Moab, Utah: Beautiful sandstone arches, cliffs, and rivers. Great mountain biking. Dinosaur fossils and footsteps. Lots of beautiful camping. A great place for 4Wheeling.
Telluride, Colorado: A quaint mountain town with great outdoor sports (the altitude is rough though). Beautiful hiking, challenging biking, and lots of winter sports too.
Klamath Falls, Oregon: You can visit my site by clicking here and get info on some of the hiking, biking, and outdoor recreation in this beautiful part of Southern Oregon.
Lots of birds. Lakes and rivers make for outstanding canoeing, boating and fishing.
Ottawa, Canda
Quebec City, Canada
Montreal, Canada
I've added some book picks to help make traveling even more rewarding!
Going out West? David Lavender's One Man's West
is an excellent first hand account of ranching and mining around Telluride, Colorado.
Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West by Timothy Egan is an
intriguing account of Western life woven around important ecological, economic and political
issues.
INTERNATIONAL
Hong Kong: a big city with lots of great food joints and shoopping. A good stoppover for a couple days. Can hike or tram up to the "Peak" and check out some interesting modern architecture in town. Lots of shopping!
Nepal: Hiking out of Pokhora, a town on a beautiful lake a couple hours outside of Kathmandu, is a good bet for enjoyable trekking into the Annapurna range. Lots of tea house eateries and GuestHouses along the established routes. Enjoy the bridges and panoramas of terraced fields and snow-capped peaks. Excellent food, definitely try the local dishes. Watch out for the "donkey trains" as you climb the stone paved trails.
Phuket, Thailand: Increasingly becoming an overdeveloped tourist mecca for Europeans. Phuket is something like Vegas; it has to be seen to be believed. Much of the charm and traditional culture is being replaced with glitz. Still a fun place check out with warm and friendly locals, and some interesting sites to visit by boat.
One of my favorite ways to travel is with books by local authors.
The pleasure of India is greatly enhanced in conjunction with one of this century's greatest works of fiction, Salman Rusdie's
Midnight's Children .
Gita Mehta's A River Sutra is a more fanciful and relaxing read than Rusdie's intense work, and is also well crafted.
A more intellectual sampling of "modern" India can be found in V.S. Naipaul's India: A Million Mutinies Now
and, in a less intricate and more accesible form, in Gita Mehta's Snakes and Ladders : Glimpses of Modern India
No trip to Indonesia would be complete without reading Pramoedya Ananta Toer's quartet beginning with
This Earth of Mankind .
There are a number of interesting books by Japanese authors and about Japan. One of
my favorites is Japanese Inn by Oliver Statler.
This classic features a rich historical fiction account revolving around an Inn in Imperial Japan
Another must read is Shogun by James Clavell, an entertaining thriller about Japan and colonial trade.
Invesment and travel? Check out Investment Biker this classic motorcycle
travelogue written by Jim Rogers is full of interesting insights and opinion. Though much of Mr. Rogers investment advice has been wrong, a lot his
views are compelling, useful and interesting.
I will be adding some more great books to check out before during or after your trips. I am also seeking out great sites to check out. Let me know if you have any suggestions!
Travel Links:
One interesting and useful site for information is LonelyPlanet.
For travel gear you can check out
Magellans.
For cheap airline tickets you can try bidding at
Priceline.com
and bid on an itinerary.
You can also check out
Travelocity
which gives you quotes on itineraries and I have found useful for straight forward domestic travel.
If you need medications for your trip
PlanetRx
is a great resource to use for research on medications and for convenient online ordering.
.