Cambodia: Faces of Time

At Bayon (BAH-yon), the temple at the heart of the ancient Khmer capital Angkor Thom, images of the Buddha populate the walls and towers of what is otherwise a Hindu temple.  Bayon, second in size and grandeur only to Angkor Wat, was built in the late 12th century by Jayavarman VII, the great Khmer king who embraced both of Cambodia's religions.  These timeworn faces have seen centuries of pelting rain, torrid heat and total neglect.

Like Angkor Wat, Bayon is designed as a Hindu temple: a tall central tower and four other towers representing the five peaks that are home to the Hindu gods, and a moat representing the Sea of Milk in Hindu mythology.  Below, columns support a 100-meter-long causeway that crossed the now-dry moat at Bayon.

The central tower at Bayon is in the middle of the photograph below. 

Cambodia: Letting Nature Win at Ta Prohm

Despite the fame of Angkor Wat, perhaps the most striking photos of Cambodia's ancient temples are those of Ta Prohm, evocative images of nature conquering the works of man.  This Buddhist temple, built around 1186, once had 39 towers. Giant banyon and other trees have consumed the complex's stone structures over the centuries.  Although other temples were similarly overtaken by nature, a decision was made to leave the trees in place here while at other temples the trees were removed and the stones reassembled.  Read more about Ta Prohm by clicking HERE.

There's Always Room for Pie

      This has nothing to do with travel.  It's about a pie made by our friend, the writer/baker Frank Starr who has a weekend home across the cove from us.  It's called a sugar cream pie.  More specifically, a Hoosier sugar cream pie.  Frank's a Hoosier who left Indiana long ago and seems none the worse for it, though he retains an interest in many things Hoosier, including pie.  He wrote about this pie last year on his elegant blog.  Click HERE for his blog, then scroll way down to read about the pie.

    So why am I mentioning this?  When I discovered the pie on his blog, I hinted rather rudely that such a pie was something I'd like to taste.  Yesterday, Frank called. He had baked me a pie!  Although the recipe reportedly dates back to 1816, the pie Frank produced was quite fresh.  The ingredients are cream, sugar, a little butter and a little flour.  It's not a light dessert.  It's a rich and delicious dessert.  We had it at dinner last night.
     When I ran into Frank this morning, I thanked him for the pie.  He let slip -- and his wife, Jan, also mentioned it -- that today he was baking a cherry pie.  Bet he's using fresh cherries.
     Boy, that sounds like another good pie!  Guess it would be rude to come right out and ....

Nicaragua: Rio San Juan and Public Health

     Meet Yaro Choiseul-Praslin.  He is the proprietor of Sabalos Lodge (click HERE for its website), a wonderful eco-lodge on the Rio San Juan, the free-flowing river that connects Lake Nicaragua with the Caribbean. The lodge consists of several buildings, some of them treehouse-like structures practically hanging over the river. Howler monkeys and croaking frogs will reminded us every night that we were in a jungle.

     Yaro is the local face of Rio San Juan Relief, which attempts to provide basic health services to the people of this isolated corner of Nicaragua, the hemisphere's second-poorest country.  For more information,  click HERE to visit the organization's website. 

     Yaro and his son Rafael house visiting medical personnel at the lodge and transport them -- often by boat -- to villages where they examine and treat people with a wide variety of health problems.  They also offer basic health information, such as how to brush one's teeth.  

     When Jane and I were at Sabalos Lodge in January 2012, we met Dr. Nicholas Halikis of Torrance, Calif., a hand and upper extremity surgeon.  He and Janelle Freshman, a physical therapist who organized their mission (and her non-medical husband, Howard), had brought a bunch of coloring books and other things for children.  They said they started to hand them out to desperately poor children at one stop and were told to wait -- save them for the even poorer children that they would be seeing soon elsewhere. 

     I know physicians who do this sort of volunteer work, but I had never before been near where it was being done.  It's hard for Americans to imagine a place so remote that it's difficult to obtain any level of health care at all. You may have cellphone service, but if you break a leg, there's no one to call. In the villages of the Rio San Juan valley that aren't on the river, a trip to a river dock can take hours.  Then there's the wait for a ferry.  From Sabalos Lodge, for example, it's more than  an hour upstream to the town of San Carlos, which itself has only a bare-bones infirmary.  Managua is 45 minutes away by air or five hours or more by road.

     So here's to Yaro, Rafael and all the U.S. and Nicaragua folk who do good work through Rio San Juan Relief.   

       

Nicaragua: A Garden of Eden

AT RIGHT, the Corredor de los Pintores leads to Maria Guevara Silva's inn.

In Ernesto Cardenal's landmark book "The Gospel in Solentiname," a teenager named Mariita contributed this to a discussion of the Beatitudes: "But a rich person who shares love has to share his goods, too. That's how he shows that he shares love. Because if he says he has love and doesn't share his goods, how are we going to believe him?"

That was then, in the late 1960 and early '70s. Today Mariita (Maria Guevara Silva) owns and operates an inn in the Solentiname Islands in Lake Nicaragua. Thanks to Father Cardenal's pioneering liberation theology and his unusual arts program, these islands remain a paradise for painters and a place apart in our materialistic world. You can visit them in my New York Times article (CLICK HERE): In Lush Nicaragua, Legacy of a Priest. Click HERE to go directly to the New York Times slideshow of my Solentiname photographs.

When a Travel Agent Is Better Than the Internet

Seth Kugel, the New York Times' Frugal Traveler columnist and blogger, has made a startling discovery. Sometimes, travel agencies can get you a fare lower than anything you can find online.

Keep this tip in mind for your next trip abroad, especially if you're going someplace far away that's not served by loads of international carriers. If you're going to Croatia, for example, a Croatian travel agency in New York is probably a good bet. Agents who are from your destination country and specialize in travel to that country, are likely to know about airlines and strategies that Kayak and Expedia don't. That said, it helps to be in a big city like New York that has a lot of travel agents who primarily serve immigrant populations. You can, however, contact such agencies by phone or email.

Click HERE for Seth's report.

Nicaragua: Selva Negra Offers a Coffee Plantation Experience (and More)

AT LEFT, a mural at Selva Negra depicts the coffee harvest.

During our three weeks in Nicaragua in January, Jane and I tried to see as much of the country as we could. One place we're particularly happy to have visited is Selva Negra, a coffee plantation a two-hour drive northeast of Managua. It's in a cloud forest in the mountains above Matagalpa, itself a pretty neat destination with a large cathedral, decent shopping and good restaurants and coffee bars.

AT LEFT, a path leads to one of the guest cabins.

Selva Negra (CLICK HERE) is a largely self-contained plantation, producing its own foods, housing its own workers and showcasing an amazing natural environment. Its coffee beans (most of its production is purchased by Whole Foods for sale in the U.S.) grow on bushes spread out as understory plants in the cloud forest.

AT LEFT, a variety of flowering plants occupy the top of the double roof on our one-bedroom cabin.

Selva Negra was founded more than a century ago by German immigrants and is today owned and operated by two of their descendants, Eddy Kuhl and his wife, Mausi Hayn.

AT LEFT, Mausi Hayn explains to us how coffee beans are processed at Selva Negra.

Lodging options range from beds in shared rooms in a hostel to multi-bedroom private chalets. Meals are served in a big dining room overlooking an artificial pond. Selva Negra makes its own cheeses and the large but inexpensive cheese plate may be the best food value in Nicaragua. Most of the food on the fairly extensive menu comes from Selva Negra's farming operations.

AT LEFT, a wild orchid blooms at Selva Negra.

Guests are offered a range of activities: tours of the coffee operation (the coffee estate is often referred to by its original name, La Hammonia), horseback riding, birding walks, hikes and more. We were fortunate in having Mausi Hayn show us around the property herself. There are tree-hung swings scattered around the property, which is a popular weekend getaway for people from Managua and elsewhere in Nicaragua.

AT LEFT, an open-air stone chapel that the Kuhls built in 2000 for the marriage of one of their daughters. Selva Negra now offers it to guests for their weddings.

Selva Negra is a model of environmental sensitivity. It uses human and animal waste to create methane gas, which it uses. Taking advantage of its rainy location high in mountains, it has created its own hydroelectric system to capture the energy of water that flows from the plantation to the valley below. Even paper waste there is recycled -- magazine pages and other pieces of paper are folded into impossibly tight strips that are woven to form purses, tote bags and other products. Plastic water bottles are used as insect traps among the coffee plants.

Nicaragua: Volcano Vacation

Atop Masaya Volcano, northwest of Granada and southeast of Managua, Nicaragua, the visitor is rewarded by the smell of sulfur. This active volcano, which we visited at sunset with Tierra Tour out of Granada (CLICK HERE), has a huge crater, shown in the top two photos here, that emits noxious gases. Sometimes after sunset red molten lava is said to be visible at the bottom, but it wasn't on the night we were there.

The third photo is from the top of another volcano, Mombacho, which is also an easy half-day visit out of Granada.

Masaya's rocky top and deep crater make it seem bigger than it is. Masaya is a mere 2,083 feet high.

From Mombacho, one can see the city of Granada and a chain of tiny islands in Lake Nicaragua. Mombacho, at 4,409 feet, is visible from the streets of Granada.

Fortunately for the old and the lame, there are roads right up to the tops of these two volcanos. Once you're there, though, there are quite challenging trails that take you to a peak above the Masaya crater and actually into the jungle-filled Mombacho crater.

The bottom photo is of Concepcion, an active volcano on Ometepe Island. Concepcion is 5,282 feet high. The photo is taken from the bar at Totoco Eco-Lodge, which is on the slopes of 4,573-foot (and dormant) Maderas Volcano.

There are no roads to the tops of Ometepe's two volcanos, although there are trails. The trail to the top of Maderas passes through a plantation that grows coffee in the shade of the jungle, and the coffee workers' paths intersect with the path to the top, making it easy to lose one's way. The close-up photo of a howler monkey in an earlier posting was taken on this trail.

Nicaragua: Monkey Business

Like lots of other tropical countries, Nicaragua has jungles and monkeys. Three kinds of monkeys, to be exact: white-faced capuchin, Central American spider monkey, and the manteled howler monkey. Unless you spend all your time in the cities, you're likely to encounter monkeys.

We saw spider monkeys only at the park office at the Indio-Maiz Biosphere Reserve where a mother and an infant lived more or less as pets. The only capuchin we saw was on a leash on someone's front porch in the village of Balgue on Isla Ometepe.

Howler monkeys, however, were wild, free and everywhere. We saw them at Sabalos Lodge (bottom photo) on the Rio San Juan. We saw them on the slopes of Volcano Maderas on Ometepe (middle two photos). And we saw them at Morgan's Rock (top photo), a Pacific Coast resort north of San Juan del Sur.

You may not always see howler monkeys, but it's hard not to hear them. They're loud, one of the loudest animals on earth, with an unearthly howl that can be heard for over a mile. On our first night at Sabalos Lodge, in an open-air treehouse cabin, we felt like we were surrounded by creatures from Jurassic Park. They howl but they don't otherwise bother people. They stay high in trees, jumping from one treetop to another often with a baby clinging to an adult's back.

Often all that's visible are dark silhouettes high in the trees, but sometimes they're close enough that you can see the brown fur on their backs.

At Sabalos one afternoon, we were in our cabin when we realized that the monkeys we had seen in a riverfront tree close to the front of our cabin were moving away from the river.

"Ping, thud, plop," we heard as the monkeys passed over our metal roof. Then there was a less than pleasant barnyard odor.

We think we got dumped on by family of monkeys.

Nicaragua: Toilet Training

At Totoco Eco Lodge on Isla Ometepe in Nicaragua, the toilets come with instructions:

--Please only urinate into the front separator (smaller hole).

--Toilet paper can be put down the larger hole.

--If used, please always throw 3 scoops of sawdust down the larger hole.

--Please avoid any sawdust getting into the front urine separator.

Top photo: view of the toilet in our cabin at Totoco.

Middle photo: it's not sawdust but coconut fibers that we were tossing into the "large hole."

Bottom photo: I'm sure you wondered what a urine separator looks like. Here it is.

Composting toilets have been around for a while -- you'll find them in rural areas of Europe and North America where there's no sewer service and where for one reason or another a septic system can't be installed. But Totoco's toilets are not composting toilets in the usual sense; the composting is done elsewhere. The solid waste and sawdust go into a big bucket that twice a day is emptied into a compost area somewhere out of sight of guests. It wasn't apparent what happened to the urine that is so carefully kept separate.

There was no odor -- either in our own bathroom or in the toilets shared by the dining room and the hostel. TotocEco Lodge has a handful of cabins like ours and eight or so hostel beds in a large room beside the dining room. If you're going to stay at a hostel, it's hard to imagine one with better views, nicer common areas (there's a pool) or more interesting toilets.

Nicaragua: Isla Ometepe

Isla Ometepe is a large island in Lake Nicaragua, one of the world's largest freshwater lakes. It is shaped like the numeral "8," with a volcano in the middle of each half and a swampy area along the Rio Istian in the middle.

At left are two of the many howler monkeys we saw on Volcano Maderas, the smaller of the two volcanoes. We stayed at Totoco Eco-Lodge (CLICK HERE), which is on the slopes of Maderas.

This shot of Maderas was taken while kayaking on the Rio Istian. (You may have noticed that I'm not bothering with accent marks on these Spanish names. You're right. I'm not.)

This is a tiger heron that was wading along the Rio Istian.

And this is Volcano Concepcion, the other volcano, which is a mile high and very active, as seen from Totoco Eco-Lodge.

Nicaragua: A Not-So-Nice Capital City

Managua, Nicaragua's capital city, is a dirty and unpleasant place.

It has more or less recovered from the 1972 earthquake that killed 10,000 people and destroyed 50,000 homes.

Eternally vulnerable to another quake (there had also been a major quake in 1931), it's largely a city of one-story buildings, open street drains that the unwary can fall into, horse-drawn carts and

.

overcrowded buses that were probably school buses in the U.S. decades ago.

Knowing all this, we planned to stay in Managua only our first night in Nicaragua, waiting for a flight the next day to San Carlos, and our last night in Nicaragua, since we had an 8 a.m. flight back home.

We did find nice restaurants in the area where we stayed both nights, the Los Robles district, which has a number of hotels, including a multistory Hilton. We stayed first at Los Robles (CLICK HERE) which was in the process of putting in a very nice looking pool area and patio.

Our last night in Nicaragua was at the nearby Casa Naranja (CLICK HERE). Of the two hotels, I would have to recommend Los Robles over Naranja, though both are nice. The common courtyards and pool area at Los Robles are much nicer than those at Naranja, and the rooms are bigger and brighter. But both are well-located, have helpful, English-speaking staff and can help arrange airport transfers.

I didn't carry my camera around in Managua (it's a city with few Kodak moments), but here are two shots from the highest point in the city, the Parque Historica.

At the top is a fellow zip- lining above the Laguna de Tiscapa, the water-filled crater of an extinct volcano. The other is a giant silhouette of Sandino, the ruthless freedom-fighter whose name was appropriated by the Sandinista guerillas.

Not shown but nearby is a monument to the people killed in the 1970s uprising against the Somoza dictatorship. It bears a poem called "Epitaph for Adolph Baez Bone" by Ernesto Cardenal. Here's an English translation by Andrew McKenna:

They killed you and / didn't tell us where / they buried your body.

But ever since that day / the whole country/ has been your grave.

or rather / in every part of the / country that

does not hold your body / you have risen again.

They thought they had / killed you with their order / of fire!

They thought they / were burying you

And what they were doing / was planting a seed.

Nicaragua: Rain Forests to Cloud Forests

Nicaragua is a startlingly diverse country -- tropical rain forests, soaring volcanoes, mountainous cloud forests, big cities and tiny isolated communities. Jane and I got a taste of all these during our January 2012 visit.

I'll be writing more later about each place we visited: Managua, the Rio San Juan, the Solentiname Archipelago, the Selva Negra coffee plantation, the colonial city of Granada, Ometepe Island, and San Juan del Sur.

In the meantime, here are some photos. From the top:

-- Concepcion Volcano on Ometepe Island (seen from the air on a fight over Lake Nicaragua).

-- The small La Costena airplane that took us from Managua over Lake Nicaragua to San Carlos, where Lake Nicaragua drains into the Rio San Juan.

-- The balcony of our treehouse cabin at Sabalos Lodge on the Rio San Juan, a neat eco-lodge with a focus on helping the local community, which is very poor.

-- The Rio San Juan as seen from El Castillo, an old Spanish fort built above rapids on the Rio San Juan. It was meant to help protect Spanish shipments of gold from Granada to the Caribbean, where the treasure was transferred to larger ships to be sent to Spain.

Maryland: Assateague in the Fall

The Saturday after Thanksgiving 2011, Jane and I went with a couple of friends to Chincoteague and Assateague, two Atlantic Ocean barrier islands off the coast of Virginia at the Maryland line. In fact, part of Assateague is in Maryland, though you have to leave Maryland to drive to it.

We went because it was supposed to be the height of the autumn bird migration. Indeed, this time of year is usually so good for birding that the wildlife refuge on Assateague opens a long back road to the public -- the only day of the year it does this -- to accommodate the crowds of people with expensive cameras, tripods, telescopes and binoculars.

But this fall is not like other falls. It's been a lot warmer and the birds are late. So we saw many of the same sorts of birds -- egrets, herons, bald eagles, mallards, black ducks -- that we see at home by the Chesapeake Bay. We did see a few of the wild ponies that have been famous ever since the 1947 publication of the book "Misty of Chincoteague." The lack of fowl did not mean the cameras weren't used. Lots of birds or few birds, Assateague is a beautiful place.

Canada: Toronto Revisited

Photos top to bottom: an art school near the Ontario Gallery of Art; the financial district along King Street; outside the Rex, a jazz and blues bar on Queen Street; the Queen Mother Cafe on Queen Street; a gallery in the Ontario Gallery of Art on Dundas Street.




A November 2011 trip to Toronto was very different from our June 2011 trip. For one thing, we flew this time. Air Canada's Jazz service flies a turbo prop on the 90-minute trip between Baltimore Washington International airport and Toronto's Pearson International. We also stayed in the heart of downtown, not going as far west as some of the restaurants we visited in June, and not using the city's neat streetcars nor its modern subway. We walked everywhere from our fairly conveniently located hotel, One King West.

Downtown Toronto, at least the heart of downtown, can be thought of as three east-west corridors: King Street, a few blocks north of the waterfront; Queen Street, a few blocks north of King; and Dundas Street, the next big east-west street to the north of Queen.

King Street is the financial district. Our hotel was at the corner of King and Yonge, which divides downtown into east and west. To the east on King was the auction house that was the purpose of our visit, an auction of Inuit art at which we were fortunate to win some interesting inventory for our Inuit art business, BaileyMajorArt.com. Head west on King, cross the major artery Spadina, and you come to Crush, an excellent if rather pricy wine bar.

Queen Street has loads of Indian Restaurants, though no one would confuse it with Brick Lane in London or East 6th Street in Manhattan. It also has the Rex, a jazz and blues bar with a handful of hotel rooms upstairs. Another favorite on West Queen Street is the Queen Mother Cafe, which can have long lines at breakfast but is also a great choice for lunch. The Bloody Caesar is a generous take on the Bloody Mary with clam juice.

Dundas has a string of small Chinese restaurants and the Art Gallery of Ontario, a major museum. It's basement has a glass wall allowing visitors to see its shelves and shelves of stored Inuit carvings. We caught an exhibition on Marc Chagall and the Russian avant garde. It also has a large gift shop that stocks a number of good books on Inuit art, a stylish but friendly bar, and a large restaurant.

Jane and I were lucky in that the weather was perfect for walking during this visit. We also benefited from a very slightly weaker Canadian dollar -- something like 98 U.S. cents would buy a Canadian dollar. Back in June, it went the other way.

Though we had no amazing restaurant experiences and our hotel was decidedly unremarkable, we still had a great time. This may have been a business trip, but there was a lot of pleasure.

Nevada: Nights in Vegas, Days in the Mountains and Desert

You've probably heard that Nevada has been hit harder than most states in the current economic downturn. It's not just the housing market -- it's everything.

And just as bad news for a foreclosed homeowner can be good news for a home buyer, the slowing of Las Vegas tourism is good news for anyone who goes there now.

Everything that anyone goes to Vegas for is still there -- the casinos, the shows, the spectacle and the amazing desert wilderness outside town.

It's not hard to find hotels deals. In addition to the usual suspects like hotels.com, take a look at SmarterVegas.com, which offers all sorts of tips for holiday and other trips to Vegas. For example, there are some holidays that don't attract many visitors at all --Thanksgiving, for one -- and that's when you can get the best deals.

If you go to Vegas, don't spend all your time in a windowless casino. Did you know there's skiing nearby? Check out SkiLasVegas.com. And there are a number of companies that offer ATV excursions and other activities in the desert. If you're interested in hiking, you probably can't do better than Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area.

What happens in Vegas may stay in Vegas, but get out of town a little and have an experience worth talking about.

Ole Miss: It's Complicated

There's an interesting article in the Travel section of the New York Times for Sunday, Oct. 16, 2011. The article, by Dwight Garner, is nominally about a football weekend at Ole Miss, but it's really a portrait of the campus and the town of Oxford, Miss. I have long thought that the more one knows firsthand about a subject, the more inaccuracies one will see in any newspaper article on that subject. That's not the case here.

Of course, the Oxford and the Ole Miss that I knew firsthand no longer exist. I entered Ole Miss as a freshman from Jackson, Miss. (hey, Dwight, try to wring a travel article out of Jackson), in 1969 at the height of the Archie Manning era and left with a B.A. in journalism in 1972. My last semester, fall of 1972, I worked at the local paper, the Oxford Eagle.

I've been back to Oxford three times since. Once in the mid-90s with a former roommate and his wife; once with my kids around 2002 or so, and once in 2008 with my wife, Jane. The last time was to do an article about Oxford as a weekend-home destination for the New York Times. If you click on that link, please be assured that I also wince at the headline, which should say the streets are lined with magnolias, not paved.

Like Dwight Garner's article, mine begins with the importance of Faulkner to the town's current cachet. And bookstore owner and then-Mayor Richard Howorth. My article suggests Oxford as a weekend destination for people who already have a reason to want to go there: kids in school, old-school ties, affinity for Southern culture, etc.

His article touches on something I hear a bit about (thanks to a couple of nephews who went to Ole Miss, not to mention their mother and two uncles): that Ole Miss no longer cares about football. The party is more important. When I was a student, everyone seemed to take the football very seriously, the parties in the Grove were relatively modest (no chandeliers, no fine china that I recall), and after a loss, there would be a lot of profoundly sad people. I found out just how seriously people took football when I wrote an editorial in the student newspaper calling for the end of varsity sports there -- I was upset that athletes had air-conditioned dorms and I didn't. I was the object of some abuse for a while, but it wasn't as if I had suggested banning Bourbon-soaked picnics in the Grove.

Today's focus on parties? Just shows that, even in Mississippi, progress is possible.

The Best Ways to Fly

It's a commonplace observance these days that flying isn't much fun. It isn't what it used to be. Part of that is due to the security practices put in place since 9/11. Most of it is due to cost-cutting by the airlines. And why are they cutting costs? Because most of us shop for flights solely on price, and to get that low price we're willing to put up with cramped seating, carrying on our bags and other inconveniences.

If you're like me, virtually all of your flights are on American carriers. I remember a few years ago that a friend who had just flown on Virgin Atlantic for the first time said that it was "like flying used to be."

Recently, its U.S. sibling, Virgin America, came in at No. 5 on Travel & Leisure's listing of "the World's Best Airlines." One other U.S. carrier cracked the top 20, JetBlue at No. 17. Most of the "best" airlines are Asian, none of which I've flown. Two of my favorite foreign carriers, Air France and Lan, did not crack the top 20.

A lot of people seem to like Southwest -- and I count myself in their number, mainly because it offers a direct flight between Baltimore, the closest airport to where I live, and Jackson, Miss., my hometown. I particularly like that it allows you to check two bags at no additional charge.

I also am learning to like its boarding procedure: passengers line up in the order in which they printed out or received their boarding passes and then can sit wherever they choose. What I don't like is the personality overload that afflicts some flight attendants. I want my drink and my bag of pita chips with no jokes or stories. The safety talk before the flight should not resemble open-mic night at a comedy club.

But, you know what they say: flying isn't what it was.

Virginia is for ... what, exactly?

I'm not a huge fan of Virginia. Sure, it has some pretty scenery. That's a vineyard at Barboursville, right, about two hours from Washington, D.C. And there are loads of charming small towns, good restaurants and beautiful drives. Both Washington's Mount Vernon and Jefferson's Monticello are in Virginia.

What I don't like about Virginia is its political climate. It's one of the states that is suing to prevent implementation of the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obama's health reform bill. The current governor and attorney general have also done everything they can to knock down anti-discrimination policies that benefited gay people. Overall, it's a state that in some ways seems determined to return to the 1950s if not the 1930s.

That said, not everyone there is politically regressive. The state went for Obama in 2008 and given rising voter remorse about electing so many Republicans in 2010, there's a chance it will stay blue in 2012. I don't think visiting Virginia is on a level with taking a golf vacation to Haiti during the Duvalier regimes.

If you're a lover, Virginia may well be for you after all. Here are a couple of the state tourism board's web sites. CLICK HERE for wine travel; CLICK HERE for autumn travel ideas.

Turkey: Seth Kugel's Istanbul

Seth Kugel is blogging his way through foreign countries as the New York Times Frugal Traveler. Click HERE for his July 17, 2011, article about a $100 weekend in Istanbul.

This was possible because he couch-surfed, which means he stayed for free with someone he contacted through www.couchsurfing.org. This may seem sketchy, but loads of people, most of them younger than Seth, do this. My daughter, who lives in Wisconsin, has played host to couch surfers and has couch-surfed herself, staying a night or two this summer with a young woman in France.

Spending a weekend and only $100 in Istanbul meant that Seth's visit to the Grand Bazaar, shown here, ended with no shopping bags and no rugs for the trip home.

My wife and I really enjoyed Istanbul on a trip to Turkey last year. Earlier posts on this blog discuss Istanbul, the baths there, and other aspects of a vacation in Turkey -- but not on Seth Kugel's meager budget.

Seth doesn't mention visiting the great archaeological museum in Istanbul, which was a highlight of our visit. Its collection of artifacts far outshines anything you'll see in New York or London.