Offbeat is only way to describe this edition of Perceptive Travel magazine. Featuring small change, alien races, and spiritual retreats, readers are drawn into worlds often not visited by the majority of travellers.

In A Dollar and a Dime in Vietnam, Richard Sterling reminds us of the importance of always carrying small change when travelling. But more than that, he reminds us of that we should never make assumptions about someone else -  human nature is guaranteed to surprise. Sterling, a Saigon resident who writes about food and travel, offers a real slice of Saigon life, at least Saigon life for an ex-pat.

On the other side of the world, in Quebec City, David Lee Drotar looks at Signs of Alien Life Among Us with a review of Extraterrestrials: What If? at the Musee de la Civilisation exhibition, Cirque du Soleil show Les Chemins invisibles, and the UCI Mountain Bike World Championships at Mont–Sainte–Anne, followed by a late night visit to the Image Mill. This is Quebec City, but possibly not as you know it.

And in New York state Rachel Dickinson, in Cliff Notes from Beyond, decides to check into a Spiritualist Camp in her hometown and get in touch with her dead Grandfather.

Plus as usual, there’s an eclectic collection of  travel book reviews by David Farley (author of the offbeat An Irreverent Curiosity) and editor Tim Leffel rounds up some great world music worth having a listen too.

Coffee and a new issue of Perceptive Travel magazine. What more could you ask for on a sunny weekend?

Of course, if you are a subscriber to the Perceptive Travel newsletter, you’ve probably already read this issue of the magazine.

Not a subscriber? Then what are you waiting for. Click here and get a heads up every month when the new Perceptive Travel magazine hits cyberspace. Plus, being a subscriber gives you a shot at winning great travel prizes.

This month Perceptive Travel is giving away the Sansa slotRadio, a small preloaded MP3 with radio. To find out more about this quirky but cool gadget, check out this Practical Travel Gear review of it.

I’ve written a lot recently about Montana: the hiking, the berry-picking, the swimming, all the vigorous activities you can get up to in the Rocky Mountains. As one last post inspired by my recent trip home, here’s one for the people who want to enjoy Northwest Montana without spending a hard-core month at the gym beforehand.

Both Whitefish and Glacier Park have plenty to offer the more sedentary traveler. For summertime activities, there’s Big Mountain in Whitefish (which I cannot, I’m sorry, start calling by the name chosen by its new Aspen Corporation owners: Whitefish Mountain Resort. It’s too much of a mouthful. And the logo looks like a fish from the nuclear plant in the Simpsons). A ski resort in winter, in summer the mountain offers, in addition to hiking and mountain biking, an Alpine Slide, a Zip Line, a “Walk in the Treetops;” and, so you can have beers and a stunning view at the summit, the gondola chairlift that runs all summer long. My 5-year-old niece adored the ride up the gondola, and we chose a chair — pictured above — for the ride down, which was less utterly silent but offered more scope for views.

If you get to the top and feel up to it, you can take an easy wildflower walk around the top ridges of the mountain. Even more than stupendous mountains, there’s nothing like a delicate meadow of paintbrush, beargrass, and lupine that says “Montana” to me. The Summit House also has a little field museum downstairs, where you can learn about the various flora and fauna in the area. The even have lots of stuffed dead creatures and various fur pelts so the kids can get an idea of size, scale, and fur style of various local animals.

Down in the town, there’s the Amtrak train station, which always draws my train-loving husband. The station museum is a testament to Whitefish’s gritty railroad frontier history that gave rise to its original name “Stumptown.” It’s also full of memories for me, as I spent my entire 4 years of college riding Amtrak back and forth from this station to St. Paul, Minnesota, every Christmas and summer.

If you make it in August, you might be in town at just the right time for Huckleberry Days, a celebration of the Rockies’ treasured huckleberry. Music, festivities, and the Huckleberry Fair in the train depot park at one end of town. I was delighted with the fair, having never been before: craftspeople and artists from all over the Northwest make an annual pilgrimage to sell their wares here.

The Huckleberry Fair is definitely a step back in time. While there are fast-food vendors and glossy town-related pamphlets, there aren’t, for example, eager hawkers of tawdry goods. “Web site?” repeated one artist and crafter after another. “Nah. I just sell at fairs, like this. Much more fun than keeping up a storefront, and I’m just not interested in shipping stuff through the Internet.”

Way to make you feel like what you’re buying is unique. Although I really don’t see myself going in for antler art. I know people who buy vacation homes in Montana think you’ve got to decorate them with silly moose-patterned blankets and so on, but a lamp made of deer antlers, however well crafted, does come across as a little weird.

If you aren’t in town for the fair, the Whitefish Farmers Market is open all summer, every Tuesday from 5 to 7:30 p.m. In addition to local produce (both wild and cultivated), there are artisans selling everything from jewelry to soap, and entertainment by local musicians.

And then there’s Glacier National Park, which, however much I value its miles and miles of hiking trails and solitary mountain scrambles, is by no means inaccessible to those not interested in lacing on the boots. One of the park’s most popular things to do is to take a Jammer bus tour. Known prosaically as Scenic Interpretive Red Bus Tours, the vintage red buses roam all over the park on scheduled tours. They’re immensely popular, and I’d almost say that hiking purists miss out on one great park experience by avoiding the guided bus trip.

And afterwards, whether you’ve hiked the nearly 14 miles to Sperry Chalet and back, stretched your legs on one of Glacier’s easier hikes, or stuck with the Jammer bus, it’s worth stopping by Lake McDonald Lodge or Apgar Lodge for a Moose Drool beer, a buffalo burger, and a real introduction to the park’s history. Lake McDonald Lodge has the kind of view that grabs you by the throat: the still, sparkling motor-free lake (except for the scheduled boat cruises) backed by completely wild mountains showing the scars of 2003′s forest fires. Inside, the rustic Swiss chalet-style architecture, with strong beams and a fireplace you could walk into, has remained nearly unchanged since 1914.

Just because you don’t hike doesn’t mean Montana isn’t for you. All you need is a sense of humor, a sense of adventure, and a love for nature in its wild form.

(This post is co-linked to WanderFood Wednesday. Go read other foodie posts!)

I go hiking for a lot of reasons. What I don’t expect is to find treasure.

Gold? Pirates? No, something better, something edible, something that I know almost nothing about: mushrooms.

Last week I wrote about picking delicious, treasured huckleberries in Montana. Huckleberries I know. I can identify them, eat them, and even know how to bake with them. Sometimes. But mushrooms? I have a cute little mushroom guide in pamphlet form in front of me (highly recommend these for flower lovers, birders, and casual mushroomers, by the way — the Pocket Naturalist series by Waterford Press) and there are way too many skull-and-crossbone symbols in it to make me feel at all secure picking and eating mushrooms in the wild.

I do, however, absolutely adore them. It might be the half-Russian in me, or it could be my affinity with hobbits, or perhaps simply childhood memories of my father gathering and frying wild mushrooms while camping, but I could live, happily, on mushrooms pretty much forever. That’s what Russian peasants have been doing for a good long time. Mushrooms, I have read, have higher levels of protein than does beef, so stop pitying those poor peasants who have to gather ‘shrooms and have no meat. Mushrooms are what allowed my grandmother to get her two children through the Siege of Leningrad alive.

So while I don’t feel confident enough to gather my own mushrooms, I do feel confident eating those gathered by my father and his wife. In fact, considering what they found while we were out in the woods last month, I feel privileged, almost royal in the delicacies we were fed.

My father’s wife does not like hiking, but she forgave us all for dragging her out when she saw, growing wild and plentiful in the Montana woods, a mushroom known as Pine Mushroom in English. “I can’t help myself,” she said, pulling out a plastic bag I’d been saving for my son’s inevitable diaper. “My hands will pick them by themselves.” She twisted the stem of an unimpressive looking fungus.

I found out later this single mushroom, known as Matsutake in Asia, is highly prized in Japan, China, and Korea, is difficult to cultivate, and can sell for $100 per mushroom. That’s not a typo. My father, husband, son, niece, and I ate a princely meal that night, thanks to my stepmother’s quick eyes and early mushroomy education. She learned from her grandmother.

My father learned from his mother. Even after surviving the Siege of Leningrad, living on potatoes and wild food, mushrooms were always a part of my family’s life in Russia. Right now, at the end of August, my aunts, uncle, and cousin are on their annual vacation in Russia’s far north, hiking for hours to harvest mushrooms that they’ll dry and preserve in various ways to last the winter. I’ve tried their pickled, preserved, and reduced mushrooms, and have always been hard-pressed not to eat their entire year’s supply.

My father’s skills allowed him to contribute a yellowish-brown mushroom from further up the trail. It smelled beautiful, but I didn’t recognize it at all. How could I? The fat, chubby King Bolete he picked looks absolutely nothing like the dried porcini I pay a fortune for at the grocery store.

My husband had serious reservations about eating these findings. I trusted my father, having eaten his gatherings while growing up, but my husband hadn’t, and had heard plenty of stories of people from Eastern Europe dying after mistaking something poisonous for an edible variety found in their home countries. My stepmother showed us how the King Bolete would change to a bluish tint when cut if it were poisonous, and my father demonstrated the differences in spore patterns, texture, and gills they use to weed toxic varieties from edible ones.

He finally joined the feast after finding out that they’d taste-tested both mushrooms hours before feeding them to us. He didn’t regret it.

Montana is only one place in the vast world of mushroom gathering. France, Italy, and various countries in Asia have a thriving economy based on mushroom sales, and a long historical culture of mushroom experts and wild mushroom gathering. Even where I live in New York’s Hudson Valley there are mushroom hunting clubs.

After this last trip, I’m thinking of joining up. Mushrooms are one of the most divine wild foods in the world, and it seems a pity to miss out because I’m terrified of suffering a wretched death at the hands of a Dung-loving Psilocybe or Death Cap.

Lessons passed down through generations in Russia, and introduced to me while traveling in Montana, might be the catalyst for someday feeding my own kids, with confidence, $100 mushrooms picked wild while traversing some other country’s mountains.

I read David Farley’s interesting new book while traveling this summer – An Irreverent Curiosity: In Search of the Church’s Strangest Relic in Italy’s Oddest Town. Since Farley has contributed several stories to Perceptive Travel (one of which is among the three we got into the Best Travel Writing 2009 anthology), it would make sense for me to review the book on the webzine. Only one problem. This month’s book reviewer is…David Farley. See his Perceptive Travel book reviews September 2009.

So, I’ll follow up raves in the New York Times, Newsweek, and Outside with my own enthusiastic recommendation.

This is a quest book, a stranger in a strange land book, a study of a small city in Italy, a religious history lesson, and a “cast of characters” book all wrapped up in one. And there’s a mystery of course: a search for the lost foreskin of Jesus Christ, which used to be displayed in this little town’s church.

David spent long enough living in the strange little city of Calcata to eventually be able to interview people in Italian and go researching in the Vatican library. His search for what happened to the lost relic leads him on side trips—mostly dead ends—to mystical spots in Italy, to France, and to the doorsteps of people with knowledge who don’t really want to discuss the matter. After all, the ever-morphing Catholic Church is not so gung-ho about displaying shriveled body parts any more and they’ve threatened excommunication to those who openly talk up this one.

So bits and pieces of the mystery’s answer float in here and there, but this book is more about the journey than any resolved discovery. Calcata itself is the story’s star—a quirky walled and isolated medieval hill town “energy locus” that has drawn hippies and eccentrics from the 60s on. Naturally a place like this has no shortage of strange people living in it, so Farley has a rich source of antics and dialogue to mine in order to lighten up the mood.

The author has become an expert on the history of the Catholic church, the whole history of relics, and Italy itself. Thankfully we get just enough of that knowledge to have the background we need, while reading through a fun, engaging story on eccentric people in “Italy’s oddest town.” Does he find the Holy Foreskin? Well, it doesn’t really matter. This story is entertaining and engrossing enough to make the actual discoveries just a sideshow.

See an excerpt here – Special Education: the Retard’s Guide to Learning Italian