Don George

The occasion is the annual dinner of the American Himalayan Foundation, and on this night more than 900 people have gathered from around the world to honor Hillary and the extraordinary work accomplished by the foundation he established, the Himalayan Trust. Sir Edmund is reflecting, once again, on the climb that changed his life: “I was just an enthusiastic mountaineer of modest abilities who was willing to work quite hard and had the necessary imagination and determination. I was just an average bloke; it was the media that transformed me into a heroic figure. And try as I did, there was no way to destroy my heroic image. But as I learned through the years, as long as you didn’t believe all that rubbish about yourself, you wouldn’t come to much harm.”

It’s the same message he’s been delivering for decades, and as they have for decades, the people in the audience shake their heads and smile. They all know: There’s only one Edmund Hillary.

To say that Hillary is held in awe by this vast and glittering gathering would be a monumental understatement. The love and respect that fills the room is almost overpowering. People speak of Hillary with hushed reverence, almost as if they were speaking of the mighty mountain he conquered.

David Breashears, director of cinematography for the acclaimed new IMAX film “Everest” and one of the world’s most respected climbers, tells the audience: “Ed pointed the way for the rest of us. It was just such a thrill to follow him.”

Then Jon Krakauer, author of “Into Thin Air,” the gut-wrenching bestseller about the Everest tragedy of May 1996, walks to the podium. Looking straight at the head table, he says, “Quite simply, Edmund Hillary shaped the course of my life.”

And there it is — Hillary’s smile, still as broad as the Himalayan sky.

There was no knighted mountaineer to inspire young Edmund Percival Hillary’s dreams when he was a lad growing up in New Zealand. Edmund’s father was a rural newspaper editor and beekeeper, and there wasn’t much money in the household to fuel far-flung adventures. Even so, Hillary spent a good deal of his childhood reading tales of adventure and dreaming. “There was a phase when I was ‘the fastest gun in the West,’” Hillary recalled in an interview, “then another when I explored the Antarctic. I would walk for hours with my mind drifting to all these things.”

Hillary’s first climb was up 7,500-foot Mount Oliver in southern New Zealand. “It wasn’t a difficult mountain by any means, but making it through the snow to the ridge, then along the ridge and up to the summit really captured me,” he said. “It was then that I resolved I was going to do a lot more mountains.”

And he did. He began climbing seriously among the Himalayan peaks of India. Then, in 1951, at the age of 31, he was asked to join a British expedition to the Everest region. That team reconnoitered the Khumbu glacier and a great ice fall under the mountain. “We were the first to realize there was a potential route up Everest from the south side,” Hillary said. Two years later, Hillary was invited with Norgay and 400 others on the massive British Everest Expedition, the first ascent from the Nepalese side. As the expedition proceeded toward its goal, the force dwindled until only Hillary and Norgay were left for the final ascent.

In this age of high-tech commercialized mountain climbing, it is almost impossible to imagine the earth-shaking impact Hillary’s and Norgay’s achievement had in 1953. Here was a mountain — unreachable, tantalizing, fearsome, deadly — that had defeated 15 previous expeditions. Some of the planet’s strongest climbers had perished on its slopes. For many, Everest represented the last of the earth’s great challenges. The North Pole had been reached in 1909; the South Pole in 1911. But Everest, often called the Third Pole, had defied all man’s efforts — reaching its summit seemed beyond mere mortals.

Hillary’s and Norgay’s feat was electrifying. Heightening the impact even further was the felicitous coincidence of their arrival just before the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II — and the dramatic announcement of their triumph on the morning of the coronation. Add to this the figure of the mountaineer himself — firm of jaw and bright of eye, humble and high-minded and handsome in a lean, mountainous way, daring but down to earth, supremely competent without being showy — and you had the makings of an immediate legend. Hillary embodied the dash, the pluck, the stiff-upper-lip and what-the-hell, let’s-go-for-it aplomb the British empire still aspired to, and almost overnight the two mountaineers became worldwide sensations. Hillary was knighted, Norgay was given the George Medal, one of Britain’s highest civilian awards, and the duo was medaled, titled, toasted and feted around the world.

Tellingly, Sir Edmund did not simply cash in on this fame and while his days away in early retirement (nor did Norgay, who taught mountaineering and dictated several books about climbing before his death in 1986). Quite the contrary, he continued his explorations: In the ’50s and ’60s he undertook another half-dozen Himalayan ascents; in 1957 he trekked across Antarctica; in 1960 he embarked on a much-ballyhooed expedition to find the Abominable Snowman; and in 1977 he journeyed by jet boat to the source of the Ganges.

In this sense, Sir Edmund can be seen as the last branch in the great historical tree of terrestrial explorers, a direct descendant of such adventurers as Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus, Lewis and Clark, Stanley and Livingston, Perry and Scott and Amundsen, Sir Richard Burton, Charles Lindbergh — explorers who drove themselves to do what no one had done before, “because,” in the famous words of Sir George Mallory, “it is there.”

In 1958, Hillary himself edited a book devoted to just such explorers. It was called “Challenge of the Unknown,” and it contained excerpts from accounts by such adventurers as Lindbergh; Antarctic explorer Adm. Richard E. Byrd; Thor Heyerdahl, who sailed from Peru to Polynesia on a balsa-wood raft; Sir Ernest Shackleton, who crossed the sub-Antarctic Ocean in a whaleboat; and Col. P.H. Fawcett, who would lose his life looking for the lost mines of Muribeca. In the introduction to that book, Hillary wrote:

“Modern developments in machinery and equipment have produced major changes in the technique of exploration. Aircraft and vehicles are in many cases replacing the human legs; oxygen bottles are giving new strength to air-starved lungs in the thin air that clothes the giants of the Himalayas; and radio communication has removed the loneliness from the most desolate land. But despite all this I firmly believe that in the end it is the man himself that counts. When the going gets tough and things go wrong the same qualities are needed to win through as they were in the past — qualities of courage, resourcefulness, the ability to put up with discomfort and hardship, and the enthusiasm to hold tight to an ideal and to see it through with doggedness and determination.

“The explorers of the past were great men and we should honour them. But let us not forget that their spirit still lives on. It is still not hard to find a man who will adventure for the sake of a dream or one who will search, for the pleasure of searching, and not for what he may find.”

Most impressively, the challenges Hillary undertook during these years weren’t only of the geographic kind. He was also using his fame to aid the people who had helped him reach Everest: his beloved Sherpas. In his speech at the Fairmont Hotel, Hillary recounted how an elderly Sherpa from Khumjung village, the hometown of most of the Sherpas on his Everest ascent, had come to him a few years after that expedition and said, “Our children lack education. They are not prepared for the future. What we need more than anything is a school in Khumjung.”

So Hillary established the Himalayan Trust, and in 1961 a three-room schoolhouse was built in Khumjung with funds raised by the tireless mountaineer. In its first decade the fund focused on education and health. Then, in 1975, tragedy struck: Hillary’s wife and 15-year-old daughter were killed in a plane crash while flying from Kathmandu to a school dedication ceremony.

A lesser man might have been defeated by this devastating disaster, but Hillary responded by redoubling his Himalayan efforts. In all, the trust has built 27 schools, two hospitals and 12 medical clinics, plus numerous bridges and airfields. In recent years the trust has expanded its scope, devoting considerable funds to rebuilding monasteries and to reforesting valleys and slopes in the Mustang, Khumbu and Pokhara regions. Hillary’s son Peter, himself a mountaineer, has also been active in working for the Sherpas.

“I have never felt sorry for the Sherpas,” Sir Edmund said in San Francisco, “and I have never tried to impose projects on them. These are all things that the local people wanted, and we just responded. Every time we finish one project, we get more requests.” These days he spends more than half the year traveling the world from his home in New Zealand, raising money for the trust and supervising the various projects undertaken with the funds he’s raised.

And so Sir Edmund has come to San Francisco. You listen to the humility and selflessness in his words; you watch as he smiles and shakes hands with a mind-numbing parade of fans — and then touches a little boy with magic as he stoops to sign a tattered book and shakes his tiny hand. You think of how often he has been through this, how many times he has answered these same questions, told these same tales — and how genuinely gracious and good-hearted he seems to be. And you find yourself wondering: Is this man for real?

Is this man for real? Sometimes you worry that we have lost our capacity for worship, for awe, for delight and humility in the face of genuine idealism; sometimes you worry that the shadows of modern life have obscured our ability to be inspired. Then you listen to Sir Edmund talk about how fame was thrust on him, and how he has spent the years helping the Sherpas help themselves, and you watch the faces in the crowd, the smiles and the nods and the sighs, the tears that occasionally glisten in those hard and glittery eyes.

And you feel somehow that your own faith has been renewed, that there are dreams worth following, causes worth pursuing, that people can devote their lives to something larger than themselves and grow in heart and mind and grace until they become almost as high as the mountains they love.

You can feel it in the ballroom of the Fairmont Hotel; you can see it in the eyes of the black-gowned, bepearled socialites and the mountaineers restless in their sport coats and ties. This one man has captured the heart and imagination of generations. Here is someone who did the near impossible, climbing the world’s tallest mountain, and then did the near impossible again — refusing to be spoiled by all the adulation and accolades that achievement earned him, and remaining loyal to an ideal and a people he loved. Because of this man, countless lives have been bettered, and an entire culture has been preserved.

When Hillary shuffles off the stage, you watch people throughout the room — bankers and lawyers and writers and climbers — dab at their eyes, until you can’t see because your eyes too are filled with tears. And you remember what David Breashears said earlier, looking straight at Sir Edmund, his voice cracking a bit and tears glistening in his own eyes: “We shall never see the likes of you again, Ed; we shall never see the likes of you again.”

But the evening’s defining moment occurs just before the end of Sir Edmund’s speech. He has been showing slides of the clinics and schoolrooms his fund has built, and telling tales of the villagers whose eyes have been cured and limbs have been straightened, whose lives have been saved from prostitution or destitution. Then a shot of three laughing schoolgirls with shining eyes flashes on the screen, and Hillary sighs. “Ah, here are three of my favorite young friends,” he says. And as he looks at the screen, his smile is as wide as the sky.

The stories in the anthology recapture and celebrate that feeling. Isabel Allende discovers inspiration in the green depths of the Amazon; Simon Winchester is surprised by romance in rural Romania. Jan Morris explores the hallucinatory power of Gdansk; Carlos Fuentes conjures an unforgettable conjunction of the imagined and the real in Zurich.

Yet it is not only famous writers who enliven its pages. I think readers will long remember Amanda Jones’s erotically entangled encounter with a stranger on a crumbling island; David Kohn’s mind-marinating, tastebud-tantalizing tour of the Memphis World Barbecue Cooking Contest; Susan Hack’s all-too-true tales of desperately seeking Tampax in far-flung pharmacies; Jeffrey Tayler’s detour toward death on a spontaneous Sahara sidetrip; and Edith Perlman’s richly rejuvenating “junior year abroad” at the tender age of 60 — to mention just some of the adventures therein.

What unites all the accounts in this collection is writing of the highest order combined with a sense of courage, passion and wonder: courage to explore and confront the larger worlds outside and within, passion to pay deep attention to and care profoundly about what those worlds reveal and wonder at their illuminating intersections — and at the mundane marvels that make up our planet.

The epiphany at the heart of my own wanderlust goes back a quarter-century to one sunny June morning in Paris, where I had gone to work for the summer as a brief interlude, I thought, between undergraduate and graduate schools. As I did every morning, I took the rickety old filigreed elevator from my apartment — right on the rue de Rivoli, looking onto the Tuileries — and stepped into the street: into a sea of French. Everyone around me was speaking French, wearing French, looking French, acting French. Shrugging their shoulders and twirling their scarves and drinking their cafes cremes, calling out “Bonjour, monsieur-dame,’” and paying for Le Monde or Le Nouvel Observateur with francs and stepping importantly around me and staring straight into my eyes and subtly smiling in a way that only the French do.

Until that time I had spent most of my life in classrooms, and I was planning after that European detour to spend most of the rest of my life in classrooms. Suddenly it struck me: This was the classroom. Not the musty, shadowed, oak-paneled, ivy-draped buildings in which I had spent the previous four years. This world of wide boulevards and centuries-old buildings and six-table sawdust restaurants and glasses of vin ordinaire and fire-eaters on street corners and poetry readings in cramped second-floor bookshops and mysterious women smiling at you so that your heart leaped and you walked for hours restless under the plane trees by the Seine. This was the classroom.

“Salon.com’s Wanderlust” is for anyone who has been touched by that spirit: travelers who understand that the true grit and gift of travel is encountering alien landscapes, peoples, values and rites, finding yourself in a situation where you have absolutely no idea what to do, navigating and embracing worlds of newness day after day after day, not knowing how the story is going to end.

Because the story never ends. There’s always a new corner, a new chapter — and who knows what wonders await there?

Enjoy the journey!

A half hour later the phone rang again. It was my wife. “I was just talking with someone at the office who said he’s canceling his family’s trip to Turkey next week because he’s afraid they’ll get caught in riots. Do you think we should cancel our trip? Is it safe?”

Recent turmoil in Africa and the Middle East have underscored yet again the volatility of world politics — and the vulnerability of the world traveler. Vacationers are understandably skittish. Why go to a region plagued by religious, political or social turbulence? Why risk ruining your vacation — let alone ruining your life?

But sometimes it isn’t easy to make last-minute travel changes. Sometimes business travelers are scheduled to attend critical meetings in a region they would otherwise avoid. Or sometimes — as with us — travelers are about to embark on an ambitious trip they have already organized and paid for. In such situations, the assessment of risk is complicated; you have to weigh a cornucopia of conflicting factors before deciding whether to cancel or not.

Such circumstances have given birth to a brave new entrepreneurial world: the travel security industry. This is a much more cloak-and-daggerish place than the official foreign ministry Web pages, local publication sites and message boards to which Net-savvy travelers have conventionally turned for information about what’s really happening around the world. In addition to scouring the Internet themselves, travel security firms draw on global networks of intelligence operatives to help make their own risk precautions and predictions.

I must confess, right here, that basically this whole industry partly creepifies me and partly outrages me. The creepiness quotient arises from the fact that the industry is based on and nurtured by international fear and chaos; like media outlets themselves, but even more directly, travel security firms live on social and political turbulence. The outrage arises from the fact that, ironically enough, given their obsession with intelligence details, such firms intrinsically play off and promulgate old fears, stereotypes and divisions.

Don’t travel, these firms will tell you. But travel is always a balance of risk and reward — and I believe from the core of my being that the world is essentially a friendly place, and that travel is the most powerful antidote of all to the diseases of religious and racial ignorance, exclusion and persecution. It is incumbent on all of us to get out there and experience the world ourselves, not through the screen of someone else’s perceptions and perspectives.

Mark Hall, manager of business development for Air Security International, and Ellen Tidd, director of Kroll Information Services, both emphasized that their companies don’t tell clients not to go to a place, they just provide as much information as they can so that their clients — mostly large multinational corporations with frequent-flying executives — can make informed decisions.

Where do they get their information? Kroll trolls the Internet for much of its intelligence, which focuses on 300 cities, said Tidd. “We have eight analysts and 30 languages among us and we’re especially expert at using Internet sources in various languages — we read the Turkish press in Turkish, for example. Plus we have a network of people in various places sending us information all the time. We update our city reports every week at least and more frequently when the circumstances warrant.”

“Air Security International has 10 information analysts who speak 15 different languages, so we use local-language newspapers and magazines extensively,” Hall said. “We also have a network of 250 agents around the world who are constantly providing us information. Plus we have a sister company, Air Routing International, that regularly debriefs pilots about conditions around the world. When we see a pattern of events developing from these reports, we investigate more closely. Finally, we buy information from freelance intelligence agents on a regular basis. While most of the intelligence we use is open-source, nonclassified information, some of what we get is pretty darn close to classified. We know for a fact that some government organizations use us as a source of intelligence.”

And what kind of intelligence do they provide? For example, if I had to go to Jerusalem right now on business, I asked Hall, what would ASI tell me?

“We would advise you to be sure to use secure transportation — we could set that up for you — and possibly to hire a bodyguard. We would tell you to avoid bus stops and religious areas and typical tourist areas. We would also tell you not to stay higher than the seventh floor in your hotel because the fire ladders don’t reach beyond that level.

“ASI is recommending that its clients travel with heightened awareness if they are going to Mediterranean countries, the Middle East, Europe and Africa,” Hall said. “If you are going to any country where there is a large congregation of Muslims, we are saying you should be especially aware of the situations developing around you; exercise special caution. The point really is this: When world events heat up and one faction is pitted against another, terrorists try to make a point — and they look for vulnerable targets to do so. It’s like a bomb threat in a building — you want to exercise every precaution.”

Kroll’s reports try to understand and depict where the situation in a place is heading, Tidd said. “Right now, for example, we’re especially concerned about Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil. There are Islamic extremists based in the remote areas where these countries converge geographically; based on State Department reports, which we monitor constantly, we believe that they are gathering information about American expatriates who live in those countries. This is public information — you just have to know where to look for it, and then you have to be on the lookout for it constantly.

“We are also increasingly concerned about Indonesia — there’s a large Islamic population there and anti-American sentiments have been simmering for some time; and South Africa, where local police say a series of bombings in Capetown over the past few years have been linked to a local Muslim vigilante group, but they haven’t been able to prove the connection. Zimbabwe seems to be heading towards revolution or civil war — agriculture is devastated, tourism is in the tank and they are having food riots regularly; Ivory Coast is a wreck; and the Philippines are also simmering with unrest over charges of corruption in the government and ongoing guerrilla problems.”

Like ASI, Kroll right now is paying particular attention to places where there may be overflows — anti-American sentiments and demonstrations — from the Middle East conflict, Tidd said. “We are not saying don’t go, but we are advising travelers to keep a very low profile and be extremely attuned to the situation around them. Avoid places associated with the U.S., such as well known American brand chain restaurants and hotels, and don’t go around dressed and behaving like an American. Don’t wear sneakers, for example; you might as well be wearing a T-shirt with the stars and stripes on it.”

What kinds of security services do these firms offer? Kroll sells subscriptions to its city travel advisories and then consults with companies on more sophisticated risk assessments. ASI’s menu of basic services includes executive protection and transportation, crisis management, due diligence intelligence (for an international chain planning to open a hotel in a country, for example, it will investigate the local power grids, the water, security concerns, the political situation, etc.) and weather monitoring. ASI also offers such exotic fare as an evacuation package. A basic evacuation can set you back as little as $5,000, Hall said. It depends on how many people are involved and how hot the situation is. When was the last evacuation? “That was in Jakarta a few years ago; we took in a 727 or a 747 and got out some 40 people when nobody else would even go in there.” Do you have to pay in advance? “No, we do the job and then we bill afterwards.”

These firms are not tailored to backpackers or even middle-class holiday travelers. Almost exclusively, their business is based on advising corporate clients, which are by nature conservative, cautious and paranoid about the great unknown world outside the corporate walls.

This paranoia is the security firms’ sweet spot. View the planet through the lens of ASI’s “hot spots” Web site, which posts updated reports each day on the world’s 10 to 25 biggest hot spots, and you discover a paranoiac’s paradise. On the day I spoke with Hall, Oct. 25, the site included information on protests in Romania over a failed investment scheme; power outages in Yugoslavia; anti-Israel protests in Jordan, Indonesia and Bangladesh; a riot of 3,000 villagers in Sri Lanka; severe rail line disruptions between Scotland and England; an earthquake and ethnic clashes in Indonesia; a typhoon near Okinawa; political clashes in Egypt; and fuel prices more than doubling in Somalia, bringing traffic to a standstill in Mogadishu.

While all of these are true, experienced travelers know that such reports give only the merest sliver of a much larger picture. When I was just out of college, I lived in Athens, Greece, for a year on a teaching fellowship. This was in the time of the hated colonels, who had been backed by the United States, and protests outside the U.S. embassy were an everyday occurrence. Sometimes out of curiosity my friends and I would go to mingle among the protesters; we would wear backpacks with Canadian flags on them and speak French to each other, but beyond those simple precautions, I never felt worried. Even when tanks were brought into the streets, I never for a moment thought about leaving Athens. And yet friends and family back in the States watched footage of those same tanks rumbling through the tear-gas clouds and thought I must be suicidal.

It’s a question of perspective, knowledge and sensitivity. I understand the need for corporations to look to security firms to safeguard their precious executives, but at the same time I resist the image of the world those firms intrinsically convey — and am repelled by the way they cash in on chaos, or on the perception or threat of chaos.

“How does it feel to profit from terrorism around the world?” I asked Tibb at one point. “Don’t you at least feel ambivalent about making money from other people’s misery?”

“Our feeling is that the world is going to do what it’s going to do, regardless,” she said. “What we do is keep our clients informed so that they can avoid getting caught up in these terrible problems and make decisions with as much background information as possible.”

When I asked ASI’s Hall the same questions, he said, “Look, we don’t create the problems; we just monitor them. And we go out of our way not to scare people unnecessarily — unlike some of our competitors. It’s easy to scare people with misinformation. Our philosophy is that we give people a logical point of view so they can make an intelligent decision. And believe me, we don’t high-five each other when a revolution happens somewhere. We have agents, connections, friends around the world; when these events happen, it hits us very, very close to home.”

Well, OK, it’s too easy to condemn these firms for preying on corporate ignorance and fear; if they can save some lives, God bless them. But it’s also too easy to fall prey to the notion that the planet is fundamentally daunting and dangerous, and that we need to rely on the intelligence and advice of firms such as these to understand and navigate the world.

Is it safe? We have just returned from our cruise, which began in Venice, Italy, and stopped in Rab and Dubrovnik, Croatia; Corfu and Sicily before ending on Italy’s west coast. Throughout our journey, I’m happy to say, from the Croatian countryside to the quais of Corfu, nary an anti-American word was heard.

While this was hardly a death-defying odyssey — Dubrovnik was probably as close as we got to the heart of world conflict — it did profoundly reinforce for me a truth I have long held dear: The world would be a much less safe place if we all stayed home. In our own small way, we travelers are like pilgrims, lighting candles against the darkness, hand to hand, as we go.

Before reaching these conclusions, the publication compared the performance of the four main online booking sites — Travelocity, Expedia, Lowestfare and Cheap Tickets — with Apollo Galileo, one of the four standard computer reservation systems that virtually all travel agents use to get their flight information and to book their flights.

The editors found the online sites deficient in a number of areas. Each site manifested at least two of four problems: lack of sensible itineraries, reordering of flight information, difficult-to-navigate features and unavailability of flight listings. The comparison also turned up “disturbing evidence” that Web agencies bias their listings toward carriers with which they have special financial relationships, according to CRTL’s editors.

Orbitz — a controversial new online agency that has been created by five airlines — crowed when the Consumer Reports article came out. For good reason: When you’ve been bashed on the head for months, it feels good to watch the club hit somebody else instead. Almost from the moment it was announced in November, Orbitz has been fighting allegations that it will lead to anti-competitiveness in the airfare marketplace. Critics suggest that a site owned by five airlines — United, Northwest, Delta, Continental and American — is not going to be able to resist the temptation to offer special fares that other agencies, online or offline, will not have access to; in a highly competitive environment, competitors and consumer advocates worry, Orbitz will naturally resort to behind-the-scenes, behind-the-screens deals and fares.

Not so, Orbitz says. In an interview last week, Carol Jouzaitis, the company’s vice president of corporate communications, and Cornish Hitchcock, a lawyer and longtime consumer advocate whom the company has hired to build a consumer advisory panel, flatly rejected the notion that Orbitz will be anti-competitive. In addition to the five owner airlines, or “equity partners,” Orbitz has signed up some 30 airlines as “charter associates” — meaning their fares will be displayed and sold on the Orbitz site, and that they promise to give Orbitz access to their lowest public fares. In return, the company has gone out of its way to legally guarantee neutrality in its listings. “We turned all our contractual materials over to the Justice Department because we knew we had nothing to hide,” Jouzaitis said. “We’re the only travel Web site that has contracts with airlines that say we must be unbiased. We must display information in a neutral manner; we’re contractually bound to do so.”

It’s the Expedias and Travelocitys of the world that need to worry about bias, the Orbitz spokespeople say, brandishing the Consumer Reports article. “There are 275 or so Web sites out there now. And Travelocity and Expedia are No. 1 and No. 2. Travelocity has six of the eight major portals. And our research shows that through those portal arrangements, Travelocity is actually reaching 85 percent of Internet households on an unduplicated basis. That’s a lot of eyeballs. So what are most first-time users seeing? Travelocity! And they say we’re the ones who are going to be anti-competitive and lock up market share?”

And that’s why I keep seeing sumo wrestlers slogging it out in the mud. And then I wonder, do I really want to get this dirty? Because even if the allegations of bias are true, savvy Web users should be able to avoid falling for the anti-competitive ploys of any one Web site. That, ultimately, is what the Web is really good for.

To understand the whole morass, you have to understand the history of air ticket bookings — specifically, the evolution of the computer reservation systems, or CRSs. The CRSs began in the 1960s when airlines realized they needed distribution systems for their flight routes and tickets. Four main CRSs were created — WorldSpan, with principal participation by Northwest, Delta and TWA; Apollo by United; SystemOne by Continental (later subsumed into Amadeus, which is owned by Lufthansa, Air France and Iberia Airlines); and Sabre by American. These airlines signed up other airlines to use their systems, and the other airlines paid a service fee. Naturally, as time went by, the CRSs began to tilt in favor of their parent airlines; if you were looking for competitive fares on Sabre, for example, American Airlines flights would tend to appear at the top of the list, and since travel agents were busy and didn’t want to scroll through numerous screens or down long lists, often those top-listed flights were the ones that got booked.

In the 1980s, the Department of Transportation stepped in to regulate the CRSs, saying that they couldn’t bias the listings by carrier. Of course, there are other, more subtle ways to bias the listings — by type of aircraft, for example, or by connection airport — and there are ways for CRSs to give travel agents incentive to work with their particular brand, but by and large, the CRSs cleaned up their acts. With all the airlines watchdogging one another, the system seemed to be working relatively well.

Still, the fundamental truth didn’t change: There were two ways to buy an airline ticket — directly from an airline or through one of the CRSs. And over time, the Big Four CRSs themselves developed into a kind of oligopoly, cooperating to charge airlines more and more for their services. A 1996 report by the U.S. Department of Justice stated that “the booking fees that CRSs charge are widely believed to be at supra-competitive levels and appear to have little relation to costs. While the costs of computing power have dropped dramatically over the last decade, the price of CRS services has risen substantially. Indeed, the price has now risen to the point that even airlines that own CRSs have publicly complained about the level of the fees.”

Orbitz executives fulminate against this situation, saying in essence that the CRSs are holding airlines, agents and consumers hostage, and vowing that eventually the company will circumvent these charges by working directly with the airlines; there’s a kind of “liberation at midnight” passion to these claims.

But this is where it starts to get really tedious.

Basically, there seem to be two main questions being bashed around in that mud pit. One is, Are the online sites biased? For example, do Travelocity’s flight listings favor airlines that advertise on its site (as the Consumer Reports article claims)?

The other is, Will Orbitz be unfair in some way? Will its arrival on the scene give travel agents online and offline even less accessibility to low fares than before? Will it fundamentally upset the integrity of airfare competition?

This second issue is all conjecture now and will be until Orbitz actually launches its full-service site, scheduled to officially begin operating June 1. (A beta launch is scheduled for February.)

As to the other question, about their bias, both Expedia and Travelocity say, “No, no, no!”

Here’s Suzi LeVine, marketing director for Expedia: “We like that Consumer Reports pointed out that consumers have different preferences — price, time, duration, carrier … But Consumer Reports didn’t say that differences in CRSs will produce different results. For example, we did an identical search on WorldSpan, Sabre and Apollo and we got different results … Each CRS has developed different algorithms to answer the question … The differences Consumer Reports found basically reflected differences between Apollo, which they used, and WorldSpan, which Expedia uses.

After the Consumer Reports article appeared, Travelocity said in an official statement: “As an online travel agent, Travelocity.com has a system access agreement with Sabre, its CRS. Travelocity.com republishes the data it receives from Sabre in a manner that is easily understood by and accessible to its base of 22 million members. Travelocity.com does not use carrier identity or any form of bias in republishing those displays.”

When it comes to the anti-competition threats posed by Orbitz, Travelocity and Expedia seem to be hurling from the same side of the pit, but when it comes to the larger implications of the bias issue, they start slogging at each other.

“Reordering flight information to preference certain airlines is bad for consumers, and it hurts our reputation as an industry if there is a perception of bias,” Travelocity president and chief executive officer Terrell Jones says.

Richard Barton, president and CEO of Expedia, says, “The inspiration for [regulating CRSs] was that the airlines owned the CRSs. We run a retail business. Should a government body decide where Wal-Mart should place Chee-tos on the shelf?”

And this is what I say: Who cares? OK, it’s a serious issue. If a booking site is masquerading as an unbiased, absolutely neutral fare-finding service and in fact is loading the algorithms so that a money-paying partner is getting preferential treatment, that’s not fair and it should be regulated and stopped.

But in terms of what the consumer gets, it doesn’t really matter. Any smart consumer knows better than to trust one site, anyway. A recent survey by Gomez found that more than 60 percent of vacation travelers visited at least two sites before booking their travel itineraries, and nearly 45 percent visited four or more sites.

So the alarms that we hear are a good example of applying 20th century thinking to a 21st century situation. In the 1980s, when the CRSs were regulated, consumers relied on travel agents to research and purchase their tickets. Today, more and more consumers — an estimated 52 million American travelers, according to a recent report in USA Today — use the Internet to research their trips.

If they’re smart and thorough, they check out Travelocity and Expedia, and they check out the airlines’ own Web sites and consolidator sites and newspaper ads — and next summer, they’ll check out Orbitz too. (Actually, they can check out right now a beta version of the software Orbitz will be using; it’s at ITAsoftware, and I found it excellent in some quick surfing over the past few days.) And as more and more sites come online in the months to come — Hotwire, Qixo and FareChase are three more recent entries to try — they will have even more opportunities to find the ticket that suits them best.

So who really cares about bias? The Consumer Reports article flashes a big red neon sign that says caveat emptor — but it seems to me that the emptor is already caveating. In an ironic way, the very unreliabilities of the Internet are leading us all to become more savvy consumers. Isn’t that what progress is all about?

- – - – - – - – - – - -

Now it’s your turn: Do you agree that the bias issue is basically much ado about nothing? Do you think Orbitz will undermine the whole air travel industry? Tell me what you think.

For two and a half hours, I search, and search, and search — and come up with: a site whose categories aren’t intuitive and aren’t defined, so I waste time looking for “moderate” hotels when what I really wanted was “inexpensive”; a mapping misadventure that tries to locate Rome somewhere in Africa; a prolonged “Search for hotels” link that finally leads to “HTTP Error 400″; a hotel site that crashes my computer, twice; and woven through these, fruitless frothing hours waiting for pages to download and then surfing through lists that give me information about wonderful-sounding hotels but don’t allow me to book them.

After all this and the bottle of Chianti, I eventually find three choice places, each of which — when I finally reach the right informational page — turns out to be unavailable for the night I need.

Inescapable conclusion: The Internet sucks.

Next morning: I call the travel agency I used to use and find that the phone number has been changed. Dial directory assistance and get a number in a different area code. Call and ask for the sophisticated, astute agent I always worked with. Person who answers says, “I don’t know of anyone by that name who’s ever worked here.” Uppity whippersnapper. Tell her, “I want a room in Rome for the night of Nov. 4. I’d like to spend between $100 and $150 for a small place with some atmosphere, hopefully a somewhat romantic place, near the Via Veneto or the Spanish Steps. Can you help me with that?”

“Oh, no,” she says, “we don’t do international bookings anymore. Except for Mexico.”

“Ah, can you recommend anyone who does?”

“Sorry.” Click.

Next, I got the Italian Consulate in San Francisco to recommend me their favorite agencies.

Call the first agency, in San Francisco. Get a very forthright guy who says, “You want us to book a hotel for one night in Rome? One night only? Oh no, sir, we don’t do that. Actually, we will do that, but it will cost you a $100 service fee, and I doubt you want to pay that — it’s almost as much as the room will cost. We will book a stay of many nights, or we will book a tour with air and hotel, but just one night — it’s not worth the work for us.”

Right. Why didn’t I think of that?

Call the second recommended agency, a large tour operator out of Sacramento, Calif. Woman who answers says, “Oh no, we don’t do anything like that. We just organize large tours.”

“Well, can you tell me the hotel you normally use?”

“Oh sure, we use the Accademia. Try them.” Click.

I get the San Francisco Yellow Pages and scan the pages of travel agents, pick out one that specializes in Europe. Guy who picks up the phone chuckles heartily at my request. “Oh no, we don’t do anything like that. Book just one hotel room for one night? Oh no, ha ha ha …”

Travel sucks.

I drive to the local bookstore and pick up an armful of guidebooks: Lonely Planet, Frommer’s, Fodor’s, Cadogan, Rick Steves and Cheap Sleeps in Italy. Drive home. Total time: 30 minutes. Total cost: $121.50 — about what I’m hoping to spend for a night.

I zoom like a finely honed search engine through the books and find three places that just about all my softcover confidantes think are really good: the Campo de’ Fiori, the Pensione Navona and the Hotel Duca d’Alba. Total time: 30 minutes.

Armed and dangerous now, I sally back into the wilds of the Internet.

I go to Frommer’s and type Pensione Navona into the search field. “Your search for “pensione navona” matched 0 of 3,583 documents. 0 are presented, ranked by relevance.”

OK, that’s helpful. Go to the Rome accommodations page, choose to list the hotels alphabetically, find the Pensione Navona in the list, click on it and get an agreeable description. But — doh! — there’s no way to book the hotel from the Frommer’s page.

I click on a link that says Book Lodgings and go to a page co-branded with PlacesToStay.com. Right at the top of the page it says: “This list shows ALL properties in Rome.”

That sounds hopeful, but unfortunately, there’s no search function. Why not? Why can’t you search the stupid list by hotel name? Is this too much to ask?

So I scroll and scroll and scroll, feeling incredibly stupid, until the Duca d’Alba pops onto the screen. Click on it. Nice page with photo and essential info: 27 rooms, short walk from Forum and Coliseum, check in noon, check out noon, etc. Click on Check Availability.

Eureka! I’ve hit the jackpot! I’ve won the lottery! There’s a double room available for 220,000 lire (about $95). Grab it before it disappears. I click on Make Reservation, fill out some forms to become a registered member, then reserve the room using my shiny new user name and password, and finally input my credit card info. That’s it! You’ve got room!

Bring on the champagne!

I can’t think of six and a half hours I’ve ever spent more fruitfully. Well, there was that one fishing trip where it rained all day and the only thing I caught was a rubber boot, that was close.

But this fishing trip caught more than a rubber boot — it caught the Duca d’Alba!

Now, what have we learned from this?

1) The Internet is NOT a one-stop travel shop.

If you had unlimited time and patience you could probably, eventually, accumulate all the information you wanted — just about when that roomful of monkeys was putting the last period on “Henry VIII.” The Net’s much-ballyhooed seamless integration ain’t seamless or integrated. A truly seamless Net would allow me to research hotels by price, location and description, to map the location precisely, to choose a hotel and to book it on the spot, without all the backpedaling, starting over and dead ends I encountered. What’s the problem here? Am I missing something?

I understand that guidebook publishers are not travel agencies and vice versa, but if booking travel online is one of the great potential uses of the Internet, one of the new e-honeypots, why hasn’t someone built a site that does all this without the pain and patience-plucking? Wouldn’t that be the killer travel app?

The Internet is supposed to make you feel empowered, but by the end of this epic expedition what I’m feeling is more like — deflowered. Of course, like sex, the first time is probably the most unforgettable and in many ways the most complicated and difficult as well. Next time I book online, I’ll skip the clumsy foreplay and go right to the sweet spot, and presumably, it should get better and better as I do it more and more.

2) The travel industry is turning upside down.

The conventional wisdom is that travel agents will do one of three things — go out of business; embrace and exploit the Internet as an essential extension of their core business and expand their customer base accordingly; become experts in a particular niche and sell their services and expertise as consultants, making their money not just on commissions but more importantly on service fees charged either by the hour or by the job. I got a taste of this with the travel agent who said he could book me a room, but the service would cost me as much as the room.

It used to be that the reason people used travel agents was that they knew all the mysterious booking mumbo-jumbo that mere mortals weren’t privy to; now the Internet has made us all travel shamans — and so suddenly what the travel agent has to sell is not the booking chants and dances but his own (and his team’s) intimate personal knowledge of the world. Of course this was always a part of the package, but today it’s the primary part of the package.

3) Printed guidebooks are not going to disappear, at least not as long as I’m alive.

I find it much easier to make sense of a place by going through a guidebook page by page, section by section, than by the equivalent scanning online. Maybe this is a generational thing. Maybe my children will find it easier to scan a Web site than read a guidebook — but for me, at least, I was able to organize my booking expedition only after I got the printed guides in my hands. Then I could look at the maps and at the descriptions of the different areas and leaf back and forth and figure out what my options were, where I wanted to be and what kind of place I really wanted to stay in.

4) A simple request is not.

Booking a hotel room in Rome for one night — how difficult could that be? Well, how much is a day worth to you? Let us pause a moment to pay homage to the travel agents of yore, whose truly heroic efforts — much maligned and for mostly measly commissions — have never been properly appreciated.

5) Multimedia, mon.

For a mission like mine, the best plan clearly is to use a combination of all the sources available — get recommendations from friends and colleagues (and a friendly travel agent, if you know one), buy guidebooks and see what they say, surf the Internet. Yes, this can take forever, so my advice is to figure out in advance just how much this all means to you. How much time do you want to spend on planning, how important is getting exactly the right romantic hotel in exactly the right close-to-ruins-and-shops neighborhood? If it’s your honeymoon, it may be worth a week of work. But do the how-much-is-this-worth math and then stick with it. The Internet can easily become a huge whirling hurling time-suck. And remember, time is money.

In his new book, “Online Travel,” Perkins helps readers make full use of the Internet as a travel planning and booking tool. Of course, Perkins is not the first to plow this terrain. Amazon.com lists dozens of titles devoted to similar topics, including “Internet Travel Planner,” “Buying Travel Services on the Internet,” “Travel Planning Online for Dummies” and “Complete Idiot’s Guide to Planning a Trip Online.”

But Perkins sets his book apart by focusing on general travel strategies, rather than specific sites. As he writes in the introduction: “A book that merely catalogs and describes Internet sites is obsolescent the day the author submits a final manuscript. But the basics of travel planning and buying don’t change all that rapidly … If you know how to use a travel site — what to ask, where to ask it, and how to ask it — you can effectively apply that knowledge even to sites that weren’t out there when I completed the text of this book.”

Perkins organizes his book according to the way travelers plan and buy travel services. The first two chapters present the overview. Perkins first separates the vast array of online travel sites into seven helpful categories: portals that lead to other sites; airlines, hotel chains, cruise lines, etc. that are trying to sell something to travelers; travel agencies; sites providing information, but not trying to sell anything; government; consumer publications; and travel publications.

The second chapter looks at the wealth of information available on the Web to travelers wanting to research and plan trips. Perkins describes what you should expect from government-sponsored sites, those maintained by individual tourist attractions and artistic/sports venues, and sites produced by guidebook and travel magazine publishers.

Subsequent chapters focus on airlines; hotels; cruises; vacation packages; scams and deceptions; complaints and compensations; online and offline travel agents; and a grab bag of topics under the heading “the rest of it,” including overland travel, insurance, credit cards and phoning on the road.

For casual travelers, Perkins’ book offers seasoned explanations and common-sense advice. For frequent travelers, I think the most useful parts of his book are the chapters on airlines and hotel rooms.

The airline chapter begins with a concise explanation of how airlines set their fares: “They establish very high ‘full fare’ prices for Coach/Economy seats that carry no restrictions. They figure that business travelers will pay top dollar to be able to buy a peak-time seat on short notice and to be able to switch tickets to different flights at any time. Airlines sell seats they don’t fill with business travelers to vacation travelers for sharply reduced prices — well under half the full-fare prices — with restrictions that discourage business travelers from using them.”

Once you understand this system, you know the more restrictions you live with and the farther in advance you buy your ticket, the better deal you’ll generally get.

Perkins then goes on to outline his strategy for finding the best airfare. First, he advises readers to start with the airlines themselves. Their best deal is the benchmark against which you measure all other fares. (But first, you have to know what airlines fly the route you want to fly. Perkins recommends Wheels Up as “arguably the most useful” of the sites that match airlines and routes.)

After checking the airlines’ sites themselves, your next stop should be the online travel agency sites, such as Travelocity and Expedia These allow you to compare fares from various airlines; they also offer route alternatives (in cases where more than one airport serve the same destination) and low-fare e-mail alerts.

The problem with these sites, as Perkins notes, is that not all of the airlines are listed in their databases. (It is worth mentioning here that Perkins’ book is published by Microsoft Press and that Expedia was originally created by Microsoft and is still partly owned by Microsoft. To his credit, Perkins does not focus egregiously or gratuitously on the Expedia site, but when there is a choice among many similar sites, Expedia is one that always gets mentioned.)

You should next check the sites of the low-fare airlines, such as Southwest, Frontier, Jet Blue and others (Perkins provides a list of 12 in his appendix), which may offer better fares on the same or similar routes and often are overlooked by computer reservation databases. Then, if you want to spend more energy and time on the search, you should check out charters, consolidators and reverse auction sites, such as Priceline.com.

In each case, Perkins details the risks of these alternatives — from inconvenient flight times, complicated check-in procedures to difficulties getting refunds. Finally, Perkins mentions alternatives for travelers with more flexibility than finances — sites specializing in last-minute travel discounts, round-the-world tickets, courier travel and “airhitching” (a variation of the old standby travel).

What I like most about this is that Perkins puts himself in the minds of travelers and walks them through the airline selection process, detailing the possibilities — and the potential problems — step by step.

Perkins’ chapter on booking hotels online is equally detailed and valuable. He begins by describing the different hotel chain sites (where you should be on the lookout for special short-term promotional rates), then proceeds to discuss the big-city discounters (where you’re likely to find great deals in midpriced hotels) such as Quikbook and wholesalers such as Hotel Reservations Network.

He next considers the pros and cons of budget motels, bed and breakfasts, vacation rentals and exchanges and other accommodation alternatives, from hostels to castles. He concludes with sage words about price-shopping pitfalls: Beware of prices that are quoted as “per person, double occupancy” — which means the actual room rate is double the quoted figure. For European hotels, check to make sure the value added tax is included in the quoted fare, and beware of differences in rating systems among countries. The United States, for example, has no standard rating system, so a “five-star” hotel in one place might be a “three-star” in another.

Perkins’ chapters on cruising, land travel and tour packages are somewhat less useful, partly because there are far fewer online options in these areas, but even these chapters are full of practical tips that leisure travelers in particular can profit from.

All in all, “Online Travel” is a concise and clear-eyed guide to making the most of Internet sites for travel planning and booking. There’s no hipper-than-thou attitude here, just good old unvarnished information and advice. While Perkins wisely tries to avoid the site-obsolescence pitfall by focusing on general strategies, he inevitably ends up referring to sites — and right now, at least, one of the greatest values of his book is the copious list of more than 600 Web addresses in the appendix, covering everything from accommodations, airlines, tour packages and transportation.

The content is clearly the crux of this book, but I must add that the design is amateurish and off-putting. The cover typeface, layout and photo selection make the book seem much less sophisticated than it is, while the inside pages use a background-color technique to set off chapter introductions and text blocks that seems hastily conceived and simply sloppy.

In this case, the present is far better than the packaging.