Well it’s official. The US dollar is now circling the bowl and going down the toilet. I guess all the supposed conservatives who voted for GW Bush are going to have to take out an extra home equity loan to pay for that summer trip to Europe this year.

But now we’re stuck with this mess and currency traders are tripping all over themselves to make bets it’s going to get even worse. So what do we do?

Come on down, the price is right!
If you’re European, Santa just gave you an early Christmas present. Stop what you are doing, log on to your favorite travel web site, and book a trip to the USA. You’d be nuts to buy expensive clothes, shoes, or electronics at home when there’s a giant 30 percent off sale going on across the pond. Most consumer goods are already cheaper in the US anyway, so the currency slide is making the difference jaw-dropping. This article, one of many coming out in US newspapers now, talks of $288 Timberlands for $100, $80 video games for $30, and half-price jeans. Another one in the Wall Street Journal gave a breakdown on IPods and digital cameras, with some avid shoppers saving enough over home prices to finance their whole vacation.

Yeah yeah, I know it’s a hassle getting a visa now and you’re going to have to submit to a fingerprint and a digital photo at customs. But just pretend it’s something you have to do in order to get a giant discount on your wardrobe and electronic toys. (If you told me pints of ale were going to cost me a dollar each in London, you could photograph me from all angles and ink all ten of my fingers!)

For others who have often struggled with a weak currency, such as Canadians and South Africans, it’s time to hit the road. Expensive places aren’t as brutally expensive as they used to be and countries with currencies tied to the dollar (see below) are looking like more of a bargain every week. If you don’t make at least one international trip in 2005, you’re going to hate yourself when you are older.

Americans take heart
OK, we’re looking at a record low against the Euro and a five-year low against the yen. Europe and Japan, already expensive destinations for Americans, are now priced like luxury goods. In popular London, it now takes almost two US dollars to buy one British pound. The Euro is nudging $1.50 at exchange booths in Paris and Rome. What’s not so simple to see is that the problem is spreading to unrelated areas of the globe. For US travelers, hotels and meals are much higher than they were just a few months ago in diverse places such as Australia, Canada, and Fiji. Some of my World’s Cheapest Destinations have gotten noticably less cheap: Morocco, Hungary, and the Czech Republic are the worst extremes.

It’s not all gloom and doom, however. Just pick a country where the dollar is holding steady. It’s a big world and there are still plenty of travel bargains to be found.

Habla Espanol?
Here’s an easy rule of thumb for value travel: go to any country in Latin America where Spanish is the main language. The dollar is in trouble in Portuguese-speaking Brazil, but most other Latin American economies are tied closely to the dollar, either officially or in practice. Airfare specials to the region are plentiful right now, even though it is summer south of the equator. Hotel prices in most of Latin America have barely budged over the past few years. Once on the ground, US travelers will find their dollars going a long way, whether in Argentina, Peru, Costa Rica, or Mexico.

The Other Side of the World
As in Latin America, many currencies in Asia are closely linked to the dollar. The greenback has held steady in China, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, India, and others. Bali is still one of the best deals on the planet and the Thai baht is still around the same level it has been for years.

Caribbean Deals
If you are in package tourist vacation mode, this region is looking better all the time. Throughout the area, local currencies have traditionally been tied to the US dollar and this trend is holding steady. Islands that have traditionally been comparative bargains, such as Jamaica and the Dominican Republic, are still solid values. More independent travelers should consider islands off the coast of Panama and Honduras. These laid-back destinations offer Caribbean waters with less crowds and lower prices. (For the really intrepid, check into the Corn Islands off Nicaragua.)

Go Against the Grain
For those willing to open up their horizons, there are plenty of other options. Tourism numbers in Egypt and Jordan have fallen off a cliff in the past few years and it’s a buyer’s market for hotels and tours. Turkey is by far the best value in Europe right now for Americans. In Africa, meanwhile, the US dollar is in trouble in the nation of South Africa, but is holding up fine in the safari destinations of Kenya and Tanzania.

Staying Close to Home
In the US, of course, exchange rates are a non-issue. As much as it pains me to say it, this might be a good time to stay on home soil if you are just looking at vacation options. In the past few years, airfares in the US have dropped for nearly every market. Package deals for warm places pop up almost every week. You can get a great hotel deal almost anywhere through Hotwire or Priceline. And sign up for a weekly airfare alert from SmarterTravel.com that will provide weekly flight specials from a home airport. Travelocity.com provides alerts for user-chosen routes–you just type in a route and what level fare to watch for.

If you want to really stretch your travel budget, you need to uncover the local “screaming bargains” for each location.

When you are traveling to a foreign place, it is sometimes hard to get your bearings and you end up spending lots of money on things you didn’t realize were expensive until it was too late. Like buying tomatoes or strawberries in the wrong season, you end up missing the deals and paying a premium.

I just got back from Mexico, where I’ve spent a lot of time over the past year. Some people probably wonder why I included Mexico in The World’s Cheapest Destinations, since if you spend a week in Cancun or Cabo San Lucas, it’s really not very cheap at all. Those are gringo tourist spots though and not reflective of real costs across the country. As I walked through big box retailers like Costco and Carrefour there this past week, though, I found lots of other things are as expensive or more expensive than in the US: electronics, furniture, toys, and towels to name a few. I’ve found this to be true in a lot of “developing” countries and my gut instinct is that there are more middlemen and less competition, so people don’t benefit from the highly efficient pricing that a freer market entails.

However, as in most countries, there are lots of screaming bargains in Mexico once you figure out where to look. Filling lunch meals at a simple restaurant near the town square can be found most anywhere in the country for less than $2. Seasonal fruit and vegetables cost a pittance. A nice loaf of French-style bread is a few pesos and a whole kilo of freshly-made tortillas is less than one US dollar. Some handicrafts are a bargain outside the tourist traps, “dollar-store” type items are 30 cents instead of a buck. I bought a five-gallon jug of bottled water for US $1.25.

Conversely, transportation is no screaming bargain in Mexico. The buses are quite nice, but not really cheap. If you’re on the move a lot, it can get expensive being a backpacker. So what’s the strategy? Eat well and stay put.

Whereever you go, if you are on a traveler budget instead of a tourist budget, it is important to sniff out the screaming bargains and adjust your activities accordingly. When we were in the Philippines, for instance, the dirt-cheap items were cashews, rum, and mangoes. Often we had mangoes for breakfast, cashews for snacks, and bottles of rum shared with friends for entertainment. That left us lots to spend on not-so-cheap adventures. In India, the all-you-can-eat thali meals are as cheap as 25 cents in the south, so you pig out at lunch. Train prices are some of the lowest on the planet. Visiting many museums and sites is almost free. Alcohol, however, is expensive outside Goa.

If you are in Eastern Europe though, you should drink great pints of beer that are less than a dollar, eat inexpensive pub food, and go to lots of cultural activities and museums. They’re all a great deal.

Even among countries in the same region, there are wide disparities. Vietnam has some of the cheapest beer on Earth and beer is pretty cheap in Laos, but in Muslim-dominated Malaysia, one sin-taxed beer can easily triple the price of your meal. Clothing and handicrafts are a screaming bargain in Thailand, but head south to Malaysia and Singapore and it’s a different story. You can find a decent room for the night almost anywhere in Indonesia for $2 to $4, but in most of Vietnam you’re lucky to find one for twice that amount.

Even in expensive countries, however, you can find relative bargains. Japan is known for its $15 apples and $800 train tickets, but spending a few hours in a relaxing bath house is often less than $5. You can often have a fun dinner at a yakatori restaurant without totally draining your wallet. In expensive New York City, loads of attractions are free, the subway is cheap, and there are plenty of inexpensive places to eat if you know where to look.

So where you find out where the deals are? First of all, do your homework. Look at several guidebooks, read articles, check out the Thorn Tree message board on Lonely Planet’s site. When you first get into a country, spend some time looking at prices at the local market or in the grocery stores. Best of all, ask other travelers who have been there a while, “what’s cheap here?” There are always plenty of items or services that are a deal; find out what they are and then adjust accordingly. You will find your money taking you much further.

Besides the fun, the thrills, and the experience of the new, is there a true high-brow reason to spend an extended time away from the home country? Do you really become intelligent, or more aware, or more well-rounded by traveling the world?

As I write this we are a week away from a US presidential election, so the timing is appropriate. Both candidates love to make pronouncements about times they did this in Israel or that in Russia, or this in Mexico, but of course you usually could have missed their visit while you took an afternoon nap. Politicians are always on a very fast, very orchestrated visit that is set up to ensure a safe and predictable jaunt.

Jim Rogers, author of Adventure Capitalist, wrote in a business magazine prior to the invasion of Iraq that going in there would be a catastrophe. He said then that if anyone in the administration had actually spent real time in the Middle East as he (and I) had, they would realize what incredible long-term damage it would do to world peace and America’s standing if we launched a pre-emptive war there. The outcome would probably be the exact opposite of what the ivory tower planners expected. It didn’t take a genius to see that–just someone who has actually walked the streets in the Middle East–but alas, here we are.

Anyone who has traveled the world for a few months or a few years–outside of the confines of the military–knows that you tend to see things differently after you have spent months in foreign countries. Once you get back home, people who see the world in terms of black and white suddenly seem like cartoon characters or inhabitants of a parallel universe. The aggressive and gleefull materialism around you now seems disconcerting and childish. Religious fanatics on all sides start looking like the same clan, but with different chants and costumes. And the life of slaving away at a job you don’t like until you retire exhausted and then start traveling around now seems like a lot of misdirected energy.

Are travelers smarter? Are they superior to the bad-TV-news-watching, McMansion-buying, strip-mall cruising homebodies? No, we can’t say that without a properly conducted study, but travelers do seem to have their eyes, ears, and minds open wider.

Once you’ve seen true poverty and a struggle to feed one’s family, people living on the government dole in the US, Canada, or Europe don’t seem to have it too bad. Once you’ve seen much of the world’s population using an outhouse, hauling water from a well, and cooking over wood coals, the struggle to buy a nicer BMW seems rather insignificant. The whining over outsourcing jobs to India or Indonesia seems a bit unfair when there’s a chance to raise a country’s living standards to a slightly larger fraction of ours because the workers can do an equally good job for ten dollars a day.

But most importantly, by traveling you gain that broad liberal arts education that most schools aim for but never achieve. When you are moving from city to city and country to country, geography is not some esoteric concept represented by dots and lines on a world map. Geography is suddenly something you experience every week. History is not some regugitated set of facts to be forgotten once the test is finished. Instead it is a living breathing past that affects most of what you see and experience. Architecture is not some study of styles and building materials and dead people. It’s something you see and feel and walk inside to experience for yourself. You learn about linguistics, economics, world literature, and political science, all without even furrowing your brow.

You don’t learn about the religions of the world from some dry textbook. You hear the call to prayer from a mosque, you see Buddhist monks with begging bowls streaming to the temple at dawn, you see the Hindus bathing in the Ganges and sprinkling flower petals into the water. You learn what makes these religions what they are and see how they affect the lives of everyday people. And suddenly you think–what would happen if the fundamentalist Hindus had been born on a farm in Alabama? Or if the right-wing Christians of America had been born in the deserts of Algeria? Or if the Zionist Jews had been born in southern India instead of Eastern Europe? Would they believe that culture’s overriding faith just as strongly? Or would they “find their way home” like a dog who has been dropped by the side of a road?

I don’t know the answers to these questions, but by being a traveler I recognize the questions in the first place. I’ve learned a lot from circling the globe three times and taking other jaunts to places besides a package tour beach resort. Mostly I’ve learned that the world is far more complicated than most non-travelers think it is, and that no, we are not all alike on the inside. We all want to survive, be happy, and take care of our family, but that’s about as far as it goes. As the events in Russia have shown, we don’t even “all want freedom.” Some people just want some stability they can count on.

So I guess if you like for things to be simple and predictable, spend you life where you grew up, take a predictable job, and go somewhere all your friends have gone when you retire. If you want to fill your head with interesting ideas, knowledge, and experience, however, travel beats the hell out of college any day–not in an employers mind, unfortunately, but in what’s between your ears and what is in your heart.

I am writing this week’s blog after being on hold an amazing 52 minutes with the apparently overworked people working the Delta Skymiles call center. Thankfully I had a headset on, so I could get some other things done in the meantime. About 20 minutes into this marathon, I made a reservation, with exact dates and seat assignments, for a trip to Peru. (One of The World’s Cheapest Destinations.) But in a twist that would make Kafka proud, I then had to hang up and call a different number to actually have the miles taken out of my account to pay for it. And doing it on the web is not an option for international flights.

So I had no choice but to again wait on the phone until someone finally picked up. (I guess they hope you’ll forget about it and not be able to use the miles.) On this call I got patched through to someone after 21 minutes, but even though I had punched the number to choose “international,” I got someone who could only book the ticket if it were domestic. Never mind that I already had a reservation and all my information is in their system. She couldn’t help. So she transferred me to someone else who couldn’t help either because my frequent flyer number was not on her screen—it didn’t transfer with the phone call and she wasn’t able to just type it herself. She transferred me to another line so I could enter in my number again. So I was back where I started, listening to a taped loop about how great it is to fly on Delta. Two people and many minutes later, I finally got my trip booked, with a shade less than an hour gone from my life.

Last week my wife booked two frequent flyer reward tickets with Southwest. It took all of three minutes. She gave them the numbers, picked the flights, and it was done. No restrictions, no separate phone number, no time on hold. If the “discount” airlines can make it so easy, why is that so hard for the old guys?

Is it any wonder the old guys are losing money? Is it any wonder that none of the “legacy” airlines are doing well? They can blame it on bad labor deals, high fuel prices, and a travel recession, but it’s simpler than that. I have two words that explain it all: bad service. When you get treated better on a cut-rate airline than you do on the ones that used to be full service (and still act like they’re better), of course we’re all going to gravitate to the lowest ticket price. We don’t get any more for our money by doing otherwise.

A couple of weeks ago in the Wall Street Journal, there was an article about a feud between Delta and their catering company over unpaid bills and the risk of future defaults. So the catering company refused to deliver food to Delta at JFK Airport in New York one day. As a result, the planes flew across the Atlantic with no food on board except what the flight attendants could go scrounge up from a local supermarket! (Yes, including first class.) They profiled a guy who flew a total of 28 hours to India with nothing to eat but a muffin!!

Delta is so hurting for pilots that they’re bringing guys out of retirement. USAir is trying to fashion itself into a budget carrier in order to crawl out of bankruptcy someday and United is not sure what to do to turn things around except chop salaries.

So what can you do about it? Probably nothing, except making sure you use up your frequent flyer miles instead of hanging onto them too long and watching them vanish. Be careful booking a round-the-world ticket with the Star Alliance (US carriers are United and USAir). And cross your fingers for me that Delta will still be around next year so I can actually use that flight to Peru I worked so hard to book!

Is one of the most beautiful places on earth getting too dicey for travelers?

A few weeks ago I was interviewed by an Italian travel magazine on where to find the best international travel bargains. In an interesting juxtoposition of questions, they asked me what my favorite country was that I had been to and then asked if any country featured in my book was now maybe too dangerous for travelers. The answer to both questions was “Nepal.”

For years, I’ve been telling people it was one of my favorite places in the world. Despite the troubles they’ve had, I would still go there tomorrow and I would still do the wonderful three week trek on the Annapurna circuit. After all, problems in a country always sound worse on the news than they are on the ground, especially compared to the situation outside your own front door. Lately though, the situation has crossed the line from “be careful” to “maybe think about going somewhere else.”

In the past, the Maoist rebels created a lot of trouble for the government and killed plenty of people in the name of communism. (What decade are these people stuck in?) Never mind that Mao’s policies have been denounced even by the Chinese and communism in its Maoist form only still exists in North Korea and Cuba–two countries that have seen their output and wealth collapse after Russia stopped propping them up.

While the attacks in the past were often bloody and dramatic (whole police stations wiped out, assassinations in the royal palace), tourists and foreign workers were generally left alone–apart from the occasional forced “donation” on a hiking trail. While as many as 10,000 people have reportedly died over the past eight years, foreigners have generally been sideline observers.

In recent months, however, things have gotten uglier.

- The restaurant at Pokhara’s Fishtail Lodge was bombed this past May. Nobody was hurt, but this is a popular hotel for tourists (I spent a night there and ate at that restaurant…)

- Last week, a bomb exploded on the grounds of the Soaltee Crowne Plaza hotel in Kathmandu (Hmmm, I’ve been there too…)

- Security on flights between India and Nepal has been stepped up after intelligence indicated that the Maoist terrorists were planning to hijack a plane. (Umm, and I’ve been on those flights…)

- Nepal has requested anti-mine trucks from India after reports that the rebels were planning to mine major roadways. (And I’ve ridden buses on those roads…)

- The Maoists have announced a general strike during the start of the important five-day Kumari religious festival at the end of September. The strike is designed to force business to grind to a halt during one of the most important tourist events of the year. Like most of the group’s actions, it would make the poorest people in a poor country even poorer.

There is hope, however. The residents of Nepal, especially in the capital, are fed up with the violence. Thousands turned out for a recent peace rally. A few days later, 10,000 or more marched to protest the country’s monarchy and demand a peaceful restoration of an elected parliament.

So far, the Maoists seem to be targeting tourist businesses to get into the news, not to actually kill foreigners. It’s a fine line, however, and since the group knows it is scaring away tourists, and therefore most of the country’s income, they are obviously not too concerned about the health and well-being of anyone.

I’m not saying don’t go, but as we enter into the prime trekking season of the year, keep your eyes on the news and watch the Thorn Tree message board on Lonely Planet’s site for updates from people on the ground there.