Great Journeys, a new Lonely Planet book due for release at the beginning of October, covers more than 70 of the world’s most amazing and spectacular routes and will have even the most dedicated ‘armchair’ travelers scrambling to get out on the road.

And to celebrate the release of Great Journeys, Lonely Planet wants to help at least one lucky person get going.

Together with Railbookers, Lonely Planet is giving away a trip on the Trans-Siberian Railway from Moscow to Beijing via Mongolia.

To enter, visit lonelyplanet.com/greatjourneys (which should be live sometime this week) for details on how to enter.

The contest ends on October 7^th at 11:59 GMT

Once you’ve entered and are waiting to find out it you are the chosen one, you can get a taste of what it would feel like to take a trip along one of the world’s longest and most fascinating rail journey with this virtual trip put together by Google map and Russian Railways.

It’s an armchair traveler’s dream come true.

Traveling from Moscow to Valdivostok, peering out the virtual window onto the Russian landscape with the sound of wheels on the track, Russian radio in the background, lulling you into a false sense of actually being on the train – it’s a brilliant collaboration of technology that’s almost, but not quite, as good as being there.

The actual title of Kathleen Peddicord’s book is How to Retire Overseas, but even if you are decades away from thinking of retiring, it is a useful read. Peddicord herself has moved her young family from the United States to Ireland, France, and her current home in Panama over the years, so she brings perspectives from her own experience as well as from research and interviews with others who’ve lived overseas long term, in retirement and for other reasons.

The first chapter is the most important, really: Peddicord advises that the basic step to planning a long term move outside your home country is to get to know yourself, both in practical matters and in less tangible ways. You need to think about what you know about yourself, how you like to live, what your resources are, and what your priorities are. It’s not just a matter of what languages you know and how well you know them, she points out,, but how you might feel living in a community where there are no other English speakers. That might be just what you are looking for — or not. It’s not just a matter of what your health is like, but how near you’d need to be to what sort of health care and what your peace of mind would be about that. Will you be traveling back to the US often once you move? How easy will that be to organize from your chosen location? Would you enjoy living in a community of expats, or not? These are the sorts of questions Peddicord advises you to consider at the outset, and she gives you lists of them to think over.

Know Yourself is the first part of a section called Ten Steps You Can Do Before Leaving Home, which includes chapters on brainstorming about where you might like to live (take out a map, that’s called), sorting out money issues, health, and real estate and renting areas you can consider and research, and figuring out to what to do with all your stuff.

There’s a section called Looking for something specific? which offers short introductions to places arranged by topic, so to speak: best places for mountains, seaside, good schools, language issues, health care, and the like, with two or three destinations considered in each section with both good and bad points noted.

Peddicord has fourteen places she considers retirement destinations, which she writes about in a bit more depth in a section arranged by country. These include Croatia, Panama, Ireland, France, Thailand, Ecuador, Malaysia, Italy, and Argentina. One point she makes that’s well worth noting when reading these: you move to a place, not a country. Locations within even small countries vary widely as to costs, landscapes, day to day life. Think about your own country, and you’ll know that is true

The last three sections of the book offer practical advice through stories of the successes (and mistakes) Peddicord, her family members, and others have had in building lives in countries not their own. You may not find the exact circumstances Peddicord faced when looking for a plumber in Ireland or furniture in Panama, but you’ll get the idea of what sort of things might arise and have the chance to think about how you’d handle them. Those stories come up in a section called Settling In, which among other things has a short but important story about making friends in a new country.

The section on overcoming challenges is told through stories too, with expats dealing with varying degrees of knowing a language to coping with the hassle factors of being in a different culture to managing expectations for living in one. In addition to several cost of living tables and a section called frequently asked and not so crazy questions, Peddicord concludes with a short chapter on the two most valuable things she’s learned about living overseas.

One of them is, not so surprisingly, to go ahead and take the leap. Should you be considering that, How to Retire Overseas is a resource that both provides practical information and asks good questions to help with your thinking.

I’m trying to decide why “Cambodian Grrrl” is the best travel book I’ve read this year.

Part memoir, part travelogue, with a dash of manifesto here and there, “Cambodian Grrrl” is the story of Anne Elizabeth Moore’s experiences living in a women’s dorm in  Phnom Pehn, where she’d come, at the age of 37,  to teach young women how to self-publish zines.

It’s a  giant challenge, not just because of the expected language barriers, but because of  cultural and governmental controls on free expression, and restricted access to information  — for example, many of the young women did not know very much about the genocide that had affected their own parent’s generation; Moore finds herself in the awkward position of telling them about it.

When I first opened the book, I was on the lookout for the pitfalls that often plague this genre:

1. One: The self-righteous narrator: watch as the crusading Westerner swoop in on the downtrodden folk and save the day!
2. Two: The paean to the Noble Savage — why life is so much better when you are freed from Western comforts!
3. Three: Policy wonkage — a slight story wrapped around a policy white paper.

“Cambodian Grrl” avoids all of these. Moore hits the right self-deprecating notes necessary to avoid the first problem, and is clear-eyed enough to avoid the second. (For example, she handles both of these at once in a deft set piece on washing her own dirty underwear by hand.) And while she does get in an enormous amount of information about the political, historical, and economic situation in Cambodia, it’s slid in the context of her own adventures and misadventures, and through the words of Cambodians. There are a couple of places where she directly discusses her own politics and philosophy, but she swerves away from the shrill, and everything is leavened with a great deal of humor

From a travelogue perspective, Moore does a great job of sketching the confusion of getting around town in a place where streets and buildings are numbered auspiciously, rather than…well, numerically.  She discusses shopping in the markets, the widespread advice to tourists to bargain and how bizarre it seems to haggle over such a small amounts with people who comparatively have so little.  And she also points out one of the weirder facets of dark tourism, or tourism based on human tragedy. Tour guides standing around, for instance, brightly offering tours of the Killing Fields.  I’ve not been to Cambodia, but I have traveled in Poland, and have seen the same bizarre brightness applied to tours of Auschwitz. (And posters and other souvenirs…not sure what anyone really does with those.)

There’s also the opportunism that comes with this, for example, a boy standing outside Tuoul Sleng, a torture center, begging for money, is asked his age, which he says his 12.

“Where are your parents?”

“We don’t have,” he said, gesturing to a shorter kid a few meters away.

“Where are they?” I asked.

“Killed by Pol Pot.”

 

He was too young for that to be true, but the women next to me mumbled with concern and handed him a dollar. He has benefited from her lack of knowledge.

Of course, this is also a story about how young Cambodian women began to make and distribute zines.  I found this part equally absorbing, and moving– the essential aspect of communication (and communication freed from commerce, imagine!)  a freedom of expression that is still so rarely used in these United States, even though we seem to communicate an awful lot about things that don’t matter that much.  It struck me that even as a person who has been involved in commercial publishing for her entire adult life, I’d never heard the sentence that Moore tells her students: “if you want to, you can start to change what people know.”

The one thing I really wanted, after I’d finished this slim book’s 95 pages, was to see the zines that Moore’s students made. I checked out Moore’s blog, clicked through a few pages of older posts, and didn’t see any. Perhaps some examples will be available soon. (Updated: there are a couple of older posts with images of the zines here and here, with others on the way. More as it happens.)

Stay at Loews Coronado Bay Resort in San Diego and you could take advantage of their one night surfing package that includes not only surfing lessons but also a how-to book on surfing, board shorts, and a surf ‘n’ turf supper.

There’s only one catch – this package is only for dogs.

Although I’m sure, if asked, the resort would be able to cater for two-legged traveling companions as well.

This is just one of the many deals highlighted in The Privileged Pooch, a specialized travel guide to pet-friendly places in Southern California. Written by travel journalist (and dog owner) Maggie Espinosa, this book offers a fascinating look at luxury hotels, eateries, and shops that cater for the four-legged travel companion.

After reading The Privileged Pooch, it’s clear that many hotels are not simply providing a convenient service to entice clients. They are actually whole-heartedly embracing their canine guests, offering everything from in-room massages, a canine room service menu, and even four legged yoga classes.

Covering San Diego (voted ‘America’s Best City for Dogs’ by Dog Fancy magazine), Palm Springs, Orange County, Los Angeles, and Santa Barbara, the book provides in-depth information on 69 hotels and almost as many bistros, activities, and shops that are seriously dog friendly.

Even if you’re not planning on traveling with a dog, this book is well a read, especially if you have an interest in the history behind many of the luxury hotels in Southern California. Plus, there’s the added bonus of discovering new and interesting eateries and shops that you might otherwise never have learned about.

(Disclaimer: I was provided with a complimentary review copy of The Privileged Pooch to read and review)

Alaska. Vast, remote, land of bustling cities which still are not quite like anything you find in the lower 48 and back country and bush which are definitely not like back country you find elsewhere. In the south there are rain forests, and in the north, the Arctic. Wildlife from moose to polar bear to rabbit to deer, and sea life from crabs to whales to salmon — and that’s not even getting to the people, who have a varied mix of background from Native to newcomer. Then there’s Denali, and the glaciers, and the midnight sun.

That just begins to show the range of what is there to know and explore. Exploring Alaska has often been a tough subject for guidebooks, too, as the necessarily condensed and selective nature of that sort of writing comes hard up against dichotomies and vastness of modern day Alaska. Frommer’s Alaska Day by Day has a good approach, though, and more importantly, they’ve chosen a good writer to follow through on a structure that invites you to tailor your own trip to the north, rather than setting you out on a well beaten path.

Have no worries, though, those well beaten paths are covered, too. Author Charles Wohlforth is a long time Alaska resident whose writing on the impact of climate change in the state has won awards. He’s also worked on other Frommer’s guides, so he knows how to research and write about both the details of lodging and dining and the history and landscape that bring you there to enjoy those things.

The book is structured first by region and then by a range of itineraries, such as, for example, three day trips, seven day trips, traveling with kids, Wohlforth’s favorite experiences in a region, and the like. He tells you when he likes something, certainly, but he also speaks up when he thinks something doesn’t live up to its billing (and tells you why he thinks that). Frommer’s are not budget guidebooks, but for many areas there are good ranges of accommodations by price (hostels are included in some areas) and food options from pizza places to high end establishments. There’s good information with costs and practicalities on getting around by ferry and by air, as well as by road and rail, and suggestions on when and where you might want to do each. The basics of exploring the Denali region, how to see glaciers and wildlife, how to see the northern lights, what you might want to do and see in Fairbanks, Juneau, and Anchorage, and other highlights that define an Alaskan journey for many are covered too. Wohlforth comes across as a man with a deep background in his home state, and one who is able to follow the structure of a guidebook plan while writing well about a place he loves.

There are loads of photographs, and maps as well, to go along with the text. Informational photos, so to speak, give you an occasional flavor of a restaurant or the feeling of a lodging, maps help you find and keep your bearings as you think about traveling across the state, and shots of landscapes and the sea, glaciers and mountains and forests, may have you dreaming of an Alaska trip even if you weren’t thinking of doing so. There’s a lot to take in within Frommer’s Alaska Day by Day, but it should prove a useful guide and a good companion along the way in Alaska, or in your armchair.

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