TRAVELING IN STYLE : Side Trips : Detours, Diversions and Armchair Delights

FULL METTLE HELMET

Stanley probably wore one when he found Dr. Livingston. Hemingway donned one when he was on safari. Standard-issue headgear since the mid-1850s for British soldiers consigned to the Middle East and India, the pith helmet survives into the 1990s as a classic of style and substance, form and function. Made of canvas and perched on inner straps, the helmet allows plenty of air circulation around hot heads.

Stores such as Polo, Banana Republic and Abercrombie & Fitch don’t even stock this retro chapeau, and a New York importer, British Khaki, says that it’s at least seven months behind in meeting mail-order demand for the hot-again hat. But in Southern California, we found the original made-in-India version at Union War Surplus in San Pedro ($19.95), California Surplus Mart in Hollywood ($24.98) and Hollywood Supply Sergeant ($17.95).

THEY DON’T LEAVE HOME WITHOUT IT

What do veteran frequent fliers always take along?

- Robert Peter Gale, professor of medicine at UCLA Medical Center, who went to Chernobyl in 1986 to assist nuclear-accident victims, is about to return to Russia to help “their crippling health-care system with regard to cancer in children.” He’ll be taking two travel esentials: his Compaq laptop computer and his Casio Boss electronic notebook. “A toothbrush you can always buy--well, maybe not in Moscow--but you certainly can’t buy a data-filled computer.”

Adam Tihany, restaurant designer and co-owner of Remi restaurants in Santa Monica and New York, where he lives, always takes “pictures of my two kids and an alarm clock--and two watches. The one on my right arm is on New York time; on the left arm is the local time.”

Anita DeFrantz, president of the Amateur Athletic Assn. Foundation and member of the International Olympic Committee, never leaves Los Angeles without “a neck pillow, especially for the red-eye flights. And my address book.”

KABC-radio talk-show host Michael Jackson wouldn’t be caught anywhere without his riding boots--”The family always rides,” he says--and his Nikon 20/20 camera with three extra lenses. - Laker center Vlade Divac takes along his Nintendo GameBoy--even to Paris, where the team was scheduled to shoot in a pre-season McDonald’s tournament that ends today.

- Karl Malden, actor and president of the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences, whose never-leave-home-without-them commercials for American Express traveler’s checks brought him more notoriety than his starring role in TV’s “Streets of San Francisco,” says he really never leaves home without his wife, Mona. Aha!

PARADISE SCENE

“Encounters With Paradise: Views of Hawaii and Its People, 1778-1941” is an exhibition of art inspired by outsiders’ visions of the islands. At the Honolulu Academy of Arts, Jan. 23 through March 22, 1992. EGYPTIAN EYE

Traveling by four-wheel-drive vehicles and camels, Kentucky-born Mary Cross photographed Egypt--desert nomads, Cairo merchants, shepherds and tourist sites. The text and pictures in her book “Egypt” (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich)--particularly her shots of usually cloistered Bedouin women (above)--are detailed enough, a male scholar has raved, “to make male veterans of travel and research in Egypt blush: They depict a dimension of Egypt inaccessible to the male outsider.”