It also sums up the fundamental inspiration for "Salon.com's Wanderlust": a collection dedicated to putting the romance and the passion -- the "unconquerable longing" -- back into travel writing.

Remember the first time you traveled to a foreign place? If you are like me, you were overwhelmed and exhilarated. Every moment seemed unbearably precious, every outing an extraordinary lesson in a new culture and a new people -- full of thrilling sights and smells, tastes and textures, thoughts and values, encounters and connections: a whole new world!

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.

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"The Department of State warns U.S. citizens to defer all travel to Israel, the West Bank and Gaza ... Government employees have been prohibited from traveling to the West Bank and Gaza and urged to avoid East Jerusalem, including the Old City. Private American citizens should avoid travel to these areas at this time and Americans residing in the West Bank and Gaza should consider relocating to a safe location, if they can do so safely ..."

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?

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That's what I get for plunging too far into the latest battle in the ongoing online airfare wars.

It started early this month, when Consumer Reports Travel Letter, a respected watchdog publication, stated in its cover story that the four main online air booking sites are guilty of shoddy service. "The Internet is an exciting new tool, but it's no more likely to garner you the best airfare than a low-tech telephone ... Travel sites don't easily, fairly and thoroughly deliver" the lowest available fares and the full range of flight options, wrote CRTL.

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.

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I pour myself a little Chianti and fire up the computer.

What happens next is like one of those agonizing dreams in which you helplessly watch yourself move in slow motion trying to escape some torturous terror.

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.

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In his career, Perkins has developed a reputation as one of America's foremost consumer travel journalists, valued for his trenchant reporting, straightforward critiques and sensible advice.

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."

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Then I settle into my brand new Club World seat -- nicely roomy, and still with the feel of furniture that has just come through the factory door -- and befuddledly face a technophile's dream of gadgetry: shiny silver levers and sleek inset buttons with arrows and icons, things that pull down and things that slide out and things that I'm not quite sure what they do.

As the flight attendants take coats and drink orders, I start pushing and prodding and pulling and folding. Release one lever, pull a fluted silver handhold and a personal video monitor swings in front of me. Release the lever beside it and a tiny fan-shaped table barely big enough to hold a wine glass folds down.

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But you know the sad saga: As more and more travelers began to accumulate and redeem miles, the airlines began to realize that they were losing money. They were giving away seats to freeloaders when they could be filling them with full-fare customers.

And so the airlines began to impose restrictions on their mileage programs. You couldn't use miles to get seats around Christmas, New Year's Day, Thanksgiving or Easter; you couldn't use them to fly during peak summer periods. You needed to book flights weeks and sometimes months in advance; and fewer and fewer seats on each flight were allocated to passengers flying on free tickets.

Then the miles began to come with expiration dates, like milk cartons: "Do not use after ..."

Soon, keeping track of your miles almost became more of a hassle than they were worth. You'd look at your statement and think, "I'm about to lose my miles. I'd better fly somewhere quick." Or even more sobering: "If I just fly to Salt Lake City this weekend, I'll have enough miles to get a free ticket."

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My admission last week of my own worst STT, "The Case of the Undocumented Daughter and the Dumbfounded Daddy," inspired many of you to send tales of your own worst tricks. I take great comfort in the knowledge that such smart people can do stupid things.

Let's begin with two letters near and dear to my heart because they show that I'm not the only person with paranormal passport problems:

"I enjoyed your story about your daughter's passport but kept thinking, huh, that's nothing. Imagine moving to another country with a toddler and a newborn, whose passports you carefully applied for the week each was born (two passports each, British and American -- they have dual nationality). By the time you have finished packing up the house and seen the moving van and your husband off to France, you are a crazed zombie from lack of sleep and stress and are looking forward to one full day of nothing to do but nurse the baby before you fly to France yourself. That night, just before you drop off to sleep exhausted on the mattress on your soon-to-be-former neighbor's floor, you bolt upright in a panic. The file cabinet! With the passports in it! It's on the ferry to Calais!

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But I promised that if you told me your worst stupid traveler trick, I'd tell you mine. More than 100 of you fulfilled your part of the bargain, so now it's my turn to share my most stupid traveler trick of all.

The year was 1987. It was a tumultuous and exhilarating time in my life. The previous August, our daughter, Jenny, our first child, had come into the world. And on Jan. 1, I had been named travel editor at the San Francisco Examiner under the newly revitalized and robust regime of publisher Will Hearst. It was a heady time.

Early that year, I had been invited in my new role to attend the annual April conference of the Pacific Asia Travel Association, a grand gathering of travel poobahs -- heads of airlines, hotel chains, national government tourism organizations, travel agencies and tour operators.

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The happy ending was that the hotel took pity on me and waived the charges for all the calls made while I was out of the room -- more than 70 $1-service-charge calls in all!

At the end of my column, I invited readers to share their own stupid traveler tricks -- and more than 50 of you responded. Thank you, thank you -- I no longer feel alone!

So this week I am going to share the best (or the worst, depending on your point of view) of these letters.

But to begin, I should -- as a number of readers pointed out -- name the hotel that generously and graciously waived my phone charges: It was Le Meridien Beverly Hills, and if you happen to stay there, please give the good people at the front desk my regards.

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First of all, thank you for your enthusiastic responses! More than 450 of you sent me e-mails proposing a variety of explanations for the mysterious phone charges.

The main explanations fell into three categories.

One was some variation on an endless-redial theme, as in these e-mails:

"I think that the redial button was stuck on the phone, automatically redialing the same number until the next time the phone was used. Good guess?"

"The phone was trying to redial the last number you called automatically -- a feature that is offered in some areas of L.A."

"I think the hotel is using an AT&T service that automatically redials a busy number until you manually pick up the phone and dial another number."

Essentially, most of these speculated that my last phone call before leaving for dinner had not gone through, thereby triggering an automatic-redialing service that would keep trying until the call was completed. This was a good guess, but wrong.

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Here's the latest:

I was in Los Angeles recently for a little meeting -- no, not that little meeting. (And no, I will not run.) It was actually a meeting of travel professionals, public relations people who make a living representing hotels, amusements and destinations to journalists and to the public.

I had been invited as a travel expert -- someone who's been around long enough to tell people what they should know and shouldn't do. So I gave my presentation and attended some enlightening and entertaining panels and receptions and dinners and it was all silky smooth until the night before I was due to check out.

Sometime during my last day in a hotel, I usually call up my account on the in-room TV just to make sure I haven't inadvertently been charged for a dozen $6 mini-bar Cokes or someone hasn't signed a $300 dinner tab to my room number.

I remoted my account onto the screen. Everything looked fine for the first day of my stay, Aug. 6, and for the beginning of Aug. 7. Then something went terribly, terribly wrong.

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You think of Claudia Kirschhoch and a chill taps your spine.

Kirschhoch is the 29-year-old Frommer's Travel Guides editor who disappeared from the resort area of Negril, Jamaica, on May 27.

It's a baffling tale. Despite posting a reward offer of $50,000, about 20 times what an average Jamaican makes in a year, her parents, resort proprietors and police are apparently no closer today to finding Kirschhoch than they were on the morning of June 2. That's when employees at the resort where she was staying entered her room, after her parents had called worriedly looking for her, and found everything -- passport, plane tickets, wallet with cash and credit cards, camera, clothing, luggage, house keys -- still there, all except for her sunglasses, a portable radio and a bikini she had bought just before the trip.

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I was feeling especially happy as I'd just checked my new luggage -- the first I'd bought in 25 years. Think of it: For a quarter-century I lugged around my parents' graduation present: a dirt-colored, hard-sided, scuffed and battered Forecast suitcase, which I had come to think of as the Fearless Forecast.

Fearless belonged in the Smithsonian. But we had bonded. I had a hard time justifying the expense of a box to throw my clothes in.

Still, I had grown increasingly uncomfortable with Fearless over the years -- kind of the way teenagers feel about parents who wear hopelessly outdated pants.

As sleek suitcases circled round baggage carousels, I'd wait until the last minute to grab my bag, hoping no one would see it belonged to me. At hotels, I'd wait until Fearless was swept away by porters before entering the lobby; I overtipped bellboys so they'd keep it to themselves. I consoled myself with the thought that no self-respecting thief would ever pry this bag open.

The justifications had begun to wear thin.

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Collis and I had a drink afterward and agreed it was one of the more surreal things we'd ever done. Then he flew back home to Antibes, France, and I flew back to San Francisco.

After that I began to look for tips and musings in his International Herald Tribune column, "The Frequent Traveler," as well as in his work in the New York Times, and I began to feel like I had a ubiquitous friend who was keeping a lookout on the business travel world while I was looking elsewhere.

And so it was with a kind of nostalgic familiarity that I picked up his new book, "The Survivor's Guide to Business Travel."

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Not anymore. Oh, no. The whole notion of "best ticket" has been blown out of the skies.

Ask 12 passengers on any random flight today how much they paid for their tickets, and you're likely to get 12 different answers.

Why? Well, Fred the friendly travel agent has been joined by a host of not-so-friendly competitors: the name-your-price site Priceline.com, online travel agencies such as Travelocity.com and Expedia.com, the airlines' own Web sites, discount online sites and traditional offline bucket shop discounters. And the plot will thicken this fall when two new players enter the fray -- the absurdly christened, airline-backed Orbitz.com (I'm glad the Justice Department is looking into possible monopolistic illegalities associated with this site, but shouldn't it also investigate whoever came up with that name?) and, launching in September, the lowest-fare-available Hotwire.

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Virgin Atlantic Airways announced Thursday that its passengers can now receive in-flight cellphone calls, making it the first airline to offer such an option. The service will be available immediately in all classes on all Virgin flights, according to spokeswoman Sharon Pomerantz.

To use the service, passengers swipe a special card supplied by their cellphone service provider through onboard phone handsets, then dial a registration number. Phone calls to the passenger's cellphone number are routed through a ground station to the plane via satellite. The passenger receives a visual prompt on his private monitor and hears a light ringing in his headset. He then picks up the handset to conduct his call. The service can be used throughout the flight, except on takeoff and landing.

The option can be deactivated with a second swipe of the card.

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Luckily, on this Hawaii trip, my schedule afforded a single entirely free afternoon between speeches, panels and receptions. This brief block became the focus of my pre-trip preparations: What could I do?

On previous visits to Oahu, I had discovered a few fine ways to while away a weekday afternoon. You can go to Waikiki's leafy Kapiolani Park and watch extended families picnic and play Frisbee with the slow, stately grace and from-the-belly joy that seem enviably Hawaiian. You can hike into the scraggly wilds of Diamond Head, so incongruously close to the concrete and steel of Waikiki. Or you can spend $20 to $120 on a package tour and go virtually anywhere in an air-conditioned coach with a gregarious guide.

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Well, I have a master's degree in tourism, and I'm here to tell you.

August 2000: The sole remaining survivor is helicoptered off to Kota Kinabalu into the waiting embrace of her agent. Film crew follows.

September 2000: After screening a grainy video of the final "Survivor" over pad thai in a Khao San Road dive, an attractive and insouciant French couple persuades a young blond American prone to hallucinations to join them in a crazy dream" to reach the island.

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