent by a very good florist (have your hotel recommend one) in advance of a dinner party or the day after. Avoid purple, yellow, and particularly red, which has a reputation for casting spells.

EUROPE

What to give on the continent that has everything? The best advice is to do your research. Mrs. Obama gave her songwriting French counterpart, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, a Gibson guitar, and the two became fast friends. If you haven’t a clue, stick with the tried-and-true: picture books, music, and so on. Don’t overdo it or you’ll embarrass your host, and remember that throughout Europe the trend is away from the exchange of business gifts.

The Skinny: Europeans still follow the old tradition of giving an odd number of flowers—except 13. Business gifts to avoid include anything with a company logo (considered tasteless), anything personal (no perfume or clothing), and anything expensive. In some countries, including Germany and France, a gift of wine implies that the host’s cellar is inadequate.

When to Give: Invited to dinner, most people would bring candy or send flowers the day after. In business, wait until negotiations are finished, when something modest will suffice.

The Presentation: Always wrap; score extra points by swaddling your gift in an elegant and eco-friendly furoshiki—these traditional wrapping cloths, once used by Japanese traders, are gaining popularity around the world. Don’t include your business card. Gifts are opened immediately.

England

The Gaffe: Restrain yourself when giving business gifts.

The Foolproof Gift: An American sports souvenir, a round of drinks or a meal, or an invitation to a sports or cultural event (theater, a concert) are all acceptable ways to express gratitude to your British hosts. For a dinner party, flowers or champagne.

France

The Gaffe: White chrysanthemums (they’re for funerals), yellow flowers (they imply infidelity), and anything with a company logo.

The Foolproof Gift: Tania Chamlian, a New Yorker who spends several weeks a year in France, says that if you should find yourself in Paris and in need of a last-minute hostess gift, your best bets are “macaroons from Ladurée, cocoa-flavored eclairs from Jacques Genin, or chocolate from Chapon. Also high-end food baskets and of course champagne.”

Germany

The Gaffe: Don’t give wine in Germany, unless it’s very, very special. Opt instead for fine chocolates or imported liquor, especially bourbon or whiskey. Other things to avoid: red roses (they’re for romance) and lilies, chrysanthemums, and carnations (which are all for funerals).

The Foolproof Gift: Brouwer says her German friends are crazy about cowboys and love books about the Old West.

Italy

The Gaffe: Brooches and handkerchiefs are associated with funerals.

The Foolproof Gift: Select a gift of wine with caution. Unless its vintage is superior, give whiskey instead.

The Netherlands

The Gaffe: Large gifts make the Dutch uneasy; keep them small and appropriate to the occasion.

The Foolproof Gift: Imported liquor and Belgian chocolate are prized.

Russia

The Skinny: Travel agent Gwen Kozlowski of Exeter International says that business gifts are often consumable and food- or drink-related. Because hunting is popular with the Russian elite, Kozlowski also suggests a high-end rifle for an aficionado. A book about animals might be a safer choice. She also points out, “Birthdays are huge—bigger than Christmas, bigger than anything.”

When to Give: As a thank-you for a private dinner party or a visit to someone’s home.

The Presentation: Gifts are given in the original wrapping from the store; Russians say it’s because they like their trees.

For a Colleague: For a top client, Kozlowski recommends “something personal and unique, such as a painting or other artwork.” For a male colleague: cologne, a designer tie, or a high-end mobile phone. “For ladies, it’s always flowers and perfume. If it’s a momentous occasion and they’re a close colleague, even jewelry would be given. Brand names are king.”

The Gaffe: Birthday presents can be given late but not early—and no baby gifts until the baby is born (it’s very bad luck). Don’t give yellow or white flowers, or an even number of stems.

The Foolproof Gift: Books are always a good gift, and so is a silver picture frame. Writer Leah Ingram, a graduate of the Protocol School of Washington, recommends Tiffany for travelers to label-conscious countries like Russia: “That little blue box is known around the world.” You can get a sterling silver money clip, key ring, or ballpoint pen for $150 or less.

Sweden

The Gaffe: Don’t give another country’s crystal; the Swedes have their own.

The Foolproof Gift: Liquor is very expensive and thus much appreciated.

Turkey

The Gaffe: Unlike their European neighbors, Turks do not open gifts in the giver’s presence and neither should you. Gifts should be halal (see “Keeping the Faith”).

The Foolproof Gift: Flowers are not typically given as a hostess gift, but “for thanking extravagantly, you send big bouquets of flowers,” says Engin Akin, Turkish cookbook author and hostess extraordinaire. Orchids are considered very posh. “When invited to dinner it’s usually a box of baklava, chocolates, or something for the house like a candle or decorative item.” The traditional hostess gift: badem ezmesi, a delicacy made with crushed walnuts, or an ornamental object for the home, such as a vase. At the end of Ramadan, bring sweets for the children.

THE MIDDLE EAST

In much of the Middle East and North Africa, especially Muslim countries, “you give gifts based on how important the relationship is,” says the Protocol School of Washington’s Hickey. Very often, however, the value of business gifts is restricted to a token amount. “That’s where you really have to do your thinking.” As tools of knowledge and learning, books and writing instruments have symbolic value. For a Muslim host, good choices are fine leather (except pigskin), silver, porcelain, crystal, and cashmere. Don’t assume that it’s safe to bring wine or alcohol because your hosts imbibe; other guests may not and are likely to be offended.

Give and receive gifts with the right hand, or both hands if the object is heavy. In some countries (such as Saudi Arabia), gifts are opened in front of the giver and examined carefully to show proper appreciation. In others, such as Egypt, they are set aside, still wrapped, with a polite thank-you.

Egypt

The Skinny: Egypt is roughly 90 percent Muslim. Most etiquette guides recommend sweets (chocolates, local pastries) for the hostess.

When to Give: Whenever you are a guest in someone’s home.

The Presentation: James Berkeley of Destinations Adventures International says that wrapping, though often elaborate, is not mandatory; wrapping paper can be hard to come by in Egypt. “The latest fashion is to wrap a present in a lovely cotton or linen towel, with a bow.” Often, gifts are wrapped twice: a layer of ordinary paper with a bright and decorative paper on top, “but it’s not like anyone’s going to count.” Wide ribbon is better than narrow. Social norms against handing over a gift with the left hand have relaxed considerably, says Berkeley.

For a Colleague: Small electronic gadgets are popular gifts, as are compasses, quality pens, and items by Egyptian jewelry designer Azza Fahmy, who has a line of silver business gifts.

The Gaffe: Don’t give flowers. They’re traditionally for funerals and weddings only. Gifts should be halal (see “Keeping the Faith”).

The Foolproof Gift: In a pinch, pick up a box of Egyptian sweets (typically made with lots of honey and nuts). In Cairo, Fauchon, Mandarin Koueider, and Cafe La Poire are good sources. Present them to the host, not the hostess, and bring small gifts for the kids.

Israel

“There’s not a lot of business-gift exchange in Israel,” says Terri Morrison. “In that regard, it’s like a mini United States. Instead, people will take each other out for a show or a sports event.” For a dinner party, bring flowers or sweets. Don’t bring a non-kosher gift to a kosher household or invite a group to a non-kosher restaurant without checking first to make sure it’s okay.

Lebanon

The Skinny: Gifts should be modest, and make sure they’re halal (see “Keeping the Faith”). “You just don’t want to do anything that’s over-the-top,” says Rita Zawaideh of Caravan-Serai Tours.

When to Give: If invited to a Lebanese home, bring sweets or flowers for the family, never for an individual.

The Presentation: Wrapping doesn’t have to be formal but is expected. Gifts for your host should be given as you come in the door.

For a Colleague: Coffee-table books, mugs, and calendars are all good choices. A gift for the secretary or assistant may be appropriate. If it involves crossing gender lines, beware: A man should always say the gift is from a female colleague or family member.

The Gaffe: A gift that says “Made in Israel” will not go over well.

The Foolproof Gift: Flowers are a good idea, and so are crystal or silver plates for holding candy or nuts. If the family has children, bring them something.

United Arab Emirates

“In the UAE, gift-giving is very common, appreciated, and an integral part of the culture,” says Lindsey Wallace of Linara Travel.

The Skinny: “Traditional gifts to friends include an elegant tray filled with chocolates or a fully stuffed and cooked lamb,” says Wallace. For special occasions—weddings, newborns—UAE nationals give lavishly, including diamonds, gold, and jewelry to the bride or newborn girl.

When to Give: For birthdays, newborns, marriages, and when a service is rendered.

The Presentation: Wrapping “isn’t terribly important,” says Wallace. Present a gift in person if you can; otherwise, send it to the recipient with a card.

The Gaffe: Be very careful not to suggest the gift is meant as a bribe.

The Foolproof Gift: Chocolates, a home accessory, or flowers are common. If children are at the home, it is customary to bring toys or sweets.

If you’re a fan of Disney theme parks like we are, your biggest curiosity about Tokyo Disneyland Park is probably how it compares with the American Disney parks. The answer is: it’s very similar because Disney tries to make them like this but we found Tokyo Disneyland to be very different and it was also beautiful.

The biggest difference is probably the most obvious: Tokyo Disneyland Park is located in Japan. Most of the signs on the rides and attractions are written in Japanese. All signs, restaurant menus, etc., are printed in Japanese (although they all include English translation in small print). We always asked the cast members to help us translate something or to direct us to a ride. They really liked trying out their English skills with us. Each and every time that we would ask them about Disneyland they would ask us about our Disneyland. It was fun telling them we only live a very short distance to the Disneyland in California.

One big feature of Tokyo Disneyland Park is that it’s big—about 114 acres. Compare that with Disneyland Park, which is 74.2 acres, and the Magic Kingdom in Florida which is 106.3 acres. Despite its larger size, Tokyo Disneyland has fewer rides and attractions, but with new construction each year this is bound to change. Much of the park is open space, seemingly designed to hold as many visitors as possible. During the busy summer months it’s not uncommon for the park to open its doors in the morning, then have to stop admitting visitors around noon because it is filled to capacity (about 85,000 guests). The doors reopen again around 5:00 PM. The park can see over 100,000 visitors a day. When we were here we never had to wait very long in a line. For some reason we felt that the lines went faster here. It was fun hearing the different languages while we were waiting.

For the most part, the layout of Tokyo Disneyland Park was similar to the Disneyland in California and Florida: You walk through a main entrance and up Main Street to a central hub which branches out to the various lands of the park. As you would expect, the centerpiece of the park is a castle; Cinderella Castle. Despite the familiar layout, there are some obvious differences. Main Street is called, “World Bazaar” it is covered by a Plexiglas canopy. There is no steam train around the perimeter of the Park; instead it runs around Adventureland, Frontierland is not called Frontierland, it’s called Westernland. There’s no New Orleans Square, although there is an area that looks like New Orleans Square but it is technically Adventureland. Fantasyland looks like Disneyland’s Fantasyland did in the late 1970s. Tomorrowland does not look very futuristic.

The first Walt Disney theme park to open outside of the United States, Tokyo Disney Resort includes Disneyland and DisneySea, a water theme park, two hotels and a shopping mall. The parks have about 25.8 million annual visitors, over 96 percent of them from Japan and most from the Tokyo area.

One of the wonderful things about all of the Disneyland and most of all Tokyo Disneyland is that it is meticulously maintained. The Park is over 25 years old now but you’d never be able to tell, even on close inspection. The landscaping is groomed to perfection. Rides and attractions are all as close to perfect as can be, both cosmetically and functionally. Walkways, benches, and eating areas are always spotless.

Part of the reason that the Park is always so clean is that the staff does a great job of keeping it that way.  A known fact is that Japanese people, are pretty neat and tidy themselves. Part of this is cultural, but the other part has to be simple necessity: if you lived in a country as densely populated as Japan you’d have to be organized just to survive. One example of how the Japanese people help keep their park clean is that in Japan its poor etiquette to walk and eat at the same time; this helps keep walkways free from popcorn and ice cream spills. (This is one Japanese tradition I broke and was immediately stared at. This was a hard rule not to break because strolling around Disneyland while eating a box of popcorn is a small pleasure I have enjoyed all my life.) And since Tokyo Disneyland offered the best flavored popcorn we had a hard time following the do not eat while you walk rule.

Despite its similarities, Tokyo Disneyland Park is different that regardless of how many times you’ve visited Disneyland Park in California, Florida’s Magic Kingdom or Hong Kong Disneyland, visiting Tokyo Disneyland Park for the first time will be fresh and exciting and wonderful. It was for us.

One interesting feature of DisneySea is a choice of three hotels and they have a five-star hotel built right into the park. The Hotel MiraCosta sits in and around the Mediterranean Harbor area of DisneySea, near the main entrance to the park. The design of the hotel integrates beautifully with the scenery of Mediterranean Harbor—if you didn’t know about it beforehand you might not realize there was a hotel there at all. The quality and service match any five-star hotel in the world, and the hotel features its own gourmet restaurants and a first-class spa.

Tokyo DisneySea Hotel MiraCosta, which opened on the same day as Tokyo DisneySea Park as a hotel situated inside the Park, welcomed its 10th anniversary on September 4, 2011. To celebrate this anniversary year, the hotel is offering 10th anniversary programs from September 4, 2011 through March 19, 2012 in conjunction to the Tokyo DisneySea Park’s 10th Anniversary event period.

The success of Tokyo Disneyland is unquestionable. For many years, it sat at the top of the list of the world’s theme parks in terms of total attendance. Based on this success, executives at Tokyo Disneyland wanted to create a second theme park on the same property. Instead of copying an existing Disney park however, they decided to create a whole new experience, one that would not only celebrate the Disney tradition but also something that all Japanese hold sacred—the sea. Disney Imagineers took this concept and set out to create a park with the highest levels of elegance, excitement, and attention to detail. They succeeded brilliantly. The result is Tokyo DisneySea Park. We loved this park it was beautiful and bright. It’s no exaggeration to say that DisneySea is probably the most beautiful theme park in the world. The design and execution of the theming and scenery are stunning, and it is immediately obvious that little expense was spared in the creation of this magnificent park. The little Mermaid under the sea area was spectacular. In 2011 it will be at Disneyland Southern California.

Rule 1: Leave the Fanny Pack
What makes an Ugly American ugly? Is it the timbre of our voices? Or the way we travel in herds? Or is it (as we suspect) our love of sweatpants, baseball caps, and yes, fanny packs, no matter the occasion or place? While it can sometimes seem that the world has fallen victim to a sort of sartorial globalization, where jeans are welcome anytime, anywhere, the truth is-of course-more nuanced. What works in surprisingly laid-back Singapore will be greeted with looks of horror on the streets (or in the boardrooms) of Paris. And ladies, while you can (and should) pile on the gold and jewels in Greece, quirky and stripped-down is the way to go in Germany. So here are the rules on looking not just appropriate but actually stylish around the globe, whether you’re in a meeting, At a party:, or just walking outdoors. Plus: Tips on how to wear a head scarf, what to pack for safari, and how to play European for a day. Ugly American? Fuhgeddaboudit.

AFRICA/THE MIDDLE EAST
In general, coverage is key. But while merely clothing your collarbone is enough in Jordan, just an inch of shoulder skin could get you arrested in Iran; over in Dubai, you’ll need a brand or two to make it big. Men are usually fine in long pants, and women carry shawls for a quick conservative fix, but consider yourself forewarned: Style is a sensitive subject here.
DUBAI
At a meeting: Women’s pantsuits should be sheeny and glam; men’s duds are buffed, black, and paired with slim ties.
On the street: The mall, not the street, is the social arena. Here, girls in T-shirts (their shoulders covered out of respect and as a remedy against the freezing AC blasts) tote the latest Louis Vuittons. Carry a pashmina to cover up in case you find yourself in a traditional souk—although you’ll see miniskirts and shorts, they’re for people who know the city well enough to avoid ultra-conservative quarters. On men, reflective aviators abound, as do Gucci sandals.
At a party: Go glam to the gills: No Swarovski is too shiny and no Giuseppe Zanotti is too high. Men wear Y3 trainers and tailored blazers over graphic tees.
P.S. Put on clean socks if you’re going to a local’s house—you’ll leave your shoes at the door.
EGYPT
At a meeting: A long-sleeved ?button-down with slacks is acceptable for all but the most formal meetings. You might spot an older lawyer or professor wearing a tie, but ties and sport coats are almost obsolete. Women, on the other hand, always wear jackets over high-necked shells and loose pants.
On the street: Shorts are a faux pas unless you’re hitting the greens or playing squash at a sports club, and even then they’re wrong for women, who are better off in pants or long skirts (ankle-length jeans and khaki cargo styles are popular). Men always layer undershirts beneath polos, even on warm desert days.
At a party: It would be hard to underdress. Men are never turned away for wearing a smart shirt and slacks, even if others are wearing full suits. For women, a shoulder-covering black sheath is safe and sophisticated.
P.S. About 90 percent of Egyptian women cover their heads, but tourists aren’t expected to.
IRAN
At a meeting: Men wear crisp Italian suits and shined shoes. A chador (hooded floor-length cloak) is needed for a woman meeting a clerical group, but for most gatherings, she should slip on a black manteau (a loose coatlike garment), low closed-toe pumps, and an Iranian hijab. Locally bought products drape best and look contextually refined.
On the street: Special police enforce the Islamic dress code, which requires women (non-Muslims included) to be covered from head to toe. The working classes wear full-length black chadors, but a manteau over jeans is an acceptable alternative. Hijabs are often patterned or pinned with pretty brooches. Makeup should be minimal, and while bright lipstick isn’t allowed, flawless eyebrows are an absolute must.
At a party: Wear whatever you want under your outer cloak; ?the young remove their voluminous robes to show off tight jeans and strappy stilettos at friends’ informal gatherings. Older intellectuals conceal elegant suits under their cloaks.
P.S. They’re credited with creating the first perfume, so it’s no surprise that the Iranians are scent savvy: Although women might be cloaked, they’re often doused in glam, sexy fragrances like Azzaro’s vetiver and pimento tonics.
ISRAEL
At a meeting: Israelis take pride in dressing down: Jeans are more common than jackets and ties, and business formal often means no more than a button-down and khaki pants. For women, skirts are better than trousers for meetings with religious colleagues. But in liberal Tel Aviv, anything goes—particularly trendy dresses from boutiques on Dizengoff and Shenkin streets.
On the street: It’s South Beach style in resorty Eilat and Tel Aviv, where cotton shorts and tank tops are de rigueur during the hot summer months. Everywhere in Israel is fairly casual, but Jerusalem, Galilee, and Tiberias get colder winters and call for more conservative dress. In these places, long skirts are ideal for women, and everyone covers up at Jewish and Christian religious sites, with high necks and long sleeves.
At a party: Secular celebrations call for jeans and nice tops; for religious ceremonies or weddings, cover past the elbows and below the knees.
P.S. Far from frumpy, Israel’s a burgeoning fashion hub: Lanvin’s Alber Elbaz and designer Yigal Azroel hail from the Holy Land.
JORDAN
At a meeting: Suits and shoes should be simple, and dresses work for women provided they’re shin-length and sleeved. Big hair is not for the Jordanian boardroom: Tie long locks into chignons and keep short dos neat. The “Hillary Clinton look” is a woman’s best bet, according to John Shoup, author of Culture and Customs of Jordan.
On the street: Rich red embroidery is popular, so Western women can don detailed tunics over loose trousers (many local women wear pants) or black cotton dresses embellished with traditional needlework. Men wear khakis and collared shirts.
At a party: King Abdullah II is a sartorial guide; he’s almost always dressed in navy suits for nighttime (gray for daytime) and a light-colored silk tie. Queen Rania set a haute new tone by sporting Lanvin, Dior, and Elie Saab to evening affairs, but the first lady covers her shoulders and legs (with couture) when she’s out in Amman.
P.S. The veil’s a release of sorts for trendy young women, who can show a little more skin as long as the head is covered.
LEBANON
At a meeting: Newscasters like Rima Maktabi set female fashion mores, making straight skirts, fuchsia jackets, and big hair (never a ponytail) the look for any sort of meeting. Men favor two-button Hugo Boss in navy or black.
On the street: Beirut is fashion-forward, but the city’s poor Shiite majority dictates a conservative look. Since the stylish set don’t do much walking, women shuttle around in Audis wearing light dresses or caftans. Men are ostentatious in Hermès belts and loafers, and carry crisp bills folded into platinum money clips. Be warned that such liberal style won’t fly outside the capital city.
At a party: Anything goes on weekend nights in the nightclub district of Ashrafieh, but fancier parties demand draped, flowing gowns by local designers like Rabih Kayrouz and Krikor Jabotian.
P.S. Women express themselves through their accessories, which are often over-the-top: bright scarves, gold bangles, glittery clutches, and neon satchels from local favorite Sarah’s Bag (100 Liban St.; 961-1-575-585).
MOROCCO
At a meeting: Casual Friday hasn’t arrived in these parts—women and men are invariably formal in suits.
On the street: “You see styles of the twelfth century and modern urban wear” when strolling down any Moroccan street, says Joel Zack of Heritage Tours Private Travel. Some women still wear head scarves (they’re no longer required for Muslim girls), but Zara jeans and trendy tops are the popular style du jour.
At a party: Hand-piped tunics, bright floor-length djellabas, and elaborate caftans outfit crowds of locals and émigrés who gather in ornate riads. French expats come in a chic Little Black Dress (LBD), and cover up en route with a light cotton shawl.
P.S. Moroccans are particularly averse to shorts and everything Lycra (which, in our opinion, should be universally shunned).
SYRIA
At a meeting: A suit for men; women wear smart skirt ensembles (never trousers or slacks).
On the street: Although tight jeans and bare midriffs aren’t unusual in hip Damascene hoods like Salahiya, you’ll have to search hard to find a Syrian woman over 40 wearing pants. Older women wrap the head in a hijab—or an Hermès scarf—when shopping in marketplaces downtown, although this isn’t required of tourists. Do remain respectful by covering arms and legs before going out.
At a party: Syrian socialites idolize First Lady Asma Assad, the London-raised Deutsche Bank alum who beat out Carla Bruni to become French Elle‘s best-dressed political lady in 2008. Assad loves an LBD or a curvy suit by Valentino or Chanel. Her husband, President Bashar al-Assad, is always perfectly pressed in a two-button wool ensemble.
P.S. Don’t worry about bringing a covering to tour a religious site: If a mosque requires women to wear abayas—which leave only face, feet, and hands exposed—it provides the wrap at the door.

ASIA
You’ll need a myriad of outfit options for a transcontinental Asian trek. Miniskirts and monochrome black are safe bets from Jakarta to Japan, but women in India and Pakistan cover their legs and sport vibrant, rich hues. In fact, very few styles would work in every country: Flip-flops, for instance, are trendy in Singapore, verboten in China, and, in Indonesia, acceptable only for shower wear. Here’s how to prep before you pack.

CHINA
At a meeting: Twenty years ago, “Chinese fashion” meant dark Mao pantsuit uniforms; today, work clothes are still homogenous suits and ties, even on the hottest summer days. Businesswomen go without makeup and jewelry, and everyone shies away from conspicuous consumption to show they’re focused on the business at hand.
On the street: Arms, chest, and back should be covered, but “China is not puritanical,” says Qin Herzberg, co-author of China Survival Guide: How to Avoid Travel Troubles and Mortifying Mishaps. “Dressing unconventionally won’t offend anyone. It’s a question of presenting oneself in the best light.” Although Chinese women wear conservative cuts, shirts are sometimes transparent, leaving the bra in full view.
At a party: Exaggerated styles and silhouettes by Comme des Garçons, Martin Margiela, and Yohji Yamamoto are currently hot (in a monochromatic palette, of course).
P.S. “Chinese women would be loath to wear any footwear without straps, because it shows too much of the foot,” says Herzberg. “The style also reminds them of flip-flops, which are seen as cheap.”

INDIA
At a meeting: Hillary Clinton, you’re in luck—pantsuits are okay anywhere on the Indian Subcontinent; choose cotton or linen in summer, and accessorize with a colored scarf or dangly earrings to keep up with vividly dressed locals, who wear bold diaphanous saris to boardrooms in Bangalore and Mumbai. (Men, don’t be afraid to wear color, too—you certainly won’t feel out of place).
On the street: Unless you’re here to visit a Bollywood star, designer clothes aren’t right for Indian city streets. A sari won’t work, either: “Western women look silly because they can’t wrap or tie it right,” says Barbara Crossette, author of India: Old Civilization in a New World. Instead, wear drawstring pants, leather toe sandals, and a nice cotton tee. Men can go super-comfy in a kurta, or knee-length tunic, usually worn with cotton or linen bottoms; the women’s version is called a kameez.
At a party: Since beautiful silk is readily available, women commission local seamstresses to make sleek knee-length tunics with side slits and legging-like pants worn bunched at the ankles. But your jewels are what you’ll really be judged by: “Indians have their jewelry made to order; no one buys off the shelf,” Crossette says. Men wear short-sleeved button-downs, slacks, and loafers.
P.S. Sandals are easiest when touring, since you can slip them off quickly before entering temples. And a word to the wise: Ankle bracelets are out.

INDONESIA
At a meeting: ”I’ve never seen a tie in Indonesia,” says Virginia Gorlinski, a Northwestern University music professor who has traveled to the country dozens of times. Modesty’s more important to Indonesian moguls, who wear batik button-downs with khaki pants and closed shoes. Women sport ponytails, plain dresses, long sleeves, lipstick, and blush, and leave any notable jewelry at home.
On the street: Flip-flops? “They’re what you wear in the bathroom,” Gorlinski says. “Never out in town.” Pair heel-covering sandals (like gladiators), sneakers, or ballet flats with Levi’s or Lee jeans—American denim is revered in Jakarta and its surrounds. Wear some kind of collar (a polo shirt, perhaps) as a sign of respect.
At a party: Men swap jeans for khakis and sneakers for loafers. Cotton’s not formal enough to wear out at night; to Indonesians, synthetics hang best and are worn in vibrant prints. Because the typical man measures five feet two inches (women average four feet ten inches), you needn’t bother packing heels.
P.S. In rural areas, naked bathing’s a bad idea, no matter how private your stretch of the river feels. Some locals are so modest that they don’t even strip down in their own bathrooms.

JAPAN
At a meeting: “The Japanese word for dress shirt, wai shatsu, comes from the English for ‘white shirt,’ which gives you an idea of the range of colors worn at work,” says Dan Rosen, professor at Tokyo’s Chuo Law School, who recommends basic black suits. In 2005, the government launched a Cool Biz initiative meant to lower AC costs by encouraging lighter work attire; it’s been met with fierce resistance by the jacket-and-tie-loving Japanese working class.
On the street: For Tokyo youth, nothing’s too studied or over-the-top, so the laissez-faire American norm is seen as slovenly. Women should wear heels, makeup, and a dose of frills, and men must be clean shaven and must spend time on their hair.
At a party: Agnès B. and Louis Vuitton are the easiest icebreakers, since the Japanese love labels—along with the stylish shapes by local designers like Yohji Yamamoto. No sweat suits, please!
P.S. Planning to shop here? Note that Japanese sizes run significantly smaller than those in the States. If you wear a medium in the United States, a Japanese XL might be a squeeze.

PAKISTAN
At a meeting: Tunics, fitted jackets, and even low-cut (but not décolletage) blouses work for women, who must always cover their legs—preferably with loose pants. Men in corporate fields like banking wear ties (and jackets for real conference room affairs), but media types don’t.
On the street: Loose jeans and a tunic-like top (shirts should reach the upper thigh) make for perfect daywear when layered with a bright embroidered scarf. In the south, men and women wear vibrant colors and breezy cotton layers. The country’s northern half is cooler and requires heavier, darker duds. No shorts, tank tops, or above-the-knee skirts.
At a party: It’s culturally atypical to walk to events at night, so you can wear whatever you’d like to private parties: Bright young things don body-hugging Hervé Léger dresses and strappy stilettos, and their male counterparts put on T-shirts and Gucci loafers. At Karachi’s plethora of glitzy charity balls, style runs the gamut from Eastern saris to fancy Western frocks. Women wear gold bangles, large earrings, and glittery nose studs.
P.S. Makeup’s vital for girls; heavy kohl is worn around the eyes.

SINGAPORE
At a meeting: You wouldn’t think so, given Singapore’s rules—happy reputation, but business meetings are actually super casual here (well, dresswise at least). Jackets aren’t required, ties are rare, and both sexes wear oxfords and slacks. For women, trendy peg-leg pants are often permissible.
On the street: Those in their 20s and 30s strut in tank tops, hot pants (board shorts for boys), and flip-flops. A polo shirt by Fred Perry or Ralph Lauren is a popular option, as well as anything from casual mass-market stores.
At a party: ”A Marni dress with Giuseppe Zanotti sandals for house parties,” says Aun Koh, director of Singapore-based Ate Consulting. Brands are important to upper&-class dames, who competitively collect Hermès bags. Men wear designer jeans from the likes of G–Star Raw and Dr. Denim.
P.S. Hems are worn high at every age—get your gams ready.

EUROPE
If there’s one hard and fast sartorial rule in Europe, it’s this: Shabby is never chic. And no one, whether in London or Leipzig, likes the American travel-comfort gear of clunky sneakers and shapeless skirts. That having been said, style varies wildly from country to country. The mullets that will make you a star in Moscow won’t fly in peg-leg-trousers-crazed London or sleek Paris. So how should you dress? Just stay simple, look to the locals, and follow a few basic rules.

FRANCE
At a meeting: Dark, tailored, unflashy suits by Dior Homme or Jil Sander for both women and men (who need not wear ties).
On the street: Avoid bright colors—even kids’ clothes come mainly in cream, navy, gray, and brown—and take care to shun the plethora of other offenses: pleated chinos, walking shorts, sport sandals, baseball caps, golf attire, loud logos, sneakers, T-shirts, and sexy clothes. “In France, it’s always best to keep things simple, neutral, and classic rather than too trendy,” says Miles Socha, European editor for Women’s Wear Daily.
At a party: On a normal night out, overdressing’s okay, but if it’s black-tie, underdress: Men should wear business suits sans ties, women should slip on cocktail dresses, and for a normal night out, femmes should keep it simple, silky, and black.
P.S. ”One’s shoes and belt should always match,” advises François Delahaye, former general manager at Paris’s legendary Plaza Athélnée. But, he adds, a man’s tie should never mirror his silk pocket square.

GERMANY
At a meeting: German men wear the tweedy jackets you’d expect, while female professionals—who hold only 15 percent of management positions—strive to be staid in dark suits, discreet jewelry, and loaferlike shoes.
On the street: Germans run the gamut from wildly fashionable to definitively frumpy—with an intellectual in-between group that pairs their sack dresses with edgy haircuts and bold jewelry. Although nothing’s verboten, the perpetual cold dictates sensible coats, which, for the stylish, are asymmetrically zippered or bat-sleeved and made of wool.
At a party: ”Restrained flash” is the ideal, according to Jenny White, associate professor of anthropology at Boston University, and Henrik Vibskov’s bias-cut patterns are the perfect approach for both sexes. At a hipster shindig, women add an eclectic twist with Buddy Holly glasses and colored tights.
P.S. Anything shabby will be noticed; people will cluck at a scuffed shoe and gape unrestrainedly at a hanging hem or soiled shirt.

GREECE
At a meeting: Men, you may never look as good as a Greek does in a suit, pressed cotton shirt, and Hermès tie, but you might as well try. Women, forego glitz and gold buttons for dark Armani suits, strappy heels, and smart leather bags.
On the street: Jackie O’s legacy lives on in the legions of Greek women wearing linen trousers, nice tees, sweaters tied around the shoulders, and oversized shades. Both women and men “aim to look like a Gap ad,” says Olga Merck Davidson, a Brandeis College professor who spends part of her year in Greece. Mr. Onassis has his own followers, who wear jeans and Ralph Lauren shirts, sleeves rolled to the elbow.
At a party: Clothes are secondary to jewelry, especially the chunky, dark-gold baubles and bangles worn by so many Greek women. If you can look past the sparkle, you’ll find skirts, tailored to mid-thigh, under fitted jackets. Scentwise, women strive to smell like rosemary, not like roses: They’ll only use organic products (such as the locally made Korres). Men wear dark pants and starched shirts.
P.S. No baseball caps, no Birkenstocks, no billowy fake-hippie skirts. Ever.

ITALY
At a meeting: While Italians can pull off anything at work—from Bermuda shorts to bustiers—Americans should avoid such sartorial sprezzatura (on us it doesn’t look cool, it looks crazy). Still, shirts can be low-cut and vibrantly hued; men’s suits must be perfectly tailored.
On the street: Young people pair tight Dolce & Gabbana tops with Diesel jeans, while sophisticates sport slim three-piece suits, always matched with the right hat or narrow knit tie.
At a party: A woman won’t leave the house without her Dolce & Gabbana dress and heels (four–inch minimum). Men look good in navy suit jackets with blue shirts buttoned all the way up.
P.S. Think brands, brands, brands—and preferably Italian: Versace, Gucci, Cavalli, or Armani.

RUSSIA
At a meeting: You’d be hard-pressed to get hems higher or necklines lower than those of Muscovite businesswomen. While Americans shouldn’t try to keep up, they’re expected to spend time on their hair and makeup. Men accessorize mullets (a trend!) with double-breasted suits, preferably pin-striped.
On the street: Scanty outfits require tights and fur coats during frigid Russian winters; men flash as much Dolce, Versace, and Armani as possible, along with acid-washed Italian jeans. Sneakers draw incredulous stares.
At a party: ”The average Russian woman has higher cheekbones and longer legs,” says Peter Savodnik, a Russian-based journalist. You can catch up with stilettos (worn 24/7) and local fave Stella McCartney. Men have it much easier, Savodnik says: “Brush your teeth, use some product, tie your shoes, don’t make eye contact with cops, and everything will be fine.”
P.S. ”Super Euro cologne—and especially anything Armani—is the height of hip; the more the better,” says Savodnik.

TURKEY
At a meeting: Neither men nor women should go without manicures, since Turks are known for being perfectly groomed. Hair should be trimmed, suits fitted (jackets and pants need not match), button-downs left open and worn without undershirts peeking through. Tailoring is a primary indicator of class, so no matter how cheap the suit, it should fit well.
On the street: ”I once heard that a woman had trouble getting a tea-man to serve her because she dressed like a frumpy housewife,” says White. So dressing down is not an option. Men and women cultivate a studied casual look in designer jeans, Tod’s loafers, and ironed high-end T-;shirts (like James Perse)—never shorts.
At a party: Visible brand names are seen as cheap and low-class. Truly chic women wear Matthew Williamson florals rather than triangle-stamped Prada, and accessorize with one large statement bauble, like a giant cocktail ring by Turkish born Sevan Biçakçi. Hair is tightly pulled back. Men wear open shirts under light jackets with dark pants (or vice versa).
P.S. “Never wear a long raincoat,” White says. “Even when it’s pouring, a secular Turk will wear a short coat so as not to be mistaken for a conservative Islamist.”

UNITED KINGDOM
At a meeting: The downtown banking-and-newspaper bustle calls for a suit and tie (no tie on Fridays), but you’ll be laughed out of Soho or Kensington ad agencies in the same getup: There, cool execs don a uniform of the newest Nikes and skinny jeans.
On the street: Quirky Kate Mossinspired London girls throw on a high-low mix of Top Shop and Temperley; they’re freer and less polished than other city style–setters. Men wear peg-leg trousers in primary colors with plaid shirts or tees. Don’t opt for chinos and polos—the preppy look won’t fly in London. At a party: Skinny jeans take a girl or boy from meetings to a cutesy mews (switch from heels to Chuck Taylors) to a Shoreditch pub crawl (back to heels).
P.S. Wellies might be as British as it gets, but they’re really country wear. Do take them off if you’re lounging indoors.

Etiquette 101: Dress Codes from Condé Nast Traveler on Concierge.com

The Andaman Islands, closed to foreigners until 1995, are the ultimate tropical mystery in that cabinet of wonders called India. Tony Perrottet loses himself in a place of unearthly perfection, where crabs climb trees, elephants swim, and man has barely left his mark

“Just don’t swim in front of him,” whispered Sanjit Biswas, a worker at the jungle lodge where I was staying in the Andaman Islands. “That can spook him.” My guide from Bangalore nodded in solemn agreement. “Rajan’s a little bit fussy. Sometimes he just won’t go in, and nobody can really force him.”

Okay, I thought, as I tiptoed through the shallows of Beach No. 7 to meet my monstrous swimming buddy. No sudden moves or I could be squashed like a chapati.

Rajan finished off a pile of bananas and thudded down to the gently lapping waterline. His mahout, a wiry villager named Nasru, stepped up onto one tusk and slipped over his back as casually as if he were hopping on a bicycle. As for me, I still hovered uncertainly. I mean, swimming with a twelve-thousand-pound pachyderm is a bit more ambitious than cavorting with a dolphin in Florida. What if he panicked? Turns out I shouldn’t have worried; Rajan was more comfortable in the water than I was.

The story of the swimming elephant of the Andamans has all the elements of a modern fairy tale. Rajan was first brought from mainland India as a youngster in the 1970s to work for local logging companies, and he spent a grueling thirty years hauling felled trees through the jungle—underfed, overworked, and underpaid, not unlike his human co-workers. At the time, there were some two hundred elephants on the archipelago, and the only way companies could move them between islands, once the hardwood trees had been extracted, was to have them swim. Then, in 2002, the Indian Supreme Court banned logging in the Andamans to protect the archipelago’s biological diversity.

Most of the elephants were shipped back to the mainland to labor at Hindu temples. But one lucky beast, Rajan, whose rich owner was in no hurry to sell, was left on Havelock Island in the care of his old mahout. There he enjoyed an enviable life, spending his time grazing, dozing, and, about once a week, swimming in the sea, an activity that he gave every indication of enjoying immensely. The swimming elephant became Havelock’s unofficial mascot and a celebrity among the few travelers who made it here. But in 2006, his owner received a lavish offer from a temple in Kerala—about $65,000—and Rajan faced a return to a harsh, often cruel work regime. So the owners of a small jungle lodge, Barefoot at Havelock, put out an Internet appeal to former guests and raised the cash to buy Rajan outright, so he could enjoy his old age on Beach No. 7.

Luckily, the morning I swam with him, the Indian Ocean was like a warm bath, just the way Rajan—and I—like it. I first treaded water a few feet away, watching him step like a delicate matron into the sea. He raised his trunk to breathe as if it were a giant snorkel, and his mahout slid off his back and swam alongside him; soon Rajan was pedaling away with his feet, gliding through the deep blue with unexpected ease. In my goggles and fins, I drifted alongside, admiring Rajan’s graceful, slow-motion movements, and at one stage brushed my palm along his wrinkled flanks. For one unforgettable stretch, I flippered downward and swam beneath Rajan, watching him from below; weightless and drifting in silence, I had the strange sensation that we were flying.

I’d already learned that the Andamans were insanely exotic; but this was taking things to a new level, more like a Hindu fantasy—Babar gone Bollywood.

I should hardly have been surprised by dreamlike experiences in the Andaman Islands, given that the archipelago has always been the least-known, least-populated, and least-visited corner of that sprawling cabinet of wonders, India.

Few places on earth have been so shrouded in obscurity. For centuries, these 550 specks of jungle in the Bay of Bengal were ranked alongside Zanzibar, Pago Pago, and Timbuktu as the ultimate in tropical mystery. Sailors told fantastical tales about the islands’ tiny, black-skinned “cannibals” who would butcher shipwrecked crews—Marco Polo, with his usual flourish, insisted that the natives had “heads like dogs, and teeth and eyes likewise”—and the Andamans’ image hardly improved in 1858, when they were finally settled by the British as a brutal prison colony. The new arrivals were terrified when they encountered the islands’ Stone Age inhabitants, who were related to African Pygmies and lived in four tribal groups, the Great Andamanese, the Onge, the Jarawa, and the Sentinelese. (Anthropologists surmise that they arrived on foot from Africa sixty thousand years ago and were cut off when the land bridge flooded after the last ice age.) The only news that leaked out of the islands occurred when a visiting British viceroy of India was murdered by a prisoner while strolling along the docks. It’s no wonder that the Andamans’ sole appearance in world literature was in Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1890 Sherlock Holmes thriller Sign of the Four, in which a one-legged convict, having clubbed a guard to death with his false leg, escapes from the prison and stalks Londoners in the company of a murderous, dart-blowing “savage” with gnashing yellow fangs.

The veil of mystery has hardly lifted in the generations since. It didn’t help that, after independence, the Indian government kept a tight seal on the strategically sensitive frontier. Non-Indians were not permitted to explore the Andamans at all until 1995, and even today, foreign nationals are allowed to visit only some thirty-eight of the islands.

And yet in the last few years, word is finally leaking out about the Andamans’ unearthly perfection. The centuries of isolation present us with a rare time capsule. Today, fully ninety percent of the Andaman Islands’ land is protected as national park or as tribal reserve for the native inhabitants. The beaches are pristine and the diving spectacular, and the jungle shudders with wildlife—including Andaman cobras, twenty-foot saltwater crocodiles, and such endemic oddities as emerald geckos and the world’s largest crab, the gigantic robber crab, which can climb palm trees, knock down coconuts, and crack them open for the milk. As yet, there are no grand tourist developments, only modest hotels, bamboo huts, and thatched-roof cottage “resorts.”

Even so, this idyllic quality is under growing threat. Only eleven of the islands are inhabited, but since Indian independence in 1947, these have been flooded with immigrants, mostly Bengali refugees from Bangladesh, swamping the descendants of the original settlers and putting the protected reserves at risk. The other great threat, of course, is tourism. The influx was delayed by the tragic 2004 tsunami, which damaged many of the islands (although miraculously caused relatively little loss of life). But visitor numbers have tripled since before the disaster and continue to grow.

To me, all this made the Andamans an irresistible prospect. I wanted to see for myself whether this forgotten patch of tropical paradise was going to survive its impending popularity. And I had another, more historical agenda: to untangle the confused reports about the four tribal groups, who have suffered from 150 years of disastrous colonial contact. The Great Andamanese had already been pushed to the edge of extinction. Would the Onge, the Jarawa, and the Sentinelese survive the twenty-first century?

I was poring over antique photographs of the “tribals” as they are referred to by locals, as I flew toward the only airport on the Andamans, Port Blair, and the pilot banked over a tiny, mango-shaped island called North Sentinel: Its dense forests are home to the Sentinelese, who, according to the London-based advocacy group Survival International, are the most isolated tribe on the planet today. Only a hundred or so hunter-gatherers live here, having always violently rejected any contact from the outside world.

After the 2004 tsunami, the Indian government sent a helicopter to check if they needed help. As the helicopter hovered, a Sentinelese warrior, naked except for bark around his midriff, ran onto the beach with bow drawn, ready to shoot a six-foot arrow.

But I had to start my trip to the Andamans through the old colonial capital, Port Blair, which drifted on for decades as one of the loneliest outposts of the Empire. Today, most foreign travelers don’t look beyond the town’s frayed exterior, with its chaotic parade of auto-rickshaws plying shabby provincial streets. But to Indians, Port Blair is saturated with the history of the independence struggle against the British, and has become a pilgrimage site as revered as, say, Concord is for Americans. “The Andamans have a mythological status,” explained Rudrangshu Mukherjee, an Indian journalist I had met in Calcutta. “In the early 1900s, those who chose to resist the British with violence were either sentenced to death by hanging or deported to Port Blair for life imprisonment. Today, these men would be called terrorists. Our nationalist historians call them armed revolutionaries.”

The sacred site is the Cellular Jail. This colonial Guantànamo, with seven splayed legs like a starfish, was built in 1906 as a rare example of the Panopticon, a prison system where a single warder on each floor could monitor hundreds of prisoners at once by looking down each of the seven long corridors. It was closed in 1945, and four wings collapsed in a 1941 earthquake, but the remains have been carefully restored, with the cruelty of the British as the prime exhibit. I walked past an eternal flame to a life-size model of a prisoner tied to the triangle for whipping. Indian tourists inspected the gallows, where all prisoners were forced to watch executions. And room after room was filled with snapshots of men, like Baba Bhan Singh, who may be obscure to the rest of the world but are beloved heroes and martyrs here.

The next afternoon, I was sunning myself on the roof of a public ferry as it skimmed across shallow reefs. By the time we reached Havelock Island three hours later, the forlorn clutter of Port Blair was no more than a distant memory. At the arrival jetty, just a few makeshift teahouses sat in the shade of coconut palms. A Bengali woman strolled past in a purple sari with a blue umbrella, while two cheery schoolboys in uniforms and neatly parted black hair skipped by holding hands.

The modern world was definitely receding fast.

Since access was opened in 1995, Havelock Island has become the favorite goal for travelers to the Andamans: It’s where the most alluring elements of the archipelago are condensed into a sweet tropical cocktail of coral, sand, and rain forest. In the 1800s, it was roamed by the fierce Great Andamanese, who picked off stray convicts until the British forcibly removed them; it then remained uninhabited until the 1960s, when logging camps were set up around the coast. When villages sprang up on the same sites, they simply stuck with the numbers that once identified the camps, from No. 1 to No. 7.

Tourism on Havelock is still homespun, small-scale, and personal, like an Indian version of Hemingway’s Key West. This became obvious when I met Susheel Dixit, the intense forty-six-year-old who founded the tiny jungle lodge Barefoot in 1996. As we drove along the one-lane road to the west side of the island, dodging roosters and crabs, Susheel explained how business had been rather slow until 2004, when Time magazine suddenly named Beach No. 7 the best in Asia. “I think people were amazed,” he said with a laugh. “They looked at the magazine and thought, Where the bloody hell are the Andamans?”

To me, Barefoot still felt like a lost colony of shipwrecked sailors, with eighteen thatched-roof cabins in the forest. Incense sticks were burning by the pathways; leaves fell constantly from the trees, like snow. I strolled the two minutes to Beach No. 7 (which has officially received the new name of Radhanagar, although nobody uses it) to find out for myself what perfection looks like. The vines parted to reveal a mile-long crescent of sand, unmarred by even a pebble underfoot. The water was crystal clear. Jungle poured like a tidal wave from the hills behind. I had to admit, you couldn’t come up with a more flawless stretch if it was computer-generated. It was also gloriously empty. At midday, there were only a few swimmers— dozen Indians, fully clothed, as is their wont, standing in water up to their waists, and as many Europeans, near-naked, lolling on the sand.

In this isolated dreamscape, even the simplest activity results in bizarre scenes. I went to dinner at the island’s best restaurant, an open pavilion which has since closed, and cautiously ordered a glass of Indian champagne. (Called, grandly, Marquise de Pompadour, it is made in Maharashtra and should have on its label, nowhere near as bad as you’d think.) Suddenly the chef ran in and excitedly declared, “There’s a turtle nesting on the beach!” The few guests immediately dashed along the starlit sands to watch from a distance as a giant leatherback dug her nest. Later, when I asked Julio, the restaurant’s maître d’, for the bathroom, he pointed to the dark bushes.

“But you take a torch,” he said, grinning. “Snakes!”

I thought he was joking until the next afternoon at Barefoot when, a stone’s throw from my room, I was summoned by Susheel to watch a fifteen-foot king cobra devour a twelve-foot krait snake. Eyeing me suspiciously, the cobra worked its lethal jaws in a machinelike rhythm, then plowed into the jungle to digest in private.

And yet, pristine as Havelock was, there were ominous signs for the future. The five thousand immigrant farmers continue to clear land for paddies for their favorite crop, rice. Backpacker hostels are sprouting on the west coast. Garbage disposal is the number one problem, with piles of refuse simply dumped near the jetty. Signs in the villages implore now! try to do something for nature or face disaster, to no avail. With the Indian government offering no help, Susheel recently bought a plastic compressor himself, which will recycle bags and bottles into tiny pellets that can be used in road construction, and is planning an incentive program to get settlers involved. “I feel responsible,” he said. “I was the one who really brought the outside world here.”

To show me the Andamans he grew up with, Susheel offered to take me on a three-day camping trip to the uninhabited islands north of Havelock. At dawn, our dunghi, or motorized dugout canoe, slipped from the jetty onto a glassy sea, manned by five Karen tribesmen, originally brought from Burma to the Andamans by the British for their seamanship skills. I sat in the prow and allowed myself a modest Heart of Darkness moment as I disappeared into the tropics. We passed Strait Island, where the last remnants of the Great Andamanese were resettled by the Indian government in 1970 to stop them succumbing to alcohol and despair. The population had been five thousand in the mid-nineteenth century, but war and disease have left only about fifty survivors today. The same sorry tale was repeated for the Onge tribe on Little Andaman, whose numbers have collapsed from more than six hundred in 1911 to about a hundred today. Although half of their island is a tribal reserve, Bengali immigrants now outnumber them there 120 to one.

Camping gave me a sense, however remote, of what life must have been like before the British gunboats arrived. For two days, I indulged in the Crusoe island fantasy, swimming, basking, and eating fish roasted on open fires. We camped behind the beach, sipping Kingfisher beers as hermit crabs sidled around our feet. Hungry bats dropped fruit seeds onto our tarpaulin, making regular thuds, while Susheel told stories from his childhood in Port Blair, when he and friends would take boats to wrecked ships to see what they could salvage before the hulls were sucked under the waves.

“What else should we do?” he said, laughing. “There was no TV!”

At dawn, I was awakened by the Karen patriarch, Norman, who handed me a glass of chai. It was then that I found my perfect moment. I set off into the bay in a kayak as the sun erupted in a pink ball from the horizon and bird calls echoed from the foliage. Suddenly the water was boiling around me—hundreds of tiny fish were leaping out of the waves. Just as quickly, the frenzy subsided and I was left alone, bobbing in silence.

It may not have been the ineffable inner peace described by the sadhus, but it was as close as I may get in this lifetime.

Seductive as all this solitude was, the human dramas on the Andamans were too compelling to ignore. Above all, I had to know what had become of the Jarawa, whose violent collision with the outside world began only in the 1970s. Ever since British days, the three-hundred-strong tribe had been hostile to intruders: They slipped through the jungle like ghosts, wearing nothing but pieces of red bark around their waists, hunting wild boar and gathering honey. Nobody even understood a word of their language. But in a flourish of misguided development, the Indian government in 1971 decided to build a road along the border of the Jarawa’s remote forest reserve. Called the Andaman Trunk Road, it pushed frightened settlers into direct contact with the tribe, with predictably disastrous results. The Jarawa sabotaged the road’s construction. They ambushed and killed workers and poachers and harassed the Indian “bush police.” But they were unable to halt it. For the next twenty years, an undeclared war simmered between tribals and settlers along the route, while Indian anthropologists tried to lure the Jarawa out of the jungle and onto settlements, without success. Some tribe members began to trade honey for tobacco, sunglasses, or red cloth, a color they loved, but then grew more aggressive: On several occasions, they even held up passenger buses with bows and arrows, demanding cookies. This volatile situation changed in 1996, when a young Jarawa known as En Mei was found with a broken leg and taken to Port Blair, where he spent five months in the hospital; the man overcame his initial terror, and after his return to the forest, led groups of curious young Jarawa out of their homeland. Unfortunately, the effect of the interaction has been anything but benign: Epidemics of measles, influenza, and tuberculosis soon raced through the Jarawa, who had no immunity; their numbers sank to around 250. Stories abounded of corrupt bush policemen bribed by tourists to let them visit the Jarawa and ply them with trinkets in return for posed photographs, and of travel agents offering gawkers jeep tours along the road.

In 2002, the Indian Supreme Court ordered the Trunk Road closed, but the ruling has been brazenly ignored. Several times a day, public buses rumble along the road from Rangat to Port Blair, carrying a mix of settlers and tourists. Along the Jarawa reserve, the buses travel in an armed convoy to ensure that nobody gets out of the vehicles. At least the official policy has become more enlightened: Attempts to lure the tribe from its land have been dropped, and the emphasis is now on protection. The Jarawa can leave their reserve—it’s not a prison—but outsiders are forbidden to enter.

It’s not the most comfortable ride. I perched on the edge of a bench in a packed, steaming-hot bus, as kids wailed and Hindi music blared. After a bone-rattling journey along a narrow, potholed road and two ferry crossings through croc-infested mangroves, the driver stopped at a military checkpoint where rusty signs warned against dealing with the Jarawa (and particularly against taking photos). Then our “armed escort” got on board—an elderly bush policeman in a beret and frayed khakis, nursing a .303 rifle that looked World War II vintage. We didn’t have far to go before the Jarawa appeared—first a trio of women, naked except for fringes of red string around their waists, standing in the road and staring at the oncoming bus. They slowly moved off while the driver shouted curses in Hindi and the Indian passengers roared with laughter and excitement. This unedifying scene—a small group of Jarawa casually blocking the road, then slowly moving out of the way of our cursing convoy—was repeated with minor variations three times along the route. While the passengers found the Jarawa hilarious, I thought they presented us with a perfectly honed example of nonviolent resistance—textbook Gandhi.

Environmentalists are weighing new plans to force the closure of the road, but many in Port Blair believe it may be too late. Some Jarawa are venturing more regularly into settlements, where they trade for processed foods and alcohol. “The damage has been done,” one government official told me off the record. “What happened to the Native Americans and the Maori and the Australian Aborigines is now happening to the Jarawa. Nothing has been learned.” But Sophie Grig of Survival International is more optimistic. “If you talk to people who are working with the Jarawa directly, you find that they are still hunting in the traditional way,” she said. “There is still every chance that, as long as their land is protected, they will remain independent and self-sufficient.”

The last, most resilient of the four tribal groups is the Sentinelese, still living on their tiny island twelve miles west of Port Blair. I couldn’t go even if I wanted to—landing there is illegal and, given that our bacteria are so dangerous, unthinkable—but on my flight back to the mainland, I glimpsed their emerald speck one last time. It was incredible to imagine what was happening beneath that dense jungle canopy: An estimated one hundred Sentinelese are there, living their ancient lifestyle, apparently indifferent to the outside world and so far vigorously resisting all encroachments; their canoes are not stable enough to cross open seas. In the 1960s, some Indian anthropologists did try to make contact by dropping coconuts on the beach, but the islanders drew bows on anyone advancing. Now, thankfully, they are left alone: Once a year, relief workers with binoculars observe them from offshore to make sure there haven’t been any disasters.

But will this be enough? One day, I suppose, curiosity will get the better of them, and some young Sentinelese will invite contact, unaware of the lethal reservoir of disease that has historically decimated other tribes. We can only hope that they will take their time.

The world would be a far less wondrous place without them.

Babar and Me and the Deep Blue Sea from Condé Nast Traveler on Concierge.com

When it comes to cashing in miles, knowing the secrets of how, when and where to search can mean the difference between a decent award and an amazing one.

When it comes to playing the game of miles, knowing how to redeem them and when to search for awards is as important as staying on top of all the promotions that will help you rack up the miles. If you’re lucky, a quick search using the airline’s online booking tool will bring up the award flight you’re looking for, but in many cases, you will need to do some legwork and find the awards you want on your own and then call to book. You’ll likely be charged a booking fee for calling, but it will be well worth it if you get the award you want.

According to our WebFlyer.com poll on award booking, 88.1 percent of those answering the survey said that they have not been able to redeem miles for the award flight they wanted on the dates they wanted to fly. It may be true that there simply is zero availability for your desired flight routes and dates. If you are looking to fly your family of four on a very popular route during a peak travel period, such as from New York to Paris in July, you may spend hours searching and still come up empty-handed. So you need to be realistic about the availability of mileage awards and either travel during less desirable times or to other, less popular cities.
But if you know how to search, there may be more award flights available so don’t give up on your dream trip too early. We’ll look at a few of the ways you can search for awards to circumvent some of the problems inherent to the airlines’ own booking engines, such as not including award inventory on partner flights and failing to search all possible routings.
Unless you are searching for a fairly simple award itinerary and aren’t looking to redeem miles for a multi-city award or an award using partner airlines, booking online via the airline’s website may be adequate. But if you have a complicated itinerary or are booking an international award and your airline’s website does not include partners, you will need to broaden your search and check out some of the other tools available. We will look at some of these tools that can help you find awards on partner airlines when redeeming miles for international flights.
Do Your Research
If you ask any United Mileage Plus frequent flyer where United’s hubs are located, they are likely to tell you: Chicago, San Francisco, Washington Dulles, Denver, Los Angeles and Tokyo. But if you are redeeming Mileage Plus miles, you should also get familiar with the hubs of the Star Alliance carriers. Knowing airline hubs and flight routes is basic information that will help you plot your award flight.
It’s also helpful to consider different connecting cities and figure out possible itineraries that will get you where you want to go. For example, if you want to use US Airways Dividend Miles and fly from Cleveland to Delhi, you’ll need to break down the flight into segments and figure out which Star Alliance airlines can get you to which cities and how. If you simply search for award seats from Cleveland to Delhi and nothing comes up as available, you won’t know where the problem segments are. Maybe there aren’t any seats only from Cleveland to New York, which may result in seats unavailable for your entire itinerary. But you could find alternatives, such as connecting through Detroit, Chicago or Toronto. The online booking tools and customer service agents will search for awards, but they won’t search for every possible routing on every single partner airline. By investing some time and effort in searching for award seats yourself and looking segment by segment, a response of “sorry, no seats available” can turn into a successful award trip with some creative connections and routings.
Go Long
When breaking down an award trip, it’s a good idea to search for the longest segment first and then try to secure seats on the shorter flights. In the example listed above, instead of searching for flights from Cleveland, we would start by looking for transcontinental flights from Star Alliance gateway cities, such as New York, Toronto or Chicago. For example, Continental Airlines flies direct from New York to Delhi, but if there aren’t any seats available on the direct flight, you can search for alternate routings that connect in Europe. Continental Airlines flies from New York to Frankfurt and then Lufthansa flies from Frankfurt to Delhi. Or you could fly on Turkish Airlines from Frankfurt to Delhi with a connection in Istanbul. Another possible option is to consider Air Canada, which also flies from Toronto to Frankfurt. The list of options, while not endless, is certainly long, but once you know who flies where and how, you can explore possible connections and put together an itinerary based on availability.
The airlines’ award booking tools will generally look at how to get you from point A to point B with the fewest connections and the most direct routing, which most people prefer. But if award seats are sold out, you can consider alternate airports that a customer service agent or award search engine may not search. A frequent flyer we talked to was booking a flight from Dallas to Buenos Aires and was told by the AAdvantage customer service agent that there were no award flights available on that route on the days he wanted to fly. But he’d already researched the flight and had found availability from Dallas to New York JFK and from JFK to Buenos Aires. He requested the agent check flights connecting in JFK and “After a few minutes of holding time, she came back and said, ‘Sir, you were absolutely right, you can fly DFW-JFK-EZE on that day.’” The award booking tools available to members and even those available to customer service agents aren’t perfect. Searching segment by segment can turn up award flights that simply won’t show up any other way.
Using Online Award Booking Tools
According to an informal poll we conducted, the majority of frequent flyers prefer to book award flights online, if possible, and one of their biggest frustrations when booking award tickets is award booking websites that don’t work or don’t allow you to book partner award flights. The airlines’ websites vary widely in their degree of usefulness. They can be a good place to start your search, but if your flight itinerary will include partner airlines, in many cases they won’t be very helpful and you will need to either search for awards using another website or by calling the airline and hoping a knowledgeable and helpful customer service agent picks up the phone. Instead of leaving your award trip in the hands of someone who may not care as much as you do about your itinerary, there are resources available to help you find award seats on your own before you make that call. We look at some of those resources and give advice on the best tools for members who participate in one of the three global alliances: oneworld, SkyTeam and Star Alliance.
Oneworld ( I admit I am a AA Dedicated Flyer) It has worked for me for ever!
When redeeming American AAdvantage miles at AA.com, the online booking calendar will only search for flights on American Airlines. To find flights on oneworld and other partner airlines, you will need to search somewhere else. American AAdvantage members can search for awards using the Qantas website, which will search for some oneworld partners, including British Airways, Cathay Pacific, Iberia and American. But the tool won’t search for all partner flights on all routes and awards on Japan Airlines are not included. British Airways has a website oneworld members can turn to that will search for awards on some partner airlines, including American, Cathay Pacific, Iberia and Qantas. Sign up for a Cathay Pacific Asia Miles account and you can search for awards on Cathay Pacific and Dragonair at www.asiamiles.com.
Star Alliance
When searching for award flights on Star Alliance carriers, including Continental Airlines, United Airlines and US Airways, a number of different websites will be helpful. We take a look at the options below.
All Nippon Airways
The best airline site for Star Alliance awards is the ANA website, which has an award search tool that includes inventory on most Star Alliance airlines. The tool was tweaked a bit last year so that it will only search for Star Alliance inventory after doing an initial search for an ANA flight if you don’t have any miles in your account, but it’s easy to work around this change. To search for flights, join the ANA Mileage Club and log on. Search for an international flight award on ANA (typing in ICN and NRT for your “from” and “to” cities will work). From the results page, scroll down to “Use Star Alliance Member Airlines” and then type in your actual origin and destination cities and travel dates. The tool will display a chart with available flights and class of service. There are blue arrow buttons above the departure and return flights that will search for dates before and after the dates you entered, but you can only search for award seats one day at a time. The ANA tool won’t display all possible connecting flights, so you can try out different possible routings or search segment by segment if your search is at first unsuccessful.
The ANA tool can be invaluable in your search for awards and by finding availability before you call the airline, your chances of securing a seat are much higher, although still not 100 percent. Just because a seat is available with the ANA tool doesn’t mean you’ll actually be able to book it when you call the airline, but it’s accurate much of the time. A frequent traveler who calls himself MileageAddict says, “I love using the ANA tool, calling UA, giving specific dates and times and listening to the shocked response: ‘Oh wow, this never happens. Mr. MileageAddict, the exact dates and flights you have chosen are available.’”
Continental Airlines
Continental Airlines has a decent award search tool that includes award inventory on a growing list of partner airlines, including Copa Airlines (including Aero Republica), United Airlines, US Airways, Air Canada, SAS Scandinavian Airlines, bmi British Midland, TAP Portugal, LOT Polish Airlines, EgyptAir, Air China, Blue1, plus inter-island add-ons operated by Hawaiian Airlines and Island Air. The award chart will show available flights for two months at a time, so the OnePass award booking tool is good if you are looking to redeem miles on those participating airlines.
United Airlines
United.com includes award inventory for Star Alliance flight awards on Continental Airlines and US Airways only. United recently made some changes to the award search capability, like adding the ability to search by mult-city, but the improvements did not include adding more partner award searches.
US Airways
Dividend Miles members can only search for US Airways flights at usairways.com.
SkyTeam
According to a recent poll on milepoint.com, 76.5 percent of survey respondents said that SkyMiles are the most difficult miles to use for awards. Milepoint member The Points Guy, who started the “The Definitive Guide to Booking a SkyMiles Award” discussion on milepoint.com at www.insideflyer.com/link/?4176, books several SkyMiles awards a day and has some suggestions for redeeming SkyMiles and SkyTeam awards. He says you can begin your search at Delta.com, but the award calendar and booking engine isn’t entirely accurate. Sometimes the calendar will display awards at the low level that don’t actually exist when you go to book them or fail to show awards that are available. The award booking website includes awards on some SkyTeam member airlines, including Air France and KLM, but not every flight will show up on the award calendar.
Delta.com allows you to search for roundtrip, one-way and multi-city itineraries. When piecing together a trip, search for individual segments using the one-way option so you can find awards at the lowest levels. After you find the segments you want, you can use the multi-city search and enter your destinations and dates. Write down the specific flight numbers of the award flights available at the low level so you know which flights to select when using the multi-city tool. You can also call Delta and have an agent book the award for you.
Another website that is useful for searching for SkyTeam flights is Airfrance.us, where you can sign up for a Flying Blue account to search for flights on Air France, KLM, Alitalia, Kenya Airways, Air Europa and TAROM.
Using Subscription Web Tools
There are four subscription-based tools that will look for flight awards on multiple airlines: KVS Tool, ExpertFlyer, Award Nexus and UsingMiles. If you only book one or two awards a year and your itineraries tend to be straightforward point A to point B and back again, you probably won’t need any of these tools. But if you like to create more complex itineraries that include stopovers, open jaws and flights on multiple airlines, you may want to consider signing up for one or more of these services.
Most of the information that you will find using these tools can be found for free by searching the websites listed above, but the information will appear in a different format. The advantage to using one of these tools is that you can perform one search on one website instead of going to each individual airline’s website. They each are slightly different in the services they provide and in the number of airlines they will search. The KVS Tool pulls data from many airlines’ websites whereas ExpertFlyer has “contracted directly with two GDS services to access airline information,” according to their website. Some of the information on ExpertFlyer.com can be found other places but some of it cannot.
KVS Tool
Gary Leff of the View from the Wing blog says that KVS is his main tool when searching for awards. “It’s the convenience and speed of the tool that I pay for, much better than searching each site individually.” All of the information you will find on KVS can be found for free elsewhere, but the site can definitely save you some time if you search frequently for awards. You can open multiple screens at one time so you can conduct several searches concurrently.
The KVS Tool shows availability of awards on all oneworld and Star Alliance carriers and most SkyTeam carriers. You will need to sign up for several frequent flyer accounts (if you don’t already have them) to search for award inventory. The KVS Tool will search by accessing award inventory on the websites of ANA, Qantas, Flying Blue, Delta, Asia Miles, Miles & More and KrisFlyer. KVS will allow users to search availability by global alliance, whereas ExpertFlyer users can only search award inventory on one airline at a time.
KVS Tool has three levels of membership at $20 for Gold for six months, $35 for six months at Platinum and $45 for six months at Diamond. Annual and shorter two-month subscriptions are also available. To conduct searches for award flights, you will need to subscribe to a Platinum or Diamond level, which you can test out for two months for $15 for Platinum or $20 for Diamond.
ExpertFlyer
With expertflyer.com, subscribers can search for awards on 40 airlines, but US Airways and Continental Airlines are not included in the list. At the higher membership level, you can use the ExpertFlyer tool to search for awards and upgrades plus or minus three days, which is useful if you can be flexible on your flight dates. And it has an automated search feature where you can set up an alert so that if seats open up on that particular flight, you will be alerted via email. The tool will also show you how many award seats are available. If there are a few seats available, you can safely wait a few days to decide whether to book a ticket but if the tool only brings up one available seat, you’ll know to book as soon as possible.
When searching for a flight award, you can only search for award inventory on one airline at a time, unlike the KVS Tool and Award Nexus that will allow you to search for awards on multiple airlines at once.
ExpertFlyer is not as comprehensive as the KVS Tool in terms of the number of airlines it supports, but it does have some content that is not available via KVS. Ben Schlappig of One Mile at a Time blog points out that “ExpertFlyer is the only place to find American Airlines upgrade award availability online. Another huge benefit of ExpertFlyer is their automated monitoring service, which can serve a few purposes. First of all, if you need to get onto a flight that’s sold out entirely or sold out in your preferred fare class, it will monitor for space to open up. If it does, they will send you an email alert. The same applies to upgrade space and award space on select airlines, including Alaska, American, United and more. That alone can more than justify the membership fee.”
ExpertFlyer is a paid subscription service that offers a basic plan for $4.99 per month and a premium plan for $9.99 per month. An annual premium subscription of $99 is slightly cheaper than paying the monthly $9.99 fee. You can also sign up for a five-day free trial and test out the service to see if you like it.
Award Nexus
Award Nexus is a service that will search for flights on all Star Alliance and oneworld airlines, but not SkyTeam. The service is only offered to registered active members of FlyerTalk.com or milepoint.com. You will need to enter your FlyerTalk handle to create an account and if you are only registered at milepoint.com, you can send a message with your milepoint handle and email address to the site founder at peter@awardnexus.com and request a membership.
The founder of AwardNexus.com has put together an award tip chart that includes some helpful notes on the “quirks” of each mileage program website. We have published the chart below to inform you of some of the idiosyncrasies of each website.
Award Nexus offers free and premium memberships, so you can try the free version first and test it out. There is no monthly fee, but each award search requires you to “pay” a set number of points. With a free membership, you can request 100 points every 90 days and for additional points, you will need to upgrade to a premium service, starting at $50 for 500 points.
The Award Nexus tool is similar to the KVS Tool in that it searches the award inventory found on airline websites. You could find the same information by going to each of those sites individually, but Award Nexus provides a shortcut that will search for awards on “all 28+ Star Alliance airlines and all 10+ oneworld airlines” by gathering information from Air Canada, Continental Airlines, All Nippon Airways, British Airways, Qantas and Japan Airlines websites. Award Nexus is a useful tool if you want to search for an award flight on a number of different airlines for a wide range of dates. You can search for awards by alliance and you can search for seat availability up to a week at a time. With one search, you can find availability for a particular route on all Star Alliance and oneworld carriers.
You can schedule a daily search for award seats on a particular route and sign up to receive updates on seat availability. Members of the site can save up to four searches and receive daily notifications of results via email.
AwardNexus.com also has a Route Explorer tool that can help you find alternate routings for your itinerary. Type in your origin and destination cities, such as Los Angeles (LAX) and Paris (CDG), and either Star Alliance or oneworld and the tool will display possible connecting cities, such as Chicago, Toronto, Newark, Zurich, Philadelphia, Frankfurt, Montreal and Houston. Even if you know hub cities like the back of your hand, this tool may still pull up connections that you hadn’t considered.

Award Tips

Site
Coverage
Date Range
Web Accuracy
Notes

Air Canada
All Star Alliance airlines
Min: 0 Max: 355
Inconsistent
*Sometimes Air Canada has been observed to not display an available award seat on a Star Alliance flight, even if that flight is nonstop and no other Air Canada flight is available. Such hidden flights are available by calling. *Air Canada has a bias toward routing you on Air Canada and connecting in Canada, even if the routing would be far away.

Continental Airlines
Many Star Alliance airlines Omission examples: Turkish Airlines, Singapore Airlines
Min: 0 Max: 328
Reliable
*Continental has a fast site with sensible connection choices. *Continental makes no distinction when searching business or first. If you specify one, results for the other cabin will also be returned. *Continental results do not specify actual cabin. For premium awards, some segments may be booked in an alternate cabin (e.g. in economy for a business award), and there is no way to tell from the search results alone. *On a few routes, Continental has been observed to show Virgin Atlantic Airlines award availability.

All Nippon Airways
All Star Alliance airlines
Min: 7 Max: 330
Reliable
*All Nippon Airways will only show nonstop or 1-stop flights. You need to search segment-by-segment for 2+ stops. *All Nippon Airways will sometimes show flights as on request (REQ), meaning you need to attempt to reserve for All Nippon Airways to actually check availability for you. This usually happens for Asiana or All Nippon Airways flights.

British Airways
All oneworld airlines, OpenSkies
Min: 0 Max: 355
Inconsistent
*Sometimes an award seat that could be available is not shown on BritishAirways.com. You will need to call to get access to those unseen seats (tip: ask them to waive the phone booking fee since the site is not showing them as available). *British Airways is not reliable for partner coverage, because partner options are only offered if the initial search date does not have any British Airways flights available. For example, if there is a British Airways itinerary available on 12/12 (regardless of how out of the way British Airways metal flights may be), no partner flights will be offered for any date in the entire search.

Cathay Pacific
Cathay Pacific/Dragonair
Min: 0 Max: 360
Reliable
*Cathay Pacific has been observed to make extra awards available to its own members. If you see an award from Cathay Pacific, it is possible it is unavailable to partner airlines. Sometimes the extra awards will become available after a few hours or a few days; sometimes they never become available.

Japan Airlines
Japan Airlines only
Min: 7 Max: 330
Inconsistent
*Japan Airlines allows waitlisting for its own members, so if you have Mileage Bank miles, log on to the site for waitlist possibilities.

Qantas Airways
Many oneworld airlines, Cathay Pacific, JetStar Airways and some South West Pacific airlines Omissions: Japan Airlines, Mexicana, Royal Jordanian, Dragonair, S7
Min: 1-7 Max: 353
Reliable
*Note that while Qantas Airways shows Cathay Pacific results, Dragonair does not appear in the results. *There are reports that Qantas Airways occasionally returns phantom Cathay Pacific seats, which are not actually available.

This table is reprinted from https://awardnexus.com/page/tips with the permission of Award Nexus.
UsingMiles.com
A new website with an award search tool that is free to use can be found at usingmiles.com–the site will also keep track of your mileage balances. After you register and enter your frequent flyer accounts, you can search for a flight and the search engine will let you know the number of awards available on the route you enter with the programs you participate in. You can then click the link to the airline’s website to book the award flight. If no flights are available, you can sign up to receive email alerts on a daily or weekly basis to notify you when award seats become available. See the 60 Seconds interview in this issue of InsideFlyer to learn more about usingmiles.com.
Calling to Book
After you’ve found the flights you want and made detailed notes on the exact flights that are available, the next step will be working with a customer service agent who can book the ticket for you.
Gary Leff who has booked countless awards through his award booking service has spent hours talking with airline customer service representatives and suggests that you befriend the agent on the other end of the phone. While you may be more knowledgeable about the program rules and award availability than the person you talk to, it’s a good idea to pretend that you know less than you do. Leff suggests you initiate the conversation by saying, “Another agent previously found these seats and would you please check to see if they are still available?” Since you’ve already done the work to find the flights with available award seats, you can go segment by segment and provide the exact flight numbers and origin and destination for each leg of your itinerary. If the agent you get isn’t helpful, it’s better to play call center roulette and hang up and try again. You may have to call more than once, but it’s better to call back until you get someone helpful and knowledgeable than to try to work with someone who doesn’t know how to help or isn’t willing to take the time to figure it out. Save yourself some frustration and politely thank them for their time and call back.
As a reminder, United Mileage Plus has a history of “StarNet Blocking” awards on partner carriers. If you are redeeming Mileage Plus miles for a partner award and the agent is unable to see availability for a flight you know has award space, it is possible that United is blocking availability. Fortunately, StarNet blocking has become less prevalent in the past year and Leff says he hasn’t “run into any blocking at all myself since September [2010].” And now that United Mileage Plus and Continental OnePass members can transfer miles between their accounts, if you do run into StarNet blocking, you can simply transfer your Mileage Plus miles into your OnePass account and complete the award reservation using OnePass miles.
Award Booking Services
It is possible to spend less than an hour searching for and booking an award, but it can also take much longer, especially if you don’t have much experience with complicated itineraries using partner airlines. If you are looking to book premium class tickets for international itineraries and don’t want to invest the time searching for awards and calling customer service agents, bloggers Gary Leff, Lucky (Ben Schlappig) and The Points Guy (Brian Kelly) are all experts at award booking and will help you create your dream trip and book it for you. At bookyouraward.com, Leff asserts that “Whatever the award itinerary you want, in whatever class of service you prefer, I can book it for you. I will make things easy, listen to your preferences, and present you with your best options–and then handle everything, all you have to do is enjoy the flights.” Leff charges $250 for the first two passengers and $100 for each additional passenger and he will only charge the fee once you are satisfied with the itinerary and he successfully books the tickets.
Ben Schlappig of PointsPros.com also offers an award booking service and charges $150 for the first passenger on any type of award and $100 for each additional passenger on the same trip.
Brian Kelly of thepointsguy.com has been redeeming miles and points for luxury travel and first class seats for years and offers his award booking service to help others maximize the value of their frequent flyer miles. His fee depends on the complexity of the award, but is generally $125 per ticket for international awards and $100 for domestic/Hawaii. Visit the award booking section at his website to fill out an award booking form and Brian will get back to you. Leff, Schlappig and Kelly have many years of experience searching for and booking awards and if you are short on time or don’t find the award seats you want, their services can be invaluable.
With the information we’ve shared with you, you should now be able to turn an award booking “no” into a “yes”–but remember, being flexible will go a long way.

InsideFlyer.com: Award Search Strategies

Sometimes there’s nothing as transporting as the perfect piece of clothing from a far-off land. Joan Juliet Buck explores the magic and meaning of the treasures in her wardrobe

In Ireland back when newscasters opened the evening news by announcing, “The time is approximately eight o’clock,” my godfather’s wife Ricki would bundle the guests into two Opel station wagons and lead the way up into Connemara, to Millars’s shop in Clifden, so that the Mexican musician and the French movie producer and the Swiss actress could buy things made of wool. It was three hours of motion sickness, alleviated only by word games. A mere half an hour away in Galway was a perfectly good store called O’Maille, and pronounced Omalia, full of tweeds and sweaters. But the long trek to Clifden brought access to rarer, richer tweeds in better colors, and thickly cabled sweaters hot from the gnarled hands of knitters on the wind-beaten Aran Islands. Millars’s tweeds were hand woven next to the shop, so that Ricki Huston could order personal color combinations which suggested, say, a rainy sunset on the Atlantic, or mulberries in cream; six months to a year later, she’d have a bolt of her own.

In that cave of authenticity, we ran our hands over the halo of white fuzz that rose from the rough tweeds, to check whether the blue felt the same as the pink. We girls were measured for some kind of west Ireland folk costume: madder-dyed red skirts of scratchy baínín with two velvet bands near the hem. By the time they were ready, we had outgrown them but bore the tight waistbands on the thick costumes with dignity because they were the real thing.

We tried on pebbly fishing hats, and wound the long crios sashes around our waists for a high generic folk look, especially when we added the mirrored skullcaps that my godfather had picked up in Kabul. I didn’t yet know that most cultures with flocks of woolly sheep—Greeks, Bulgarians and Turks, the Hopi and the Navajo—made the same belts.

One day, we found a pile of pale striped flannel farmer’s shirts left over from the past. They were 20 years old or 60 or older—ancient enough to be messengers from history. The collarless shirts had buttons to the sternum, their backs were longer than the fronts, and they smelled slightly oily. We were overjoyed: Now we could dress with the austere integrity of simple farmers. The shirts were infinitely too big for us, so we added belts and became Russian revolutionaries, which intensified our allegiance to the lot of the common man, allowing us to roar out old Irish revolutionary songs with new conviction. On the other hand, the designer Donald Davies had copied these same shapes for his collection of fine tweeds in Dublin, London, and Paris, so that by rooting around at Millars’s, we’d become as chic as our mothers.

Millars’s was my first exposure to the paradoxical magic of garments that are apart from fashion and out of time. If I’d been raised in America, the same thing would have happened with Mexican fiesta skirts on a trip to Tijuana, and I would have come home swirling flounces, stamping my feet, and shouting “¡Arriba!” instead of wailing “Kevin Barry gave his young life for the cause of liberty…”

It was the beginning of a life of very full suitcases and incongruous, contradictory sartorial allegiances. Wearing the vast flannel shirts prepared me for the Marxist viewpoint of the lycée teachers, and within a year I had hunted down a Mao jacket in a china shop in Paris. The way the indigo cotton felt on my back put me in sympathy with the shouting Chinese mobs I saw on television as the Cultural Revolution began. Ricki Huston gave me a Mexican red leather belt studded with nail heads, which might have belonged to a female bandit. On Portobello Road, I found an old Egyptian dress made of black netting covered in a pattern of silver; the effect was Cairo whorehouse, 1919. As an antidote, my mother took me to Lisbon and bought me a bracelet of pearls and carnelian beads to grant me the dainty demeanor of a Lusitanian debutante.

I was primed for costume by a childhood in which every adult getting off a plane handed over a doll in national dress: There was a fierce Spanish Gypsy dancer with dangerous eyes, a matador with a sharp sword and an embroidered suit of lights, a geisha with a startled porcelain face peering down at her beige and coral kimono, Austrian dolls in dirndls, and endless regional French dolls—a Niçoise with a straw hat and a bunch of toy mimosa in a toy basket, an Alsacienne with a giant black bow on her head, a Bretonne with a coif like a sugar loaf. The clichés stuck: In Spain I bought flamenco dancer earrings and shoes to align myself with the free spirit of untamed Gypsies.

By then London was in full Haute Boho mode. In Morocco, at Agadir, I bought a red cape and wore it to ride into the desert on horseback, but back in London it looked a little too plain. Every hostess entertained in silk caftans that hid the figure but implied the wearer had “It”—the term for sex appeal coined by Elinor Glyn, the original flame-haired temptress. Her 1907 novel, Three Weeks, about the seduction of a young British aristocrat, had outraged the Edwardian bourgeoisie. A designer named Thea Porter imported antique Oriental fabrics, sewed them up with chiffon, then added beads and braid, and the grande dames, from Lady Antonia Fraser to Edna O’Brien to Bubbles Harmsworth, wafted about in multicolored Eastern silks like dominant harem hens. No one wore a sari—that would have been an improper use of native costume, given Britain’s imperial past. Their generation had swooned over the saturated romance of Lesley Blanch’s 1954 book, The Wilder Shores of Love, and wanted to emulate its heroines: Aimee Dubucq de Rivery, captured by pirates to become a sultan’s favorite; Jane Digby, who married a sheikh; Isabelle Eberhardt, who went about the Sahara dressed as a bedouin.

Thea Porter’s trove of caftans, embroideries, and golden patchworks produced an Orientalist mirage in Belgravia living rooms, but it was expensive. We younger ones had to make do with what we found at one of the India Craft shops that dotted London: enough plastic bangles and dangling earrings to push the paisley on a nylon jersey top-and-pants set into the facsimile of something exotic. But it wasn’t authentic.

For that we had to get out of town and hit the figurative silk road, which historically wound from the Mediterranean through Samarkand into China. In the seventies, the Soviets had locked up Central Asia, no one went to China, and the only person to venture north of the Karakorum was Bruce Chatwin. But there was Nepal. There was India and Turkey and Morocco and Bali. The boys went for the drugs, and the girls went for the finery, and came home wearing things I had never seen: a tall blonde in a salwar kameez from Peshawar, with a dupatta slung over one shoulder; a small brunette in a tiny mirrored kanchali that fastened at the back with ancient ribbons over a great pleated patterned skirt, which she told me was called a ghagra. They all wore kurtas, fine cotton tunics from India and Nepal. Those who went to North Africa came back with Palestinian thobes, long dresses embroidered with red cross-stitching. Salwar kameez! Dupatta! Kan­chali! Ghagra! The younger generation, done up in medleys of exotic swag, made the Belgravia caftans look tame. The grande dames turned to Zandra Rhodes for improbable crinolines in yards of organdy printed with zany doodles, and Belgravia living rooms began to look like the hallucinations that the younger set was having on LSD.

I never took the silk route, but I went to New York, where a man named Sam Hilu sold the same clothes that my adventurous friends had risked health and sanity to find at the far ends of the earth. A short trip down to Sam Hilu’s Odyssey warehouse on lower Fifth Avenue and I was in many other worlds at once. Here were infinite numbers of kurtas, with and without embroidery; by now Sam Hilu’s imported kurtas were in stores on every street, and although no one was ever sure if they were meant to be worn over jeans or to sleep in, they were basic summer wear. Sam had a few wedding takchitas; some thobes; and Afghani winter coats—reversed sheepskins embroidered in bright silk flowers—that gave off a light aroma of livestock. I found a Chinese skirt that thrilled me with its oddness: a high blue cotton waistband above strict pleats in orange and black, with toggle buttons. And then there were the necklaces: tinkling shreds of silver metal set with turquoises and sewn onto red cotton bands that tied with string, tiny beads woven into flat patterned pendants, long round silver chains to use as belts. I saved up to buy a heavy silver cuff, its edges lined with triangular points. It was set with carnelians, paler than the ones on the Lisbon debutante bracelet. These were warrior stones, and they had lived.

I returned to London decked out in a mixture of red tribal textiles—who needed to sew when you could drape, pin, and belt with sashes?—and hung about with large pieces of tarnished silver. The effect was a loud mixture of Oriental seduction and tribal aggression. I was not a real hippie—no VW van, no serious drug use, no tolerance for loud music—but my allegiance was with the authentic as represented by exotica. I was looking for soul.

The soul is in the body. There are certain atavistic gestures that humans make, ancestral tics that have nothing to do with the present culture. They are physical and unconscious. The sudden jerking of the legs as you fall asleep is a neurological vestige of the time when we were baboon-like creatures who slept in trees, ancient wiring kicking in to stop the body from falling off a branch. The same kind of wiring template exists, I think, for clothes and adornment. Ears have been pierced since antiquity. The act of wrapping a piece of cloth around your body feels good, like a hug. Securing something at the waist with a knot is physically satisfying. It may account for the popularity of Diane von Furstenberg’s wrap dress.

And then there are shawls. Covering the head is an instinctive gesture that has become a religious and political bombshell. Rummaging around Sam Hilu’s Odyssey warehouse, I found that my hair never looked right with any of the things I tried on. My hands automatically went to his scarves, and without thinking I’d wrap them around my head, several at a time, for an effect that was sometimes a turban and sometimes exactly what women wear in the Balkans, the Caucasus, or North Africa. My unconscious gesture reproduced the Jewish mitpachat and the Muslim hijab.

In fundamentalist Muslim countries, religious law imposes the full veil. In Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, the flowing black niqab turns women into moving monoliths. The burqa is the symbol of repression in Afghanistan. The shielding, covering, erasing, confining veils contract into headscarves that Muslim women wear to signal their faith, whatever country they live in. In France, headscarves have just been banned in schools. They’re not just scarves. Folk costume and all forms of traditional dress carry a force, whether they are durably sewn for toil, patterned as symbols of fertility, adorned to convey power, or cut to make noise and displace air in celebrations. The force is like mana, the mystical charge described in Margaret Mead’s books about Polynesia, or the numen of the Romans. Mana is the soul of an inanimate object, and it attracts that which most resembles it. It also repels that which least resembles it. Ethnologists will tell you that the arrangement of cross-stitches on Bulgarian wedding shirts or the rhythm of contrasting colors on ikats represent the Great Goddess. Things made by hand in the same way in the same place for centuries have more power than T-shirts from Wal-Mart, but nothing you put on your back is neutral. No wonder when we travel, we shop. We are looking for our ancestors.

In Moscow in July 1989, during the transition from perestroika to nascent capitalism, the uncertain but elated Russians were still doughy, most women shaped like loaves, all of them dressed in clothes that reflected long Orwellian hours of standing in line with insufficient coupons to buy inferior goods. But among the crowds of babushkas and nylon-shirted dumplings, I saw graceful people whose existence I had never suspected: Central Asians, Uzbeks and Kazakhs, Turkmens, Kyrgyzs, and Tajiks. Tall men and slender women, the women with long black hair in braids down their backs, both sexes wearing long bright cotton coats. I wanted one. Gum, the department store on Red Square, displayed only alternating rows of gray socks and small cellophane-wrapped packages of macaroni.

I asked someone who asked someone who knew someone, I handed over a $20 bill, and later that day was given a turquoise coat, channel quilted over cotton and lined with a flower print. It didn’t really fit. It was stiff and straight, and the sleeves were far too long. Peering into the mirror of my tiny room in the horrendous Rossiya hotel, I realized that to get a fuller effect I needed a kurta in an ikat fabric to wear underneath it. I asked the someone who knew someone, but that was too much to ask.

“Go to the tourist shop,” he said. “They have things there.”

“Tourist shop?” I asked.

The hotel had 3,200 rooms. I pounded the corridor from the European section (where I had been put because I had come off the plane with a French delegation), turned left through the Georgian and Caucasus section, where large mustachioed men in singlets loitered at their open doors proffering bottles of arak, turned left again past a cafeteria where policemen with plastic totes lined up to buy sturgeon, and left again into the American section—now a good half mile of hotel corridor away from my room—and rode a cavernous elevator down to the gift shop. A neon-lit place with glass counters, it had the charm of a dispensary. A very large dispensary.

On the walls behind the counter was hung Russian amber. Miles of Russian amber from the Baltic Sea. Necklaces hanging on hooks, chunks strung with chunks, beads with beads. The chunks were pale, irregular, and matte, in every shade of cheese: palest provolone, variegated parmesan, Kraft yellow, deep cheddar. The beads were shiny, in every shade of liquor: Armagnac, bourbon, whiskey, beer, brandy, even cherry brandy.

I was suddenly beset by greed for food, alcohol, and adornment. If I chose a crumbly pale yellow, I had to have smooth brandy beads; but then I wanted a dash of bourbon, and some gouda to offset that. A necklace of chardonnay caught my eye, and another, darker, like Château d’Yquem.

Drunk on the sight of petrified resin, I spent all my money on too many amber necklaces. Back in New York, there were days when they made me look like an expression of nature come to life, and days when I looked like a crazed schoolteacher.

One night in Paris in 1993, I wore rather too many of them to a dinner for some Tibetan monks. We were in the house of a famous and aristocratic explorer. The spoils of his travels were on display—tribal masks, boxes, treasures. I found myself standing next to a monk, an older man with a shaved head, one bare arm protruding from brown and orange robes. Both of us were staring at an arrangement of immense ceremonial amber necklaces from Tibet. He looked at the necklaces and then looked at me. I looked at the necklaces and looked at him. His eyes went to the five strings of Baltic amber around my neck and back to the table and back to my eyes.

I got the hint and did the only thing possible. I pulled the longest necklace over my head and, bowing deeply in what I hoped was the correct attitude of veneration, held the necklace out to him. He took it with a smile. It felt good. As if by making possible a gift to a holy man, that moment of insane greed in the tourist shop in Moscow had now revealed its purpose.

My Life with Full Suitcases from Condé Nast Traveler on Concierge.com