Nicaragua is becoming the least expensive Caribbean destination.

To travel best requires some time preparing for your visit to a particular location - that you don't travel anywhere without spending a few nights reading about the culture and history of the place you are visiting. This is what most of us don't do - we fling ourselves on an exotic destination hoping that someone will tell us what we are looking at, but by that time it's too late, and all the lectures and tour guides simply add to our confusion.

You avoid the overcrowding of tourist locations by traveling in off-season. That is now one of the major rules of smart travel - go when the tourists are NOT there, and even though you may have to don an extra layer of clothing, you will enjoy the sights and the experiences at the destination in the way that they were enjoyed before they became so well-known.

At its best, travel should challenge our preconceptions and most cherished views, cause us to rethink our assumptions, shake us a bit, make us broader minded and more understanding.

Nicaragua is becoming the least expensive Caribbean destination.

My favorite place in the whole world is the city of Paris. to me, Paris stands at the frontier of every major category of travel - in food, art, theater, history, in so many different areas that I simply don't get tired of it.

My favorite place that I've been to that most people haven't been to is the Golden Triangle in the northeast of Thailand, which is inhabited by people as if in the Stone Age, without any form of power, without running water, simply living in huts on stilts.