1,000 years of pain: One girl's take on Chinese footbinding

Today, I bring you a guest writer. My 13-year-old daughter's social studies teacher gave this assignment: "Write a poem about footbinding in imperial China." (I think Manolo Blahnik lifted his design ideas from the Chinese... ) Here's Dana's opus. She got an A+:

The Chinese tradition of footbinding was thought to bring a woman beauty,

But many consider it an act of cruelty.

To break a woman's toes and cause so much pain --

But at what cost?

To attract a man?

But what is so attractive when the poor woman can barely stand?

Imagine the pain of your foot being forced to take the shape of a lily.

I must say, I do think it seems quite silly.

The peasant women,

Yes, they have it good!

Their feet are free to grow just as they should.

It is the wealthy women who have their feet bound,

In hope, by a man, they will be found.

I do not agree with this,

I see it unfair.

These poor women spend most of their hours confined to a chair.

I would not want my feet to be broken and bent,

Inside the house most of my time would be spent.

The pain they go through with their feet half normal size,

This tradition is not a very wise enterprise.

However, it symbolized nobility, beauty and wealth,

While at the same time not good for their feet's health.

LoriHein.com

Montserrat's Escolania: Missed the boys by a bread's length

A compact range of jagged peaks pokes the sky southwest of Barcelona, and atop sits Montserrat, a monastery and city on high that legend pegs as a pilgrimage site since the 9th century.

If you have a rental car with plenty of gas and don’t mind puffing uphill behind mammoth tour buses, you can drive to the top of Montserrat. When we got to the base of the mountain, I had a quarter tank, which made an up and down attempt imprudent. So the kids and I hopped on the teleferico and rode one of its bright yellow aerial tram cars up through the brown-gray, serrated peaks to the fantastic, monastic aerie.

Montserrat is a religious site – monastery, basilica and shrine – gone commercial. And I mean that in the best way. It’s an incredible take. From Montserrat, panoramic views extend to the snow-capped Pyrenees and into Andorra, and the dramatic, rocky quarters in which the place itself is enclosed merit awe. Montserrat’s buildings, notably the basilica with its splendid painted ceiling and wall murals, are alone worth the trip to the top of the mountain. Visit during mass, and you’ll see priests and monks gathered at the altar under great chandeliers while scores of worshipers in tourists’ clothing file up to receive communion. Around the basilica’s perimeters, tourists not needing the sacrament snap pictures.

I’ll always think of Montserrat as one of the handful of places I’ve visited where I’ve been gyped, robbed by guidebooks I trusted.

Guidebooks are useful to a point. You can rely on them for the broad sweep – what’s generally good or lousy about a place. But don’t rely on them to tell you when the Escolania, Europe’s oldest boys’ choir – musically-gifted cherubs who live at Montserrat alongside Benedictine monks whose order has reigned at Montserrat for a thousand years – will sing.

They sang, and I missed them, because I trusted my guidebook. Boys whose collective voice equals or outdoes the Vienna Boys’ Choir, the Escolania is a human phenomenon. And I missed it. Even though I was there.

"The Escolania sings only at 7 A.M., on weekdays, in the basilica," said my guidebook. I had so wanted to hear them, but I ‘d already dragged my kids across the world. I couldn’t also drag them out of their Barcelona beds in twilight to get up to Montserrat in time for a 7 A.M. Escolania performance. They’d be on the therapist’s couch for years if I pulled such a thing. So I resigned myself to seeing Montserrat without hearing the Escolania. I’d have to settle for a CD from the Montserrat gift shop.

After the kids and I explored Montserrat – the basilica and the surrounding high peaks carved by nature into surreal, ethereal formations – we retreated to the tourist cafeteria for lunch. It was almost 1 p.m.

I ordered a ham sandwich, which came built upon a foot-long French baguette. The cafeteria wall bucked up against the basilica wall, and, as I ate my long sandwich, I intermittently pointed it at the wall, remarking that the beautiful church we’d just visited was "right through there, and that’s where the boys sing."

We rode the yellow tram back down through stupendous stone peaks to the teleferico parking lot. I’d picked up some brochures and tourist literature in the tram station and had stuffed them into my backpack.

That night, after the kids were asleep, I took out the brochures: "Escolania sings each weekday at 1 P.M.," they all said.

At 1 P.M., while I’d been eating my ham sandwich, the angel-throated boys had been singing on the other side of the wall.

Now, when I listen to the boys on my Escolania CD, I shake my head, knowing I’d been but a baguette and a bad guidebook away from hearing them live.


www.LoriHein.com

Moo-vers and milkshakers: Cow Parade comes to Boston

Since 1998, gaily painted, life-size cows have grazed on sidewalks, squares and street corners in cities around the world. Zurich was home of and host to the first Cow Parade, a civic art project wherein sponsors commission artists to decorate plaster cows that graze awhile in public spaces before being sold at auction to benefit various charities.

From June 3 – to September 5, you’ll find a hundred embellished bovines in Boston. (If you’re in town and want to do some cow-spotting, I’d suggest searching around Boston Common, once a pasture for real cows.) The heifer herd will bring color and whimsy to Beantown through the summer tourist season and will then be sold to benefit the Jimmy Fund, a non-profit organization affiliated with Boston’s renowned Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. The Jimmy Fund’s main mission is to help children with cancer.

Some have bashed the civic cow art displays: not real art; not real artists; tourist bait; crass commercialism; silly waste of time.

Lighten up. When we see a painted cow on a city street, we laugh and snap a photo. Today’s world needs all the fun it can get. We know we’re looking at a plaster cow, not Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. Adding to the general feel-good factor is the fact that the cows are sold to benefit worthwhile causes. What’s not to like?

The Zurich Retail Trade Association mounted the original Cow Parade and owns the copyright to civic cow art. It entrusted CowParade Worldwide in Hartford, Connecticut to bring cow art to North America. Cows have paraded in cities like Chicago and New York.

The cows have calved immootators. Some cities have bypassed the Zurich-Hartford cowglomerate and created their own paintable plaster icons.

Lizards in Orlando; angels in LA; gators in Lake Charles, Louisiana; mermaids in Norfolk, Virginia; giant painted overalls in Cedar Rapids, Iowa; chairs (think Tyrannochairus Rex and It’s A Jungle Out Chair) in Charlotte, North Carolina; dinosaurs (Flora-Saura, Glamasaurus, Tree-Ceratops) in Martinsville, Florida. There’ve been pigs in Cincinnati, moose in Toronto, frogs in Toledo.

We were in Zurich in 1998 and saw the original Cow Parade. There were 815 cows plunked down around the city. Some were in plain view in well-trodden public places, and others were surprises – cow snouts sticking from half-doors cut into the stone walls of shops on ancient, twisted streets.

We gave a name to every cow we spotted and recorded them in our trip journal. The journal entries read like our Kenyan safari wildlife-spotting entries, but instead of "wildebeest, warthog, zebra, flamingo, giraffe," our Zurich safari yielded entries like "tiger cow, unicorn cow, cricket cow, diving board cow, tennis ball cow, jingle bell cow, computer cow, eyeball cow, chocolate cake cow, cow-on-stilts...

www.LoriHein.com

Great travel narratives: Marco Polo to William Least Heat Moon

"Would you come on the air and talk about travel books?" asked the host of a local TV show. "I think people would be interested in that. " I outlined some possible discussion topics and titles and e-mailed them to the host. She named the program "Great Travel Narratives from Marco Polo to William Least Heat Moon." That's a lot of ground to cover in a 30-minute show, so I spent a few days with my travel library deciding what to leave in and what to leave out.

A recent Wall Street Journal article on the growth of audio travel guides that you download, from vendors like iToors, to your music player or cellphone, noted that the new technology, while interesting and useful to some, poses no immediate threat to the printed page. Citing Nielsen Bookscan statistics showing that 14.2 million guidebooks were sold in the U.S. alone in 2005, up eight percent from 2004, the Journal confirmed "there’s a general boom in travel literature."

For the show, which has a suburban boomer-senior viewer demographic, I decided to focus on well-worn, well-told classic travel narratives. Prepping for the taping and whittling my huge collection of travel literature down to the few volumes or authors we’d be able to discuss during the half-hour segment was, itself, a wonderful journey. I paged again through books that transported me to some of earth’s farthest corners in the company of some of earth’s finest wanderers.

"Whoa! What’s with all the books?" asked Dana when she came home from school to find me at a table covered in three-foot stacks of volumes whose spines tempted with place-names like EGYPT and Peking; TIBET and Timbuktu; ANDES and Alhambra; Rajasthan and GRANADA; West Africa and ARABIA PETRAEA.

"Just catching up with old friends," I said, and dove into the piles to pull out Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta; Wilfrid Thesiger and John Lloyd Stephens; Washington Irving and Mark Twain; Freya Stark, Mary Kingsley and Alexandra David-Neel; Lowell Thomas and T.E. Lawrence; Gerald Brenan, Geoffrey Moorhouse and Graham Greene; Dervla Murphy, Colin Thubron and Peter Matthiessen. Through the centuries, through the world, through their eyes.

In the end, I opted to bring to the set accessible, reasonably contemporary works likely to be found on the shelves of most small town libraries: books by Eric Newby, Bruce Chatwin , Paul Theroux and William Least Heat Moon (or Heat-Moon -- he's sans dash in his early years, avec dash now).

Not surprisingly, the half-hour ended before even this limited trip could really rev up and get going. We barely scratched the surface of Chatwin (In Patagonia, What Am I Doing Here? The Songlines), Theroux (The Great Railway Bazaar, Riding the Iron Rooster, The Kingdom By the Sea, The Pillars of Hercules), and my two favorites:

William Least Heat Moon – He tried for years to get it published, and thankfully Blue Highways eventually was. Heat Moon’s tale of his U.S. road trip in Ghost Dancing, his workhorse van, is a classic of American road trip literature. Heat Moon’s journey was both escape and discovery. Job loss and a failed marriage led him to set out on a trip that would, as the best journeys do, let him both leave and find himself. He sank into America’s small places and let them and their people sink into him. Through his life, Heat Moon has explored most of back road America. River-Horse, a vivid but more cerebral read than Blue Highways, takes us across America from the Hudson to the Pacific on a water route that took Heat Moon years to map out. When he ran out of roads, he took to the rivers.

Eric Newby: I discovered Newby in a newsstand in London’s Heathrow airport. On a long layover to somewhere far, I needed reading material. I picked up Travelers’ Tales, an anthology that Newby had compiled and edited. Arranged geographically by continent, then chronologically within that framework, the selected snippets and stories told me Newby was a traveling man with a sense of humor, and I wanted to know more, so I devoured everything Newby I could find. In Love and War in the Apennines, WWII soldier Newby walks out of an Italian POW camp on Armistice Day and hides in the mountains. He meets Wanda, the village girl he’d marry and the soulmate who’d accompany him on many of his adventures. The Newby books I managed to mention on the air – On the Shores of the Mediterranean, A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, Slowly Down the Ganges – are joyous delights.

"All travel is circular...the grand tour is just the inspired man’s way of heading home."
- Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar

"...who can say where a voyage starts – not the actual passage but the dream of a journey and its urge to find a way? For this trip I can speak of a possible inception: I am a reader of maps... I read them as others do holy writ; the same text again and again in quest of discoveries, and the books I’ve written each began with my gaze wandering over maps of American terrain. At home I have an old highway atlas, worn and rebound, the pages so soft from a thousand thumbings they whisper as I turn them."
- William Least Heat Moon, River-Horse

"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely, on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime."
- Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad

Dream. Read. Go.

www.LoriHein.com

Free camping day at family-friendly KOAs

May 12 was Come Camp With Us Day at KOA . If you missed the campground chain’s giveaway day this year, you’ll get another shot at a free site next year. Come Camp With Us Day, when KOA gives away some 25,000 campsites for a night in May, is an annual event (2006 is number three). KOA locations start accepting reservations in February, so mark your calendar.

The kids and I got hooked on KOAs on our trans-America trek. Backcountry types will scoff and say staying at a KOA isn’t camping. By their definition, they're right. Nobody’s roughing it at a KOA. These are tidy, well-lit, family-friendly enterprises with pools and WiFi and microwaves to heat the pizza and Chef Boyardee ravioli that you buy at the camp store. They're located close to civilization -- and often close to go-kart tracks, burger joints, gas stations and Dairy Queens. If you want remote, pitch your tent elsewhere. At a KOA, you'll have plenty of company.

As a woman alone on a 12,000-mile road trip with two kids, these places were just the ticket after 300 miles of hot, dusty driving. They had activities, movies and video games for the kids, and electricity for me, so I could pull out the laptop and get some writing done.

We tent-camped quite a few times – and it’s the tent and RV sites that KOA offers as freebies on Come Camp With Us Day – but we fell in love with the Kamping Kabins. For less than 50 bucks, we got our own little bunkhouse with four beds, a desk, lights and outlets, a porch – sometimes with a swing – and a little patch of front lawn. Water pumps were steps away. KOA offers ritzier cabins with bathrooms, separate bedrooms, heat, AC, and even kitchens, but the economy models suited us fine.

We had some great KOA moments: eating canned chili by the fire in Santa Rosa, New Mexico while the long, sweet whistle of a hundred-car Burlington Northern Santa Fe filled the desert night; sitting poolside and swapping road stories with other traveling families in Cedar City, Utah; gathering under a purple High Plains sky in Belvedere, South Dakota to sing "You Were Always on my Mind" along with Almost Willie Nelson, whose braided pigtails hung to his waist; watching Dana, who'd signed on as a volunteer mucker, grin big as she shoveled clots of haystuck manure from the Mount Rushmore KOA's horse stables.

I made sure she washed her sneakers under our water pump before letting her back inside our cozy Kamping Kabin.

www.LoriHein.com

Las Vegas, Lake Como and Living National Treasures

Don’t overlook small museums.

They often have great stuff that you can enjoy without the hassle, crowds or ticket prices of their stuffy, celebrated sisters. Four miles from my house, in Brockton, Massachusetts – birthplace of fighter Rocky Marciano and a shoemaking mecca in its heyday – sits the Fuller Craft Museum, a rare Brockton cultural gem. (The city is trying mightily to revitalize itself, and a few seasons ago it scored a home run by enticing actor Bill Murray and a group of investors to fund the Brockton Rox, a pro baseball team whose home field is a beautiful new stadium next to Brockton High School. Working as a Rox usher has become the cool summer job for area teens. Bill Murray Bobble Head Night is in the lineup for July.)

Brockton is the last place I would have expected to encounter great art. But it’s at the Fuller that I discovered the masterful work of glass artist Dale Chihuly. Chihuly’s ethereal glass creations have graced some of the world’s most renowned museums, but the tiny Fuller managed a few years back to get hold of roomsful and mounted a special exhibition.

As the kids and I wandered the galleries blooming with back-lit, blown-glass Technicolor flowers and other crystal creations, I understood why Dale Chihuly was honored, in 1992, as the first National Living Treasure by the Institute for Human Potential at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.

Just as places are designated as treasures because of their cultural or historic importance, so are people in the arts. In 1950, the government of Japan was first to begin selecting accomplished artists as Living National Treasures. Japan's model of honoring valuable cultural contributors, and subsequent selection guidelines espoused by UNESCO, have since taken root in countries, institutions, states like Hawaii, and tribes like the Cherokee that wish to recognize their human, "intangible treasures."

Having been turned on in Brockton to the work of a National Living Treasure, naturally the first thing I wanted to do when I got to Las Vegas was see Dale Chihuly’s Fiori di Como, Flowers of Como, the 40,000-pound blown-glass explosion that hangs on a 10,000-pound steel armature and covers the ceiling of the Bellagio Hotel’s lobby.

Before I could view the glass masterpiece, I had to get the kids past Bill, the Bellagio security guard, who, thankfully, was having a mellow day and providing only spotty enforcement of the hotel’s "Under 18 Policy." Families be warned: the Bellagio does not want you.

Bill was stationed next to the "Must be 18 or registered guest to enter the hotel" sign. I chatted him up and found he was from Watertown, New York, a place I pretended to know something about: "Watertown... nice quiet place..." Bill, either gullible or homesick, lit up, pointed to the sign and said, "They enforce it more on the weekdays, less on the weekends, so go ahead."

Dana and Adam were the only kids in the entire place (save for two tow-heads, coutured by Gap and pulling cutesy backpacks on wheels, who were checking into a suite with their flashy parents), and it was weird. I couldn’t wait to see the Chihuly ceiling and hightail it out of the Bellagio.

If you’re in Vegas, see the Chihuly ceiling, even if you have to leave the kids at the door while you dash in. (Bill’s probably retired, and the Bellagio now makes a point of posting its exclusionary policy on its Web site, so the odds of sneakin' the young ‘uns in are slim.)

Probably easier to fly to Italy to see the real Bellagio, a dreamy town on Lake Como, home to George Clooney, and just an hour’s drive north of Milan.

When I dug out a photo of Bellagio, taken from the lakefront balcony of our lovely, high-ceilinged connecting rooms at the Hotel Britannia Excelsior in Cadennabia (to get special treatment at the best price, deal directly with the owners by e-mail or fax when booking a non-chain hotel), I could see how Bellagio’s color and magic inspired Chihuly’s Vegas masterpiece.


www.LoriHein.com

Wildfire Awareness Weeks in the West

States throughout the West have declared "Wildfire Awareness Weeks" this spring to remind residents and travelers that small acts like tossing lit cigarette butts or leaving smoldering campfires can ignite fiery, potentially deadly devastation.

In Texas, Wildfire Awareness Week came in April. In California, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger picked this week, May 7-13, to put fire awareness on the front burner, as did Washington's Governor Christine Gregoire. The Web site of the Oregon State Fire Marshal offers a how-to guide and tool kit for public officials around the country interested in running their own fire awareness weeks.

Once you've seen wildifre, you never forget what its fury feels like. As the kids and I rolled through the West on our cross-country summer road trip, wildfire or wildfire threat was a constant companion. We first met it in Utah, and it stayed with us through several weeks and seven states. An excerpt from Ribbons of Highway: A Mother-Child Journey Across America:


After Lee Vining, we were renewed. Even New Paint took to the road with sparked vigor.

But the heat didn’t let go for long. We’d feel it again before we hit Tahoe. Antelope Valley’s Walker River ran beside us for a while. Clear, green, and bouncing fast and white over tan rocks. It led to the town of Walker, its mountainsides burned. Three virgin wildfires were building strength in the hills above the road. At Coleville, bad went to worse, and the earth was on fire again.

Coleville High School had been turned into a firefighting command center. Two fires raged. And they got bigger, before our eyes, gaining on us most of the way to Tahoe.

A card table marked “Check In “ sat at the high school’s front door. Inside the fenced-in schoolyard, workers catching a break ate from Stewart’s Firefighter Food Catering trailer. A water tanker driver slept in his cab, boots sticking out the truck’s window.

It was a big operation. Signs at the command center thanked “Marines, Pilots, Firefighters, Law Enforcement.” Planes circled the fires, and a massive Chinook dropped loads of retardant from a huge, hanging red bucket. It was eerie to be in the thick of this. We were glued to the windows, watching the fires spread and water tankers race south toward us on 395 out of Reno, Nevada. People had started to pull off the road to sit it out and watch. Everyone’s headlights were on. The smoke cloud chased then caught up with us. It blocked out the sun and took on the look of an atomic blast- orange, yellow, sick gray and brown. I stopped to take pictures. We’d never see the likes of this again, so close. Dana shouted, “My seat is red!” The dashboard was orange, the road and cows outside the van a frightening shade of fiery crimson.

At Topaz, California, population 100, we drove above Topaz Lake, elevation 5,050 feet. The lake below us was peppered with weekend boaters and jetskiers who flitted about in noon darkness, the water and air turned gray by the gargantuan smoke clouds that would soon send everyone indoors. People were eking out a last bit of Sunday fun before the fire put an end to it. It was surreal. People buzzing about on fast boats, and water-skiing, while a hideous mountain of flame, ash and smoke bore down and ate more of the land just beyond the lake. I looked at the water the people played in and thought if it could only be lifted up and delivered to the hills, it might be enough to stop the fiery advance.

At the state line, cars traveling south from Nevada waited at the California Agricultural Inspection Station, everyone looking up at what they were driving into. The air was heavy with the smell of burning pine. Tiny pieces of ash floated around New Paint and settled wherever they could take hold. The day turned brown. We rode down into Nevada’s Carson Valley, through Gardinerville and old, brick Minden. Sierras embraced us. The fire followed us.

“Tahoe Horse Shows in the Sun,” said the sign. From the road, I’d seen a few riders fly over jumps. I pulled into the show site. “Any chance this young horse lover from Massachusetts might watch for a few minutes?” I asked the old man sitting under an umbrella by the dusty parking lot. “Go on through,” he smiled. This was serious stuff. Professional riders, wealthy owners, incredible equines. The scene was moneyed, electric, regal, privileged. And surreal.

As these impeccably-postured people and equines flew, seemingly without effort, around the arena and over the jumps, as rapt owners and spectators watched every turn and hoofbeat, two wildfires raged not more than a score of miles away. The fire we’d driven under was eating the sky to the right of the small grandstand, and a second fire, wholly in Nevada, was gaining momentum and height to the left. No one looked at, spoke of or paid any attention to the wildfire-filled sky. They rode and watched their horses. Over our heads, firefighting tanker planes came and went, landing at an airstrip next to the show site, reloading with slurry and water, and taking off again. And again, and again, and again, while people rode five-figure horses and tried to win blue ribbons.


www.LoriHein.com

Four free flights to Zurich: How I did it

For the past few weeks, I’ve been a woman on a mission: use my family's motley but massive assortment of frequent flier miles and other reward points to score free plane tickets for all four of us to an international destination – any international destination.

A family caucus produced the only limits by which I was bound: no ultra-long plane rides; no more than one plane change; no longer than two weeks gone.

Our miles and points have built to epic levels over the past few years because I’ve found it either impossible or impossibly frustrating to trade them for plane tickets, and free seats are the only reward I care about. I'm not interested in magazine subscriptions, trendy electronic gadgetry, Williams-Sonoma kitchen clutter or first-class upgrades. I want plane tickets.

Blackout dates; unavailable destinations; expired miles; reward program changes; one free seat if we buy the other three; tickets available, but at double the miles; confines of the school vacation calendar; the unfair advantage enjoyed by a telephone reservation agent with availability data you can’t see and he or she won’t share – all these have conspired to keep us from being rewarded by our reward programs.

We had so many miles in the bank I started to think we should address them in our wills and estate plan. We’d surely be dead before they were used. Maybe the kids could get a free trip to the Greek islands after we were gone. We might even get the last laugh and finagle the whole family foursome onboard if the kids packed our ashes in their carry-ons (to prevent our remains from spending eternity on the island of lost luggage) to cast them into the Aegean Sea (at Santorini, please).

This time, I resolved not to give up until I had four free tickets to somewhere good (or just somewhere not too bad). I checked the coffee supply, hunkered down, and prepared to fight the good fight.

I scored four tickets to Zurich .

A key to my success was a nifty tool I found on one of the pages of Continental Airlines’ OnePass site: reward availability calendars. I searched Continental because we could transfer American Express Membership Rewards points into our Continental accounts. Worth a look.

On the Continental reward pages, when you type in a destination, you see monthly calendars that show what types of reward seats are available for each date. I typed in every major European city, specified four passengers, then looked at the June through September calendars that popped up for each. I used Newark, Continental’s hub -- lots of flights going in and out -- and an easy four-hour drive from our house, as the start point. I then made a list, by city, of all available reward dates. My four-page list showed summertime seats available for flights between Newark and Milan, Amsterdam, Brussels, Dublin, London and Zurich.

Stay with me now... I then combined the available dates into depart/return itineraries of no fewer than 10 days and no more than 14 (remember the family caucus). Then, eliminating all the date combinations that didn’t work with our summer schedule, I narrowed the list down, took what was left and prioritized the destinations. I put Zurich on top because we could use it as a jumping-off point for a road trip to the Swiss and French Alps and Lake Geneva, places we haven’t been.

I invested about four days in this process. The airlines don’t make it easy. But the online calendars, coupled with persistence, flexibility and pots of coffee on my end, yielded $4,300 worth of free tickets to Switzerland.

Enough to allow a guilt-free splurge on Swiss chocolate and cheese. And maybe an antique cowbell for the windowsill.


www.LoriHein.com

Tim Leffel's new Perceptive Travel magazine: To Nairobi and beyond...

Tim Leffel, author of The World's Cheapest Destinations, recently launched a great new online magazine, Perceptive Travel, and the third issue is out.

Perceptive Travel delivers quality storytelling by some of the best travel writers around. The magazine's first two issues featured stories by people like Rolf Potts, Jeff Greenwald and David Farley. Sign up for the Perceptive Travel Newsletter to receive an e-mail alert each time a new issue is released.

In the new May/June edition, I take you to the top of a Nairobi skyscraper, where Daniel, the building's janitor, gives me a 360-degree tour of his city and shares its problems and its possibilities. Click here to read Nairobi by Degrees. Enjoy the journey.

www.LoriHein.com

Santorini: Go for the light alone

Twenty islands, including the volcanic wonder that is Santorini, form the Cyclades, an Aegean archipelago named for the circle (kyklos) that the original 12 Cycladic islands formed around sacred Delos, birthplace of Apollo.

Today, the Cyclades, expanded to include islands not in the original dozen, are on the must-see lists of most travelers to Greece. The island chain bursts with antiquities, ruins, ancient gods and myths -- and black pebble beaches, tavernas, inter-island ferries, markets and shops, glorious food and drink, and excellent people-watching.

But the sun and the magic it creates are the main event.

Santorini has more than its fair share of Cycladic sunshine. The island is so blessed with light that even the rocky interior plain that slopes eastward away from the island’s dramatic volcanic cliffs produces lush tomatoes and rich wine grapes.

On Santorini, stay up late, but get up early, too, because the play of light during the bookends of a Santorini day is one of nature’s great gifts. Santorini is at its most splendid early and late, when sunrise and sunset turn the island’s signature cuboid houses and churches into white canvases that invite and absorb whatever colors God decides to splash. Here, dawn and dusk are not times of day, but dramatic performances.

Go to Santorini for the light alone.

www.LoriHein.com