As my time zone eeks toward the turning of the year this week, the world seems to be set to start 2009 off on a very bad foot. Russia is swaggering its natural gas monopoly around (again) and threatening to leave some Ukrainians very cold this winter. Charitable foundations are scrabbling to rescue themselves after losing money in the stock market (not to mention the Madoff scandal). And Israel and Palestine. Again. Enough said.

Single-handedly, none of us can bring peace to the Middle East or save average and poor world citizens from being dependent on volatile commodities for food, heating, transportation, and energy.

But as Perceptive Travelers we can bring our own added value(s) to the world’s economies — monetary, social, even spiritual. We can help make the world a smaller place by bringing understanding.

The world’s still pretty big, with plenty of people and peoples who don’t understand other cultures or traditions, and plenty of people who hate the ones they see.

This is the year to make a resolution that matters. Use your travels to bridge gaps and deepen both understanding and relationships. Write a book. Write an essay. Start a blog.

Share meals. If you’re home, cook a dish you learned to love on your travels. If you’re away, share a special tradition or holiday celebration from your home (I always loved cooking American Thanksgiving for friends when we lived overseas).

Learn to play a different style of music. Live in Kyoto? Learn soulful jazz. Live in Nebraska? Learn throat-singing. Read books about the culture and history of instruments and music while you’re learning. Share your passions with those around you. Pass books on.

Educate yourself. Argue in defense of justice and against hatred, but do it gently. Some of the most inspiring stories I’ve heard in the last few years is of Israeli and Palestinian students and kids working together to move beyond centuries — millenia, even — of distrust and antipathy.

Learn to love the world, if you don’t already. That’s the real goal of all this traveling, all this soaking up and cultural immersion, all this packing and repacking of backpacks and wearing out of walking shoes, all this planning of excursions and saving up of tickets. Love every bit, every speck, the tout who won’t you alone at midnight in Izba, the tired-looking babushka selling cucumbers out of a bucket in Moscow, the businessman in Tokyo who wants to set you up with a prostitute despite your state of happily-married-ness, and the grumpy widow who overcharges for greasy posole at the local hostel cafe.

Because when you come home (as you will eventually; even if you don’t go back to your country or your birthplace, some place will become home again) it is only by learning to love these people and the places they’ve lived in that you can learn to love the tedious, boring, provincial types you grew up with. And that’s where the real change starts.

I just finished uploading a bunch of photos of travel-related Christmas ornaments to my Flickr page – doodads from China to Israel – so click below for a slideshow and you can see what I’ve been up to with my new Canon camera holiday gift (thanks very much, Mom and Dad!)

For RSS readers and anyone who can’t see the box below, the URL for the slideshow is here.

Every time I sit down to watch The Amazing Race I think to myself ‘I could do that.’

Of course, it’s easy to say you could do something when you know it’s never going to happen.

But what if you did have the opportunity – would you jump on in with both feet or run away and hide?

Well,  some innovative and adventurous souls have been transforming The Amazing Race concept into reality, which means, if you are up for it, you can give it a try.

For those with a competitive spirit, there is the annual Global Scavenger Hunt, three-week international travel adventure competition that will visit at least 10 nations on 4 continents between April 17th & May 9th, 2009. In it’s fifth year, this is the real deal, aiming to “test each Team’s ability to combat not only the inevitable jetlag, but language difficulties, cultural differences, their appetite for strange foods, logistical snafus, and Team dynamics in the atmosphere of a well organized competition.” An Amazing Race without the cameras.

The Global Scavenger Hunt is limited to 25 two-person Teams (singles may apply). The entry fee of $9,900 per person covers all international airfare, 23-nights in First Class hotels and about 40% of meals. Teams are interviewed for suitability. You can sign up here.

If that sounds a little too strenous for you, then maybe Competitours might be a better match for you. According to Intelligent Travel, this new tour company has been set up by Steve Belkin, a former TV producer and life-long traveler,  to offer Amazing Race fans a chance to experience the Amazing Race concept without the frenzy or stress. Success depends more on creativity, resourcefulness, originality and the ability to be spontaneous than on speed and strength. You and a partner (spouse, sibling, friend) team up and fly to Europe to participate in a 14 day, 5 country travel game, competing with 16 other teams to earn points by doing fun, quirky and interactive challenges (no mandatory or extremely physical stunts required). But just like the Amazing Race, your itinerary will be a secret – you’ll only get a half-days advanced notice of your next destination.

It will be interesting to see if this form of travel takes off. Back in 2006, an Australian company The Real Race, offered ‘once-in-a-lifetime fully inclusive luxury adventure tours for anyone…[with]…no losers and no eliminations, contestants participate from start to finish and accumulate points. Everyone wins just by taking part and the team with the most points at the end wins back the entire cost of their holiday!‘ But they don’t appear to have any tours listed for the future which makes me wonder if they are still being offered.

So, what do you think?

Are you an Amazing Race Traveler or an Amazing Race Couch Potato?

Me, I think I’m a bit of both.

Earth911.com gives some tips on how to stay green even when stuck in the airport.

Or you could skip the airport altogether and ride the rails with these eco-friendly trains

Stockholm has been shortlisted for the European Green Capital 2010 and 2011 titles. Have read of stockholmtown, the city’s new eco blog to find out what makes Stockholm so green.

Find out how a community in Columbia went from cocaine to green tourism.

At San Francisco Airport, look for kiosks this spring where you can purchase carbon credit offsets just before you board your plane.

And if you think that volunteering on vacation means you have to rough it, think again. Seems that many luxury hotels and resorts have seen the light and are helping guests do good without giving up the perks of high-end travel. For example, at the Ritz-Carlton Kapalua in Maui, you can spend the day lounging by the pool or digging up weeds. Or at the JW Marriott New Orleans, you can get involved with the local chapter of Habitat for Humanity.

Two days ago, while volunteering for the local library, I was chatting to a woman about what her grown-up children are doing now. Her oldest, it seems, had gotten the travel bug and just spent 5 years living in Thailand, Italy, and one or two other countries, supporting herself teaching English. Now she’s living in a tent in California, working on an organic farm and teaching yoga. The kind of life that, to be honest, is completely alien and almost repulsive to most people in my local New York county. “My youngest is just in his first year of college,” she ended with, “and there’s no way I’m going to let him travel. I’ve already lost one to that.” Lost one child to the big, scary, foreign outside world.

It’s hard explaining travel addiction to one who just doesn’t have the gene. Lots of people travel on occasion, like the idea of seeing the world or one specific spot, take a vacation — but wanderlust, the neverending urge to go, to discover the unknown, the somewhere new, that’s something different. We all know that.

I was in a travel writing class once in which a friend of mine wrote a funny, breezy essay about a strangely fated road trip she and her sister took across the US. It was full of the incidents true travelers dream of: they left Boston without a plan, then broke down in Texas and ended up back in New Orleans, where they got waitressing jobs for six months before continuing.

For a travel writing class, we were split strangely down the middle into two camps in responses to this essay. There were people like me, who wanted more of the breaking down in Texas story (their rescuer was straight out of Stephen King; you really can’t make this stuff up) and thought absolutely nothing about a 19-year-old and her slightly older sister haring off across the country in pre-cellphone days with a car that barely worked.

Then there were the others, epitomized by one girl’s question: “Your mother just let you go off like that? Wasn’t she worried? Didn’t she give you a AAA card?”

Those of us who didn’t grow up with parents like that, including the writer, just looked at one another, lost. Yeah, her mother probably worried a bit, but parents come in all shapes and sizes, and plenty are more than willing to let their kids grow up quickly and independently.

One guy bridged the gap between us. Having just spent a year cycling around the world, starting in Japan, he was definitely in the wanderlust camp. But he also had a mother who swore she would panic and call the State Department if he didn’t call her every single Monday evening, wherever he was. When he studied abroad, he had to call every single day.

For better or worse, I come from a “be free, my child, go find yourself” household. When I told my parents I was going overseas two weeks after my college graduation to move in with a guy I met while studying abroad the year before, they failed to point out that I would have no health insurance, was plunging off into the definite unknown, and had only $700 in my bank account. Nope, their response was simply, “Oh, how fun!”

Nothing like the woman I met at the library two days ago. I felt very sorry for her because she thinks her daughter (who has what sounds like a fantastic life to me) is lost to her, and I was also very grateful that my parents were perhaps less involved with my life than many expect to be. But thinking back to the wanderers I’ve known, the kindred spirits I’ve traveled with, and patting my own toddler-aged mother’s soul, I have more understanding for those who can’t understand our needs. They want to keep us safe the only ways they know how.

So this holiday season, wherever you are, think of the ones you’ve left behind. Call your mother, tell her you love her. Call your sister, ask how her kids are doing. Send a letter to your spouse from Everest base camp, let them know they’re in your thoughts as you venture on, to them, the unthinkable and incomprehensible. Write your uncle a postcard from Buenos Aires, tell him he came to your mind recently.

In the end, I think what most of our loved ones want is to know we won’t forget them.