TRIPPING THROUGH 1998

For a travel writer, I didn’t travel very far this year. Most of my trips were domestic: to Death Valley, Big Sur, Santa Fe, Montana, Chicago, Utah, Las Vegas and Phoenix. Outside the U.S., I got as far south as Puerto Vallarta, as far west as Bali, and as far east as Helsinki--never quite making it around the world. A poor showing? I don’t think so because this year I took the biggest trip a person can take. I moved--from Manhattan, where I’d lived for 20 years--to L.A.

So as 1998 draws to a close, I find myself thinking not only about the new places I’ve visited, but about the idea of home. When you travel, you never leave home without taking it with you as a kind of touchstone. I spent my first few months in sunny, spread-out, laid-back L.A. constantly comparing it to gritty, dense, kinetic Manhattan. Having once lived in New England, I can’t visit the English countryside without yearning for western Massachusetts. And I can’t tell you how many times I dreamed of my own impossibly small, shabbily furnished apartment in New York while staying in substandard hotel rooms around the world. When we intensely miss the place we’re from, it’s as if we’ve caught a disease called homesickness. Fortunately, it’s seldom debilitating, and learning all over again that there’s no place like home is a confirmation, even if you haven’t gone as far as Oz.

I was homesick for a time after I moved to L.A.--to the point of tears on the afternoon when I got trapped for three hours behind the wheel of a car, trying to find a way out of Hollywood during the Los Angeles Marathon. Something about the flowers and the sunshine made me feel as if I was losing the edge I’d been sharpening all those years in New York, and no matter where I looked, I couldn’t find a decent martini. It was the travel that made me settle down because to leave home as frequently as I must, you’ve got to have a home you care about getting back to.

I suspect that the most adventurous travelers have a strong sense of home--like travel writer Dervla Murphy, who’s ridden a bicycle across the Middle East and walked thousands of miles along the crest of the Andes, always departing from and returning to the Irish village of her birth. In her 60s, painter Georgia O’Keeffe, so in love with the red badlands of northern New Mexico that she rarely budged from her isolated ranch, suddenly got wanderlust, seeing Europe and Asia for the first time. “When asked why she traveled so much, she would reply that she wanted to see if she lived in the right place,” according to her biographer, Laurie Lisle.

That’s how I like to travel, waiting and hoping for a place to strike my soul, sizing it up as a potential home, wondering who I would be if I lived there.

When I visited L.A., before ever intending to move here, I imagined a lighter, more joyous version of myself, in a sports car with the top down and Mozart cranked up loud. And I still haven’t given up the idea of retiring to Rome, where I’ll live in a crumbling palazzo, walking with a cane and passing myself off as an impoverished contessa. Who knows if I’ll ever see any of the places I visited and loved in 1998 as home? But I’ve added a few of them to my list, so it must have been a good year.

Hong Kong, pitched on the edge of the South China Sea, heads my list of favorite cities. I saw it for the first time in January, when I stayed for over a week, and went back in the fall on my way to Bali. I knew right away that I could live there because with its rushed pulse, crowds, stunning harbor and skyline, it reminded me of New York. But as the days passed, I came to see Hong Kong as utterly exotic and all Chinese--not like the traditional mainland, but thrumming with ambition, pragmatism and go. The Hong Kong dollar has remained stable during the Asian financial crisis, but with tourism lagging, there are deals to be had at hotels. When you go, shop for gorgeous Asian-influenced clothes and accessories at Shanghai Tang, on Hong Kong Island, catch the night horse racing at Happy Valley, visit the pink flamingos in Kowloon Park and see the exquisite ceramics at the newly reopened Tsui Museum of Art.

Upon reflection and with a heavy coat, I also could live in Helsinki, a stylish city, off the beaten track, adorned with exquisite Neoclassical, Art Nouveau and Art Deco buildings, celebrating its 450th anniversary in 2000. I was there in February, when the Gulf of Finland was choked with ice, which didn’t make sightseeing easy but did convince me to go back one day--preferably in the spring. As the birch trees green, I’ll hear Sibelius at Finlandia Hall, designed by the early modern architect Alvar Aalto, take the ferry to the island fortress of Suomenlinna, ride the tram around Toolo Bay and drink vodka in the rooftop bar of the Hotel Torni. Still, there is something intense about Helsinki that defies the light heart, which is why, if I lived there, I’d be a psychotherapist.

While researching a story on Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright’s low-slung, light-loving summer home in the Arizona desert, I started yearning to live in a Wright house, despite the fact that those who do frequently complain of sagging cantilevers and leaky roofs. But to me, every Wright dwelling is a poem, purged of extraneous clutter, reaching toward a simpler, more artful way of life. So it was with great interest that I learned about the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy in Chicago, which lists Wright houses currently for sale. The least expensive is going for $25,000. Alas, it’s in Gary, Ind., and needs at least $100,000 worth of repairs.

In 1998, I found other things to love, as well. The bad bits of travel--the missed connections and ugly hotel rooms--are irritatingly frequent, and make colorful stories to tell when you get back home. But much of a travel writer’s job is to find the good bits, which are a pleasure to report.

Not surprisingly, the year’s best views came from spots around Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbor, followed by the Pacific from the cliff-top Sierra Mar restaurant in Big Sur’s Post Ranch Inn. There, your gaze sails off into blue nothingness at the edge of the world. Rooms start at $365 a night, but a meal with a view is worth the splurge.

In August I visited the Canyon of the Virgin River in southwestern Utah’s Zion National Park. The view was particularly stirring from Angel’s Landing, a precipice reached by a four-mile hike ending with a hand-over-hand climb up a razorback ridge. At the top is a sweeping view of the canyon, narrower, geologically younger and, to my eye, more arresting than the Grand Canyon several hundred miles south. Just make sure you don’t drop your camera.

I did drop my camera--an expensive affair, owned by this newspaper--coming down from Angel’s Landing. Bang, bang, bang it went on the rocks before vanishing over a cliff. So it’s small wonder that the year’s most amazing event came two weeks later, when I got a parcel from Zion National Park containing the wreck of the camera, which had been found by a hiker.

My favorite hotel of the year’s travels proves the maxim that you can’t judge lodgings by a rate sheet. At the Garden View International House, which is run by the Hong Kong YWCA and sits on the flanks of Victoria Peak, I got a stylishly decorated double with a picture window for about $70. The runner-up was Miracle Manor in Desert Hot Springs, where I went for my own private getaway, not to write about. This little hideaway with a naturally heated mineral pool and rooms for $70 to $135 (no housekeeping) is as stylishly minimalist as any Philippe Starck hotel, but a lot more heartfelt.

Best museum was the Art Institute of Chicago, an Impressionist treasure trove. Best souvenir was a pretty little Alvar Aalto glass pitcher purchased for about $25 at the Helsinki Airport, well-loved but broken in my move to L.A. Best airline deal, hands down, was Cathay Pacific’s All-Asia Pass, offering 21 days of travel among 16 Asian cities for $999. Best meal: a five-course extravaganza for two for about $300 (with wine) at Le Cirque in Las Vegas’ new Bellagio Hotel. Best sunset: from the porch at Hubbard’s Yellowstone Lodge in the Paradise Valley of southwestern Montana.

Actually, the sunsets are just as fine in L.A. I’ve got my eye on several Frank Lloyd Wright houses in the Hollywood Hills. And on a fair weekend, you’re likely to find me in a convertible, listening to Mozart, with the wind in my hair. L.A. is home now. But for people like me, who believe that home could be anywhere, that’s no reason to stop looking--and traveling.