Suggested Travel List.

I spent four thousand dollars over a seven month period (not including camera equipment and airfare). I kept company with bedbugs, ate on the street and sometimes slept there. I know people who have traveled the world on five thousand dollars a year (including airfare). You can see the world for the price of a second-hand car. The question is, do you want to?

Travel is a time/money tradeoff. You can buy a Lonely Planet Guide in the United States for full price. You can buy a second-hand copy in-country for about half price. You may get lucky and have one offered to you the moment you step off the plane. You may have to find the local backpackers' cafe, put up a notice and wait for one. There are very few things you can't buy in a large city of a foreign country. It will, however, take you several times longer and be infinitely more exhausting to buy overseas than in your home town.

Let me put in a plug for low-budget travel. I don't travel on a shoestring because I'm cheap (I prefer to think of myself as thrifty). For me traveling is about meeting people and the only way to do that is to put yourself in their path. That means if you rent a luxury jeep with tinted windows you will most certainly be more comfortable than if you cling to the top of a bus for several hours, but you will also have isolated yourself from the local population.

The other tradeoff you may be facing is weight-comfort. You start out with an 83 lb. pack that has everything in it from your favorite (spare) pair of jeans to your lucky rabbit's foot. By the end of the trip your pack is 34 lb., you've whittled down your toothbrush to half size (and hollowed out the handle), you've memorized all the word from A to G in your foreign dictionary and have used those pages as toilet paper, and your letters home are written in blood because you threw out your Bic pen halfway up the last mountain. You're hating every minute of it, but it's going to make a great story when you get home.

The List...