Around The World In 80 Dinners Part 1

Around the World in 80 Dinners.

The Ultimate Culinary Adventure.

by Cheryl and Bill Jamison.

Acknowledgments.

If we've had any success at all in relating our tale, much of the credit goes to three talented and inspirational ladies. Our former editor Harriet Bell suggested we take a pause from writing cookbooks and try our hands at a new genre, in which she gave us important early guidance. Doe Coover, our hard-toiling agent, made us see and understand some of our initial mistakes and how to correct them. Carolyn Marino, who took over as the editor, went through our first draft with a sharp pencil and piercing insight, cutting extraneous material and showing us what needed tightening. None of them, of course, shares any of the blame for blunders that remain.

We also want to thank Sam Daniel; Rebecca, the reservation agent; and other employees at American Airlines who a.s.sisted us so ably in putting together our flight plans for an around-the-world trip. In a modern take on medieval alchemy, they turned frequent-flier miles on paper into fifty thousand actual miles with wings.

OFF TO EAT THE WORLD.

NOTHING SPOILS A DAY MUCH MORE THAN S SAM D DANIEL CALLING TO SAY THAT you have too many legs. you have too many legs.

"Mr. Jamison?" he asks cheerfully when Bill picks up the phone, signaling in one short breath that he's a stranger we probably don't want to hear from.

"Yes," Bill answers warily, holding the phone askance.

In a soothing, sonorous voice-imagine Bill Clinton on Valium-Sam introduces himself and says, "I'm with American Airlines, a.s.signed to the office that coordinates AAdvantage award travel involving our partner carriers in the ONEworld alliance. Our committee of all the airline representatives met yesterday and reviewed the around-the-world Business Cla.s.s itinerary you booked recently. We found that it contains more than sixteen legs, or flight segments, the maximum permitted."

Bill is fully alert now and determined to remain tactful, contrary to his natural instincts. "Sam, I've read all the published rules for this kind of award travel many times, and they don't include any limitation on the number of legs."

"Yes, sir. It's a new policy."

"Do you have it in writing somewhere so I can review it?"

"No, not yet, but the committee feels strongly about it."

Bill thinks back quickly to the long conversation he had two days earlier with Rebecca, the perky international agent who obligingly booked our three-month trip without a single protesting peep about the number of flights. "Why didn't Rebecca catch this? She's clearly sharp and professional."

"She doesn't know about it yet. We haven't had an opportunity to inform the reservation agents."

"Sam," Bill says in a slight slippage from the most diplomatic approach, "you sound like a decent and intelligent guy. You don't by any chance think I'm a total fool, do you, the kind of guy who might, for instance, pay the delivery charge on a truckload of bulls.h.i.+t?"

It's either that or else a crackpot committee has put him in an untenable jam, changing the award rules after a booking, which of course he would not admit. Sam a.s.sures Bill that he doesn't consider him a fool and promises, "I'll help you make adjustments as painlessly as possible." Needing time to consider the agony of amputating legs, Bill lies about an imminent appointment in town and schedules another call with Sam later in the day.

For us, this is the adventure of a lifetime, not the kind of thing you want to see hacked to pieces in advance. For decades now, ever since each of us spent a year studying and traveling in Europe during college, we've dreamed-separately at first and then together-of circling the globe with enough time to genuinely enjoy places that intrigue us. To make the spree affordable, it's essential for us to use frequent-flier miles to cover most of the air expenses, but Sam threatens to clip our wings for taking undue advantage of American's AAdvantage program.

Bill immediately confers with Cheryl about response tactics. The most obvious option is combative confrontation, refusing to yield ground to a fickle bully, whoever the culprit is. Bill in particular likes this approach viscerally but doubts it will work. Drawing from his many years of poker experience, he says, "Aggression succeeds when you've got the best hand or can effectively bluff an opponent. We have decent cards in this case, because of the late, clumsy s.h.i.+ft in policy, but they control the awards. They're holding pocket aces, known ironically in poker slang as 'American Airlines' because of the A.A. initials. About all we can hope for is a split pot."

Cheryl asks if he could get help from friends in London at British Airways, one of the major ONEworld alliance partners. Two decades ago, when the airline was in transition from public to private owners.h.i.+p, Bill served as a management consultant at the highest levels of the corporation's marketing, information management, and strategic planning departments. "Everyone I could call for advice has left now, but I know something about the power politics of the business. If we overreach, they'll squash us like pesky bugs."

After talking through the situation for more than an hour, we decide to try accommodation, at least at first, to give Sam a chance to fulfill his promise of painless surgery. When Sam calls back shortly, Bill affects a nonchalant air, asking him for suggestions on salvaging our travel plans. "We can cut three legs in the United States if you simply pay for direct, nonstop flights-much better, don't you agree, Mr. Jamison?-between your home airport in Albuquerque and your overseas departure city of Los Angeles."

"That's reasonable, Sam," Bill says, not mentioning that we've been considering the idea anyway.

"Then for some of the additional frequent-flier miles still in your accounts, we can switch your three flights inside Australia on Qantas to a separate reward package, removing them from this itinerary." Bill balks briefly at this, mostly as a bluff, until Sam offers to rebate some of the miles later.

These changes bring us down to seventeen legs, one of which is the gap, or "open jaw" in airline lingo, between our arrival and departure cities in Australia, covered now by the separate set of tickets. In other conversations over the next two business days, Sam encourages Bill to propose another cut. Bill has one in mind as a last resort-paying for our relatively inexpensive flights between London and Nice-but he politely protests that a simple break in the itinerary between destinations should not be counted as a flight segment. Sam asks, almost in exasperation, "Why aren't you getting angry with me? Everyone does."

Bill changes the subject to avoid the question but thinks to himself, "Aha, now he's beginning to feel defensive." Apparently Sam convinces the committee to allow Bill's point about the open jaw because he graciously stows the scalpel without mentioning the matter again.

By this time we regard Sam as a genuine ally, a savvy manager trying to balance a.s.sistance to customers of his airline against demands laid down by other airline partners providing us most of our free Business Cla.s.s seats. He never implies in any way that he's caught in the middle of this situation, but it seems increasingly likely to us. In looking back on the problem after the trip, we suspect the impetus for the after-the-fact rule change came from a foreign partner, perhaps Qantas, which unlike the other ONEworld carriers, consistently treated us like hobo freeloaders, often authorizing only Coach Cla.s.s tickets and refusing to upgrade them, as Sam said they would, when Business seats sat empty.

In the end, despite the minor glitches, everyone wins. The committee flexes its muscles, Sam negotiates skillfully, and we keep our itinerary wholly intact, emerging in fact with more than seemed likely to us before our initial conversation with Rebecca. For 220,000 frequent-flier miles each, four ONEworld members-American, British Airways, Cathay Pacific, and Qantas-give us $20,000 worth of Business Cla.s.s award travel taking us around the globe to ten countries over thirteen weeks. It takes almost half as many miles for a similar ticket to just one European city and back, so we feel like we're absconding with the little pot of gold at the end of the frequent-flier rainbow.

As much as people complain about the difficulties of collecting awards from frequent-flier programs, neither of us has encountered many problems in more than twenty different experiences on various airlines. This time we antic.i.p.ated more trouble than usual because of all the destinations involved, the need to construct routes between them on several ONEworld carriers, and the tangle of rules that govern the travel. Bill spent many hours on the Alliance Web site figuring out which partners flew where, when, and, most important, how often, knowing that the chances of scoring a ticket increase in direct proportion to the frequency of flights. He built a preferred itinerary on this basis and then developed backup alternatives to ensure our flexibility, often one of the keys required to unlock the treasure chest.

The other critical key is making reservations as soon as possible after they become available, generally about eleven months before the last flight. Airlines allocate a limited number of seats for reward travel-the main constraint in obtaining free flights rather than frequently blamed blackout dates-and the early birds claim the spoils. Bill called the international AAdvantage desk several times to get an exact availability date for us from different agents. Opinions varied on whether it was 330 or 331 days from the end of the trip, but the agent who got his attention advised starting a little earlier than either of those dates because you have two weeks to complete the booking process. Bill selects January 12, 2005, for a launch date, a week ahead of 330 days from a mid-December return, and phones that morning.

On the initial call, he tries to get Qantas seats from Los Angeles to anywhere in Australia, the most logical first stop geographically. No seating availability at all for the whole month of September. Then Bill claims a need to rethink plans, hangs up, and verifies this information with another agent. Rebuffed again, on his third call he goes to backup plan number one, flying Cathay Pacific to Bali (originally our second stop) and hopping from there to Australia next. This time the agent is the genial Rebecca, who tells him there is wide-open availability on Cathay Pacific almost every day of the month. Bill books our departure for September 18 and proceeds through the rest of the reservations, accepting several changes as necessary in ideal flight days and routes but otherwise raking in a bonanza more fully and easily than expected-at least before Sam springs his surprise forty-eight hours later.

On the evening after concluding the final arrangements with Sam, Cheryl tests a few recipes from our cookbook in progress, The Big Book of Outdoor Cooking and Entertaining, The Big Book of Outdoor Cooking and Entertaining, submitted to the publisher shortly before our departure and released in the spring of 2006, after our return. When we sit down for dinner to enjoy the dishes-including a spectacular grilled shrimp with romesco sauce-with a bottle of Co te du Rho ne wine, the conversation naturally drifts to our big trip ahead. Cheryl says, "Sam played a major role in making this happen, didn't he?" submitted to the publisher shortly before our departure and released in the spring of 2006, after our return. When we sit down for dinner to enjoy the dishes-including a spectacular grilled shrimp with romesco sauce-with a bottle of Co te du Rho ne wine, the conversation naturally drifts to our big trip ahead. Cheryl says, "Sam played a major role in making this happen, didn't he?"

Bill raises his winegla.s.s and proposes a toast. "To Sam, our favorite amputator."

Cheryl clicks her gla.s.s to his and adds, "A leg man any woman can love."

Our planning for the journey began four years earlier, in the winter of 2001. Both of us had acc.u.mulated about fifty thousand frequent-flier miles on two airlines, American and Delta. It wasn't enough yet for a trip abroad-we don't do domestic with our valuable miles-but it seemed an apt time to set a goal and start focusing the collection of additional mileage on one of the two carriers. Early conversations centered on single countries and regions, mainly India, South America, and Southeast Asia. One night a little lightbulb blinked on above Cheryl's head, just as if she were Cathy from the comics: "Let's check out around-the-world possibilities. Maybe we can go to all these places and others, too."

The next morning Bill leaped into the research, first on the Internet and then on the phone with AAdvantage and SkyMiles representatives. American and Delta both offered around-the-world rewards in conjunction with foreign airline partners, but at the time at least the American program appeared broader in scope, less limited in restrictions, and clearer on the parameters. So he began playing on the ONEworld Web site, constructing fantasy itineraries to test the feasibility of stringing together a bunch of wonderful destinations. By the end of the week he told Cheryl, "A brilliant idea. This baby is gonna fly."

"I've been thinking," Cheryl said, "about the timing. Would it be possible to save up enough miles and arrange our future work schedule so we could make the trip in late 2005 to celebrate our twentieth wedding anniversary?"

Bill smiled and patted himself on the back. "I sure was smart to marry such a genius."

Neither of us could be certain at that point whether the timing would pan out, but we immediately settled on it as our target. From early in our marriage we've commemorated major milestones in our lives with special vacations, focused increasingly over the years on great eating opportunities. The idea goes back to our wedding, when we wrestled with a choice between diamond rings for Cheryl or a honeymoon in Kauai, Kyoto, Hong Kong, and Bangkok. The bank account wouldn't cover both, and Cheryl ultimately decided on the Pacific escape, selecting for her finger a more unusual and less expensive band featuring her favorite stone, blue topaz. It turned out to be a fantastic decision for us, a memory to share forever and an experience to repeat in different ways over and over.

Our tenth anniversary took us only as far as Las Vegas, but we met up there with three long-term friends who paid more to travel to our wedding than we did for the event itself. The five of us paraded up and down the Strip on a neon-lighted New Year's Eve and grazed our way through the most compelling menus in town at the time, early in the reign of the all-star absentee chef in Vegas, when Mark Miller and Wolfgang Puck shared the throne and Emeril Laga.s.se, still learning to talk good on TV, was merely a parvenu prince opening his first restaurant in town. Emeril's suffered from start-up jitters on our visit (in such obvious ways that the maitre d' comped the dinner), but the kitchen teams at Miller's and Puck's places put together fine spreads.

When Cheryl's fiftieth birthday approached, she planned a party at La Combe en Perigord, a lovely manor in southwestern France that serves as the base for annual weeklong culinary adventures we lead in the Dordogne. Arriving early, we picked up a rental car in Barcelona and carefully collected a couple of cases of wine for the occasion from small, independent vintners along the French Mediterranean between Collioure in the south and Bandol on the lip of the Riviera. Many of the bottles came from Jean-Benoit Cavalier at Chateau de Lascaux in Vacquieres, who greeted us fresh from his fields in a faded polo s.h.i.+rt and half-zipped work pants, and proudly shared tastes of all of his handcrafted creations while meticulously explaining the differences in the soils where he grew each of the grape varietals. At La Combe, Cheryl's mother and a number of good friends joined us for a two-day feast covering more courses than you need for a Ph.D. in gastronomy.

For Bill's sixtieth birthday, he staged an elaborate dine-around at our favorite restaurants and joints in pre-Katrina New Orleans, beginning with warm-up meals at the Acme Oyster House, Central Grocery, and Mother's, then building up the tempo at Galatoire's, Uglesich's, and Brigtsen's before a rousing climax the final evening at Commander's Palace. Totally satiated, we went from there to Orlando to take our young grandkids on a five-day romp through Disney World, and afterward ended up at baseball spring training in Vero Beach, Florida, where our Dodgers hone the season's strategy for losing as many critical games as possible without being demoted to a bowling league.

So we're not total rubes in putting together celebratory trips. Still, planning an around-the-world jaunt presented immense challenges, which excited us from the beginning. For starters, we had to save up money as well as frequent-flier miles, though we also had to spend the former to acc.u.mulate the latter on credit-card purchases. From the inception of the idea to our departure, every expense possible-groceries, utility bills, the deposit on a new Volvo C70 convertible, even small stuff such as Cheryl's daily postworkout iced tea-went on a Citibank AAdvantage card, always paid off right away to avoid any burdensome debt. Each of us had cards connected with our AAdvantage accounts, with second cards for the spouse, and we switched back and forth between them, accepting upgrades that offered extra miles and tracking progress with every monthly bill. It took us most of the time available to reach the goal, plopping down the plastic for the last charge with only months to spare.

The most daunting but fun challenge was picking our destinations, another process begun immediately and not completed until near the end. The number of places related, of course, to the time available. Two months seemed too rushed and four months pushed the limits for being out of work. Quick research on the Internet suggested fall as the best travel season overall for weather, but we wanted to avoid any stragglers from the summer tourism stampede and hoped to be back for the December holidays. From sometime in September to mid-December gave us roughly three months to roam, allowing us an average of nine days for unhurried visits to each of ten countries.

One of the early stops, we decided right off, would be dedicated to a second honeymoon. In these days of any-gimmick-goes tourism, every town from Calgary to Calcutta hypes itself as a honeymooners' paradise. If you fancy getting married locally as well, or require a large hot tub for your reception, the chamber of commerce has a special bureau to provide you a directory of vendors. The last time we took the word of a tourism tout, about fifteen years ago in the Caribbean, the ferry left St. Kitts for Nevis thirty minutes early, with our checked luggage but without us, requiring us to hire a speedboat to catch up with our bags, which were sitting stranded on the dock in Charlestown. Our tack since then: Don't ask and don't listen.

Bali emerged as our choice for the encore tryst on the basis of little more than romantic hankering. It's in the Pacific region for one thing, where we honeymooned before, and the island's exotic allure has long attracted both of us. The clincher came when Kathy Loo, a friend who's been to more places than the Rolling Stones on tour, told us, "I know a blissful small hotel in Ubud you would love." Bill looked it up on the Internet and, sure enough, the resort inn offered a honeymoon package and suite, and all the sweeter, at an affordable price.

After an invigorating date in Bali, we were bound to be hungry. So the question became, for the rest of our itinerary, where do we want to eat? Even keeping a tight focus on places with strong local food traditions, rather than worldly pretensions, our appet.i.tes went overboard on the prospects, suggesting enough possibilities to keep us running like a perpetual-motion machine for a decade. The problem became elimination, deciding which good options to leave on the table for a future meal. That eventually included virtually all of Europe, where enjoying food is akin to folk art. Since we visit regularly and wanted new experiences for this trip, it was cut to a single stop in Nice, scheduled partially because we needed a layover someplace in the neighborhood to get between South Africa and Brazil on ONEworld airlines, and also because our favorite hotel anywhere is a couple of hours away via the autoroute in Les Baux-de-Provence.

Brazil ranked as a priority from the beginning, or at least Salvador, the capital of the northeastern state of Bahia. The historic city boasts a vibrant Creole culture and cuisine, a fascination of ours for many years, as well as a lively music scene and beautiful beaches. Of all the tempting destinations in South America, it's long been at the top of our wish list. Flights to Salvador go through Rio de Janeiro, so it became a bonus stop.

South Africa fell into place quickly, too. The country's got game, literally and figuratively, plus the alluring Winelands, one of the world's emerging hot spots for creative cooking and winemaking. Cape Town-lovely by all reports-seemed to warrant some time and so did a safari, eventually planned in the Eastern Cape near Port Elizabeth rather than the more popular and expensive area around Kruger National Park. If the safari had been an overriding interest, our chief focus, we would have gone to Kruger, but traveling to the park from the distant Cape TownWinelands region took too much time and money for our purposes.

Thailand excited us on our honeymoon more than our other destinations combined, and it produces l.u.s.tfully flavored food, so it easily rated a return. Our last visit was too short and limited in scope, making it important in this case to stay longer and move around. ONEworld airlines go only to Bangkok, putting it on our map for sure, and we also decided to see Chiang Mai and p.h.u.ket, the former for its remarkable highlands culture and the latter because of its spectacular rise in the late twentieth century into international tourism renown.

A friend of Bill's from college lives most of the year in Chaozhou, China, where he and his wife own and run a ceramics factory that exports its products to the United States. They have urged us to visit for years and this could be our only opportunity before they retire. It became definite when Bill found an article saying the residents love food so much the children used to memorize and sing a ten-thousand-word ballad just about the local snacks, skipping completely over all the goose and crab main dishes. Hong Kong provides the best gateway to Chaozhou, so we add it to our stops.

Everywhere else involved compromises and trade-offs. At first we wanted to linger for a month or more in the South Pacific, New Zealand, and Australia. That proved impractical for a number of reasons, primarily because the ONEworld airlines generally serve the South Pacific through cooperative arrangements with other carriers, putting the flights off-limits for frequent-flier rewards. The only appealing island chain we could reach without a lot of ha.s.sles was New Caledonia, a Qantas port of call relatively close to Australia. It finally made the cut as a destination due to its French background and relatively unspoiled setting. New Zealand fell out of the compet.i.tion around the same time, as we preferred to focus on Australia, specifically the wine regions near Adelaide and the capital of "Mod Oz" cuisine, Sydney.

In India, the whole enormous country enticed us. Cheryl made a strong pitch for Agra, the site of the Taj Mahal-"How can we miss, on a twentieth-anniversary trip, the world's most famous monument to love?"-and Bill pushed Khajuraho, where Hindu art reached its apex in the erotic sculpture of the numerous temples-"Talk about love, this place is like a three-dimensional version of the Kama Sutra." Both of us wanted to visit Rajasthan, especially the legendary cities of Jaipur, Jodhpur, and Udaipur, and hoped as well to time our arrival for the annual camel fair in Pushkar. Given the unpredictable and sluggish state of internal transportation in India, however, we realized it would take weeks to see these places, and we simply didn't have the time on this trip. Ultimately, food ruled. Our flights would go in and out of Mumbai (formerly Bombay), so a short stop there became a given, and then we chose to head south to Kerala, known for a spicy, distinctive style of cooking much different from the northern Indian fare usually a.s.sociated with the country.

Near the end of the planning, we added Singapore to the itinerary and scratched the Seych.e.l.les. Both Singapore and Kuala Lumpur caused us to dither from the beginning. Modern cities in an international mode, they had little personal appeal to us beyond the eating possibilities. Singapore got the nod eventually because of its extraordinary wealth of street food. The Seych.e.l.les, a high priority at first, posed too many problems coming and going. Airline connections from Mumbai, the closest city on our trip, are wretched, much worse than from Paris, where we find ourselves often enough to travel to the islands at another time.

Ready finally by the fall of 2004 with ample AAdvantage miles and a preferred list of stops, we waited impatiently for the January 12 booking date, wondering what was going to fall through the cracks, convinced something would with so many destinations and flights. When everything goes great with Rebecca, and Sam's changes turn out to be minor, relief and elation overwhelm us. For a whole day.

Now out of the dreaming and scheming stage, we've got to move on immediately to the hundreds of details that need attention before our mid-September departure. As soon as our frets about the booking process fade from our minds, a more urgent question arises: What can go wrong on the trip? The answer comes from a little demon who hovers above our pillows each night, saying in a giddy Robin Williams voice, "You dummies! Everyone in the world who didn't already hate Americans certainly does at this point after the Iraq fiasco. They also think all Americans are rich, so thieves will target you. If you escape vitriolic ridicule and robbery, you'll probably catch an exotic tropical disease never seen before in the United States. At the very least, an airline will lose your luggage in an Asian country where the largest clothes on the market wouldn't fit a normal American child, much less overindulgent eaters like you."

An omen of the potential pitfalls arises ominously even before our departure. Only a few nations on our itinerary require visas in advance of arrival, a formality we expect to be simple and straightforward. It isn't in the case of Brazil, our last stop, because the consulate in Houston won't begin work on a visa until ninety days before your plane ticket (copy necessary) indicates you will land. Our British Airways flight gets into Rio de Janeiro on the seventy-eighth day of our journey, giving us a dozen days in our window of opportunity immediately before our departure from the United States-during which time our pa.s.sports have to vacation with the Brazilian bureaucrats in Texas.

The consulate insists on at least five working days for its toil, and five more get lost to the weekend between working days, the Labor Day holiday, the anniversary celebrating Brazilian independence from Portugal, and the day between these two holidays, since no one wants to work then. Bill calls frequently to monitor progress and we start to fear that one of us will need to fly to Houston to retrieve our pa.s.sports in person, with or without the visas. Finally, FedEx delivers all the official doc.u.ments to our door just forty-eight hours ahead of our first flight. If we've got a maze like this to stumble through before leaving home, what obstacles lurk ahead in the wide, wide world out yonder?

It's imperative first of all, according to our nighttime demon, to look un-American, something war enthusiasts have called us at times but nothing we've ever felt or tried deliberately to appear. Our hometown travel store in Santa Fe-the founding owners of which referred to themselves as "the bag ladies"-helps right away by selling us luggage tags featuring an image of the Canadian flag; obviously from the copious supply of these on hand, other travelers have similar concerns. More important, we need to avoid clothes that announce our nationality: athletic shoes (particularly when worn with white socks), Top-Siders and most loafers (particularly when worn with no socks), sweat suits, s.h.i.+rts with b.u.t.ton-down collars, khaki pants or shorts, baseball caps, and casual pullovers decorated with little polo players, alligators, or any other branded emblem, miniature advertising billboards few other people in the world pay to display.

The one allowed exception, definitely American in tone, is what Bill calls his "bulletproof blazer," a TravelSmith sport coat that's completely indestructible, wrinkle-free, and machine or hand washable. It's as s.h.i.+ny as an oversized flagpole at an auto dealers.h.i.+p, and almost as suspect in character, but he needs the jacket on flights and in airports because it contains an array of secret, zippered pockets to securely hold our wad of airline tickets, pa.s.sports, cash, and credit cards. The downside of the portable safe is the risk of losing everything at once if Bill leaves the coat behind somewhere, certainly a possibility in untoward circ.u.mstances.

Nothing can prevent stupid mistakes, but we seek protection from actual pilfering on the streets by leaving all valuables at home, wearing cheap watches and costume jewelry, and taking big manila envelopes to seal up things placed in hotel safe-deposit boxes, which will always include our pa.s.sports, plane tickets, one of our ATM cards, extra credit cards, and ten one-hundred-dollar U.S. bills. For identification when we're out, in the unlikely event it's ever required, we'll carry a photocopy of the main page of both pa.s.sports on a single sheet of paper. The wallet Bill carries in his back pocket serves only as a decoy for pickpockets, holding just a little local money and some fake credit cards. With the real goods stashed un.o.btrusively in a zippered front pocket, the simple ruse saved us from disaster once in Barcelona, when a thief in an almost empty bathroom "accidentally" splattered Bill with urine and pretended to help him clean it off while cleaning out his back pocket instead.

Next, it's essential to get as much protection as possible from strange diseases. Our doctor for many years until his recent retirement, Don Romig, an internist with a distinguished reputation in infectious diseases, devoted a half day of his office schedule each week to emporiatrics, a rather obscure term for travel medicine. In our old, trusty Random House College Dictionary, Random House College Dictionary, the only similar word is "Emporia," denoting a city in Kansas, so we've always figured Don invented the specialty and named it for the precautions you would want to take in visiting Emporia or any other similarly exotic destination. the only similar word is "Emporia," denoting a city in Kansas, so we've always figured Don invented the specialty and named it for the precautions you would want to take in visiting Emporia or any other similarly exotic destination.

The doctor who bought his practice, Mary Ellen Lawrence, reviews our medical records and notes that we don't need the shots for hepat.i.tis B, taken for previous trips, but wants us to get boosters for teta.n.u.s, diphtheria, and polio. Then she pulls out a world atlas of maladies, showing precisely where every dangerous microbe hangs out. "Let's check yellow fever," she says, comparing the maps and our list of destinations. "You'll be okay with that"-a relief to Cheryl since yellow doesn't really suit blondes-"but malaria will be a concern."

At a dental cleaning a week earlier, our hygienist asked Bill, "Want to hear a cautionary tale about malaria?" She knew he did since she had him sprawled out speechless on his back with his mouth propped wide open. "A pal of mine relied on some of our popular Santa Festyle 'natural medicine' for protection in Africa against malaria, which she caught and barely survived. She was an awful mess for a long time."

When the hygienist finally released his jaw and he could talk again, Bill quickly rea.s.sured her. "Some of our best friends are drugs."

Dr. Lawrence gives us a prescription for malaria pills and also a onetime dose of something to combat typhoid fever. Continuing to write, she says, "Now let's get a generous supply of an antibiotic to control diarrhea."

"While you're doing that," Cheryl interjects, "it would be useful to have another antibiotic in case of a tooth infection."

Bill adds, "And two kinds of sleeping pills for flights of different lengths, one that leaves the body after a few hours and another that will keep us down longer." By the end of the appointment our stack of prescriptions weighs as much as the Physicians' Desk Reference Physicians' Desk Reference.

Insurance covers none of the cost, of course, which adds up to hundreds of dollars. Blue Cross Blue s.h.i.+eld will pay tons more if we pa.s.s on the medicine and get malaria, typhoid fever, or polio, but won't ante up even a dime for prevention. Sure makes us proud of our health-care system.

On to the luggage our demon says an airline will lose. It seems important to rely on carry-on bags as much as possible, but the restrictions on these are tighter in Asia, Africa, and South America than at home, often prohibiting any more than one suitcase weighing a maximum of seven kilograms, the equivalent of 15.4 pounds. Our existing regulation-size carry-on bags are so heavy by international standards that packing a single change of skivvies could put us over the allowed kilos.

Among the scores of suitcases on the American market labeled "lightweight," a few actually are. Each of us gets a new Eagle Creek six-pound rolling bag plus a smaller, matching tote suitable for either carry-on or checking, depending on the flight. In addition, we take a st.u.r.dy cloth briefcase from our collection to check always with hefty, replaceable items such as books. Stashed away inside these five bags, we'll carry a couple of extremely light, fold-up totes to haul absolutely irresistible purchases, mainly those things Cheryl makes a real stink about.

Obviously, the limited luggage restricts our wardrobes, and because of that, all the clothes need to be washable by hand when necessary. Fortunately, the weather should be consistently warm everywhere except France-a time for layering-since the other destinations lie south of the equator, where it will be spring.

Other than his blazer c.u.m safe, Bill won't bring much more than three wrinkle-resistant gray slacks with expandable waistbands and zippered pockets, a half dozen casual s.h.i.+rts with banded bottoms that hang loosely outside pants, two pair of shorts (one navy blue, the other charcoal), a swim suit, sandals, and a rain poncho. Care goes into the selection of walking shoes. They must be comfortable, of course, but also dressy enough for a fancy restaurant, easy to slip on and off at Asian homes and places of wors.h.i.+p, and European in styling to reinforce our faux Canadian pedigree.

Cheryl takes much longer than Bill in selecting her clothes, which, naturally, cost a lot more than his, even though she gives little attention to trendy fas.h.i.+on statements. The priority is a flexible ensemble, equally suitable in myriad combinations for dining out in Sydney, bounding across a savannah on a South African safari, riding an elephant in Thailand, and strolling the seaside promenade in Nice. She needs to be as modestly dressed in India as the heat allows and as immodestly attired as she dares on the hot sands of Ipanema Beach.

The search begins in the late winter, when stores and mail-order catalogs start promoting warm-weather wear. She settles ultimately on six tops and four bottoms, all predominately black and made mostly of lightweight, crinkly fabrics. The tops, purchased in several cases at Chico's, include a camisole that can be worn under anything, a patterned V-neck T-s.h.i.+rt, a tank, a long-sleeved knit, a hooded gauze tunic, and an old travel favorite, a sleeveless, loose-fitting cotton-rayon blouse with bright tropical accents set against a black background. The latter develops a small hole during the trip, which Cheryl patches with duct tape on the inside without detracting from its external appearance.

Her favorite Capri pants don't fare as well, falling apart into shreds halfway through the journey. The misfortune leaves her with one other pair of Capris in a cotton-spandex blend, stretchy "travel-knit" slacks, and a skort that makes her look like a refugee from the LPGA tour but offers the comfort of shorts with the more respectable appearance of a skirt.

To dress up the outfits, Cheryl will adorn her shoulders with a silky, diaphanous scarf that folds up to the size of a small fist. Her new rain jacket, in reversible shades of blue, looks just as stylish and also scrunches up compactly. For protection against the sun, she gets a wide-brimmed crushable Tilley hat with lots of mesh to keep her head cool. She's susceptible to insect bites, so some of her s.h.i.+rts and socks come from Buzz Off, a manufacturer that impregnates its clothes with permethrin. The tags say the garments are 99.48 percent fabric and .52 percent insect repellent, and carry a warning: "It is a violation of Federal Law to use this product in a manner inconsistent with its labeling." This worries us a bit for Singapore, where the strict disciplinarians who run the country might mete out lashes to her feet if she's caught employing the socks as an emergency doggie bag.

For walking shoes, Cheryl packs a pair of Wolky sandals-black, of course-that look fine for evening wear in dark restaurants after the day's dust is brushed off. As a backup, she originally chooses a pair of Pumas, the chic closed-toe athletic shoes of the moment. Then she spots and stops a speed-walking woman on a Santa Fe street to ask about her shoes, which seem to be exceptionally comfortable and are less typically American in appearance. They are Cole Haans with Nike Air-Soles, a bargain she swears to Bill at three times the cost of the Pumas, now tossed aside.

The selection of swimsuits turns out less generous in options. Determined to avoid shopping in the "mature swimsuits" section of local stores, Cheryl heads instead to online and catalog merchants, who all report as early as March that her size is already sold out-or more likely in her mind, not really made-except in special spandex models. She orders a few of these "miracle" suits, advertised for their ability to shear off "at least ten pounds!" Once she manages to wedge herself into the industrial-strength spandex, she realizes immediately that the ten pounds is simply squeezed outside the fabric, making the extra adipose tissue bulge more prominently. In the end, she sticks with an old two-piece tankini suit, and vows to take up swimwear design in her next life.

In addition to clothes, our bags must hold an a.s.sortment of other stuff, much of it purchased especially for the trip. Our old cell phone works only in the United States and doesn't handle e-mail. Out it goes for a new T-Mobile PDA model with international calling and Internet capabilities, dubbed by Cheryl "Mobi Deux" (or just Mobi for short) after a French phone we bought once for use in Europe. Our digital camera, just a few years old, is already pixel-challenged and must be replaced; and to take notes on the fly, we need a downsized microca.s.sette recorder small enough to carry in a pocket or purse.

The rest of the packing list includes a dozen mysteries, eating guides to Singapore and Sydney (both ordered online from the respective cities), many maps, vitamins for both of us, a customized first-aid and over-the-counter drug kit, the travel charger for Mobi and the appropriate electrical adapter plugs, lots of blank microca.s.sette tapes, umbrellas, a small sewing kit, laundry supplies, and as vital as anything, duct tape for on-the-go repairs of all kinds. To treat food and drink spills on clothes, a frequent problem for us, we've got several Tide to Go stain remover sticks.

Instead of lugging along a load of guidebooks and language manuals, we review them before the trip, photocopy some important pages, and decide what other information should be summarized succinctly in destination notes on each of our stops. It still amounts to a substantial amount of paper, but it gets left in hotels on our departure from countries and slowly dwindles to nothing, providing growing room for purchases. The notes cover basics about the cuisine, recommended restaurants, tipping expectations, ideas on sightseeing and other activities, and p.r.o.nunciation instructions for key words such as "h.e.l.lo," "please," and "thank you" (despite knowing many words in French and Spanish, we can only handle verbs with any fluency in English). To haul around the notes on-site, as well as maps and water bottles, we bring a light, mesh unis.e.x tote.

While dealing with packing decisions, we find amus.e.m.e.nt in researching and reserving hotels, a favorite parlor game of ours. For more than a decade at one point in our past, before we started teaching and writing about cooking for a living, we coauth.o.r.ed three accommodation guides in Houghton Mifflin's Best Places to Stay Best Places to Stay series on Hawaii, Mexico, and the Caribbean. The job required us each year to see and review hundreds of hotels in all cost ranges and styles, providing us an intensive education in the hospitality business. From this practic.u.m, we developed a strategy for selecting hotels and particular rooms for ourselves, an approach that's hardly infallible but sometimes works spectacularly well. series on Hawaii, Mexico, and the Caribbean. The job required us each year to see and review hundreds of hotels in all cost ranges and styles, providing us an intensive education in the hospitality business. From this practic.u.m, we developed a strategy for selecting hotels and particular rooms for ourselves, an approach that's hardly infallible but sometimes works spectacularly well.

Many people think that highly regarded top-end establishments offer the finest accommodations in a town. They frequently do if you can afford one of the better suites. Their regular rooms, from our observations, tend to be dully conventional. Instead, we usually opt for the best and priciest quarters at smaller, less prestigious local inns and hotels, which generally cost considerably less and often provide more s.p.a.ce, better views, a truer sense of place, and greater romantic appeal. On this trip three expensive hotels attract us for short splurges along the way, each for a different reason, but mostly we reserve the prime rooms at more affordable places well located for our culinary sleuthing and grazing. The choices usually serve our needs-particularly the penthouse suite in Hong Kong at the YMCA-but also let us down occasionally, like in Sydney, where the guesthouse's historic charm crowds out much hope of comfort.

The first step in the selection process for us is checking guidebook, magazine, and Internet recommendations. These sources always seem suspect to us because they frequently favor the new and trendy, sometimes act as disguised forms of advertising, and often reflect the views of unseasoned travelers or reviewers with entirely different agendas than ours. Still, they provide a useful starting point, particularly in identifying hotels praised by multiple people with varied perspectives. After narrowing the field of options, we investigate the prospects as fully as possible, going to their Web sites, doing Internet searches, locating them on maps.

How to book becomes the next consideration. In our Best Places to Stay Best Places to Stay days, hotel executives talked constantly about clueless customers booking through third-party agents such as reservation services and wholesalers, usually in an effort to get minor discounts. Maybe the guests saved a few dollars, but they also got the worst room available and impersonal service. The managers told us they rewarded patrons who dealt with their hotel directly, sometimes with better rates as well as preferred accommodations. So that's what we do most of the time, relying on fax and e-mail contact in foreign countries. days, hotel executives talked constantly about clueless customers booking through third-party agents such as reservation services and wholesalers, usually in an effort to get minor discounts. Maybe the guests saved a few dollars, but they also got the worst room available and impersonal service. The managers told us they rewarded patrons who dealt with their hotel directly, sometimes with better rates as well as preferred accommodations. So that's what we do most of the time, relying on fax and e-mail contact in foreign countries.

The actual booking process turns out a little differently with each hotel on our trip. In the case of the three splurges, for example, we negotiate with the Oriental in Bangkok via fax; with the Amanpuri in p.h.u.ket through the Web site, which presents a fifty percent discount; and with the Taj Mahal in Mumbai through an Internet reservation service selling our ideal room package at a much better price than the hotel will provide. In Bali, all our communication is with the general manager herself, who gives us a great break. In Salvador, Brazil, our contact is an obsessive pen pusher who requires more paperwork from us than a bankruptcy court would demand.

Our itinerary also requires us to reserve rental cars in several spots and extra flights to destinations not served by ONEworld airlines. Enter Ingrid of Globe World Travel, our trusty travel agent for twenty years even though she lives a long way from us, in Salem, Oregon. We've never met her personally, and we don't even know her last name, but a friend told us about her once as a resource and she and Bill became phone buddies who speak regularly in an arcane travel language only occasionally resembling English. In her biggest coup on our behalf, Ingrid convinced him a few years ago to purchase a Renault Megane on a guaranteed buyback plan rather than renting a car in Europe, saving us bundles of money and giving us the pleasure of driving a vehicle with a distinctive and ample rear end advertised on French TV as suggestively s.e.xy. She books us more conventional cars this time in Adelaide, Cape Town, and Nice, and all the flights except the ones in Brazil and South Africa, which Bill gets more cheaply himself on the Internet on discount airlines that sell internationally only through their Web sites.

As Bill deals with the reservations, Cheryl turns her attention to house-sitting arrangements, another major piece of nitty-gritty. A close colleague of Cheryl's from years ago, when they both worked for the City of Dallas Arts Program, Diana Clark loves to visit Santa Fe and often stays at our place during long trips we take. This time she can come for the early and late stages of our absence. To handle the rest of the three months, Cheryl talks with a friend and neighbor, Diane Dotts, who happily agrees to stop by daily to check on everything. Both of them will pick up our mail and newspapers, throw away all the Christmas catalogs, and shred the glut of credit card offers from CapitalOne and other nuisance banks. Each will also pay a couple of bills, but Cheryl sets up almost all our regular expenses on automatic disburs.e.m.e.nt plans.

In the anxious final days of waiting for the return of our pa.s.sports from the Brazilian consulate, we occupy ourselves with last-minute ch.o.r.es. Cheryl calls our credit-card companies to tell them exactly where we'll be and when so their skittish security personnel won't think aliens abducted our plastic for a burn-the-earth spending spree. Even when we've taken this precaution in the past, issuing banks have disrupted several vacations by calling our home phone and leaving urgent messages to contact them about possibly fraudulent charges in precisely the place we told them we would be.

Bill takes care of most of the housecleaning, as he usually does. Our place seldom gets more spick-and-span than right before we leave town in antic.i.p.ation of Diana's imminent arrival. You never know where a guest will stumble across a mess, so Bill puts on his obsessive face-always near at hand-and scours every surface, including those hidden under furniture and rugs.

Diana comes in the afternoon before our departure day, when we're finally beginning to relax about the details, and the three of us catch up over dinner. She raises a question that other friends ask as well. "How will you manage to get along all that time, with the constant closeness and the strains of travel?"

Bill says, "Because I'm so good-natured."