Frequent Perceptive Travel webzine contributor Amy Rosen scored a first prize in VisitBritain’s annual travel journalism awards. Her story on lessons learned in the Wales countryside came out on top in the online category, beating out lots of better-funded competitors.

We’re in good company too. The other category winners were Anthony Bourdain from the Travel Channel, Bruce Schoenfield from Travel + Leisure, and Jane Wooldridge from the Miami Herald. Our own Bruce Northam was on hand at the ceremony to be the face of Perceptive Travel as he was the grand prize winner last year.

We win quite a few “best travel writing” awards, but Amy Rosen is like award flypaper—everything seems to stick to her. (Her How to Make an Igloo at 40 Below story won so many prizes last year we stopped counting.) So while I’m at it, congratulations to her also for scoring a First Place and three Merit shout-outs in the recent NATJA Awards—two of those for Perceptive Travel features. Nice!

She’ll have a new Norway piece up in the May issue, but meanwhile you can also check out Bloodvein: Redemption on the River in Manitoba or Extreme Eating in Morocco.

I don’t need any incentive to go hiking. Point me toward a trail or a mountain and I’m gone, even if the weather is uncongenial. But some people need a little more persuading. Or maybe they love to hike, but want something to spice up the trek. Enter Geocaching, self-described as “a high-tech treasure hunting game played throughout the world by adventure seekers equipped with GPS devices.” The idea, the official website says, is to locate geocaches (containers in which a logbook is stashed, along with any other treasures, trinkets, or traveling memorabilia other geocachers have left behind) hidden in forests, on hiking trails, or even in cities.

I like the geocaching practice for two reasons. The first is that its members adhere to a light footprint philosophy: carry in, carry out, don’t leave trash behind, treat the earth gently, etc.

The second is more crucial. In a world where Nature Deficit is actually being studied as a disorder akin to Attention Deficit, geocaching is a fantastic way for families to get outside together. I mentioned geocaching to a friend of mine the other day, and she said her sister in Boston does something similar, on a smaller scale. “It’s the only way the kids ever get outside,” she said, “so it must be a good thing.”

I grew up hiking all the time, and am grateful to my parents for instilling the walking urge in me, but as a child it could get pretty darn dull, no matter how many tree needles and animal poop I learned to identify. Couching the trek in terms of a treasure hunt would have made it a lot more fun.

Hiking in eastern New York State, and a couple places in Europe, I’ve been coming across these geocached boxes for a few years. My husband and I were hiking with a friend from Northern Ireland when another couple overtook us near Ithaca, New York, and stepped off the trail to uncover a geocache about a mile in from the trailhead.

That’s when I discovered this massive global community that has been using GPS technology in the world’s largest game of hide-and-seek. Users hide a cache, pinpoint its location using a handheld GPS, and upload the coordinates to the website, where other users can type in their location (such as a zip or postal code) to find huntable geocaches near them. At first it seemed a little silly, but when you check out the geocaching.com website, the game takes on new levels of depth.

There are currently 757,273 geocaches stashed around the world. People sometimes leave trackable items in the caches, which collect stories as they traverse the globe, and trekkers post their own stories on the Geocaching forums online.

Like I said, I don’t need a reason to get out and go hiking. But the world could use a few more fun and games, and this one might just be worth joining.

When 60 monks escaped the desecration of their temple in Lhasa, Tibet, in 1959, little was known about their rituals, beliefs, or music.

The confluence now of digital technology and Western supporters (both from the Free Tibet movement and from the growing worldwide population of practitioners of Buddhism) has begun to change the quiet privacy of their Tantric arts.

Gyuto Tantric University flourished in Lhasa from 1475 until the year their country was invaded and their population of 900 monks killed or scattered. The complex chants of their sacred rituals might have been lost to history but for the fascination of a religious scholar, a musicologist, and a drummer for the Grateful Dead.

NPR recently ran a story about Huston Smith, the scholar, who in 1964 woke at 3 a.m. in a monastery in the Himalayas to “the holiest sound I have ever heard.” In 1967 he decided to record the chanting of the monks and eventually brought the tape back to the US.

The recording blew the mind of an ethnomusicologist at MIT, and eventually made its way to Mickey Hart, a former Grateful Dead drummer. Last year Hart released a CD featuring this quiet but somehow awesome music.

Tibetan Chants for World Peace is a dusty name for the recording, which is both complex and eerily thrilling. There are so few Gyuto monks left in the world to do the chant that Hart had to digitally layer his 10 musicians to achieve the effect of the original 100-voice choir.

Although these chants are evidently “among the most secret and sacred of Tibetan Buddhism,” the Dalai Lama has given his blessing to recordings and public performances. The monks, after all, need the financial support that their popularity brings, and the mysticism is so hidden by the overtone singing that the average person would never be able to perceive the spiritual practice behind the chants.

Spiritual chanting of any kind isn’t for everyone. But I recommend you go at least to the NPR story, which has links to music samples. Like traveling to a completely foreign place, the chanting opens a bit of a mental window to some other perceptual dimension. Or at least, for me, makes a change from The Beatles and Bach for Babies.

Does the economy have you down?

Are you seeing great travel bargains from hard-up travel companies, but you’re too broke yourself to take advantage of those deals to Asia?

The Chinatown sections of San Francisco and New York are well-known, but I found 5 other pockets of Asian shopping, dining and culture for you to visit in the United States (frustratingly, there are very few good tourism-related Web sites for these places:)

• Koreatown in Los Angeles - The K-town has good food (did I say good food?) and frenetic nightlife.
• Japantown in San Francisco – This is a fairly geographically bounded, well-organized spot in the city, with a variety of shopping and restaurants, many indoors in the Japan Center.
• Little Saigon in Houston, Texas – anchored by the ironically-named Hong Kong Supermarket on Bellaire Blvd, this is one of the largest Vietnamese communities in North America. If you visit, tune your car radio to Little Saigon Radio,  KYND 1520 AM/KJOJ 880 AM.
• There is a large Filipino community in Las Vegas – I found a rather flashy community Website but not much else.
• Indians/South Asians in Millbourne, Pennsylvania (near Philadelphia) – It has a majority Indian/South Asian population.

I was surprised that the official tourism Websites for these cities either had no information at all about their ethnic Asian communities/neighborhoods,  or what they did have didn’t seem to be geared to encouraging tourists to go there.

Is this because the tourism bureaus don’t have representatives of these ethnic groups working on staff, or advocating for their community as a tourism destination, so it’s “out of sight, out of mind?”