Sometimes, things don’t work out.

My trip to Jordan had to be canceled.  I was really looking forward to it, but some family issues have cropped up and my head is really not in the right place now for such a journey.

Still, one of the main reasons that I was going still stands; it was an amazing opportunity to visit a region that is currently in turbulence but offers the traveler unmatched experiences. I’m not foolhardy, but sometimes destinations are unfairly painted as unsafe, and visitors shun them based on false perceptions and emotion.

Where would I go right now (besides Jordan) if I could?

Let’s consider a couple of other “dangerous places for travel….”

Egypt.  Tourism is a lifeblood business for the country and they are struggling mightily. The post-revolution update on Frommer’s convinced me that although there may be a few more frustrations than usual, it’s safe to visit and I’d have a lot of the antiquities to myself.

Japan.  This is a tougher proposition. The radiation situation really seems to be getting dicier as time goes on, not calmer.  The reports are conflicting, critical problems have not been stabilized and I’m not always quite sure who to believe. Since I don’t happen to have radiation detectors and Geiger counters laying about in my suitcase so that I can judge conditions for myself, I would probably head south of Tokyo. There is plenty to see and enjoy in Japan that is nowhere near the zone of concern, including onsen/hot springs in Kyushu, Shikoku, the Fukuoka area and ironically, Nagasaki and its Atomic Bomb Museum.

Mexico. Border towns? Uh, no. Figure out a way to drop in on Perceptive Travel editor Tim Leffel in his current Mexpat home in lovely Guanajuato? Yes, please.

New Zealand. Post-earthquake, Christchurch is struggling but I’d still go in an instant to visit our PT Blog author Liz Lewis. After all, she found 21 reasons to visit New Zealand this year.

So, farewell for now to the Jordan idea, but there are certainly other places to keep on my travel radar.

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Only two hours northeast of Madrid by train, Segovia is often overlooked by travellers who daytrip instead to the more well known Toledo and Avilla. Bur for my money, Segovia is the place to go.

To start with, it’s less crowded than Toledo and Avilla. And after dealing with crowded streets of Madrid, this is a definite plus.

But it’s the ruins of the Roman Aquaduct that’s the main attraction.

An amazing feat of engineering, most likely built in the 1st Century (98-117 AD), the aquaduct is one of the most well preserved Roman structures in the world.

Then there is Alcazar, a fairytale castle that sits at the top of the city and is rumored to be the inspiration for Disneyland’s castle.

And for something truly unique (and disturbing) there is the Ancient Museum of Witchcraft.

Of course, along the way, there is also a Plaza Mayor, numerous churches, and an amazing cathedral to discover.

Segovia can easily be explored in one day. But to get an in depth view of this historic city, it would be worthwhile stay for at least a week. Next time I will. In fact, I’ve already chosen my hotel. Overlooking the Plaza Mayor, it’s just seems like the perfect place to stay.

I used to be afraid of flying.

Not just a little nervous when the plane hit turbulence, but terrified for a couple of days before the flight, days during which my stomach would churn, my heart would pound, and I’d make arrangements with friends to look after my cats when I was gone.

At the airport, I could never understand how people could look so calm at the gate. I’d scan their faces and wonder if their photos would be shown with mine on the news when flight-whatever-I-was-on gained the same grim resonance as TWA 800, Pan Am 103, Valu Jet…

On the plane, I’d sit stiffly with every muscle in my body straining the plane up. I’d keep an eye on the flight attendants faces for signs of horror and despair. I’d wince when the pilot would say “we’ll have you on the ground in just about 30 minutes.” In just how many pieces, captain? I prefer one. I would be exhausted upon landing.

Many people tried to talk me out of this fear. I turned their reassurances into mental mantras. Safer than driving, safer than driving, safer than driving, I’d think, as I clutched the armrest. I would reason with myself that I was in more danger on the way to the airport than I was at the moment I was airborne, which is an indisputable fact. But I also unhelpfully envisioned myself, sitting in my seat, simply dangling in the air, out at 30,000 feet.

I really didn’t understand what kept such a giant machine in the sky. I was told it was the air itself, but when I held a pen over my tray table and let go, it just dropped. In my experience, air wasn’t a good antidote to gravity. (Physics was never my strongest subject.)

***

Although I remember feeling that fear, it’s hard for me to re-embody that fear now, since I am now utterly unafraid of flying. I don’t think about it at all, ever. I’m not even afraid during severe turbulence. I’m not afraid when reading about aircraft skin fatigue, or pieces of planes and passenger’s remains recovered in the deep ocean. In fact, it’s hard for me to keep my eyes open on a plane, somnolence that would have utterly mystified me in my anxiety-ridden mid-twenties.

I never did discover a single magic cure for my flying fear; rather, it was a combination of factors that banished it forever.

First, exposure: I had to fly a lot for my work, and every time the plane took off and landed was evidence that planes did that routinely—took off, landed.

Second, distraction: I realized that sitting in the chair thinking about death wasn’t helping. I brought work to do with me and I’d close the window shade to block out the peril of the clouds, and get lost in something I was writing.

Third, analogy: right about this time, my husband and I bought a cruiser, which we’d take out on the Northern Chesapeake Bay on the weekends. It was often choppy up there and the boat would bang around. I realized that turbulence was just like that in an airplane; choppy air was like choppy water. And I wasn’t afraid of plummeting through the water to the bottom.

Fourth, statistics: I finally looked them up.  They were so low, it was really ridiculous. How ridiculous? The death rate in recent years has been at the most 0.4 per 100 million passenger kilometers performed, which is the number of passengers multiplied by the number of kilometers traveled. (PDF) Worldwide. It’s far less for commercial carriers inside the United States. To put this in perspective, in the US you are way more likely to kill yourself than you are to die in an air accident. (PDF)

Even with all that, the fear left me gradually. First I realized I wasn’t worried days before the flight. Then I realized I could read a magazine on the plane instead of working furiously. Then a book. Then, on one flight, I fell asleep.

* * *

I still had other anxieties when traveling. Like, for instance, the first time I went to Honduras. Prior to the trip, I spent a lot of time reading the State Department’s warnings about the country, as I recall, a collection of grim anecdotes about robbery-murders in pizza places. I mulled these anecdotes as my plane flew low over folded green mountains to land in Tegucigalpa.

As the plane taxied, I took note of old burnt out planes, piles of industrial trash, and buildings without windows. My notes from the city include scrawls about machine guns, a woman resolutely climbing up stairs to a barbed wire laced apartments, broken glass windows in the Cathedral, horses foaming at the mouth, skinny mangy dogs. Although I was treated with nothing but kindness, and even though there were moments of tranquility, like the one I recorded at left, at the city’s cathedral at dusk,  the details amounted to an overall sense of menace.  I was happier when I left the city for the coast.

And yet, I ended up loving Honduras, and returned the next year. In the months between my two trips, a commercial plane crashed spectacularly at Tegucigalpa’s airport, overshooting the runway, killing four passengers.

It was then that I learned that the airport was considered quite perilous—the History Channel named it the second most dangerous in the world, for its mountainous approach, its short runway, its “stop and drop” landing. International carriers stopped flying there for a while. I don’t remember feeling especially alarmed by any of it, either at the time or when I read about it, although it occurred to me that for once, I might have been in more danger in the air than on the ground.

Maybe. But probably not.

_{This is my response to Paul Theroux’s piece in the New York Times this weekend, about assessing danger and traveling in turbulent times. “For the modern traveler there are recent and sharp reversals — the overthrow of longstanding governments, earthquakes, a volcano, the release of radioactivity into a blue sky and cows’ milk — all in the span of a few months.” He points out that two countries considered to be utterly safe by travelers—Japan, New Zealand—very suddenly were not.}

_{My first thought was that travelers tend to do a bad job of assessing danger—as evidence above, I have tended to worry about things that were not really problematic, perhaps while overlooking actual danger. But then I realized that we don’t have to be traveling to fall prey to this thought pattern: human beings tend to worry about the dramatic than the commonplace. Most of us worry more about a homicide at the hand of a stranger than a motor vehicle accident, for instance, or even more likely, death from heart disease. So I’m with Theroux, you might as well travel. You might feel like you’re less safe than you are at home, but feelings aren’t facts.}

_{Photos by Alison Stein Wellner.}

This month’s Perceptive Travel webzine offers more great travel articles.

Luke Armstrong finds paradise (and plenty of fishing) at a sleepy beach village in Colombia and contemplates the question ‘can a backpack be your home?’

In Waikiki Love and Hate on Oahu Island Gillain Kendall searches for ‘green Hawaii’ while analyzing what she loves and what she hates about a place that seems to keep pulling her back.

And Michael Shapiro discovers that Old Ireland is Alive in Place, Words, and Song when he travels to Southern Ireland to attend the Immrama travel literature festival and has a chance to interview intrepid Irish travel writer Dervia Murphy.

Three new travel books are reviewed by Susan Griffiths and PT editor Tim Leffel provides more world music reviews to get your feet tapping.

And you’ll not want to miss this month’s giveaway - a trip around the world for two!

No kidding.

Perceptive Travel and nine other independent travel websites are giving away a trip that will include RTW airfare, a tour in Southeast Asia, a Eurail pass, a week’s rental car in Europe, luggage, travel clothing, a few hotel splurges, and more. On top of that, we’re giving away eight weekly prizes during the contest and two big consolation prizes as well

Full details will be available  at Perceptive Travel on April 11.

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You may learn a good bit about a community and a neighborhood through its library, I’ve found. I’ve spent enough time in Glasgow these last years that I’ve become a card carrying member of Glasgow Libraries.

Most of my time has been at the branch in Royal Exchange Square. That is a warm and welcoming place, a lively and relatively small branch in the basement of the Gallery of Modern Art. It is also the one nearest the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, good for me as it is music which brings me to the city. Recently, I decided it was time to seek out the main library in Glasgow’s system, The Mitchell.

As it happens, The Mitchell is located just a bit off the the busy M8 highway and a short way from the lively commercial area that makes up the west end of Sauchiehall Street. It is closely surrounded by blocks of nineteenth and early twentieth century flats. As I walked its streets, the neighborhood struck me as a touch drab at first look. Not so, the library.

For one thing, it has an imposing green dome. It has sets of fairly imposing doors, as well. Once you get through them, as with so many buildings in these times, there’s a guard. Turn to your right, though, and you are greeted with an inviting light filled space. There’s an information desk for your questions, a cafe, with people meeting friends or perusing newspapers, a set of computers for library visitors to use, and Just past all this, the book collection begins.

That turns out to be rather imposing as well, although not at all in an off putting sense. The Mitchell is, in fact, one of the largest reference libraries in all of Europe. It is the general collection you encounter first, though, books selected and organized to meet the needs of students on school assignments and neighborhood residents researching a topic or looking for an interesting read. Comfortable chairs, well lighted space, and a warm toned carpet that seems just as inviting as the chairs for sitting down and looking through a book that’s caught your interest. As I took one of those chairs to look at several books on Scotland I knew I’d never find at home, I saw a teenager in full metal and piercings examining books in the nature section, a mother kneeling at a shelf to look at a book her small son was pointing out, and an elderly couple with a sheaf full of notes looking through the shelves of novels. All of us enjoying the resources of the neighborhood library on a quiet weekday morning.

Later, I explored the upper floors of The Mitchell. There is a wide ranging collection of business books and reference sources, and a staff well versed in helping small business people and those who’d like to start such an enterprise research what they need to know. There’s an extensive collection on the history of Glasgow and the history of Scotland, and library experts help people research their own family’s history through original church registers and land records the library holds. There are books and other materials in arts, sciences, and other areas that go into greater depth than the materials on the first floor.

The Mitchell has the largest collection of material relating to Robert Burns in the whole world, as well. That was one of the first areas in which the founders of the Glasgow libraries decided to start collecting when the library began in 1877. Among other things, the library holds several early editions of the ploughman poet’s work, and fourteen of his handwritten letters. There are many translations of his work, including a recent one in Urdu.

I learned, too, that library co ordinates a staff of volunteers who take books out to those who for health and related reasons are not able to visit the library in person. These volunteers are trained to consult with those they visit to determine each person’s ongoing reading interests and on return visits help them use the library’s resources for as long as they cannot come there themselves.

The Mitchell’s current home was built in 1911 and turns one hundred this year. Seeing families and scholars alike at work that morning reading books in the general collection, exploring the history of Robert Burns, and looking through the shelves of books on Scottish music, I had the feeling that the people of the Mitchell and its building had been offering the warmth of welcome to Glaswegians and those from other places who search out its resources for all that century, and are well equipped to do so as the next years unfold.