The 4th edition of The World’s Cheapest Destinations has gotten great reviews and comments from writers and bloggers, but usually by this point in the release I’ve got more readers chiming in on Amazon.

Lantern for your thoughts?

I’ve teamed up with MPowered, makers of the very cool Luci solar lantern I reviewed at Practical Travel Gear to offer an incentive to five people. If you’ve read the new edition of the book in any format, write a review on Amazon and let me know. The first five people who do it will receive their very own inflatable solar lantern that packs up small and shines for hours. It’s a great remedy to those dim-bulb cheapo guesthouses. No outlet required.

Just post a review of at least a paragraph on Amazon’s U.S. site. Send me at e-mail at this address with your name, shipping info, and the name the review is under if it’s different. If you’re in the first five, Luci is coming to join you.

This offer will run through the end of June, 2013, or until all five are handed out. (And no, I’m not telling you what to write, just to go on the permanent record with your thoughts.)

Don’t have a copy of The World’s Cheapest Destinations? If you’re a fast reader you can get the Kindle, Nook, or iPad versions instantly and start right now. They’re all under $10.

Or get the paperback just because you’re ready to travel well for less. Saving a few thousand dollars is incentive too, right?

It’s time for another collection of the best travel stories on the web, from the award-winning webzine Perceptive Travel.

One of the features is mine this time, a piece on getting to the roots of good coffee by visiting farms where the beans are grown. Come along for the ride to Guatemala, Costa Rica, Panama, and Colombia in Alert in the Americas.

On Ontario’s remote Moose Factory Island, where the Cree First Nation is cautiously courting tourism, Carolyn Heller learns that there’s more to see than the “sights.” See Going Where No Roads Go in Ontario.

Lea Aschkenas heads into the Amazon jungle of Ecuador and fights discomfort and insects to appreciate the teeming life around her.

Graham Reid checks out some new and noteworthy world music. Afro-soul, Indo-jazz, desert blues, and “Autotune goes to Africa.”

Travel book reviews from William Caverlee include Encounters from a Kayak, Food Lover’s Guide to the World, and On This Earth, A Shadow Falls.

As usual, we’re giving away some cool travel gear as well. Last month someone scored a new pair of hiking shoes from Wolverine. This month we’re giving away a whole Travelling Light package from Sea to Summit. The winner will take home a daypack that compresses down into a tiny pouch, a mesh laundry bag, Travelling Light See Pouches, and a travel wallet. If you’re on our newsletter list already, check your inbox or bulk folder. If not, sign up here to get in on the action next time. You can also follow Perceptive Travel on Facebook and watch for the contest questions.

Take a hit of the April issue of Perceptive Travel and you might reach enlightenment. Or at least be entertained.

We’ve got weirdness all around this time, starting with a story about an archaeological site in Panama where the caretakers believes it’s really a place the aliens visited way back when. See What to Do About Barriles?

James Dorsey is back with another tale of stumbling into a village in Africa and finding himself the instant elder. He wants to buy a souvenir pipe. They just want him to smoke khat with them. So it’s time for Passing the Pipe in Ethiopia.

Anja Mutic makes her debut with a tale about her first trip to India—and therefore her first impressions—being part of a luxury travel press trip designed to only show the edited version of the country. See India of Light and Darkness.

Naturally we’ve got the scoop on new books and music worth checking out, so see the April travel book reviews from Susan Griffith and the April world music reviews from Laurence Mitchell.

Win some travel gear!

Each month we give away something cool to someone who follows the webzine via the monthly e-mail newsletter or the Facebook page. See links for both on the home page and enter. Last month two readers won a nice new Armitron watch and this month we’re giving away some $100+ hiking shoes from Wolverine. What are you waiting for?

If you know someone about to hit retirement age, like your parents maybe, here’s a good travel book for them that has a chapter from yours truly.

65 Things to Do When You Retire – Travel is a collection of essays on various aspects of travel for the older set. Yes, there are 65 essays in here and the list price is 20 bucks, so a great deal. (It’s only $11 at Amazon as I write this.) All the profits go to cancer research charities too. (We submitted our work pro bono.)

It’s broken up into sections on prepping, deciding where to go, ways to travel, voluntourism options, and much more. It’s a primer on the possibilities and how to get the most from travel in the golden years.

My essay will not be a surprise to readers of this blog or my books. It’s called “Pick the right place and traveling is not expensive.” Hopefully I’ll convince a few seniors to go beyond Western Europe, RV travel, or a Caribbean cruise.

I was happy to appear alongside some other writers I know of and respect. Ed Perkins actually has a guest section in one of my books. Here he does an overview of senior travel deals.

Janice Waugh heads up the Solo Traveler blog and does an essay on traveling alone.

Rick Ingersoll writes the Frugal Travel Guy blog, one of my favorites for finding points/miles opportunities and he shares some advice on leveraging good credit for lots of frequent flier miles and free hotel stays.

I was on a trade show panel once that TV host and author Richard Bangs was moderating  and here he talks about the bucket list topper Machu Picchu in Peru.

Donna Hull of the boomer travel site My Itchy Travel Feet contributes a piece on being so taken by Montana when visiting that she moved there.

Barbara Weibel of Hole in the Doughnut talks about making local connections when traveling.

I met Judith Fein at an adventure travel conference and now she writes for me sometimes, including this Azores public art story recently in Perceptive Travel. Her story is on finding a spiritual connection in Israel.

As you can tell just from these examples, it’s a delightfully mixed bag, without repetition. Editor Mark Evan Chimsky did a nice job of picking people with something interesting to say and then keeping them from ranbling on for more than six or seven pages. Get 65 Things to Do When You Retire – Travel for the friend or relative who can use it. This is a thoughtful gift that won’t set you back much and it’s helping a good cause.

Get it at Amazon U.S., UK, or Canada. Oddly, there’s no Kindle version so far.

Want a copy for free? Sign up for the new RSS feed or e-mail version top right of this page—rss icon or e-mail box—then leave a comment below on why you would want the book. (I’ve switched from Google Feedburner to Feedblitz, so you can delete your old feed and keep the new if you end up with both.) Deadline April 15.

Getting ready to take off on an extended round of travel or a round-the-world journey? Picking up How to Travel the World on $50 a Day will be one of the best investments you can make.

Ever since I put out the very first edition of The World’s Cheapest Destinations more than 10 years ago, I’ve been continually recommending other travel books that are more general in nature, with tips on planning, budgeting, and traveling well for less. I even wrote one called Make Your Travel Dollars Worth a Fortune, published by Travelers’ Tales. Apart from philosophical Vagabonding though, there hasn’t been a good current one aimed at backpackers except Rough Guides’ First Time Around the World, from Doug Lansky. All the others have gotten dated and less useful over time or were obscure titles written by people without much authority.

I’m happy to report that How to Travel the World on $50 a Day by Mat Kepnes is a different story. He certainly has plenty of authority, running the popular NomadicMatt.com blog, plus he’s been continually traveling on a budget for years. He also goes to conferences, meets lots of other travelers, and responds to feedback regularly. He knows the issues backpackers face and the mistakes they frequently make.

This book is a straightforward, sometimes opinionated guide subtitled “Travel cheaper, longer, smarter.” It lives up to the promise with sometimes hard-won advice based on screw-ups not repeated and lessons learned from others. The $50 a day pitch is an average, not something you can necessarily do in every country easily. As Matt admits, you can get by on half that much in Southeast Asia or India, but it’s hard to scrape by on $50 a day in northern Europe or Australia even if you’re Couchsurfing much of the time.

Cheap travel inclusions and omissions

It’s hard for me not to read a book like this and find flaws—even in ones I write myself—but the flaws here are minor. There’s no index, which seems odd, and there’s barely a mention of huge costs travelers get surprised by like vaccinations, visa charges, and airport exit fees. Some of the generalizations are overdone (“Trains around Norway cost about $70 USD” or for Sweden “Grocery shopping here will cost around $70 USD per week.”) The blog writing style of short, declarative sentences doesn’t work in a book as well as it does online when people are skimming and have short attention spans. It’s also squarely aimed at people who travel like Matt does: solo.

Quibbles aside, the book is organized well and covers most of the bases. It starts out with the argument that traveling is cheaper than just living at  home and backs it all up with solid evidence. It then goes through how to do it all right in the planning stages, from getting the right credit cards and bank accounts (worth the book price by itself in money it will save you) to flights to buying the right backpack.

This section is followed by 28 pages of saving money on the road, solid advice from someone with experience on shaving the big expenses: accommodation, food/beverages, transportation, and activities. I especially like his advice on knowing what’s important to you. He will shave on accommodation in order to have a good meal, but others may want to do the opposite. Some people hate museums, some consider that the main reason to visit a big capital city. Figure out your priorities so you’ll enjoy your time on the road with a limited budget.

The largest section of the book is a regional breakdown, lumping continents or travel areas together and trying to estimate specific costs. This is a tall order, but in general Matt handles it well, showing the major differences between East and West in Europe, for example, and explaining how taking different transportation options between countries can have an impact on your budget and your enjoyment.

A few tacked-on sections at the end include specific gear and city-by city hostel recommendations (where a link to one page on his blog probably would have sufficed), a packing list, and a few pages of medical advice.

How to Travel the World on $50 a Day lists for just $15, so even if you only use one section of advice in here, it’ll pay for itself several times over. Even with 20  years of travel under my belt, there were still pages in here I dog-eared to reference later and websites to check out that I had never heard of before. Get it at Amazon (around $10 for Kindle or paperback), Barnes & Noble (Nook & paperback), or at your favorite store.