by Megan Lyles
It was 4:20 a.m. when I heard the faint hum in the distance. The noise grew steadily from a barely perceptible hope to a shrieking racket, and then slowed to individual thunk-thunk-thunks as the train pulled into the station. When it had stopped completely, I unfolded myself from atop my backpack and stood. [...]

by Margaret Ford Rogers
Matt insisted.  “They’re Cuban and know the roads.”
Hmmm. This might have been true, but naïve Matt didn’t really understand what he was saying in giving the OK for Jordan and Fermin to drive. Regardless, I should have been against it. Mickie and I had two strict rules for driving in Cuba. Never [...]

by John Edwards

Into the Wild Wild East of “Europe Minor”
After the collapse of communism in the USSR, inflation in the freshly minted Baltic republics of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia rolled up the ruble into the cheapest toilet paper around, so I decided to go East and stock up. I needed a cheap place to wipe [...]

by Robert B. Robeson
…I think I should say one word, too, a special word, about the
“Dust Offs”—the Med-Evacs. This was a great group of men.
All those who flew them, all those who did it. Courage above
and beyond the call of duty was sort of routine to them. It was
a daily thing, part of the way [...]

by Dodie Cross
I was flying from Thailand, back to the States, after a bladder repair went south. It was supposed to be a “quickie” type of surgery. “Sree day and you casseta come out,” my sweet Thai surgeon told me. “When you can pee-pee on you own, you go home.”
That was reassuring. It was close [...]

by Cindy Gold
The “Lonely Planet” guidebook on New Zealand describes the blackwater tubing experience at Waitomo Caves as “… a three-hour trip on an inner tube floating down a subterranean river that flows through Ruakuri Cave … floating through a long, glowworm-covered passage.” It also mentions you’ll be wearing a wetsuit to keep you warm. [...]

By Laurie McAndish King
Jim was hesitant right from the start.
“Cape Tribulation? Wilderness Area? No way!”
Our travel agent had provided a bright, glossy brochure of the Bunyip Lodge, and I talked my husband into going along to this eco-resort in northern Australia. “Eco-tourism” sounded so romantic: waking to the trill of morning birdsong, viewing exotic animals [...]

By Michael Shapiro
What’s the worst that could happen, I asked myself, when an attractive young woman I’d met in Tiananmen Square invited me to dinner. Three hours later I was being held against my will in a dimly lit ground-floor room many miles from the heart of Beijing. I didn’t know where I was, a [...]

By Chris LaRoche
It’s late November in Montana. Days before Halloween, my long-distance girlfriend dumped me in broken but adequate English over a crackling phone line from Germany. For a month I moped about like a sad puppy, crying in my coffee and failing exams in morpho-phonology. Finally, I decided it was time to get over [...]

by Tim Leffel
I believe we crossed the equator around three in the morning, though I don’t really know. The waves pounding our boat were just as furious on both sides of the dividing line. Perhaps if every toilet were not splattered with puke, I could have checked to see which direction the water was flowing [...]