I love Bangkok. It’s my home away from home, and at one point it actually was my home (and I hope it is again sometime soon). Still, sometimes I needed a break from the taste of black tuk-tuk smoke, the jampacked sidewalks, and all the noise, noise, noise. That’s when I’d wake up early, take the BTS Skytrain down to the Ekkamai bus station, and a short time later find myself in paradise.

While most Bangkok visitors pack their bags and head to the airport once they’re ready to trade big-city chaos for breezy beach seclusion, many white-sand beaches and crystal-clear blue waters are only 2 1/2-hour bus ride away in underrated Ko Samet. It’s also just 5 hours by bus to the even less-visited island paradise of Ko Chang. Best part? It costs just a few dollars to get to either.

Located in the Gulf of Thailand just off the coast of Rayong, Ko Samet is that rare Thai island that’s not yet fully succumbed to the demands of mass tourism. For example, water is still shipped in from the mainland, and there’s not an international resort chain in sight. The third-largest island in Thailand, Ko Chang has stunning topography and panoramic vistas, especially if you venture towards the fishing village of Bang Bao located on the island’s southernmost tip. It was here that I spent four luxurious nights at Nirvana.

Sure, because of their relative proximity to Bangkok both islands inevitably draw their fair share of backpackers and Thai tourists, but like many Thai islands, once you head south past the more-developed northern beaches by the main piers, the number of vacationers tends to dwindle to a trickle. Remember, too, that both islands still draw but a fraction of the international visitors that frequent heavily touristed, often heaving beaches such as those at Phuket and Pattaya.

Two years ago this month, Hurricane Ike devastated Galveston, Texas and low-lying areas near Houston.

It was a cruel repeat of the famous hurricane of 1900, which also hit the island during September.

Along with all of the other destruction you’ve heard about, 30,000 trees were lost on the island from both the storm and the salt water from the storm’s tidal surge.

Galveston residents decided to make something beautiful out of their lost tree canopy (many oaks were hundred of years old.)

Artists created fanciful sculptures out of the tree stumps that remained; they’re sprinkled throughout the still-recovering Historic District.

I was privileged to see many of them this week during a tourism conference, and I took photos so that you could see them, too.

It was really sobering to drive around the older section of town, imagining what it used to be like and still seeing construction and repair in progress two years later.

Go visit Galveston, which is coming back after yet another storm and is full of beautiful homes and resilient people.

Learn more about the sculptures on the Convention and Visitor’s Bureau website: Galveston tree sculpture tour.

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Mention New Zealand and people immediately think bungy jumping, wine drinking, hobbits, and amazing scenery.

But dig a little deeper, head off the beaten track, and you’ll discover much, much more – a secret New Zealand full of unique attractions and activities just waiting to be explored.

Here’s a sampling…

1. The Hokonui Moonshine Festival – New Zealand’s original boutique whisky festival, celebrating ‘Old Hokonui‘ whiskey, is held every February in the sleepy southern town of Gore . If you miss the festival, you can still discover the region’s colourful history at the Hokonui Moonshine .

But it’s not all prohibition and illicit stills. Culture, too, can be found in Gore at the Eastern Southland Art Gallery which, by featuring a diverse collection of primarily New Zealand and Australian works, attracts thousands of art lovers from around New Zealand and the world.

2. Driving Creek Railway & Potteries – New Zealand may not have Paris but it does have it’s own ‘Eyefull’ Tower, located on the outskirts of Coromandel Town a few hours drive east of Auckland. You can only get to the tower by taking a ride  on the country’s only narrow gauge mountain railway through Barry Brickell’s working pottery and wildlife sanctuary.

A rail enthusiast, Barry started building the narrow gauge rail tracks back in the 1970s as a way of transporting the clay and pine wood located high up the hill down to his pottery studio. These days, though, the train mainly transports tourists.

3. The Giant’s House  -  Hidden away in the small harbor town of Akaroa, just 85 kilometers outside Christchurch, the Giant’s House, with it’s innovative and extravagant horticultural displays and wacky mosaic sculptures, could easily be one of the most unusual B&B’s in the world.

The house wasn’t always like that. Built in the 1880’s for the local bank manager, this two storey French Style house had, for many years, a rather sedate existence. But then artist Josie Martin arrived on the scene and gave the house a rather extreme makeover, transforming it to reflect her imaginative and whimsical personality.

 4. Tasman Glacier Terminal Lake & Iceberg  -  Very few glaciers around the world terminate into a lake. And even fewer are accessible to the average traveler. The Tasman Glacier, located within the Aoraki Mt Cook National Park  just four hours from Christchurch, offers a chance to get up closer and personal with the glacier and it’s huge floating icebergs.

5. Stonehenge Aotearoa  -  You can find the world’s newest (opened in 2005) Stonehenge, a full-scale adaptation of the original Salisbury Plains Stonehenge, just an hour’s drive north of Wellington,  New Zealand’s capital city. This New Zealand ‘Stonehenge’ incorporates Maori lore and marks the stars and constellations that Polynesian navigators followed on their voyages across the Pacific Ocean.

I walked the width of Manhattan last week, heading to the Aperture Gallery in Chelsea. My route took me past Madison Square Park, where crowds snake awaiting their turn at the Shake Shack, and admire the Flat Iron Building. The area is a thicket of photographers – many tourists want pictures of both the building and hamburger-hungry crowd, and, judging from the high end cameras and tripods wielded by the black-clad emaciated young, so do many photography students

I walk through here many times a week, since this is also where I pick up a subway line that I frequent,  so I’m sure I am in the background of many, many photographs. And perhaps,  when I’m sitting on a bench in the park having an iced tea, or I pause to jot down a note when I’m waiting for the light to change, or just looking up at the Metropolitan Life Tower, which I’ve always loved, I’ve been in the foreground of those photos – the unknowing, unasked subject.

This doesn’t distress me, in fact, I rather like the idea. But I know that many people in New York City, and around the world, object to having their photo taken without permission.

When I’ve reached for my camera on the road, I’ve been admonished with a finger shake in Marrakech, yelled at in the market in Puebla, Mexico, and even had stones thrown at my car by a group of children in Rajasthan, India. While I have photographed people when I’m traveling, I often do it with the use of my zoom lens. Or I ask permission – which has yielded a few nice photos of smiling faces, although a posed photo is necessarily different than a candid shot.

Courtesy and Copyright Aperture/The Paul Strand Archive.

The reason for my trip to the gallery was to take in a new show of photographs made by Paul Strand during two trips to Mexico: one in the 1930s; one in the 1960s.  His subjects were the landscape, the architecture, religious iconography – but also the people. As I made my way around the gallery, I found myself wondering how he was able to take these photos – of people manifestly unaware that they were being photographed. The photos were of such a quality, and so carefully composed, that they obviously took time to set up – so just how did he do that without alerting his subjects to his presence?

I’d just been reading about a different photographer, Ruth Orkin, who made the iconic shot, An American Girl in Italy, 1951. A young woman rounds a street corner in Florence, Italy.  Her shawl has fallen off her shoulder, and she’s securing the other side with one hand, carrying a sketchpad and a satchel with the other. There are fifteen men of all ages on the street with her – two are on the street on a motorcycle, some leaning against a building, at a café. They’ve turned to watch her as she passes, and one of them is bent slightly forward at the waist pursing his lips – perhaps he’s wolf whistling, or creating that slurpy smoochy sound.

The photo was staged, I’d learned – or rather, it was re-created. Orkin and her model, Jinx Allen, an art student, had set out to photograph the experience of being an American girl  traveling in Italy – it would be originally published in Cosmopolitan magazine, entitled “Don’t Be Afraid to Travel Alone”.  Allen had walked down the street and elicited the response pictured, apparently.  So Orkin asked her to turn around and walk the street again.

I wondered whether Strand had done something similar. But a handy piece of wall text on his working methods informed me otherwise.

“To photograph the Mexican locals in the streets and marketplaces without their being aware of the camera, Strand fitted the Graflex with a lens extension containing a prism, enabling him to compose images at angles than differed from his apparent direction, a variation of a hidden-camera technique he had first used in the streets of New York in the 1910s.”

Courtesy and Copyright Aperture/The Paul Strand Archive.

I’ve been reading up on street photography, which is what this genre is called.  A photographer’s anonymity is prized; techniques of misdirection are common.

But what of the subjects? Do they have the right not to be photographed?

Jimi Hendrix wasn’t the first (and won’t be the last) to arrive in London near broke and unknown. The year was 1966 and for musicians, London the place to be, especially for someone as flamboyant and talented as Jimi Hendrix.

Playing at the clubs and pubs around London, Jimi, with the help of his manager and  friend Chas Chandler , took London (and the world) by storm with his charismatic onstage performance and the way he made the electric guitar sing.

It wasn’t long before he was crowned the undisputed king of the electric guitar. With three studio albums going gold with sales of over a million copies each, he was  named Artist of the Year by both Billboard (1968) and Playboy (1969). But sadly, Jimi didn’t stick around long enough to really enjoy it. In 1970, at the age of 27, he was found dead in a London Hotel.

ABC News reported: “The Jimi Hendrix experience is over.”

But as illustrated by a 2003 poll by Rolling Stone,  which voted Jimi Hendrix the greatest guitarist in rock history, his music never died.

Now Jimi Hendrix fans visiting London can follow his path from unknown to infamous with a new book, Jimi Hendrex: London, recently released by Roaring Forties Press. The second in their MusicPlace Series (the first was Grunge Seattle), Jimi Hendrix: London provides an in depth and intimate look at the public and private life of Jimi Hendrix, highlighting the places where he played, recorded, rehearsed, slept, and partied.

Full of shady characters and colourful antidotes, the book covers not only Jimi Hendrix’s rise to fame but also features a venerable who’s who in ’Swinging London’ of the 1960’s.

With maps pinpointing locations of interest, this unique book will guide fans through Jimi Hendrix’s world. Much has changed in London in the forty year’s since his death, but many of the landmarks remain.  And this book will help you find them.