2003: Despite world’s cares, the road still beckoned

MY passport photo shows an ordinary, middle-aged woman, but it’s the rest of that document, with stamps from seemingly everywhere on extra pages inserted to accommodate them, that singles me out as someone who has had the good fortune to make her livelihood by traveling the world.

Travel -- already complex as a consequence of 9/11 -- became even more so this year with the invasion of Iraq, a volatile economy and the SARS outbreak. Large parts of the world suddenly seemed off-limits. Despite those difficulties, I still love to travel. Perhaps I’m feeling sentimental because this year marked my 10th as a travel writer. I celebrated that milestone in November, in the Mexican state of Quintana Roo, which I visited in November 1993 for my first Frugal Traveler column for the New York Times.

The coincidence made me think about how the past decade had changed the Maya Riviera and me, and, more generally, about where and how Americans travel.

The area on Mexico’s Caribbean coast had no upscale hotels or fancy name when I last visited as a scruffy, inexperienced traveler. I didn’t know to pack earplugs or how to handle pompous hotel doormen.

Very little fazes me now. I can walk with equal aplomb into the Ritz or a tent on the beach.

Partly as a result, I love to mix it up when I choose my destinations. This year took me from an ice hotel in Jukkasjarvi, Sweden, 120 miles north of the Arctic Circle, to Death Valley’s Furnace Creek Inn. Along the way, there were stops in St. Petersburg, Russia; Laguna Beach; Puerto Vallarta, Mexico; San Diego; New York City; the Berkshire Mountains; Glacier National Park in Montana; England; Mojave National Preserve; Italy; and the Yucatan.

I loved the wild places. Death Valley seemed like a perfect bolt hole as the invasion of Iraq was launched. In October, my brother, John, and I set up tents in one of the world’s most beautiful spots, site No. 25 at the Mid Hills Campground in Mojave National Preserve, looking out on Cima Dome. I routinely got lost in grape arbors on a self-guided walking tour along Italy’s Amalfi Coast and, in July, hiked the tundra-hugging High Line Trail in Glacier, without, alas, seeing a bear.

Schizophrenically, I also loved the cities, especially the great capitals of Europe. I was in Brussels in July as Belgium, that funny little pasted-together country that is now the seat of the European Union, celebrated the 10th anniversary of the reign of King Albert II; St. Petersburg, crusted with winter snow and ice right out of “The Nutcracker Suite”; London, where I pursued my fascination with English history; glorious Rome with its recently renovated Borghese Gallery; and Paris, a city that I couldn’t decide whether to love or hate.

That ambivalence about the City of Light finally coalesced into pure, unadulterated affection. It was a weird year to fall in love with Paris, given the acrimony between the U.S. and France over the war in Iraq. Some American travelers cut a wide circle around France, but, if only out of curiosity over the state of relations between the two countries, I stopped there as often as possible. I found more ill will toward Americans in England and Russia -- nothing to engender fear for my life, but enough to make me feel like a gate crasher at a party.

In Paris, it sometimes seemed as though people I met were trying to compensate for political disharmony. One rainy October night there, I stopped at a bar after the theater. It was late, and the proprietor was closing up shop. Without that superior attitude I’d experienced on other occasions in Paris, he served me a wedge of cheese and a carafe of vin ordinaire. As I got up to leave, he said he liked Americans, to which I replied that, politics aside, we ought to be friends.

By the same token, it seemed important to tell a Parisian cabdriver who disapproved of the U.S. invasion of Iraq that, regardless of my politics, I supported my president, which he respected.

People everywhere understand patriotism, it seems.

Such experiences made me think about what patriotism means to people in other countries, especially in Europe, where the European Union is starting to blur national identity.

This year, multiple visits to Europe -- the most popular destination (besides Canada and Mexico) for American tourists, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce -- also made me notice how easy the EU has made travel on the Continent. People who carry EU passports generally proceed without stopping through immigration and customs.

The EU’s common currency makes it possible to go from Cortona to Cork without having to figure out how many Italian lire equal an Irish pound. The growing strength of the euro against the dollar has made travel in Europe more expensive for Americans. One euro was worth about a dollar last year at this time; now it’s worth more like $1.24. But I’m hoping that will be reversed by a rebounding U.S. economy.

In a sense, the EU is part of a broader development: globalization, a dirty word to many travelers whose peregrinations are motivated by the desire to see places that are wholly different from home. The fear that unimpeded globalization will make every place alike, with a KFC on the corner, is undeniable. In some ways, though, the trend benefits travelers. What, if not globalization, has brought good food to London?

I like the way Alain de Botton, author of “The Art of Travel,” resolves the globalization quandary. “There’s plenty left that remains mysterious enough for me,” he told me in a recent interview.

I learned this year how places with KFCs that I had visited repeatedly can remain mysterious and exciting. In August I returned to England for my seventh visit, and I did things I’d done before: touring the Tower of London with a Beefeater, visiting the tomb of Elizabeth I at Westminster Cathedral and driving to Shakespeare’s birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon, a town I’d found too touristy to love in the past.

I had a specific agenda on that trip: the hunt for places related to religious strife in 16th and 17th century England, climaxing in the Gunpowder Plot, an attempt by a band of Catholic radicals to kill King James I.

Piecing together the story as I went from the tower, where many of the conspirators were interned, to Tudor estates in the countryside around Stratford, which was then a Catholic stronghold, made everything I’d seen before new and fascinating.

It’s a matter of traveling with a theme, not so much to a place as to an idea. One could, for example, go to Belgium to explore World War I battlegrounds; sample the olives of Greece; or wander around Rome, as I did in October, searching for echoes of “La Dolce Vita” and favorite haunts of Federico Fellini, that 1960 movie’s irrepressible, quintessentially Roman director. Through his eyes, I experienced the Eternal City in a wholly new, hedonistic way, sipping espresso in cafes around the Piazza del Popolo.

Don’t forget to have fun

If you travel this way, you can go back to the same place many times and always learn something new.

My late mother, a junior high school teacher, thought of travel as a basic educational tool. The gloss I added to her lesson plan this year is that learning by traveling is, above all, fun.

So even if I felt cold about a January stay in a Swedish hotel made of ice -- the nutty nadir of my travel year -- there were the singular joys of tasting smoked reindeer meat, hearing the howls of sled dogs and standing alone on a vast frozen lake under a pale Arctic sun.

As for the year’s travel highs, I could go on and on: smelling the first lilacs of spring in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts, understanding a play performed in French at the Comedie-Francaise in Paris, sipping Russian champagne surrounded by the splendors of St. Petersburg’s Yusupov Palace.

People I meet think I have the best job in the world, but close friends ask whether I’m getting tired of my peripatetic lifestyle. The answer is yes. I really want a dog.

And no. Before I hang up my carry-on, I want to see the Alhambra in Spain, the ruins of Angkor in Cambodia, Edinburgh’s Holyrood Palace, the Iron Gate gorge on the Danube between Bulgaria and Romania, the Hindu holy city of Varanasi in India, Moscow, Berlin and the old Christian capital of Trebizond on the Black Sea in Turkey.

The passport I got 10 years ago when I became a travel writer is about to expire. The necessity of replacing it and, like a travel virgin, presenting a new passport without intriguing visas from India and China to a customs agent somewhere fills me with dread. Then there’s that unsettling new picture of me a decade older. Nothing about it suggests all the things I’ve seen and done in the last 10 years.

But that’s all right. I know they’re there.

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Best travel moment

In May, I went to the Berkshire Mountains along the border of Massachusetts and New York. On a morning walk down a dewy back road, I saw bushes bursting with the first lilacs of spring, a sight that can hold its own next to almost anything.

Worst moments

Drinking frigid vodka concoctions and waiting for bedtime in the ice bar at the Ice Hotel in Jukkasjarvi, Sweden, was like “The Lost Weekend” in Lapland. There’s nothing else to do, and the more you drink, the easier it is to get to sleep in your 23-degree room.

Before venturing into the heart of the Mojave National Preserve in early October, I stayed at the Avi Resort & Casino, near Laughlin, Nev. Watching gamblers fill their plates at the buffet and empty plastic cups of quarters into slot machines made me want to drown myself in the Colorado River.

Favorite hotels

It’s expensive, but what could you possibly not like at the Montage Resort & Spa in Laguna Beach? The hotel opened in February on one of the most beautiful stretches of beach in Southern California and has two pools, two restaurants, 262 rooms and a luxurious spa. Doubles begin at $475. (866) 271-6953 or (949) 715-6000, www.montagelagunabeach.com.

Finally, a stylish, comfortable hotel on Paris’ Right Bank that isn’t terribly expensive:

Hotel Therese, 5 Rue Therese, 011-33-1-4296-1001, www.hoteltherese.com, doubles starting at $190. It has a small, handsome lobby and guestrooms, in walking distance to the Palais Royal and Opera.

Favorite restaurants

One magical night in St. Petersburg, Russia, I attended Adolphe Adam’s “Giselle” at the Maryinsky Theater, then had a late supper at the Noble Nest, 21 Ulitsa Dekabristov, 011-7-812-312-3205. The trout caviar, Dover sole and aristocratic atmosphere are all delectable.

Foodies have long considered Al Moro, 011-39-06-678-3495, near the Trevi Fountain, the best trattoria in Rome. I finally got there this year to try Al Moro’s classic spaghetti alla carbonara, followed by zabaglione and espresso. Delizioso.

New travel discovery

I was amazed to discover that acupuncture helped me with jet lag. There’s no scientific proof, and some of my colleagues think I’m nuts. But my Chinese medical practitioner wasn’t surprised to hear that the treatments could have this ancillary effect. I get an acupuncture treatment on the morning before I fly and as soon after I get home as possible.