If downhill skiing or snowboarding are not in your skill set, or you’d like to learn but have previous knee injuries (like a torn ACL – anterior cruciate ligament – which makes it tough to handle sudden lateral movement) then you may feel left out when it comes to wintertime vacation spots.

I know I’ve felt that way….my husband is an avid downhill skier but I’ve never learned, and now my own old ACL injury makes it risky to try (basketball and racquetball are not in my future, either.)

A winter trip to near Lillehammer, Norway a few years ago had me in major pouting mode – what the heck was I going to DO all day long while he was on the slopes and the kids were learning to ski?

Enter the calorie-obliterating (400+ calories/hour) and relatively-easy-to-learn sports of cross-country skiing and snowshoeing.  After a short lesson at our Hafjell resort, I could manage cross-country skis and poles pretty well, and I really enjoyed the hushed quiet of schussing along through the trees with my instructor.

If you’d like to try the same experience in the US, the 15th annual Winter Trails day is coming up this Saturday, January 9, 2010.

At more than 100 facilities, both children and adults can try cross-country and/or snowshoeing at no cost.  The organizers – SnowSports Industries America (www.thesnowtrade.org), American Hiking Society (www.americanhiking.org) and the Cross Country Ski Areas Association (www.xcski.org) – all hope that you’ll find these trail sports a satisfying alternative or addition to downhill snow sports.

Are any of our readers big cross-country or snowshoe fans? Let us know down in the comments about your favorite resorts for those sports.

Here’s the set up: It’s August 2003, and Peter Rudiak-Gould, 21, has volunteered at WorldTeach, a nonprofit organization that places teachers in schools throughout the world. He’s selected one of the hardest duties – solo teaching duty on a remote island called Ujae, which is part of the Marshall Islands in Micronesia.

Ujae is as teensy as it is remote: population 450, land mass: one-third of a square mile. Rudiak-Gould picked it because he, like so many,  romanticized the remote. He was seduced by the promise of a simpler life, and of exoticism and natural beauty.

Well, the natural beauty part met its promise, but the rest proved to be…shall we say, more nuanced? He finishes exploring the island, circumnavigating it in 45 minutes, so it’s sort of boring, and he can’t communicate with anyone at first, and he’s lonely. The sun is omnipresent, the heat malevolent, and the food is bland. The people shout, and treat their children harshly, these children shriek in a kind of nasal Conehead-esque alarm as a way of communicating displeasure. Plus – and this would definitely rule me out – you wake up some mornings covered in flying cockroaches. The school is a mess, the culture doesn’t support education, and plus, everyone seems to idolizes  the last volunteer who was there and constantly compares our hero to his predecessor unfavorably.

But Rudiak-Gould isn’t the sort to let his senses get obscured by sulking. He appreciates and admires the resourcefulness of people who live without any possibility of shopping – for instance he learns to fix a flip-flop by fashioning string out of a torn sheet, and attaching it with the help of a sharp rock and a pencil. He enjoys the island’s conception of time, particularly for the men who were freed from the work of subsistence hunting by government food subsidies, and have elevated the art of coffee klatch into a leisurely art form. And, he sheepishly admits, he enjoys being the local celebrity, as the one white guy/foreigner on the island.

Surviving Paradise is an account of the year that Rudiak-Gould spends in the Marshall Islands. While the book is roughly chronological, it’s hard to classify in form – it’s not a travel journal and it’s also not a unified narrative. It’s more of a collection of well- knitted sketches that as a whole amount to a portrait of a lifestyle — what life is like in Ujae at this particular moment in history, as its people blending their traditional ways and attitudes with the influences of the 21st century and the developed world.

Rudiak-Gould is particularly adept at showing how tradition and outside values intersect and interact, providing deft description of traditional Marshallese fishing techniques, say, while at the same time allowing us to see Ujae kids making gang signs and wearing t-shirts that say “I –Heart- Being a Princess”, and interjecting their games with quotes from movies that they watch on video, like “drop the gun motherfucker”.

At the same time, the book also does a good job of capturing the startling change in self-conception that happen when you are in a self-imposed temporary exile. For instance, about midway through the book, he takes Christmas break in Majuro, the biggest city on the Marshall Islands, where he sees white people — including his own reflection in the mirror — for the first time in months:

“I was shocked to see what I had become. I was bearded, and my brown hair had become long and streaked with bleached blond from sun and saltwater…I was even more shocked to see what I had always been: Caucasian. I had never noticed that before.

White people now looked very peculiar: sickly, bleached. Their hair was unnaturally light, and the high lists of their complexion were too reddish. I could see the blood glowing pink right under their skin. Caucasian children looked like ghosts.”

But here’s what I find the most interesting about Surviving Paradise: while it’s a portrait of a lifestyle, and of its participant-observer, it’s not really about particular people. We don’t really learn that much about what makes any individual on the island tick – Rudiak-Gould included. He observes his surroundings, and himself in those surroundings, with a clinical but compassionate gaze. His tone is amused but restrained – in fact, I got to thinking he was British and was startled when he reminded me midway through the book that he’s from California. (Apparently, I’m not the only one who’s noted this, as I just spotted on his website.)

We don’t know what, besides obvious things like air conditioning, he misses about California. (And I didn’t know until I visited his website that he’s from Berkeley — he doesn’t say in the book whether he was from a city, the suburbs, a farm, or what.) We don’t know what his life was like growing up, what his romantic inclinations or attachments are, what music he likes. Towards the end, he mentions two people who he refers to as his closest friends on the island, but we never see that friendship unfold. He refers to letters and packages from home that were sustaining, but we don’t know who they’re from or what the substance of that sustenance is for him.

I actually liked this restraint — I originally wrote lack of histrionics –  since I think most stories of this type stray into needless, seemingly endless, self-disclosure but it would have been interesting to have had, say, an understanding of what his experience of childhood was, for instance, given that he describes the Ujae way of childhood in great detail. In any event it’s certainly not a surprise to learn that he’s studying anthropology, since that’s clearly his natural stance.

But for whatever Surviving Paradise lacks in strong characters, it more than makes up for in its portrait of evolving intellectual understanding of a place, from confusion into insight. One of the brooding questions he has about Ujae is about its treatment of children: they’re basically on their own after age four. He moves from a position of disgusted judgment to understanding, and something just short of acceptance, which seems just about right to me. It’s a process that I’ve experienced myself, albeit in a different environment – rural Alaska – and it’s one that’s rarely well-depicted in travel writing of any length.

Oh, I should add that Surviving Paradise has more urgency because the low-lying Marshall Islands are in imminent danger because of rising ocean waters thanks to global warming – besides which, this place should dwell more on our American minds, considering that we used a part of it – the Bikini Atoll – as a nuclear proving ground at the end of World War II, the horrifying aftermath of which exists to this very day. But those are additional justifications for buying the book, the story itself only briefly touches on either subject.

It was only by chance and a whole lot of rain that we discovered Ellen’s Stardust Diner at Broadway and 51st.

A chain reaction you could say.

Two days earlier we had been booked on a walking tour of Movie Locations around Central Park. But just as the tour started so did the rain. The skies opened up. The rains came down. Appearing just as suddenly as the rain, street vendors started waving souvenir umbrellas for sale at highly inflated prices. We had already looked like drowned rats but of course we bought the umbrellas. After all, the tour must go on.

It was a bedraggled looking group of umbrella huggers who finally entered Central Park. Our determined guide rattled of names and locations as we tried to listen and avoid increasingly large puddles of water. But as the rains continued to bucket down, it soon became evident that tour was quickly becoming a wash out. And although it wasn’t in the terms of the ticket (which said tours would happen rain or shine), we were offered the chance to take a future Movie Location Bus Tour instead. Having stepped in one to many puddles, it was an offer we couldn’t refuse.

The pick up point for the bus tour was Broadway and 51st, just outside Ellen’s Stardust Diner. And that’s how we discovered a slice of Americana, complete with singing wait staff.

This retro theme 1940’s and 1950’s diner, outfitted with nostalgic memorabilia, provides great diner style food, good service and plenty of entertainment. We were there for breakfast and it couldn’t be faulted – a huge plate of eggs, bacon, hash browns, toast, and a constantly filled coffee cup. And then there was the singing. We were entertained with a steady stream of music. One minute you were being served coffee, then next your waiter was bellowing out ‘Sweet Caroline’ to a group of girl scouts celebrating the birthday of one of their group. Yes, you guessed it – the birthday girl was named Caroline.

It was like being in a time warp, circa 1950s. I kept looking to the door, expecting the gang of ‘Happy Days’ to walk through.

(originally posted at Write To Travel)

New Year’s always puts me in a whimsical travel mood. Perhaps it’s a feeble hope that the next year will hold surprising insights or developments in the areas of travel, science, existence, or all of the above. Previously, I’ve written about the possibility of alternate universes and what exciting ideas they could hold for glossy travel mags, and whether we could travel in space without ruining what we discover, unlike what we’ve done with most of planet Earth.

This year, it’s hard to think of travel in outer space when movies such as The Road (based on Cormac McCarthy’s bestselling book of the same name) and 2012 (based on a wildly misunderstood aspect of the ancient Mayan calendar) blithely predict the end of life on our world, or at least life as we know it.

The popularity of these pessimistic possible futures puts me in mind of a friend of my parents’, who used to come over for Russian lessons from my mother and stayed to argue with me (then 16 years old) and my sister (then 11) about environmentalism. His take, which he always stated with almost cruel glee, was that the we were messing with Nature in such a way that humankind might not survive, but Nature herself would, so why bother trying to stop it? So the human race would die out, big deal.

That sort of attitude is awfully hard to argue with. After all, he’s right: if the human race keels over and dies, big deal. One could sputter arguments about there being no point to existence without the human mind to make reason of it (although that makes 300 million years or so of dinosaur life a little hard to explain), but that’s a pretty weak defense.

Unfortunately, it’s that same sort of outlook — watered down and softened — that chips away at funding and education for arts, including literature. In essence, we need literature to make some sense of our existence for one another; it can be argued, and has, that “basic” ideas such as human rights require an active imagination to keep alive. However, it’s very hard to prove that literature is necessary, and much easier to prove that, say, chemistry, which is both more tangible and more expensive, is.

If we’re to avoid the future envisioned in The Road, however, I do believe that literature, and travel literature in particular, is essential. (Avoiding the future envisioned in 2012 requires only a modicum of common sense — a commodity, like good travel writing, always unfortunately in short supply.)

The more connections we make between peoples and cultures, the more attempts we make to understand one another — our problems, our loves, our fears, our strengths — the better chance we have of creating a planet that truly sustains life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for everyone. (And then what, you ask? Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it. Not much chance of running out of trees and infants to save any time soon.)

It might be a stretch to say traveling or travel writing could save the planet (or, in glossy mag editorial parlance: “Save the Planet Today! Read a Travel Narrative!”), but what better or easier way to further strengthen our common human bonds?

So for 2010, I will for once cease longing to see the planet from space, and will instead hope that we will all see the planet at ground level, standing on our own two feet, from someone else’s point of view.