We’re back with our semi-regular roundup of great travel links from around the Web and around the globe.

** Things may be a bit shaky right now, but hardy travelers can add Kosovo, the “world’s newest country” to their list of nations to possibly visit in the future. Rick Steves has a Kosovo update on his blog. In the ever-tangled areas formerly known as Yugoslavia, the next chick struggling to hatch as a nation is Macedonia, which may have to change its name to join the EU. You know, a medical/security backup plan like International SOS might be a good idea if you venture into risky territory and want someone to “Get me out of this place!”

** On a lighter note, there’s always getting a gambling/cooking/arts education in Las Vegas.

** Are you on a budget? Who isn’t? I recommend ideas and insights from blogs like Less Than a Shoestring and High Culture on a Low Budget, then investigate cheap tickets from airfare consolidators. “Think different” to save money: houseboat rentals on the Upper Mississippi, college dormitory stays in Europe, small towns like Fairhope, Alabama on the Gulf Coast (bonus - Jimmy Buffett’s sister Lucy runs a restaurant there, Lulu’s, complete with a cookbook) and those pretty islands that are NOT on some magazine’s “hot list.”

** Fellow travel writer Pam Mandel just returned from an extended trip to Southeast Asia, wonderfully documented on Nerd’s Eye View and BlogHer Travel. My fave: Angkor Freakin’ WAT! :)

** Travel on your stomach gems: worldwide foodie trails in the UK’s Guardian, eating and drinking at Vancouver’s Japanese izakayas, having breakfast (and more) in Tripoli, Libya, eating your way through the delicious culinary history of Key West, Tokyo chefs and food critics take on the Michelin Guides and someone slammed back a lot of brew to build the Beer Can House in Houston, Texas.

** Finally, from the International Herald Tribune: 36 hours in Cairo, Egypt, 36 hours in Taipei, Taiwan, some travel basics for Mumbai, India and staying in homes built by Frank Lloyd Wright (related PT post: Wright’s skyscraper in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, where you can stay today.)

Sitting here in New York, it’s hard to drag my mind away from the gluttonous attention to our state governor’s fall from grace. That’s a nice way of saying that our governor’s political career has self-destructed because he somehow decided that sex is way better if you pay over $4000 for it. His monumental stupidity aside, there’s got to be better things to think about.

And there is. It’s March 14th, International Pi Day. Not pie, the stuff you eat, but pi, the number that has held the attention of mathematicians, philosophers, artists, and conspiracy theorists for several millenia. You might vaguely remember it from school as approximately 3.14 (hence the day of celebration, 3-14) or 22/7, the number you need to find the area of a circle, the symbol π … its mystery comes partly from the fact that it is one of the rare mathematical numbers impossible to pin down (if you divide 22 by 7 the digits go on past 3.14 to infinity, although there are computer banks devoted full-time to calculating further digits of pi) and therefore honored with being represented by a symbol. The BBC today has an excellent article on pi, summing up both the history and mystery of this enigmatic number. (For a much more mathematical history, try the Wikipedia article.)

The Babylonian and Egyptian cultures we think of as ancient were obsessed with pi, and it is said to be incorporated into the design of the pyramids of Giza. However, it shouldn’t be confused with the Golden Ratio, although it often is. The Golden Ratio is the proportion used for thousands of years to build temples and create art in what people thought were the most harmonious and pleasing proportions to the human eye. When you travel around the world, remember that the Golden Ratio was used (sometimes unintentionally) to make the following sights most attractive to you: the Parthenon, the Great Mosque of Kairouan, much of the art of both Leonardo da Vinci and Mondrian, the sculptures of ancient Greece, and in the Western harmonic scale of music.

The Golden Ratio doesn’t have some of the playful and easy attractions of pi. It seems that the International Pi Club is now defunct, but entry used to require reciting the number from memory up to 100 decimal places in the presence of the president. In 1998 I met someone who did it while skydiving from a plane. Lucky thing the president was an adventurous sort of guy.

On this International Pi Day there are celebrations by math geeks around the world, from pie-eating contests to pi-inspired music. Whether you attend or not, remember pi, and remember that there are things that, compared to a human time scale, last forever. And if that’s not enough to quirk your imagination, it’s also Albert Einstein’s birthday.

As an author, I find a visit to a bookstore is nearly always a depressing experience. So many great books are in the bargain bin because they didn’t sell through the overly optimistic shipment numbers. So many great books aren’t even on the shelves in most of the “superstores” that carry only a fraction of what is listed on Amazon. And as I discover more often than not, most of the physical stores have really lousy travel book sections once you get past the best-selling guidebooks to the most popular areas.

Thankfully, some travel tales take on a life of their own and succeed almost in spite of an industry that seems perpetually 20 years behind in seeing where markets are headed and perpetually slow on the uptake when it comes to how and why people buy what they do. My Exhibit A for this post is a book that riveted me, something I couldn’t put down. A tale that is too bizarre to explain properly, but is truth, not fiction. It came out years ago, but is probably selling better now than it did when released, even if you don’t factor in the used book sales in South American backpacker towns.

I am talking about Marching Powder, subtitled “a true story of friendship, c0caine, and South America’s strangest jail.” Long story short, an Australian traveler named Rusty Young holed up in a Bolivian jail with a British inmate named Thomas McFadden and took down his story, eventually faking it as his human rights lawyer and turning the whole long ordeal into a book.

It’s not a simple story though, since this particular Bolivian jail runs like a pure mix of capitalism and Darwinism, with those who have money and power buying the best cells and running enterprises, while those who came in with nothing either becoming addicts or finding a way to make money doing odd jobs. The prison supplies next to nothing, but in return the prisoners can do what they please, within reason, especially if it makes the guards some extra cash. (Hence some of the best cocaine in all of South America.) Some of the inmates have their whole families living there, like an apartment on the outside, with kids in uniform setting off for school each day.

Marching Powder came out in 2003, but why did I pick it up? Pure word of mouth. I read about it in some person’s comment on a travel message board. Then I saw a film director in a magazine talking about how it was the book he had read lately that had really stuck in his head–four years after release date. So I ordered it from Amazon—I had no illusions that it would be in a retail store and didn’t even look. My wife read it before I got around to it and said, “This weird book you bought is about the most bizarre thing I’ve ever read. It’s fantastic!” Fate won.

The day I started reading it, I was hooked. A week after starting it, I was finished and was kind of bummed. It’s not dazzling prose that gets a Booker Award or some obstacle-overcoming soul-searching that makes it a shoo-in for book clubs. It’s just a damn fine story, told well. In the end, that’s what keeps something in print for years on end while other perfectly crafted pieces whither and die.

The way the publishing business operates, there’s the attempt to make a fortune in the first 90 days and then move on to the next title, so most books like this don’t have a chance. Thankfully we’re in a new world now. a world where my first book The World’s Cheapest Destinations can sell 5,000 copies and get translated into Italian without ever being on a bookshelf, a world where word of mouth can make Marching Powder a book that keeps going and going like the Energizer bunny for years on end. Because of The Long Tail, there is now some justice in the world. Mass market crap with no substance often fades away, while the good stuff people are talking about lives on.

Supposedly some big players are working on a film version of Marching Powder, with names like Brad Pitt and Don Cheadle being bandied about. We shall see.

If you’re a world music devotee, there’s one radio program you should listen to religiously: Public Radio International’s Afropop Worldwide. African music, African culture, and the musical influences of African diaspora — there is no greater world music authority than Afropop and its host, Cameroon-born Georges Collinet. And its website is a treasure trove of an international music archive.

Afropop Worldwide’s most recent program featured the haunting music of the nomadic Fulani people, who can be found from Senegal to Guinea. Although the show plays on my local station at a time I’m not usually conscious, the first few minutes of flute music this week kept me from switching off the radio. The traditional flute, which looks like a cross between a Western concert flute and the wooden Native American instrument, emits a sound like a young man singing over the wail of the wind.

The program, inspired by an interview with Senegalese musician Baaba Maal, digs to the depths of what truly inspired music sounds like: the heart of wandering nomads, singing of love and loss and reminders that normal family life exists while you’re out with nothing but the earth, sky, and a bunch of cows.

For a wider reach, the Afropop Worldwide site is also currently providing links to artists featured at GlobalFest 2008, one of the world’s largest marathon one-day world-music events.

For forty years my in-laws have lived in a shut-in, overbuilt suburb of Nottingham, England, and will jump at any chance to get out in the open countryside. So for their fortieth wedding anniversary they hesitantly requested a driving trip around New England. None of us knew, as we bundled ourselves into the car, that we would spend the entire journey looking for a decent cup of tea and finding it in the unlikeliest place: the top of New Hampshire’s Mt. Washington, home of the world’s worst weather.

Traveling with my in-laws is one of the delights of my life — no sarcasm here. My in-laws are interesting and interested people with unfailing delight in driving through foreign countrysides. The hitch comes when it’s time to take a break. Or several breaks. Say, three or four times a day sitting down to a leisurely cup of tea and a cake.

Problem with that is, of course, that America doesn’t do tea. Not something the English are always prepared for. I can still remember the tragic expression on my mother-in-law’s face over ten years ago, when she came to the US to see Montana, and, after her very first shattering transatlantic airplane ride, a waitress presented her with an iced glass of brown liquid with a fat slice of lemon wedged to the glass.

“Is this tea?” she had asked me, desperate. The hot stuff that came wasn’t much better, but it revived her enough to make the generous quip that she supposed Americans weren’t that fond of tea, “especially after that business in Boston,” referring, of course, to the tea party that mythically launched the American Revolution.

This time we started driving from Cape Cod. I watched in pity as each day my poor in-laws drooped a little more when they were brought a pot of tepid water beside a bag of some of the worst tea even I’ve ever tasted; and then had to beg for milk instead of half-and-half.

This continued for over a week and took its toll as my in-laws were denied an English person’s lifeblood. We didn’t expect to find anything at the apex destination of our trip: the train ride up New Hampshire’s Mt. Washington.

This was not just any train. Mount Washington boasts the world’s first cog train, in vintage condition with a steam engine, powered by coal and heaved up a 37% grade by deep-grooved teeth, your bike chain’s big brother.

“This is fantastic,” grinned my father-in-law as the train chuffed further into the mountain’s icy fog blanket. When the brakeman, also the guide, jumped out to manually move the train switches, his blue coat melted into the dim light.

Mt. Washington has some of the most brutal weather in America, which makes it the perfect location for one of the country’s most advanced weather observatories. Winds up there can move at a knifing 100 miles per hour, and the mountain top still holds the world’s recorded wind record of 231 miles per hour. It can snow in midsummer. They say it’s worth risking the hypothermic hike for the view—if you can get one of the four clear days a year.

At the top, we bundled my husband’s parents through the gray murk to the observatory/cafe/post office kiosk.

“Tea?” I asked my mother-in-law.

“Um,” she said noncommittally, looking frozen and resigned. Her face said everything she was too kind to say aloud: another cup of hot liquid that tasted remarkably like dust?

And that’s when I saw, up over 6200 feet above sea level, in a place that advertised itself as ‘home of the world’s worst weather,’ on a rack of herbal teas, a green tin sitting lopsided on a bed of Lipton bags: Harrods Best English Breakfast. I slid unfeeling fingers around the lid and waved the bags under my mother-in-law’s nose. Her eyes, the same sea-gray-green as my husband’s, brightened.

“How long do we have up here?” The Styrofoam cup was in her hand before I could offer to pour.