A performance at the Strings of Autumn festival.

By EVAN RAIL

Though mainstream music fills the Czech capital all year, autumn is the time for the avant-garde to shine, with several festivals supplementing the usual operas and orchestras.

From the first day of fall through Nov. 18, the Strings of Autumn (www.strunypodzimu.cz) offers a kissing cousin of the long-running Prague Spring concert series, but more diverse in taste. The program stretches this year from the American jazz violinist Regina Carter to the Portuguese fado vocalist Ana Moura.

For cutting-edge tunes with visual accompaniments, check out Music on Film-Film on Music (www.moffom.org, from Oct. 18 to 22) for music-themed movies from around the world. Run by John Caulkins, an American resident of Prague, Moffom, as the festival is known, shows more than 70 documentaries, musicals, concert films and videos. This year's special focus on Russian films includes a live performance by the Beth Custer Ensemble during a screening of the 1929 Soviet silent comedy “My Grandmother.”

Through Oct. 21, more unconventional acts perform noise and electronic music at the Stimul Festival (www.stimul-festival.cz). Among them will be the Japanese sound performer Keiji Haino, the American experimental hip-hop group Dälek, the Italian duo My Cat Is an Alien, and the pioneering English guitarist Fred Frith.

In the middle of all this is Prague's Bollywood Film Festival from Oct. 11 to 14 (www.bollywood.cz), a long weekend of movies, music and food from the Subcontinent.

With several new high-end addresses, Prague has no shortage of excellent lodgings, though the most suitable for avant-gardists might be the high-tech Hotel Icon (V Jame 6; 420-221-634-100; www.iconhotel.eu), which opened this spring. Rooms, which start at 120 euros ($170 at $1.42 to the euro), come with a keyless “biometric” safe, a Skype phone and an iPod jack, so you can mix your own offbeat selections between events.

Gandhi’s room is sparely furnished, nearly as he left it.

MUMBAI didn't give me a headache, but it sure didn't help. My skull was already throbbing when I arrived in the city once known as Bombay, but as I strolled around Colaba, the shopping and night-life district at the city's southern tip, the hyperactive horns, the Friday-afternoon heat, the rollercoaster sidewalks, the indefatigable vendors and the children pleading for change all made me want to sprint back to my overly air-conditioned hotel room and hide under the covers.

I was about to do just that when I stumbled upon the Modern Juice Centre, a little stand that sold fresh fruit juices and chicken shawarma. I ordered a custard-apple milkshake, and with the first pull on the straw, the throbbing stopped and my world expanded.

Around me, I could now see, were gorgeous Victorian houses and quaintly run-down concrete buildings, sidewalks shaded by knobby-trunked tropical trees, shopkeepers and passers-by engaged not in ferocious arguments but in cheerful banter. I was cured of my headache, and it had cost a mere 35 rupees (about 81 cents at 43 rupees to the dollar, the exchange rate when I visited in mid-April).

Just to be safe, I dropped another 30 rupees on a ganga jamuna (orange juice with sweet lime) and surveyed my prospects. I was planning to live the Mumbai high life, a weekend-long party of shopping, eating and luxuriating, and I was hoping to do it on a budget of $500, or 21,500 rupees.

Let's be honest: in a city like Mumbai, that's a phenomenal amount, enough to sustain a backpacker for a month or one of the city's seven million slum-dwellers for a year. The idea of blowing it all in 48 hours made my stomach queasy (no, it wasn't the tap water), so I'd arranged to offset my indulgence with altruism: Sunday morning, I'd teach an English class for the Bombay Leprosy Project, a nonprofit group that helps victims of the disease.

The challenge was not staying within my budget, but doing so while chasing luxury, a tough prospect in a city where a decent hotel costs upward of $200 a night, a culture of private clubs breeds exclusivity and opportunities for throwing money away abound.

Still, I'd discovered the Ascot Hotel, an ultramodern hotel well-situated on a quiet street in Colaba. My deluxe room had pale marblesque floors, free Internet and more space than I could possibly use. For 4,500 rupees a night (plus 10 percent luxury tax), it was worth every penny — or rather, every paisa.

After my fruit shake, I wandered up Colaba Causeway, which was lined with vendors selling everything from — well, just everything. In the span of 30 minutes, they cheerily offered me bangles, shoes, pashminas, flashlights, marijuana, opium, Lonely Planet guides (bootleg and legitimate), ear cleaning (uh, no thanks), girls, boys and a horse. A horse?

I weaved my way to Bombay Electric, a spotless boutique that sold 900-rupee T-shirts and 5,000-rupee silk scarves by trendy Indian designers. I left empty-handed, and made my way to Michele Boutique, a custom tailor recommended by a friend. Up on Michele's second floor, I gave the head tailor one of my favorite shirts to replicate, then sifted through hundreds of rolls of fabric before I settled on two bright but refined stripes at 900 rupees apiece. The shirts, I was told, would be ready by Saturday evening.

Afterward, I wandered over to the tourist-clogged Gateway of India, the seaside arch that mixes Indo-Saracenic architecture with British monumentality. Just behind the Gateway was the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower, a similarly massive hotel in the same style that symbolizes Mumbai luxury.

I certainly couldn't afford to stay there, but I'd arranged to meet two friends — Aditya, the son of an Indian steel baron, and Dave, an American consultant — for a drink at the Sea Lounge inside. My gin and tonic cost 620 rupees, and no lime!

Normally, the Frugal Traveler's strategy is to save on Friday and splurge on Saturday, but since I'd already cracked open my wallet, I figured I'd switch things around. So, for dinner, we hit Trishna, a well-known seafood restaurant. Aditya, Dave and I powered through spindly king-crab legs with butter and garlic, lobster meat in an emerald sauce of pepper, basil and mint, and Hyderabadi fish tikka. When the bill came, I braced myself; surely I'd be eating plain samosas the rest of the weekend. Instead, it was 1,300 rupees each, the price of two cocktails at the Taj.

It was still early, so we descended deeper into high-end Mumbai, popping into Busaba, a bar in Colaba so slickly international that I thought I was in Singapore — except a Tiger beer cost 300 rupees, about triple the price in its homeland.

Next up was Privé, a hot club in Colaba. It is members only, but if you say you know a member, you'll probably be allowed in. This was decadence: private booths floated in pools strewn with rose petals, and the men and women were not just beautiful but expensively beautiful. As a budget-conscious tourist, I felt terribly out of place, so I fled. At 5 a.m., Dave told me later, the Bollywood star Shahrukh Khan showed up. I was already asleep in my Ascot bubble.

In just one day, I'd spent 15,785 rupees (about $367), which meant Saturday would require some belt-tightening. Unfortunately, leaving my hotel took me again to Colaba Causeway, where this time the vendors had their way. I wound up buying two pairs of camel-leather sandals (850 rupees) and two boxes full of bangles (700 rupees) for my wife, Jean.

I also found “Ten Heritage Walks of Mumbai,” a new guide to the city's older neighborhoods (355 rupees at Search Word). The guide took me past the 1920s Y.W.C.A. International Guest House and the banyan-lined sidewalks around Oval Maidan, where Indians of all ages were playing cricket. But then I was hungry.

I knew exactly what I wanted. The night before, Aditya had been rhapsodizing about thalis, the vegetarian Indian meals, from Gujarat state, so I flagged down a black-and-yellow taxi and simply told the driver, “I want a good Gujarati thali.”

The Golden Star was low-ceilinged and packed. I found a seat next to a faux-Ionic column, and the feeding began: Waiter after waiter stopped by to fill my metal platter with curried chickpeas, spinach, spicy mashed tomatoes, a tart sambar soup, a variety of breads, tamarind chutney, mint chutney, a cucumber salad, a smear of chili paste, a pile of rice, a bowl of puréed Alfonso mango — any time I seemed to be making progress, another waiter would refill my plate.

“That's Indian hospitality,” the hefty man to my left said.

Cheap, too. With tip, the lunch cost 230 rupees. There was only one problem: I was so full I couldn't eat again all day.

In the spirit of frugality, I caught a 4 rupee commuter train to Mani Bhavan, a house where Gandhi once lived. Today it's a museum, with his room preserved nearly as he left it (i.e., nearly empty). Entrance was, unsurprisingly, free. As I walked back to the train, my phone buzzed with a text message: Dave inviting me to the red-light district with an Indian couple, Amit and Aparna.

Nothing illicit was planned. They were going to see mujra, a quasi-erotic dance (think belly dancing, not Scores). This mujra parlor was hidden down a back alley in a damp apartment building. In a linoleum-lined room, we settled on floor cushions as three overly made-up dancers in sequined saris gyrated before us, mimicking moves from Bollywood hits while musicians maniacally pounded drums and harmoniums. It was fabulous, weird, deeply unsexy (especially when I got up to dance) and fairly cheap: 1,150 rupees with a bottle of beer. (Dave and I split the bill.)

Saturday night ended early. I wanted plenty of rest if I was to teach the next day — in my new, perfectly tailored shirt, of course. But the leprosy project called in the morning: one of the students was sick, so class had been canceled.

I tried to assuage my despair with a hedonistic meal at Indigo, a Colaba restaurant whose brunch buffet would have shamed Trimalchio. But as I tucked into tamarind beef salad and sipped the first of many bellinis, I felt a little queasy. Yes, the room was cool, the tables populated by Mumbai's elite and the food delicious. But it felt too self-indulgent.

As I plunked down 2,000 rupees to cover the bill, I had an idea. I totted up what I'd spent so far: 2,541 rupees remained in my budget. When I got back to Manhattan, I vowed, that cash would go to the Bombay Leprosy Project. It wasn't much, but I knew that in Mumbai, it would go a long way.

Total: 21,500 rupees.

VISITOR INFORMATION

WHERE TO STAY

Ascot Hotel, 38 Garden Road; (91-22) 6638-5566; www.ascothotel.com; doubles from 4,000 rupees.

WHERE TO EAT AND DRINK

Busaba, 4 Mandlik Road; (91-22) 2204-3779.

Golden Star, 330 Raja Ram Mohan Roy Road; (91-22) 2363-1983.

Indigo, 4 Mandlik Road; (91-22) 6636-8999.

Modern Juice Centre, Arthur Bunder Road; (91-22) 2281-2457.

Privé, 41-44 Mon Repos, Minoo Desai Road; (91-22) -2202-8700.

Sea Lounge, Taj Mahal Palace and Tower, Apollo Bunder; (91-22) 6665-3366; www.tajhotels.com.

Trishna, Birla Mansion, Sai Baba Marg; (91-22) 2270-3213.

WHAT TO DO

Bombay Leprosy Project, 11 V. N. Purav Marg; (91-22) 2522-0608; www.bombayleprosy.org.

Mani Bhavan, 19 Laburnum Road; (91-22) 2380-5864; www.gandhi-manibhavan.org.

WHERE TO SHOP

Bombay Electric, 1 Reay House, Best Marg; (91-22) 2287-6276; www.bombayelectric.in.

Michele Boutique, 21 Shah House, Mandlik Road; (91-22) 2287-0116.

Search Word Book Shop, Metro House No. 7; 23-25 Saheed Bhagat Road, Colaba Causeway; (91-22) 2285-2521.

Denis Doyle for The New York Times
By DENNY LEE

A LIGHT patter bounced off the titanium fish scales of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao as a tour bus pulled up beside “Puppy,” Jeff Koons's 43-foot-tall topiary terrier made of freshly potted pansies. A stream of tourists fanned out across the crisp limestone plaza, tripping over each other as they rushed to capture the moment on camera. After the frisson of excitement dimmed, they made their way down a gently sloping stairway and into the belly of the museum, paying 10.50 euros to see the work of an artist that most had never heard of.

It was a ritual that repeated itself several times an hour, like a well-run multiplex. And if Anselm Kiefer, the controversial post-war German artist, was eclipsed by the metallic blob that held a retrospective of his work, consider how Bilbao, a rusty port city on the northern coast of Spain, stacked up to the very museum that put it on the cultural map.

“We don't know anything about Bilbao besides the Guggenheim,” said Luigi Fattore, 28, a financial analyst from Paris, who was taking pictures of his girlfriend under the puppy. As if to underscore the point, they showed up at the museum's doorstep with their suitcase in tow. “We've arrived half an hour ago,” he said, “and went straight to the Guggenheim. Aside from the museum, we don't have any plans.”

Such is the staying power of Frank O. Gehry's architectural showstopper, 10 years after it crash-landed on the public psyche like a new Hollywood starlet. The iridescent structure wasn't just a new building; it was a cultural extravaganza.

No less an authority than Philip Johnson deemed it “the greatest building of our time.” The swooping form began showing up everywhere, from car ads to MTV rap videos, like architectural bling. And in certain artistic and architectural social circles, a pilgrimage to Bilbao became de rigueur, with the question “Have you been to Bilbao?” a kind of cocktail party game that marked someone either as a culture vulture or a clueless rube.

“No one had heard of Bilbao or knew where it was,” said Terence Riley, director of the Miami Art Museum and a former architecture and design curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. “Nobody knew how to spell it.”

The Guggenheim changed that overnight. Microsoft Word, Mr. Riley noted, added “Bilbao” to its spell checker. And as word of the Guggenheim spread, tourists of all stripes began converging onto the small industrial city — the Pittsburgh of Spain — just to check it off their list.

“I've been down there four times,” Mr. Riley added proudly. “That's probably more than most.”

Even for those who couldn't spell “Bilbao,” let alone pronounce it (bill-BAH-o), the city became synonymous with the ensuing worldwide rush by urbanists to erect trophy buildings, in the hopes of turning second-tier cities into tourist magnets. The so-called Bilbao Effect was studied in universities throughout the world as a textbook example of how to repackage cities with “wow-factor” architecture. And as cities from Denver to Dubai followed in Bilbao's footsteps, Mr. Gehry and his fellow starchitects were elevated to the role of urban messiahs.

But what has the Bilbao Effect meant for Bilbao?

I first visited Bilbao in 1999, a lone, wide-eyed tourist who had read about the “Miracle in Bilbao” on the cover of The New York Times Magazine, in which the paper's architecture critic, Herbert Muschamp, likened the “voluptuous” museum to “the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe.” And on that cold and dark March afternoon, when the lush green folds of the region's coastal mountains were shrouded behind a gray veil, the Guggenheim indeed glinted like a blonde metallic bombshell.

After loading my 35-millimeter camera, I took pictures of the museum's sinuous curves, surreptitiously ran my fingers across the titanium shingles and marveled at the galleries' lack of right angles. Oh, there was art, too: Jenny Holzer's soaring L.E.D. columns, a collection of sketches from Albrecht Dürer to Robert Rauschenberg and — caged behind a chain-link fence in a parking lot — one of Richard Serra's “Torqued Ellipses” for a future exhibition.

But the thing that struck me most, more than the dazzling architecture or cool art, was the horrible smell. Here was this magnificent museum, the most celebrated piece of architecture in a generation, and yet the river beside it was as brown as sludge and as putrid as a sewer — a world-class museum swimming in third-world biohazard.

The Guggenheim, I later learned, was built on a former shipyard, and the Nervión River, which snakes through Bilbao to the Bay of Biscay, was the nexus of Spain's Industrial Revolution. Blessed with iron-rich mountains, railroads and an excellent port, Bilbao blossomed in the late 19th century with metalworks and shipbuilding. But a century of belching factories turned the mighty Nervión into a toxic cesspool, earning the city the unflattering nickname “El Botxo,” the Basque word for hole.

But the iron mines eventually gave out; shipbuilding moved to Asia. And when the Guggenheim opened its doors in October 1997, what remained was a Dickensian waterfront of rusting cargo rigs and hollow warehouses. Farther up the river, grease-coated factories croaked along its lifeless banks, like a cemetery for the Industrial Age.

The rest of the city hadn't fared much better. The boulevards radiating from the Guggenheim may have evoked grandeur with their neo-Baroque facades and monumentality, but they were caked in soot and sadly devoid of street life. Sure, there were other signs of design — the caterpillar-like entrances by Norman Foster for a new metro system, a sweeping footbridge by Santiago Calatrava — but they only made the city seem dingier, like a polished fork in a tray of dirty silverware.

But if Bilbao wasn't exactly ready for its tourist spotlight, the gray industrial air gave the city a raw authenticity and gritty undercurrent that was charmingly provincial. In the Casco Viejo quarter, on the other side of the river, the urine-soaked cobblestones and graffiti-covered walls (mostly in support of the Basque separatist group E.T.A.) may have needed a good scrub. But it felt like a real neighborhood, warts and all, that was proudly oblivious, bordering on rude, to tourists.

In the morning, stumpy grandmothers waited in line for fresh bread and Bayonne ham at antiquated shops. By noon, old men sat in dingy pintxos bars drinking txakoli, a semi-sparkling white wine. And when the weekend rolled around, the dark alleyways vibrated with roving bands of Basque youths stumbling between pubs and drinking kalimotxos, a local concoction made from cheap wine and cola. The futuristic Guggenheim seemed to be in another city, far removed from the grubby fish markets and well-tended flower boxes that gave old Bilbao its character.

That cultural schism, however, began to dissolve. In its first year, the Guggenheim was clocking about 100,000 visitors a month. And rather than drop off precipitously like a summer blockbuster, attendance rates have leveled off to “a cruising speed of around one million visitors a year,” said Juan Ignacio Vidarte, the Guggenheim's director, adding that the vast majority were from outside the Basque region, and more than half from other countries. By the end of 2006, some nine million visitors had paid homage to Gehry's miracle.

THE impact on this city of 354,000 was dramatic. Charmless business hotels and musty pensions were supplanted by trendy hotels like the Domine Bilbao and a Sheraton designed by the Mexican architect Ricardo Legorreta. The rusty shipyards near the Guggenheim were razed for a manicured greenbelt of playgrounds, bicycle paths and riverside cafes. A lime-green tram was strung along the river, linking the Guggenheim to Casco Viejo and beyond.

And all across the city, a who's who of architects added their marquee names to Bilbao's work-in-progress skyline: Álvaro Siza (university building), Cesar Pelli (40-story office tower), Santiago Calatrava (airport terminal), Zaha Hadid (master plan), Philippe Starck (wine warehouse conversion), Robert A. M. Stern (shopping mall) and Rafael Moneo (library), to name just a few. It's as if Bilbao went on a shopping spree, commissioning a trophy case of starchitects and Pritzker Architecture Prize winners.

A tangle of construction cranes today rises over the city's terra-cotta rooftops, but the changes are already apparent at the street level. Bilbao, a muscular town of steelworkers and engineers, is slowly becoming a more effete city of hotel clerks and art collectors.

The city's main artery, Gran Vía de Don Diego López de Haro, is no longer a soot-stained canyon of bank offices. In the tradition of the Champs-Élysées, the sidewalks were widened, curbside parking removed and stone buildings scrubbed. On a warm Friday last May, shoppers streamed out of countless Zara boutiques. Men in natty business suits sat on benches, smoking cigarettes and reading El País. In front of the opulent Hotel Carlton, a handsome couple was being married.

The beautification was echoed throughout the city. Traffic circles like Plazas Campuzano and Indauxtu had been transformed into piazza-like parks, with sculptural lampposts, ergonomic benches and ultramodern landscaping. In place of polluting cars, laughing children now use them as impromptu soccer fields.

Casco Viejo was almost unrecognizable. The graffiti had been erased. The stone facades sandblasted. And old butchers shared the sidewalk with H & M and Billabong.

At lunchtime, crowds converged on upscale pintxos bars like Sasibil, grazing on octopus and Iberian ham sandwiches, which were exhibited like jewelry under polished glass cases and halogen lights. After sundown, well-dressed couples strolled through the warren of alleyways and tunnels, now brightly illuminated by cheery shop windows and klieg-like streetlamps.

But the most striking metamorphosis wasn't cosmetic: the Nervión River no longer stank. With the sludge-spewing factories gone and sewage treatment plants installed, the river began to heal itself. It may not be as blue as the Danube (the color today is more like a rusty green), but within an hour of my arrival, I spotted a lone sculler in a red jersey, gliding by a pair of cormorants.

The cleaner water, however, hasn't necessarily brought more tourists upriver. Despite a host of tourist information centers, including a glass shed outside the Guggenheim staffed with professional guides and a rainbow of color brochures, Bilbao remains very much a one-attraction town.

On a cloudless Sunday morning, the Museo de Bellas Artes — with important works by El Greco, Francis Bacon and Eduardo Chillida — was nearly empty, despite a 2001 expansion and being just a quick stroll from the Guggenheim. Maybe that's why the museum closes at 2 p.m. on Sundays. (At least it was open. The city — restaurants, grocery stores, cafes — shuts down on Sundays; everything, that is, except the Guggenheim.)

The Maritime Museum, which traces the city's port and sailing history, was completely deserted, save for the bored-looking woman at the ticket counter. Even the Moyúa neighborhood next to the Guggenheim, which should have benefited from the Bilbao Effect most acutely, is far from tourist ready. There's one postcard store across the street and a couple of hip restaurants nearby, but this residential district is otherwise filled with featureless stucco apartments, five-and-dimes and plain bodegas. A clutch of art galleries have sprung up along Calle Juan Ajuriaguerra, but its proximity to the Guggenheim is merely coincidental.

“There's no art market in Bilboa,” said Javier Gimeno Martiñez-Sapiña, who owns the year-old photogallery20. “I don't think the Guggenheim has helped. It's still very hard for local artists to sell art here. They have to go to Madrid or Barcelona.”

No wonder many guidebooks still devote as many pages to the Guggenheim — reprinting floor plans, offering tips and expounding on the museum's design — as they do the rest of Bilbao. On paper at least, Bilbao seems to have it all: world-class museum, fine Basque cuisine, a rollicking night life and lots of shopping. But like the new bike paths that were rarely used during my visit, the city lacks the critical mass of attractions to take it from a provincial post-industrial town, to a global cosmopolitan city. And in the meantime, it is losing the shabby edge that gave the city its earlier appeal.

The concentration of first-rate architecture is astounding, even without Gehry's titanium masterpiece. But architecture alone does not a city make. Bilbao is all dressed-up, but hasn't figured where to go.

“Our local culture still hasn't integrated with the Guggenheim,” said Alfonso Martínez Cearra, the general manager of Bilbao Metropoli-30, a public-private partnership that is guiding the city's revitalization. “This is still an industrial city.”

The disconnect between Bilbao the brand, and Bilbao the city was on display one Saturday night, when the narrow streets of Casco Viejo were once again packed with young bar-hoppers. The smell of marijuana wafted from a crowd outside a bar on Calle de Somera. In the group was Ikel, a 22-year-old studying to be an engineer, like his father.

“I've never been to the Guggenheim,” Ikel said between puffs, as mechanical street cleaners starting scrubbing beer and urine from the cobblestones. “It's for tourists.”

VISITOR INFORMATION

GETTING THERE

Flights from New York to Bilbao, with stopovers in either Paris or Madrid, start at about $700 for travel next month on a number of airlines, including Iberia. From Bilbao airport, a taxi to the city center is about 25 euros ($35 at $1.40 to the euro).

Most attractions can be reached by foot, though the futuristic metro system is an attraction in itself. A BilbaoCard, for unlimited metro and tram rides, plus museum discounts, starts at 6 euros for a day and can be purchased on the city's tourism Web site (www.bilbao.net/bilbaoturismo).

WHERE TO STAY

Iturrienea Ostatua (Santa Maria Kalea 14; 34-944-16-15-00; www.iturrieneaostatua.com) offers Old World charms and exposed oak beams in the heart of Casco Viejo, with rates staring at 60 euros. Ask for a room with a balcony overlooking the cobblestone street.

Gran Hotel Domine Bilbao (Alameda de Mazarredo 61; 34-94-425-33-00; www.granhoteldominebilbao.com) is across the street from the Guggenheim and has 145 modern rooms starting at 140 euros a night. The rooftop terrace offers great views of the museum and surrounding hills.

Hesperia Bilbao (Campo Volantín 28; 34-94-405-11-00; www.hesperia-bilbao.es) is a trendy newcomer, next to Santiago Calatrava's footbridge over the Nervión River, and has 151 boutique-style rooms starting about 90 euros.

MUSEUMS

Guggenheim Bilbao (Abandoibarra 2, 34-94-435-90-80; www.guggenheim-bilbao.es). Open 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. every day except Monday. Admission is 10.50 euros.

Museo de Bellas Artes (Museo Plaza 2, 34-94-439-60-60 www.museobilbao.com). Open Tuesdays through Saturdays, from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m, Sundays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Closed Mondays. Admission 5.50 euros.

La Degustation, a Prague restaurant that only serves seven-course tasting menus, with no à la carte.

IT'S never been terribly hard to convince travelers of Prague's appeal, at least not when it comes to its architecture, music and history. Czech cooking, however, has long been viewed as the lone downside, as if Prague's delicious buffet of castles, concerts and cobblestones simply had to have a counterbalance. Locals and tourists alike have gotten by on high-end French, Italian and Japanese restaurants since the mid-90s. But recently, some restaurants here have begun taking traditional Czech cooking into new territory, treating hearty Bohemian fare with the same respect afforded classic haute cuisine.

Take La Degustation (Hastalska 18; 420-222-311-234; www.ladegustation.cz), a sleek, loungelike restaurant that opened in Prague's Old Town last November. As the name implies, there is no à la carte menu. Instead, there are just three seven-course tasting menus: one featuring Continental recipes, one composed of daily market specials and one designed around traditional Czech dishes.

When I called to reserve a table, I was told that the Czech menu, Bohème traditionnelle, came primarily from an obscure 1880 cookbook by Marie Svobodova, and was warned that I should probably cancel my after-dinner plans, as the meal itself would take around three hours. Indeed it was a full 180-minute performance of unusual (and unusually fantastic) Central European fare, starting with an over-easy “lost egg,” pan-fried with the meaty, aromatic bolete mushrooms called hriby in Czech, listed on the English menu as cèpes. After this, the procession of small dishes began with a light, clear bouillon of wild poultry, spring carrots and a rich, chicken-liver dumpling, continuing with a single ravioli, stuffed with diced beef lungs, poached in a buttery cream sauce and served with a marjoram-scented demi-glace. Beefy, sticky-sweet and sharply sour, it seemed to connect old Czech cooking with the contemporary global lust for offal.

Though the set menu comprises seven courses, there's an even greater number of amuse-bouches staggered throughout, including a savory anchovy-and-root-vegetable escabeche; a silver-dollar-size sandwich filled with garlicky beef tartare; and a shockingly white tomato meringue, topped with honey and aged balsamic vinegar. (This raises the question: just how amused can your bouche really be after eight or nine such creations?) Among all the hors d'oeuvres were more meats, mushrooms and herbs: cubes of tender smoked calf tongue with chanterelles, a slow-braised rack of lamb in sweet thyme sauce and a grilled pork belly with red cabbage (organic, no less). The dessert was a palacinka, the traditional Czech crepe, but fluffier than the standard version, made of quark, a type of cream cheese, and served with fresh strawberries and vanilla ice cream.

What was most startling was how light it all seemed, especially after three hours of constant consumption: instead of heavy starches and rich sauces, the dishes seemed to focus on building intense flavors, but presenting them in delicate portions. The staff was similarly refined, easily describing oddball Czech grape varietals while dropping off the many new dishes and refilling glasses. About the only thing that wasn't terribly light was the check, which came to about 5,000 korunas for two (or nearly $250 at 20.8 korunas to the dollar).

I spent half that amount at the restaurant U Petrske veze (Petrska 12; 420-222-329-856; www.upetrskeveze.cz), or At Peter's Tower, next to the gothic spire of that name. A set of small rooms with candles and stained glass, U Petrske veze comes off as slightly more rustic, offering such old-fashioned conveniences as an à la carte menu and the traditional, plopped-down local welcome of lard and sliced rye bread.

Beyond that, the ubiquitous Czech pork seemed to have been abandoned in favor of game. Our starters included a hearty venison pâté, topped with a sweet-and-sour, red-currant jam, filled with crunchy whole green peppercorns and bits of roasted almonds. Another starter, kulajda, a soup, brightened a rich chicken broth with loads of fresh dill, bulking it out with more cèpes, chunks of potatoes and a whole poached egg. The menu lacked the classic svickova na smetane, beef tenderloin in cream (more on this later), though in its place was a variation: zajic na smetane, or hare in cream. The sweet and tangy cream sauce was thick enough to build load-bearing walls out of, perfect for the four very fluffy knedliky, or dumplings. (Though this seemed a ridiculously small number: in the kingdom of goulash and thick sauces, four knedliky is considered the right amount for a toddler.) Falling easily from the bone, the chunks of tender dark meat contrasted the slight sourness of the sauce. Another main dish, quail medallions with pepper and rosemary, brought to mind M. F. K. Fisher's observation on the intensely fragrant nature of quail.

One of U Petrske veze's great strengths, the drinks menu, includes a hidden weak spot. Though the restaurant stocks wines from many of the best producers in Moravia (the second half of the Czech Republic, east of Bohemia and just across the border from Austria's Weinviertel), it also taps one of the country's best beers, Rohozec, a rich and malty pilsner with a pleasant, peachlike fruitiness and a minty, hoppy finish. After trying one as an aperitif, my girlfriend and I had little interest in drinking anything else. I did give in to a post-meal Bavorak, or Bavarian, a cocktail of tonic and peppery Fernet Stock, licensed from the Italian Fernet Branca and produced in Bohemia since 1927.

Despite the obvious appeal for travelers interested in traditional fare, U Petrske veze feels like a local neighborhood secret, filled with the Czech language and few English speakers.

The same cannot be said of the restaurant inside the Prague Hilton, CzecHouse (Pobrezni 1; 420-224-841-111), which started out proudly introducing local dishes to its international clientele. When I visited in August, though, it seemed to have scaled back its Czech offerings in favor of more international dishes. When asked for a recommendation of a traditional Czech starter, the waiter said, “That's the one question I was hoping you would not ask.” However, he offered to consult the kitchen for help, and returned with the suggestion of a ham roll, assuring me it was a typical Czech treat.

That might be true: I've seen hundreds of them over the years, everywhere from opera premieres to beer halls. However, this was the first I thought was very good: a slice of moist ham, rolled up with a thick filling of sour cream and chives and served with a small pond of sharp horseradish cut with sweet diced apples. This is also the first one I've paid anything close to 420 korunas for, a shockingly high price for a pub snack.

The other Czech dishes at CzecHouse are also commonly found in pubs, though the prices for these seem somewhat more justified. The svickova na smetane is surely the best in the city: true beef tenderloin (most restaurants here switched to cheaper rump roast decades ago), served in a properly sweet and tangy cream bath, topped with sour red currants and served with dumplings — again just four, though the waiters were happy to bring more, recognizing the inanity of such a meager portion. The Hilton's goulash might be the world's most exclusive: 540 korunas for an oniony, thick beef stew that lacked a bit of a real Czech goulash's mysteriously deep flavor, one which allegedly comes from using each day's leftovers to start the next batch, on and on for generations. At least CzecHouse's version is probably in accordance with European Union health codes, something that can't be said for the generations-old goulash, and the tourist-friendly setting does provide an easy way into a couple of Czech classics.

The opposite was true at Cerny Kohout (Vojtesska 9; 420-251-681-191; www.cernykohout.cz), the Black Rooster, at least at its earlier location: it earned a dedicated following way in the far reaches of the Prague suburbs. Then it moved to a more accessible location in New Town a couple of years back. The owner, Vojtech Petrik, works the stoves while his wife waits tables, creating a mom-and-pop feel that perfectly suits Mr. Petrik's at-home-in-Provence style of cooking. I once joked that Mr. Petrik's recipes were political in nature, attempting to abolish Germany forever by forging a direct connection between the Czech lands and France. On this visit he seemed to be veering toward Asia, however, with a fish soup that would not seem out of place in a Korean diner: a savory, clear broth filled with deeply satisfying chunks of salmon, shallots, carrots and trout.

A main course, duck “confit,” had a richly sweet-and-sour skin and was served with a buttery, dessertlike baked green apple. Though tender and moist, it was not a confit in the classic sense of the word, and despite the appearance of more cèpes, it tasted less like a French duck than one from Peking. (It was also almost inappropriately delicious, causing me to moan loudly more times than is proper in a public dining venue.) Another main course seemed like a gamekeeper's recipe: a tender venison tenderloin paired with a slice of seared goose liver, fragrant sautéed shallots and chanterelles, sweet roast chestnuts and a syrupy raspberry sauce brightened by marjoram and thyme.

There's a lovely homey nature to the dishes at Cerny Kohout. As she cleared away a few plates, Mrs. Petrikova noted that all of the cèpes they were using came from the three kilos she and her husband had gathered in the Czech forests the previous weekend; they hadn't been so lucky with chanterelles and had to buy those. Even our dessert palacinka seemed like something straight from Grandma's house, at least at first glance, but then we noticed the hot plums inside the crepe were counterbalanced by a sweet plum ice cream — a traditional flavor here in the land of slivovitz and plum pies, but served up in a new recipe.

In many ways, the modest Cerny Kohout is probably the best of the bunch: though it can't match the shoot-the-moon variety (and prices) at La Degustation, it, too, shows that Czech food is opening up to new things, though still strongly based on local traditions.

It will almost certainly never supplant Prague Castle, the Charles Bridge, Wenceslas Square and great pilsners as Prague's top draw. But at this point, Czech food is far from a downside.

I'D stopped to use the bathroom at the McDonald's three miles from Arcosanti, the famously never-finished experimental city in the Arizona desert. This is cactus country, an arid hour north of Phoenix, and the McDonald's and Arcosanti were the most prominent outposts of civilization for miles. I asked the woman at the register what she'd heard of the place.

“Very bad, very bad. The people there ...” she trailed off, searching for a word that might capture the terribleness. “I've heard it's a cult.”

Sold.

To emerge from the massive, improbable strip mall that is Phoenix, after all, is to suspect the species needs a new plan, and soon. Sprawl stretches interminably. Sustainable growth, as an issue, suddenly feels palpable; you're parched and not seeing a lot of water around. The radio admonishes bored teenagers against using meth.

To finally crunch over the three-mile dirt road near Cordes Junction and arrive at this dusty alternative — well, it's a breath of hot, desert air.

At first approach, the skyline — a pair of concrete apses, a network of modular concrete dwellings, a rusty old crane — fails to make much of an impact. But it swells with the dream behind it. The Italian architect Paolo Soleri, a former student of Frank Lloyd Wright, began construction of this ecologically harmonious community in 1970.

With its radical conservation techniques and a brilliantly scrunched-together layout, Arcosanti was intended to reinvent not just the city, but also man's relationship to the planet: picture a 60s vision of a Mars colony, but with a cutting-edge, eco-friendly design. Evaporative cooling pools release moisture into the air. In winter, heat from the foundry furnace is collected by a hood and sent through the apartments above.

And there are always apartments above, or a library below, or another set of rooms just beyond those Italian cypresses. Through a carefully managed density, the impact is minimal, and the idea of community is reimagined.

In 1976, Newsweek declared: “As urban architecture, Arcosanti is probably the most important experiment undertaken in our lifetime.” “Undertaken” being the key word — then and now. Completion has legendarily eluded Arcosanti. Built in stages and chronically underfinanced, the place exists in a permanent state of half-doneness.

What was once the future of intelligently designed communities has morphed into something less optimistic: a stalled revolution in urban planning or a moldering relic of impractical idealism, depending on whom you ask. Often enough it's referred to as Mr. Soleri's “desert utopia,” and as with all utopias, reality doesn't always match the blueprints.

And yet.

The place hums with purpose. An educated, diversely aged and surprisingly international collection of residents rises early each morning for on-site duties: silt casting, or foundry work, or a general tending of the odd, gray structures they call home.

Later, the focus turns to capoeira practice or evening strolls along the canyon ridge. A cozy, dormitory-in-summer feel suffuses the place — if you were to set the college on broil then take away the college part. Shared living spaces. Shared tasks. Even a shared music room.

Conceivably you could let the word “commune” slip over a delicious resident-prepared lunch of roasted yams and bell peppers. Bite your tongue.

“This isn't about divided labor, or shared space or living with your friends — although that all happens here,” a visiting seminar student told me when I was there last spring. “Everyone who comes is here to make arcology work.”

Yes, Mr. Soleri doesn't just imagine cities — he invents words, too. “Arcology,” the portmanteau of architecture and ecology, guides Arcosanti as well as other, generally unrealized, Soleri creations. The pinnacle of arcology, the Hyper-Building, exists only on paper: a kilometer-high tower that would house 100,000 residents plus all their commercial and cultural requirements.

There are not 100,000 people at Arcosanti. The plan was, and is, to draw 5,000; the population is under 100.

To visit Arcosanti now is to catch it at an odd moment. The principles put into practice there long ago — environmental sensitivity, anticonsumerism — have started making their way into general consciousness. As its founder predicted decades ago, the outside world is finally discovering its current course to be unsustainable. Interestingly, for vastly different reasons, Arcosanti finds itself discovering the same.

At a community meeting while I was there, Mr. Soleri, who lives near Phoenix but spends a night or two a week at Arcosanti, eased into an old couch and quietly asked how his creation was going to keep the lights on. While tourism and the sale of bronze and ceramic bells bring in some money, he said, another $50 million would come in especially handy. Residents batted around money-raising strategies that wouldn't sell out Arcosanti's core identity; few stuck.

“Of course, we're sitting on a billion-dollar view,” one woman said, glancing toward the canyon, with its dramatic basalt cliffs and picturesque scatterings of scrub brush. But the idea of selling off a chunk of the dream only drew laughs. Somebody mumbled something about “Disney Arcosanti” and soon conversation moved on.

This is not Disney, or the Plaza, or even Motel 6. Mr. Soleri has defined his creation as “the city in the image of man,” and it forces a certain question where visitors are concerned: Which man, exactly? Certainly not the type who needs to lock his doors, or have his bathroom trash can lined with something finer than a grocery bag. Wheelchair access is limited, and guests are encouraged to bring flashlights.

But the redefining of comfort becomes contagious. And short of, say, financing it for the next century, the best way to appreciate the Arcosanti experiment is to walk it: Here, the site of a future “energy apron” around the perimeter, wherein greenhouses trap heat and disperse it throughout the apartments in winter months; there, enormous concrete armatures reaching out to one day support a canopy for the music center. A moat runs around the stage, cooling it.

For some of the estimated 40,000 to 50,000 annual visitors who want to stay overnight, two options exist.

One is a row of small, austere guest rooms ($30 to $50 a night) lining the outer edge of the site. Far more inviting and central is the Sky Suite. At $100 a night, it offers a double and a single bedroom, a snug living room and a kitchenette with stunning views of the mesa. Just outside, a roof makes for a private patio with a breathtaking panorama.

Mr. Soleri continues to call Arcosanti his “lean urban laboratory.” And a well-disciplined optimism persists here, despite the occasional writing on the wall — or the occasional absence of a wall.

But aging visions of the future have a singular appeal, and at Arcosanti, it's possible to enjoy the hopefulness without betraying it. It is not cynicism to find a special beauty in what hasn't yet come to pass.

Precisely what I was going to tell the McDonald's cashier on my way back to Phoenix, but I was running late.

VISITOR INFORMATION

Arcosanti (928-632-6217, www.arcosanti.org) is 65 miles north of Phoenix. Take I-17 to Exit 262 (Cordes Junction). Small signs will direct you to a three-mile stretch of dirt road leading to the Visitor Center.

General tours are offered seven days a week, from 10 a.m. until 4 p.m.; suggested donation is $8. Specialty tours — architecture and planning, agriculture or bird-watching — can sometimes be arranged if requested in advance.

For overnight stays, reservations are recommended. One-week ($475) and four-week ($1,125) seminars and workshops are also available; contact the coordinator at (928) 632-6233.

WE were in a canoe tethered to a submerged tree, fishing for piranha in the dark waters of the Rio Negro, about 125 miles northwest of the Brazilian city of Manaus. It was late afternoon, and the sun was already beginning to set behind a fleecy thicket of clouds, tingeing them with hues of purple, pink and gold. Suddenly a dolphin surfaced less than 10 feet away, carved a graceful arc in the air and then disappeared into the water again.

That night, back at the Anavilhanas Jungle Lodge, my base for that foray into the world's largest tropical rain forest, dinner — which included onion soup with sweet potato chips, an Amazonian fish called dourado prepared in ginger sauce, beef tenderloin and coconut flan — gave no hint of our rugged surroundings. Nor did the air-conditioned cottage where I slept, with its elegant tropical wood paneling and modern tiled bathroom. The next morning, I sought refuge from the overpowering heat and humidity in the lodge's swimming pool, where I watched boats of all shapes and sizes putt-putting their way up and down the river.

Not too long ago, options for visitors to the Brazilian Amazon region were limited: you flew to Manaus, stayed at the Tropical Manaus Hotel on the outskirts of the city, and took day trips to the edge of the forest. But that, thankfully, is no longer the case. Responding to the international boom in ecological and adventure tourism, lodgings have sprung up all over the region in the past four or five years. Travelers with a yen for the exotic and a tolerance for the unpredictable can now book a stay in the jungle with an expectation of, if not luxury, then at least a reasonable degree of comfort. ( Still, don't be surprised when you see signs like these, posted in the rooms at the Tiwa Amazonas Ecoresort, just across the river from Manaus: “Warning: The simultaneous use of the shower and the air conditioner is forbidden!”)

There are easily a dozen of these new hotels — a type of lodging I couldn't have imagined when I started traveling in the Amazon 30 years ago, often sleeping in grimy hammocks in $3-a-night fleabags with dirt floors. The main concentration is on the Rio Negro, to the north and west of Manaus, where the tannic acid that darkens the water and gives the river its name inhibits mosquitoes from breeding, so visitors don't have to worry as much about malaria or dengue or other typical tropical maladies.

And there are more lodgings to come. The most ambitious is a 102-room complex being built just off the road to the town of Novo Airão by the Accor group of France, which is scheduled to open in 2010 and will be the first international luxury chain hotel actually in the jungle; the Hilton company has also announced plans to build a 196-room “eco-lodge resort” near Novo Airão .

For the moment, however, the Anavilhanas Jungle Lodge, which opened in February, is the newest and perhaps the most chic example of the lodge phenomenon. Operated by a couple from São Paulo, it is on a bluff above the Rio Negro, within sight of the Anavilhanas Ecological Station, a government nature reserve that encompasses the world's largest riverine archipelago, with more than 400 islands and hundreds of lakes and igapós, an indigenous word that means flood forest. Astonishingly rich in both animal and plant life, the reserve area, which has been designated a Unesco World Heritage site, is unspoiled and uninhabited.

No matter what their location, the lodges tend to follow a certain pattern when it comes to outings. In the morning, for instance, before the heat gets too stifling, a nature walk is, more often than not, de rigueur; I've seen all sorts of monkeys, macaws and toucans, not to mention sloths and anteaters, on such treks. Afternoon excursions to fish for piranha provide the kind of bragging rights that delighted my teenage son when I took him with me on an Amazon trip a few years ago.

After dinner, it's often back to the boat to hunt for the Amazonian caiman known as the jacaré. But instead of carrying guns or spears, guides are armed with powerful spotlights that freeze the reptiles in position and make it possible to remove young ones from the water so that guests can run their hands over their cool, ridged carapaces.

All can arrange an excursion for you to witness the “meeting of the waters,” the spot just southeast of Manaus where the Rio Negro's dark waters converge with those of the Amazon's other major tributary, the Solimões. I've stopped there at least a dozen times and never cease to be amazed at the way the two great rivers, markedly different in color and temperature, collide with such force and volume that they seem to be fighting each other.

But each lodge also tries to offer something its competitors do not. For instance, the Amazon Ecopark Jungle Lodge, 40 minutes from Manaus, is famous for its “Monkey Jungle Reserve.” Here, woolly monkeys, some confiscated from contraband dealers, others injured, are monitored at a rehabilitation center on the lodge grounds.

At the Anavilhanas Jungle Lodge, a group of more than a dozen botos, or gray dolphins, show up daily to be fed at nearby Novo Airão. A motorboat from the lodge takes guests to a floating restaurant alongside the main dock there, where a pet anaconda circulates among customers sipping chilled beers or soft drinks. As we stood on a raft attached to the restaurant, the dolphins cavorted, sticking their long snouts up from the water for pieces of fish tossed their way or seizing fish snacks from tourists intrepid enough to go into the water.

“If we'd let the botos, they would spend the entire day here, just eating,” said Marisa Grangeiro de Almeida, whose family operates the restaurant. “But the environmental agency and the university scientists have established fixed feeding hours.”

The Anavilhanas Jungle Lodge has its own strict rules when it comes to the guides it employs. Most lodges rely on freelancers who come in from Manaus. The Anavilhanas lodge hires only residents, which quickly pays off for the visitor. My guide, Célio Silva Nascimento, not only knew all the best fishing spots and how to navigate tricky river channels that come and go with the seasons, but also had detailed knowledge of local flora and fauna, no matter how obscure.

That is important because the sheer abundance of wildlife on view can be staggering, especially as one gets farther away from Manaus. I have never seen as many birds, for example, as I did two years ago at the Pousada Uacari, which is situated inside the Mamirauá nature reserve, 350 miles west of Manaus at the confluence of the Solimões and Japurá Rivers. Startled by the sound of our motorboat, huge flocks of snowy egrets, herons, cormorants, kites, tinamous, bitterns, ospreys and curassows took to the air as we navigated an igarapé, or narrow tributary.

Like several of the new lodges in the region, the Pousada Uacari is not on land, but sits on floating rafts at a bend in the river. Here guests can view wildlife in remarkable proximity. After dark, for instance, I could see caimans, some as large as eight feet, their eyes glowing like orange lanterns; some came startlingly close, banging against the dock and making querulous grunts, a symphony that continued through the night.

There is even a lodge that is literally up in the trees. The Ariaú Amazon Towers, opened in 1987 and recently expanded and modernized, is a two-hour boat ride northwest of Manaus. One of the oldest and by far the largest of the jungle lodges, it has been visited by celebrities like Bill Gates and the King and Queen of Spain. All 269 rooms are up in the jungle canopy, as much as 60 feet above the river, and connected to one another and the dining hall and common areas via aerial walkways.

Only one lodge that I know of can claim to be on the Amazon River itself. The Amazon Riverside Hotel makes the most of that distinction, offering excursions to see the sun rise from a century-old British-built navigation beacon in the middle of the river; it also has a nature trail that leads to a hilltop observation post with a commanding view of both the jungle and the river, and has arranged hammocks at the dock for guests keen on doing nothing but watching the river flow.

Just to remind guests where they are, the Amazon Riverside's reception area, built around a lagoon, displays the outsize skulls of an adult caiman and a toothy onça, the Brazilian cougar. Lined up near the dining area is a series of jars with pickled remains of some of the animals that have been found on or near the hotel grounds: poisonous snakes, scorpions and spiders, including a giant caranguejeira, or crab spider.

The owners of the Amazon Riverside are members of Manaus's flourishing Japanese community, which migrated to the region nearly a century ago to work on jute and pepper plantations. The Tsuji family caters to Japanese tourists, an effort that is reflected in an innovative menu that includes dishes such as sashimi of tambaqui, a prized Amazon game fish, and tempura made with okra and abóbora, the Brazilian equivalent of pumpkin.

The piranha fishing there was extraordinary. On a Sunday afternoon I ventured out in a small motorboat with a couple from the Tokyo area, Satoshi Tatsumi and Kazuko Ito, and in less than two hours, we caught nearly two dozen piranha, the largest of which we took back to the hotel and ate in a tasty stew. The piranha were so plentiful that Satoshi, a martial arts instructor who was wearing a cast on his arm because of an injury suffered in a competition, was able to catch them one-handed with nothing more than a simple bamboo pole and small pieces of beef as bait.

Many lodges organize visits to the homes of people who live nearby, at the river's edge in houses usually on stilts. Known in Portuguese either as caboclos, a term equivalent to hillbilly, or more respectfully as ribeirinhos, or river dwellers, they have limited incomes and little contact with the rest of Brazil. If you've never seen liquid latex being roasted on a spit over a fire to be made into rubber or if you don't know how manioc is turned into the golden flour that is one of the Amazonian staples, then take one of these tours.

But sometimes there is an element of exploitation that I find unsettling. The Amazon Riverside Hotel pays the river-dwelling families that its guests are taken to see, but some other lodges do not. When I was visiting another lodge, I was taken to the home of Iraci Cantuária dos Santos, the 67-year-old matriarch of a family of eight. I asked her whether she would make any money from our visit. She replied, “Only if you buy something,” and pointed to herbs and carved wooden animals for sale.

To the river dwellers all visitors seem impossibly well-off. But luxury, of course, is a relative concept. The reality is that it is tremendously difficult and expensive to bring in fuel, food and other supplies by boat, and no Amazon lodge I've visited would ever qualify as a five-star resort.

You are, after all, in the heart of the Amazon jungle, and your accommodations, no matter what they might lack in grandeur, would have been the envy of the area's first European explorers. They came looking for “El Dorado” and found a “green hell” instead. Fortunately, you, the 21st-century traveler, now have other options.

VISITOR INFORMATION

HOW TO GET THERE

Until mid-2006, getting to Manaus from the United States was a cumbersome process that often involved flying to Rio or São Paulo and then doubling back. But Brazil's TAM Airlines (www.tam.com.br) now operates a daily five-hour flight from Miami. A round trip in late September or October starts at $1,025; Copa Airlines (www.copaair.com) also has flights from $969, but those include a stop in Panama.

WHERE TO STAY

The packages mentioned are per person and include three meals a day. Except as noted, transportation from and back to Manaus is also covered.

The Anavilhanas Jungle Lodge (55-92-3622-8996; www.anavilhanaslodge.com) has been open for only about six months, and is perhaps the most elegant lodging in the Amazon. It has 16 air-conditioned, wood-paneled rooms decorated with regional art, and an open-air common area stocked with DVDs and books. The minimum two-night package is 950 reals total, or $475 at 2 reals to the dollar.

Unlike most other new lodges, the Amazon Riverside Hotel (55-92-3622-2789; www.amazonriversidehotel.com), which opened in 2002, is 40 minutes downstream from Manaus, not upstream. As a result, transportation to the hotel includes a visit to the site where the Rio Negro and the Solimões join to form the Amazon. There are 15 rustic apartments, with fans but no air-conditioning. The one-night package is 625 reals; the hotel also offers a day-use option for 250 reals.

The main lure of the Pousada Uacari (97-3343-4160; www.uakarilodge.com.br) is its privileged location, in the Mamirauá nature reserve about 90 minutes by speedboat from Tefé, which is on the banks of the Solimões River. There are 5 floating wood cabins, offering a total of 10 rustic apartments, with water for the showers and sinks coming directly from the river. The minimum three-night package of 1,000 reals a person does not include transportation from Manaus to Tefé.

In a competition for most unusual setting, the Ariaú Amazon Towers (55-92-2121-5000; www.ariau.tur.br) would win hands down. Just off the west bank of the Rio Negro, its 269 rooms, some with air-conditioning, and trees growing through them, are up at the level where monkeys live. One night costs 860 reals.

The Tiwa Amazonas Ecoresort (55-92-9995-7892; www.tiwa.com.br), which opened in 2003, has 52 air-conditioned rooms on stilts over a lagoon, plus a common area with a restaurant, bar, game room and a view of the Manaus skyline. One night is 595 reals.

Less than an hour from Manaus by boat, the Amazon Ecopark Jungle Lodge (55-21-2256-8083; www.amazonecopark.com.br) has 64 rooms and 3 bungalows, a beach on the Rio Negro and a pool. At 11 a.m. and 5 p.m., there are opportunities to feed the monkeys. One night is 720 reals.

WHEN TO GO

“In September, October and November, the water levels are quite low,” said Wedson Franklin Santos, a guide who works at the Amazon Riverside Hotel, “so you get to see all the exuberance of the wildlife,” which is forced out into the open. He added that during the middle of the year, when the flood plain is starting to recede, “the attraction is more the landscape itself and not the animals, which are mostly in hiding.”

STAYING HEALTHY

Most doctors recommend a program of antimalarial medicine, beginning several weeks before arrival and continuing during a trip. (I stopped taking such prophylactics because of the unpleasant side effects, and besides, there is now a drug-resistant strain of malaria.) But there are other measures one can adopt to reduce the risk of mosquito-borne diseases like malaria and dengue. Rather than going outdoors with arms exposed, for example, wear a long-sleeve shirt made from a lightweight fabric. And do your best to avoid being outside during the period local people call “the malaria hour,” about 5 to 7 p.m.

LARRY ROHTER, who has just completed eight and a half years as chief of the Rio de Janeiro bureau of The Times, is on leave, writing a book about Brazil.

Hot-air balloons float above the hills and rock formations of Cappadocia.

By GISELA WILLIAMS

“WATCH your head,” warned my guide, Edip, as we ducked into a stone cave in the otherworldly Turkish region of Cappadocia. The ceiling, which was covered with black soot, was just a foot above our heads. “The third and fourth floors were used as kitchens,” Edip said, as we entered another cave with two troughs carved into the volcanic stone floor. “They also made wine here. It was their only real luxury.”

Spread across the middle of Turkey like a lunar landscape, Cappadocia is home to a bizarre field of anthill-like cones, rock-hewn churches and underground cities where Christians once hid to avoid persecution. It is a spectacular sight and one that has captivated travelers for centuries.

An area that has traditionally attracted backpackers and archaeology-minded tourists, Cappadocia is now going upscale and drawing a younger more sophisticated crowd. As evidence, in April the area welcomed its first true designer hotel, the Serinn House, which has been built around and carved into the area's soft rock like the subterranean chapels created centuries earlier.

Situated near sandy yellow cliffs in the town of Urgup, the Serinn has five guest rooms, each designed by the Istanbul architect Rifat Ergor to blend the caves' natural contours with contemporary features. In the largest suite (the hotel's only noncave room) a black chandelier by the Dutch design firm Moooi hangs over the bed and a red lounge chair by Ron Arad. My smaller cave room was no less design-savvy, with a colorful rug from Habitat, a light-blue Vitra chair, plastic drawers designed by Werner Aisslinger and Wi-Fi.

I didn't notice until the second day that there weren't any flat-screen televisions, but it hardly mattered. There were far better things to do, like having breakfast on the tranquil terrace where, every morning, freshly baked focaccia was served with bowls of cherries, apricots, yogurt, cheeses, tomatoes, cured ham and muesli.

But I didn't let breakfast keep me from exploring the nearby sights. You need at least three days to wander through the dusty, ancient villages scattered across Cappadocia and to survey the fantastic panorama of towering stalagmites that stretches across 50 square miles of sun-baked hills and valleys.

On that first morning I went to Pigeon Valley near the village of Uchisar, so named for the thousands of pigeon houses carved into the rock. It was a surreal vision: an outrageously phallic landscape straight out of a Salvador Dalí painting.

The conical formations are the result of volcanic eruptions that took place millions of years ago. Eons of wind, rain and other forces of nature have eaten away at the volcanic rock creating tufa, a soft and malleable stone. Many of these cones, known as fairy chimneys, contain caves and labyrinths.

As early as the third century, those chimneys became a hiding place for early Christians who fled persecution from the Romans, and then later from raiding Muslims. They dug deep into the rock, carving out underground cities that went eight stories below ground, as well as thousands of cave chapels and monastery cells.

As recently as 20 years ago, most of the cave dwellings were empty — abandoned for more modern, concrete homes. In the last several years, though, affluent Turks and foreigners have started turning them into second homes and, in a few cases, boutique hotels like the Cappadocia Cave Suites and the recently opened Anatolia Houses.

“It was the soap opera ‘Asmali Konak' that started it all,” said Laura Prusoff, an American who lives in the tiny Cappadocian village of Ortahisar, referring to a Turkish television series in 2002 and 2003 that was set in Cappadocia. “It made Cappadocia famous among Turks and put it on the map.”

Cappadocia is also becoming known as a great place for hot-air ballooning. On any given morning, it's possible to spot as many as 20 balloons in the sky. One morning, I watched two enormous balloons land on the back of separate trailers as 26 exhilarated clients drank glasses of Cloud Nine — Champagne with cherry juice.

Kaili Kidner, a British expatriate who owns Kapadokya Balloons with her husband, Lars-Eric More, said that it was the combination of amazing landscapes, consistent temperatures and a long season that made Cappadocia an ideal ballooning destination. “There's also the right kind of people who come here,” she added, “upmarket cultural tourists and adventure seekers.”

While tourism is booming, at least one tradition is dying out: rug weaving. “I give it 10 more years,” said Hasan Kalci, whose family has been selling handmade Turkish carpets for three generations. Interestingly, it's not tourism that is destroying the craft, but social progress. “Now that it's mandatory that all girls go to school, there are very few women left willing to stay at home and weave a carpet.”

So, like other entrepreneurs in the region, Mr. Kalci has branched out into luxury tourism, opening the Anatolian Houses in the town of Goreme in May 2006. “The future of Cappadocia's economic success is in higher standards and sophisticated tourists,” Mr. Kalci said, and then confided: “I've heard that Shakira might be coming to Cappadocia after her concert in Istanbul.”

It ended up being a rumor; the Colombian singer went to the Turkish coast instead. But with a descendant of Tolstoy booked into his presidential suite, Mr. Kalci wasn't that disappointed.

VISITOR INFORMATION

Turkish Airlines flies from Kennedy Airport to Kayseri, with a plane change in Istanbul. Fares start at about $1,000 for travel in October. Car rentals are also available at the airport, though it's a good idea to go with a guide for at least one full day. One of the more reputable outfits, Argeus (90-384-341-4688; www.argeus.com.tr), offers a full-day tour of Cappadocia's moonscape at $145 per person for a group of two.

WHERE TO STAY

The recently opened Serinn House in Urgup (Esbelli Sokak 36; 90-384-341-6076; www.serinnhouse.com) is a chic five-room property that offers cave rooms, glass-walled showers and Wi-Fi. Rooms start $120 a night, including breakfast.

The luxurious Anatolian Houses (Gaferli Mah, Goreme; 90-384-271-2463; www.anatolianhouses.com), which opened last year, has 19 rooms outfitted with whirlpool tubs and Anatolian antiques, including several suites in the fairy chimneys. Rates start at $300 a night.

WHERE TO EAT

Alaturca in Goreme (90-384-271-2882; www.goremealaturca.com) serves big portions of traditional Anatolian cuisine.

Ziggy's in Urgup (Yunak Mahallesi Tevfik Fikret Caddesi 24; 90-384-341-7107) is a stylish restaurant that occupies three floors of an old stone building. A favorite of local expatriates, it serves fresh salads and pasta.

Somine in Urgup (Cumhuriyet Meydani 9; 90-384-341-8442; www.sominerestaurant.com), with a rooftop terrace, specializes in traditional Turkish cuisine.

WHERE TO SHOP

Kaya Seramik in Avanos (Eski Nevsehir Yolu Uzeri, 90-384-511-2374; www.gurayseramik.com.tr) sells colorful ceramic platters and traditional Iznik tiles.

Correction Appended

AS a former American Ambassador to Morocco and now an international business consultant focused primarily on Eastern European markets, Michael Ussery has spent his career perfecting the art of the European airport transfer. Over the past decade he has logged more than 110 flights between his Washington base and Europe and the Middle East.

“There was a lot of trial and error,” Mr. Ussery said. “But at some point in the late 1990s I found Vienna airport to work best for me, and I have been flying through it ever since.”

As travel expands throughout Europe and the Middle East, Americans are increasingly having to trade nonstop flights for journeys with pit stops along the way. Many are unprepared and unaware of the potential connection headaches awaiting them.

With major airports from London to Madrid adding terminals, and already sprawling hubs like Frankfurt and Charles de Gaulle in Paris operating at full capacity, airport waits of over an hour have become frustratingly commonplace. Add in limited runway capacity, delays on arriving flights and frequent ground crew strikes, and “connecting between flights is simply inconvenient, unreliable and stressful,” according to Henry Harteveldt, principal travel analyst with Forrester Research in San Francisco.

Yet as travelers like Mr. Ussery can attest, “transiting” through Europe need not be a nightmare. The trick is knowing which airports most efficiently link American gateways with the maximum number of onward destinations — offering the quickest journey times between gates, along with high-quality restaurants and lounges along the way.

“The key factor here really is speed,” said Edward Plaisted, chief executive of Skytrax, a London-based consultancy specializing in traveler-satisfaction surveys.

In its most recent annual survey of some seven million passengers from 93 countries, Skytrax named Munich Airport the best airport in Europe, and No. 4 in the world. Skytrax respondents specifically noted Munich’s “service, efficiency ... and the ease of the transit process” as key components of its appeal, the survey report said. “While Munich still cannot rival Frankfurt in terms of service from the U.S., for connecting it really is the best example in Europe today,” Mr. Plaisted said of the airport, which saw 10 million transit passengers last year, an increase of more than 7 percent from 2005.

Indeed, connection times in Munich average just 30 minutes, compared with 45 minutes in Frankfurt, 50 minutes in Amsterdam and up to two hours in both London Heathrow and Paris Charles de Gaulle, according to Munich airport officials. And with a new daily nonstop to Denver starting this summer on Lufthansa, there are now direct Munich flights from 13 United States cities, linked to 383 weekly onward flights to Eastern and Southern European destinations. Although time savings can vary by season, flying via Munich can prove prudent. For instance, a flight from Kennedy Airport to Naples, Italy — for which there are few nonstops — can require more than three hours of layover at Heathrow on British Airways, while flying Lufthansa via Munich requires a layover of less than an hour. The Lufthansa flight takes off later, but arrives in Naples some two hours ahead of British Airways.

Much of Munich’s success is attributed to its layout. It is a 15-year-old structure designed as a single terminal and purpose-built as a transit hub. It’s a contrast to most of its regional counterparts — relics of mid-20th-century aviation architecture with terminals added as needed, often far from the original center.

But Munich is not the only central European airport that makes transiting relatively easy to bear. With layovers even at the most efficient European airports occasionally stretching beyond a few hours, easy access to a city center is a key lure for many frequent travelers. George Antoniadis, chief executive of Alpha Flying, an airplane leasing company based in Manchester, N.H., says the 15-minute train trip between downtown Zurich and its main airport is part of the reason he flies only via Zurich on his twice-monthly journeys between Boston and Athens. “It’s fully integrated into the urban life of the city, so you can easily jump out to catch some air and then quickly get back to your next flight,” he said. Zurich was ranked as the No. 2 airport in Europe by Skytrax.

When choosing to stay in the airport, Mr. Antoniadis says his transfer times at Zurich average a mere 15 minutes, thanks to its small size and essentially single-terminal layout. It’s this kind of ease that has made him a Zurich — and Swiss International Air Lines — loyalist, despite far greater numbers of Boston flights on Lufthansa, British Airways or Air France.

Mr. Ussery feels much the same about Vienna Airport and Austrian Airlines, as does Douglas Combs, a Washington-based private equities investor who travels 200 days a year, often to Eastern and Central Europe. “If I am not going to Paris or London, I am flying via Vienna,” Mr. Combs said. “There’s free Wi-Fi, the city center is just 20 minutes away, and I am usually between terminals in under five minutes.”

While Zurich and Vienna continue to dominate routes connecting to Eastern and Southern Europe, Munich is expanding on its flights to India and the Middle East, including new summer flights to both Riyadh and Jeddah in Saudi Arabia. The moves come as both regions (the Persian Gulf most dramatically) are inaugurating nonstop flights to the United States and building airports aimed at transcontinental transit passengers.

For the moment, Dubai “remains the best airport in the Middle East out of what’s available,” said Mr. Plaisted of Skytrax. The airport’s success is almost single-handedly due to Emirates, Dubai’s national carrier, which not only flies some of the most luxurious cabins in the sky — with dine-on-demand “room service” and in-suite minibars in first class — but offers three daily flights to New York efficiently linked to extensive onward connections throughout India, Asia and Australia.

Emirates’ separate morning flights to Sydney and Melbourne, for instance, depart just two hours after their first New York arrival, while Emirate’s Delhi, Bombay and Bangalore connections are also under two hours. With Delta’s new nonstop from Atlanta operational and Emirates introducing a nonstop Houston flight in December, Dubai International Airport is now a viable transit option for Southeastern and Midwestern fliers, as well.

Still, with Dubai Airport, now sprawling and struggling to cope with some 29 million annual passengers, experienced travelers are beginning to look elsewhere for stress-free Gulf transit points. “While Dubai certainly offers connectivity to almost every place in the world, the airport is just too big, too busy and lacks things to do,” said Phil McGrane, director of Dubai-based 3P Events, which produces corporate events, who regularly flies between regional capitals and the United States and Britain. “I prefer Abu Dhabi, which is small, compact and easy to navigate. The only thing lacking are good coffee stations.”

Mr. Plaisted of Skytrax confirms that the Persian Gulf will see the next great battle of the airport hubs, as both Doha and Dubai complete entirely new airports and Abu Dhabi spends billions of dollars improving its own.

In Asia, Shanghai and Beijing are also spending billions on new or improved airports — though sluggish Chinese bureaucracy and inconsistent visa policies will make it difficult for them to compete with regional hubs like Hong Kong or Singapore for United States-based passengers. And Mr. Plaisted says Warsaw, Budapest and especially Prague airports offer acceptable levels of ease and efficiency for connections to the rest of Eastern Europe. “Still,” he added, “service can vary greatly here depending on the specific airline.”

Correction: September 16, 2007

The Heads Up column and a picture caption on Sept. 9 about making connections on international flights incorrectly described the Munich Airport. It consists of two terminals, not one ­ the one built 15 years ago and another one added in 2003.

By GREGORY DICUM

THE wine bar is a simple idea, yet it can be fraught. A wall of unfamiliar labels, obscure descriptions and extravagantly wine-schooled patrons can evoke a nagging vertigo.

But in San Francisco, a city known for both its casual culture and obsession with quality food and drink, a visit to a wine bar can be an unpretentious pleasure. The city has long had wine bars — the London Wine Bar, downtown, opened in 1974 and is said to have been the first in the United States. Now, a wave of new wine bars has been opening, often in unexpected neighborhoods.

I met with Alder Yarrow, the obsessive and opinionated writer behind vinography.com, a blog that exhaustively chronicles San Francisco's wine bars. We sat at the long zinc bar at Nectar (3330 Steiner Street; 415-345-1377; www.nectarwinelounge.com), a wine bar in the Marina District. The place was just starting to fill up, and summer evening light flooded the tall, narrow space.

After I ordered a taste of 2005 Alois Lageder pinot grigio ($4) — was that a smirk I caught over my choice? — Mr. Yarrow got down to business. “May I see that?” he asked, and I handed him my copy of Zagat San Francisco.

He turned to the list of 45 wine bars in the back and began editing: “Not a wine bar ... not a wine bar ... wine bar ... wine bar ... why isn't the Bubble Lounge on this list? Champagne is wine too!”

Our server offered us a number of tastes before I settled on a glass of red, a 2004 Le Clos du Caillou ($12), and Mr. Yarrow explained his system. “A wine bar has to serve wine by the bottle,” he began, “and by the glass and the taste. It can't be a regular bar that also has wine. It can be a restaurant, but there has to be a separate seating area for wine drinking only. And it has to have more than a few wines — at least five — in a changing list. And it can't be a retailer with a small tasting area in the corner.”

It is a testament to the vibrant scene in San Francisco that even as he was ruthlessly crossing out those that did not meet his criteria, Mr. Yarrow effortlessly added eight wine bars to the list in my 2007 Zagat.

I was glad to have Mr. Yarrow on hand, but my own predilections are more pedestrian: I like drinking good wine in a convivial atmosphere. I love it, actually, yet I would be hard pressed to pontificate at length about terroir, vintage or varietal.

A retail element is a feature of many of San Francisco's wine bars. California liquor laws are famously reasonable, and many wine bars offer carryout bottles. It's also perfectly acceptable to drink half a bottle, then stick the cork in and walk out with the rest. Indeed, you can walk to a nearby restaurant, most of which have friendly corkage policies. (Still, there is an etiquette to it: don't bring in cheap wine, or wine on the restaurant's list, and if you bring an exceptional bottle, it's polite to offer the sommelier a taste.)

The Ferry Plaza Wine Merchant (One Ferry Building, Shop 23; 415-391-9400; www.fpwm.com) is two-thirds wine shop (any bottle from the shop can be enjoyed in the wine bar for a $6 corkage fee). The Wine Merchant is in the Ferry Building, that mecca of all things local and organic. Shoppers bustle past in a light-filled interior space, on their way to pick up local goat cheeses and rare olive oils.

I met some friends, easily lured away from nearby offices, and prevailed upon them to start with a pinot gris/grigio flight (three two-ounce glasses for $10). The light grapiness went well with our eclectic lunch of cheese, salami, tamales and samosas foraged from the teeming Tuesday farmers' market at the Ferry Building.

Our server was patient and helpful, and pushed my wine education forward with a glass of mystery white. It was sweet, almost meady, and turned out to be a New Zealand chenin blanc from Milton ($25). We finished with a bottle of the Wine Merchant's own California chardonnay ($14) and bought a bottle of the Milton ($19) to take with us.

Hôtel Biron (45 Rose Street; 415-703-0403; www.hotelbiron.com) is tucked on a back alley near a cluster of restaurants on Market Street. One would be forgiven for thinking it a bar bar upon entering. The walls of the small, moody space are dark-painted brick, hung with art of the energetic Mission School. Alt rock plays loudly, and low seats cluster in nooks around tiny tables crowded with big wine glasses.

I visited with a large and unruly crew that included both wine enthusiasts and rank amateurs. The bar does not offer tastes, but the owner, Chris Fuqua, was patient and generous with our high-maintenance group. From his station in the back, he eventually splashed out nearly 20 small samples before we ordered our first bottle — a 2004 Agricola Cueso nero d'Avola from Sicily ($27) that was delightfully tart and fruity. We skipped the selection of excellent cheeses, fruits and nuts, although we probably shouldn't have.

The surest sign that wine bars in San Francisco are branching in new directions is last year's opening of Yield (2490 Third Street; 415-401-8984; www.yieldsf.com), in Dogpatch. This previously decrepit postindustrial neighborhood at the edge of the bay now has not just a wine bar, but one specializing in organic and biodynamic wines.

Yield is jointly owned by Chris Tavelli, formerly the sommelier at Millennium, a highly regarded vegan restaurant. (It shows in Yield's compact and sublimely executed menu: at $9, the olive cashew mushroom flatbread was worth the trip all on its own). The airy space of tastefully rough materials draws the eclectic crowd of a sophisticated neighborhood bar.

With Johnny Cash melding into free jazz and downtempo, I finally worked past my pinot grigio problem. The one I tasted at Yield, McFadden 2005 from Mendocino ($3 for two ounces), was peary and full enough, but I was set straight by a glass of Australian 2006 Yalumba viognier ($8). Or was it the cool, almost minty 2006 Château de Lascaux rosé from Languedoc ($9)? It might even have been the 2003 Domaine de Tavernel Passerel ($8).

At any rate, nobody smirked. And if they did, I didn't notice — or care.

FOR the last few years, Queen Street West has been the epicenter of Toronto cool — with its trendy restaurants, night-crawling club kids and boutique clothing shops featuring the work of local designers. But now the action seems to be shifting a few blocks over, to a part of the street nicknamed — accurately but awkwardly — West Queen Street West.

This still-evolving neighborhood starts roughly at the intersection of Queen Street West and Bathurst, and is marked by the presence of St. Christopher House (588 Queen Street West), a former bank turned community center for the city's newly arrived immigrants and working poor, now an adult drop-in center and arts-and-crafts center.

Indeed, this strip of Queen Street West still has a slightly seedy side, from the run-down diners selling all-day breakfasts to the somewhat startling presence of the live go-go dancer in the storefront window of Misbehav'n (No. 650), an “adult” lingerie and fetish store that seems to have a devoted clientele.

But more representative of the neighborhood's new prominence are the many restaurants, cafes and art galleries that make this a lively spot to spend a weekend afternoon.

From Czehoski (No. 678; 416-366-6787), a spare but elegant restaurant set in what was once a Polish butcher shop of the same name, to Little Tibet (No. 712; 416-306-1896), a tiny spot that specializes in momos — handmade dumplings with fillings ranging from beef (10.50 Canadian dollars, about 9.95 U.S. dollars, at 97 cents to the Canadian dollar ) to spinach and cheese (10.95 Canadian dollars) — West Queen Street West offers strollers a global tasting menu.

Among the more inviting spots on the street is Bar One (No. 924; 416-535-1655), a friendly Italian cafe where a steady stream of locals comes in for Saturday brunch to chat with the laid-back staff about last night's date or tonight's club outing.

If it's just a restorative snack you're after, delicious lemon tarts (3.05 Canadian dollars) from Clafouti Patisserie et Café (No. 915; 416-603-1935) might do the trick. Or perhaps head to Red Tea Box (No. 696; 416-203-8882) for its Asian spin on afternoon tea. The “tea bento” features several offerings, including the yuzu sencha (25 Canadian dollars), which includes a lime pistachio cake, chocolate candied yuzu tart and “citrus-blue ginger cured salmon with avocado and kumquat dressing,” along with the requisite pot of tea.

But it isn't all food and drink on West Queen Street West.

Anchored by the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (Mocca) (No. 952; 416-395-0067; www.mocca.toronto.on.ca), which moved to this part of town in 2005, the neighborhood has become an increasingly popular spot for local gallery owners. Among the notable spaces: Angell Gallery (No. 890; 416-530-0444); Galerie Lausberg (No. 880; 416-516-4440); the Propeller Center for the Visual Arts (No. 984; 416-504-7142); and the *new* gallery (No. 906; 416-588-1200), opposite a former candy factory now turned into loft apartments.

Visitors looking for some interesting pieces to liven up their living rooms back home can find antique teak dining tables and daybeds from Java and gorgeous curtains from India at Rumah (No. 668; 416-703-4594).

Though locals will tell you that West Queen Street West extends all the way down to Gladstone Street, where the oh-so-hip Gladstone Hotel opened in late 2006, walking any farther than the intersection of Ossington and Queen Street West is an exercise in diminishing returns — with appliance stores more numerous than trendy cafes.

This part of this street, it seems, is still waiting for its own renaissance. Maybe they'll call it Western West Queen Street West.

Andreas Solaro/Agence France-Presse — Getty images

A 2004 Notte Bianca event at the Colosseum in Rome.

WHEN Paris held its first Nuit Blanche — a frenetic all-night, multivenue cultural bash — in 2002, few could have imagined that five years later White Night fever would be sweeping Europe’s capitals, and spreading to other cities.

From Rome, which will hold its fifth White Night on Sept. 8, to Madrid (Sept. 22), Toronto (Sept. 29), Brussels (also Sept. 29), Paris and La Valletta, Malta (Oct. 6) and dozens of other cities, collective insomnia is in, at least for one night a year.

Between opera recitals, jazz jam sessions, contemporary-art shows, circus acts, theatrical declamations and postmodern installations, the offerings are endless.

In Europe, the initiative has been so successful that several cities have formed a consortium, White Nights Europe, to time their all-night parties on successive weekends. In a perfect, newly unified European world, partygoers would migrate from one capital to the other, dancing the night away.

“That was the idea of banding together, to boost tourism,” said Giovanna Marinelli, who heads the municipal department in Rome that is responsible for cultural policies. The capital alliance — which was formed last year — has also allowed organizers to exchange organizational tips as well as promote the other White Night events.

Technically, a White Nights Europe Charter binds these capitals (Paris, Rome, Riga, Brussels, Madrid and, starting this year, Bucharest) to respect certain tenets, including that events will be free and will be organized throughout a city, not just in its center. But a lot depends on cash flow and local ambitions.

“We all try to respect the rules, but each country does it in its own way,” said Esther Beck, the main coordinator of the Nuit Blanche in Brussels. “In Rome and Paris, the budgets are bigger so they tend to have more spectacular events.”

The European White Nights cities are also supposed to share a common artistic project, which this year is the creation of a “lounge” area in the heart of each city. In Rome, organizers will recreate an Italian garden in the Piazza Capranica, near the Pantheon, that will adhere to a Renaissance model.

The lounge is meant to be an oasis of calm amid the turmoil that is sure to sweep Rome’s center: past editions of the White Night have brought as many as two million people into the streets, according to organizers. “It will be a decompression area where people can relax,” said Ms. Marinelli of the outdoor Roman lounge.

Some respite may also be found in the city’s museums and art galleries, many of which remain open around the clock.

For its lounge area, Madrid will set up a patio in the Conde Duque Cultural Center, one of the event’s main sites. It will be a truly pan-European project: The space will be designed by a group of young Madrilenian architects called Basurama, working with recycled materials (basura means rubbish in Spanish); a Dutch group will be on hand to customize second-hand clothes; a British collective will project short films by European filmmakers; and the music — electronic mostly — will be performed by various European musicians.

Each city also has its own theme, which “responds to the cultural vocation and history of the city,” Ms. Marinelli said. In Rome, the chosen theme is Italy’s nascent multicultural society, with more than 1,000 artists from 29 countries participating.

Brussels settled on two themes: a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome, which founded the European Union (as the European Economic Community), and the intriguing-sounding “Seven Capital Sins.”

“It’s a play on words,” said Ms. Beck, who explained that artists were asked to create works of art that revealed “the sins of the city — like pollution, noise, aggressiveness, violence.”

Despite the sobering theme, it should not be gloomy, with all-night dancing in unusual spots like a train station, the Gare du Congrès.

Brussels was one of the first cities to follow Paris’s lead, holding its first White Night in 2003. Past editions have been very successful “as long as there’s no rain,” Ms. Beck said.

Details about the Parisian Nuit Blanche are still scarce. What little emerges on the Paris event’s Web site (www.nuitblanche.paris.fr) is that the axis of the events will follow the course of the No. 14 Métro line, from the Batignolles neighborhood in the northwest part of the city through the city center to Les Olympiades in the southeast.

In Toronto, the second annual Nuit Blanche (www.scotiabanknuitblanche.ca), like the first, will highlight contemporary art, with three curators and 195 projects scheduled to light up the night on Sept. 29. “We wanted to provide an opportunity for the arts community to show what it’s up to and what artists are creating,” said Marilyn Nickel, a spokeswoman for the city.

Toronto joined the White Night fray after a visit from Paris city officials who ended up assisting with logistics and organization.

“They were very helpful when it came to things like audience response or security,” Ms. Nickel said. “They had expertise regarding things that work and things that don’t work, they brought all that to the table. It’s a massive undertaking, working with so many partners to bring it all together, but when it all happens it’s magical.”

As the festivals have multiplied, in many cases so have the offerings in each city. In Rome, the first White Night festival in 2003 presented 100 events. This year, there are 400.

In Brussels (www.nuitblanche07.be), on the other hand, organizers have taken the opposite tack, halving the events sponsored last year to a neat 100.

“There were too many to choose from last year,” said Ms. Beck in a telephone interview. “People missed out on a lot. It’s impossible to do everything.”

Rome (www.lanottebianca.it) is trying to capitalize on the all-night party’s potential tourism draw by planning a full program of events for the weekend. These include a concert by the Italian pop icon Lucio Dalla at the Villa Borghese and a reading from “The Aeneid” — in Italian — on the Piazza del Campidoglio (City Hall) on Friday evening, Sept. 7, as a sort of curtain raiser.

“It’s another way to promote tourism that worked very well when we first tried it last year,” Ms. Marinelli said. Spreading the events over two days “was also a good way of decongesting” the city.

Statistics on people who travel specifically for the White Nights are not available. But recent turnouts suggest that the formula works. That’s why in Italy, at least, dozens of Italian cities, including Genoa, Naples, Milan and many smaller tourist hubs like Verbania and Viterbo have begun their own all-night festivals.

“The White Night is more than the sum of several concerts or plays or performances,” said Francesco Moltoni, the city official responsible for event planning in Viterbo. “It’s the best way to get people to rediscover their city.”

NOTHING but sagebrush for 130 miles,” said the construction worker in the orange vest who was temporarily blocking U.S. Highway 20 in eastern Oregon.

As my Volvo idled in the midday heat, I looked past her at the landscape — at the dry, slowly rising hills matted with blue-green-purple tufts of hip-high scrub — then down at my map, and was impressed with her precision: For almost exactly 130 miles to the east, south and west, there was indeed nothing but sagebrush. This really was the desert.

I shut off the engine and crossed my fingers, hoping the car and I would survive.

I almost hadn’t made it this far. Back in Idaho, in 95-degree heat, the car had developed a troubling tendency to seize up with vapor locks, its liquid fuel turning gaseous and unusable, leaving me sweating and frantic at the roadside. I had to wait out one hot afternoon in a bowling alley in Arco, Idaho, near Craters of the Moon National Monument, and another watching “Live Free or Die Hard” in Caldwell, almost in sight of the Oregon border. I got so worked up I started speaking to the car, and even named it — Vivian — as if I could woo it into action.

Having driven roughly 1,000 miles a week for 11 weeks, I should have known better. Like an elderly St. Bernard, this 1989 Volvo 240DL station wagon, bought on Craigslist for $1,600 last May, moved only when — and if — it wanted to.

Still, she had brought me a long way. From New York, I’d driven south, across the increasingly Latino Carolinas, through the gold-rush hills of Georgia and into barbecue-mad and football-frenzied Alabama. Then I’d turned north, stopping in Kentucky bourbon country and living the communal life in rural Wisconsin, then zipping west across Iowa to the Black Hills and Indian reservations of South Dakota.

A sharp left had brought me back down through the great plains to the Vietnamese enclave of Oklahoma City and the weird (and wine-loving) people in Texas Hill Country. From the wild Mexico-New Mexico border, I turned north again, wending my way through the Rockies to the wilderness on the border of Wyoming and Montana.

Now, at last, having visited 26 states and nursed my car through thousands of dollars’ worth of repairs, I was in the home stretch, headed to the final stop, Seattle.

Many things surprised me on this trip, but the fact that I could eat cheap, great food on the road did not. I piled mountains of barbecue into my maw, chowed down on burgers of all sizes and devoured anything with blackberries, and still I spent only $20.98 a day on average. Sure, I could’ve spent even less, but who wants to subsist on Mountain Dew and microwave burritos?

Likewise, sleeping comfortably was rarely a financial burden. Thanks to Couchsurfing.com (where people list free places to stay, in return for the promise that you’ll eventually reciprocate), my camping gear, the occasional friend’s friend’s sister and, yes, the kindness of strangers, I didn’t have to stay in boring chain motels (or scary fleabags) very often, and averaged $31.21 a night for lodging.

This last installment of my journey would take in the deserts of Oregon, a place I was drawn to not only by their reputed beauty and remoteness, but by their place in American road-trip history. This was, in a way, where the fabled tradition began.

In 1903, the automobile was a novelty, expensive and unreliable. With no gas stations and few paved roads outside of major cities, horses and railroads offered more reliable transport than a creaky chassis powered by a breakdown-prone internal combustion engine.

Which is probably why Horatio Nelson Jackson, a 31-year-old doctor, bet friends at the University Club of San Francisco that he could drive a car from coast to coast. They scoffed. A few days later, Jackson was at the helm of a $3,000, two-cylinder Winton automobile, accompanied by Sewall K. Crocker, a mechanic and chauffeur, heading east.

To skirt the Rocky Mountains and the deserts of Nevada, they first drove north. But up in Oregon, they hit the sagebrush, and the Winton suffered. They lost all their gasoline because of a leak, had to drag the car through streambeds and once wound up being towed by a horse.

Still, somehow, they made it from Lakeview, along the southern Oregon border, through the desert to Burns and finally to Ontario, on the Idaho border. From there, despite having almost every part of the car fail at one point or another, they shot straight east to New York on what would eventually, more or less, become Interstate 80, winning the $50 bet and immortality. (The journey was chronicled in the Ken Burns documentary “Horatio’s Drive,” and its accompanying book, written by Mr. Burns and Dayton Duncan.)

If they, driving a 1903 Winton, could cross the desert, so could Vivian and I. And, as the day began to cool in Caldwell, I steered west in hope of tracing Jackson’s route in reverse.

In Oregon, my first stop was Ontario, where Jackson and Crocker had picked up tires and other supplies from the short-line railroad depot. The current depot, built three years later, is a lovely Queen Anne-style building that was in excellent repair when I arrived. (It’s on the National Register of Historic Places.) After snapping a few photos, I moved on to Ontario’s main attraction that weekend, the Malheur County Fair (admission $5).

Immediately, I noticed something odd. Though this county fair had everything you’d expect — a Ferris wheel, a country-music band, preserved-fruit competitions and livestock displays (“Lot of good steers here,” said one observer) — I spotted little details that surprised me, like the Asian-inspired “Happy Bowls” sold by the Idaho-Oregon Buddhist Temple Sunday School Women’s Association.

And although the teenagers roaming in packs dressed like American high-schoolers everywhere (i.e., head-to-toe Abercrombie & Fitch), I was struck that they came from all sorts of ethnic backgrounds — black, white, Asian, Latino, Indian. Back in New York City, this would have been routine, but for three months I’d been passing through towns and cities still subtly divided by race, and I’d almost forgotten there were places where different peoples not only coexisted but became friends.

Even 130 miles west, in the crossroads town of Burns, Ore., where I arrived just before midnight, I saw signs of cosmopolitanism: a bookstore-espresso bar, a Thai restaurant seamlessly integrated into the aging Elkhorn Club, a thriving 1930s-era movie theater. (Sadly, the budget hotel options were less urbane: I spent a night in a $60-a-night Days Inn, the next amid the garish 1970s décor of the City Center Motel, $45.)

Still, it didn’t seem a bad place to spend a couple of days, I thought. Horatio Nelson Jackson must have had it rougher. Back in 1903, the town was a mere 14 years old, and was just about as far as a town could be from a railroad station. Little wonder, then, that the arrival of Jackson’s Winton was a newsworthy event.

“A real live automobile caused considerable stir on our streets last Monday afternoon,” read the report in The Burns Times-Herald, which I dug out of the paper’s archives with the help of Randy Parks, a sports reporter. “This was the first automobile to visit Harney County and many old men had never seen one.”

In the Western History Room of the public library (80 West D Street, 541-573-6670, www.harneycountylibrary.org), I found more evidence of Jackson’s sojourn in Burns. A file there contained a number of other regional newspaper reports — “the machine broke down before it got out of town,” The Lake County Examiner reported — and, even better, a grainy photo of the Winton.

I also discovered that just two years later, in 1905, another pair of automobile drivers passed through Burns, on a race from New York to Portland, Ore., and declared that “Harney County has the best roads we have found in over 1,000 miles.” From rough desert to smooth tracks in just 24 months; the automotive century had truly begun, right there in Burns.

Today, the roads are still great, leading smoothly out into sagebrush country in all directions, and after my historical research and a $14.95 rib-eye lunch at Ye Olde Castle (186 West Monroe Street, 541-573-6601), I fired up Vivian and followed them south.

The desert, as the band America should have sung, is an ocean with its life underground, and a perfect disguise above, and as I cruised across the smooth asphalt strips, I got a sense of the fertile ecosystem and geology lurking amid the sagebrush. Low mountain ridges sprang up from nowhere, as if pulled from a bedsheet of dry earth, and from their tops, I could gaze down on low-altitude zones of green, damp marshland. Amid the silence of the desert, flocks of waterfowl and shorebirds — wigeons, dunlins, sandpipers — would flap their wings with a squawk and take off from shallow ponds.

I drove and drove, marveling at the feat of Jackson and Crocker. In my highly refined testament to Swedish engineering, I had traveled nearly 12,000 miles — thanks to America’s excellent road system, its talented mechanics and the indispensable guidance of you, my readers — but it had never been easy. Jackson, however, had had none of that, not even roads or maps, and yet he managed 30 miles per hour through this foreboding land. In comparison, my summer excursion paled.

But still I drove, stopping to visit the Peter French Round Barn (www.roundbarn.net) in Harney County, an elegant 19th-century wooden structure, 100 feet in diameter, where ranchers used to break horses in the winter.

And 40 or 50 miles down a gravel road (and just over 100 miles southeast of Burns), I came upon Alvord Hot Springs, a concrete tub of warm, slightly mossy-feeling water where I soaked for 30 minutes, indulging in a free luxury that had eluded me in Colorado (where a broken transmission sabotaged my plans to visit every spring in the Rocky Mountains).

Finally, a few minutes farther down the gravel road, I rounded a bend and arrived at the Alvord Desert, with sand as fine and white as any you’d find on any tropical beach. I walked out there and stared at the vastness, at the russet mountains blackening at nightfall, and thought of Luke Skywalker, who gazed at the twin setting suns of Tatooine and imagined himself leaving home for great adventure.

Me, I knew that my journey would be ending quite soon. The next day I would cross the Cascade Mountains, head up the coast toward Seattle, sell Vivian on Craigslist and fly home to Brooklyn — and to my beautiful, patient wife, Jean. But after this unlikely desert, I might never again feel as remote from the world, as far from the everyday bustle of American life, its pressures and responsibilities.

Had Jackson felt this, too? Had he not wanted the journey — with all its frustrations and epiphanies — ever to end, despite the enticements of home?

I considered pitching my tent right there, but I had no food, and, in any case, I needed to make progress toward the coast if I wanted the next day’s drive to be manageable. So, night having fallen, I put Vivian into gear and drove down the gravel road, rabbits scampering across my path, a dusty rain falling, lightning cracking horizontal in the distance, and tried to relish the last 100 miles before bedtime. It went by in a blink.

ALEXANDRIA, VA., is only 10 minutes by car from downtown Washington, but the two restaurant scenes once felt decades apart. On one side of the Potomac River, you had nouvelle American bistros and fancy steakhouses packed with Washington insiders and their hefty expense accounts. On the other, there were Applebee's and stodgy French dining rooms seemingly preserved in amber.

But the past is catching up. In recent years, young chefs and ambitious restaurateurs from Washington have crossed the Potomac and planted their knives in the Old Town section, where the Federal-style row houses date to when George Washington rode up from nearby Mount Vernon to talk of cutting ties with Britain. Drawn by the area's new professional class, lower rents and a blank culinary canvas, fashionable new spots are serving dishes like oysters with beer jellies and sourdough flan with fresh sardines — offerings that were unthinkable not long ago.

Among the first to dip his culinary toes across the Potomac was Cathal Armstrong. The former chef at Bistro Bis, a Capitol Hill favorite among the powerbroker set, he left in 2004 to open Restaurant Eve (110 South Pitt Street, 703-706-0450, www.restauranteve.com), a casually elegant, sunlit bistro on a red-brick paved street in the heart of Old Town. “People said we were crazy,” Mr. Amstrong said, in his light Irish brogue. “The sentiment was ‘we're not going to cross the moat.' ”

The foodies, it turned out, were already there. Former rail yards were being developed for town houses and attracting people who knew the difference between gnocchi and gnudi. On any given night, Eve's dining rooms are packed with young commuter couples and members of the local horse-country set, who tuck into French-style dishes like pork belly confit with fava beans and oregano ($28), and stuffed rabbit with chanterelles and garden peas ($31).

As word spread, Mr. Armstrong responded by opening more restaurants: Eamonn's A Dublin Chipper (728 King Street, 703-299-8384; www.eamonnsdublinchipper.com), a fish-and-chips place with a popular cocktail bar, PX; and the Majestic (911 King Street, 703-837-9117; www.majesticcafe.com), a 1932 diner that now serves comfort dishes like fried green tomatoes — locally grown, of course — and seafood risotto with squid, shrimp, mussels and salmon ($14.50).

Other chefs soon followed and turned King Street, the main street in Old Town, into a gas-lamp restaurant row. Some were drawn to Alexandria's more intimate dining rooms, where fewer seats and a bigger kitchen are the norm.

Anthony Chittum left Notti Bianche, a bustling Italian restaurant in the Foggy Bottom district of Washington, to take the helm at Vermilion (1120 King Street, 703-684-9669; www.vermilionrestaurant.com). In an old town house with exposed brick walls and flickering gas lamps that mimic those on the sidewalks, Vermilion has a relaxed, unpretentious vibe. The menu features new American cuisine like corn chowder with jalapeños and fried Nomini Creek oysters ($9) and sautéed diver scallops with pesto and pickled red onions ($16).

The small-town pace also allows chefs to spread their creative wings. “I could do exactly what I want,” said Morou Ouattara, an “Iron Chef” contestant who ran the kitchen at Signatures, a lavish restaurant in the Penn Quarter section of Washington that was owned by the lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

After Signatures closed, instead of working for another Washington restaurateur, Mr. Ouattara opened his own establishment in Old Town. Farrah Olivia (600 Franklin Street, 703-778-2233; www.farraholiviarestaurant.com) is decorated in chocolate browns and giraffe-like patterns that recall the owner's Ivory Coast upbringing. It serves American cuisine with French, African and Japanese touches and molecular gastronomy techniques. Dishes include escolar (a mackerel-like fish) that is pan-seared then shocked in an ice-cold marinade and served with pickled watermelon rind ($12). Anise-flavored gnudi (poached ravioli stuffing without the pasta) is topped with a Parmesan foam ($18).

Among the newest arrivals is Frank Morales, the former chef at Zola, the power restaurant in Penn Quarter where he garnered rave reviews. Attracted by Old Town's up-and-coming restaurant scene, Mr. Morales jumped ship early this year and joined Rustico (827 Slaters Lane, 703-224-5051; www.rusticorestaurant.com), an upscale pub that serves modern American cuisine and 310 varieties of beer and ale.

In addition to novelty creations like hop brittle and beer salt, Mr. Morales offers “trios” that include three dishes with a flight of beer, priced separately. The $17 duck trio, for example, matches a foie gras spring roll with a Belgian lambic beer, St. Louis Framboise, and a moist duck confit with Gouden Carolus Grand Cru, a Belgian ale brewed to commemorate the birthday of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (Feb. 24).

Hotels have joined in Alexandria's culinary ascent. Kimpton Hotels, for example, is turning a former Holiday Inn on King Street into Hotel Monaco. Set to open this fall, the hotel's restaurant, Jackson 20, will be run by the Houston chef Jeff Armstrong, known for his modern Southern cuisine.

Other high-end restaurants are on their way. This month, Jamie Leeds, who owns the ever-crowded Hank's Oyster Bar in Washington, will bring her popular lobster rolls and raw seafood bar to Old Town (1026 King Street, www.hanksrestaurants.com). Cathal Armstrong is looking to open a bakery and charcuterie.

And Mr. Ouattara, who named his first restaurant after his daughter, has another daughter, Kora. “She's only 16 months old, but I have to do something,” he said. “I have to open another restaurant for her.”

IT was a cool spring day at the foot of La Rambla, Barcelona's famous — and famously overrun — main promenade. I had been strolling under the freshly leafed plane trees, but now the sky threatened rain, and the crowds were growing wearisome. It was the perfect time to duck into the darkness of the Centre d'Art Santa Mònica. Inside the museum, a former convent, the bustle of the city falls away.

On the dim, vaulted main floor I found seven large screens that divided the space irregularly. Upon each was projected the video image of a luminous white wall and a barred doorway, through which I glimpsed a walkway and summer foliage.

Entitled “Lugar de Silencios,” the piece was a collaboration between the Barcelona artist Montserrat Soto and the poet Dionisio Cañas. Portly in a sweater and long gray hair — a portrait of the artist of a certain age — Mr. Cañas appeared in the video doorways from time to time, deep in thought amid crunching footfalls. Breaking the silence, he proffered snippets of poetry: “No time, no time, no time./No time for coffee,/no time for donuts,/no time for The New York Times.”

Barcelona can be overwhelming for visitors, and the stillness was a welcome break from a forced march of medieval alleyways, tapas and must-see attractions. But as my wife, Nina, and I discovered, Barcelona's art scene, in its breadth, its internationalism and above all its depth, is hardly a respite.

For the visitor, art in Barcelona mirrors the city's charming jumble. “It's a place you can walk, a city for flaneurs,” said Manuel Borja-Villel, director of the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, called Macba. “You can lose yourself here.” Indeed, when we visited, the museum featured installations by the Canadian artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. The cluttered, moody environments evoke the rooms of the mind, where memory and nostalgia give way to darker dreams.

Installations like “The Dark Pool,” a chaotic stage set shot through with snippets of sound triggered by visitors' motion, reminded me of an old bar in the surrounding El Raval neighborhood — the kind of place where dark casks of vermouth line the walls, and the air is blue with cigarette smoke and sharp with salty fish. My favorite, which I'm sure I'll never find again: a timeless joint named Montse's, vanished down a narrow street on an exploration measured in wine and olives.

Places like that, where vermouth seeps out of ancient tarnished pipes, are not the reason most come to Barcelona. But if you stumble into them, they're what you remember most vividly.

It's the same with art. Over everything loom the giants: Picasso, Dalí and Miró. Each spent formative years in and around Barcelona, and each has a museum dedicated to his work in the city. Of them the Fundació Joan Miró is the most striking. Not only is its location magnificent — it is set on the leafy slope of Montjuïc, overlooking Barcelona's jumble — but the collection is a comprehensive and definitive look at the artist's work. The airy space is filled with the echoes of laughing students, a rambunctiousness invited by the tense motion in Miró's canvases. (When we visited, the Fundació also featured a show of the bold, bent forms created by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, which seemed an ideal pairing with Miró's work.)

The Picasso-Dalí-Miró trinity connects 20th-century Spanish art with its historical antecedents. The Museu Picasso is particularly good at demonstrating this: on 58 canvases, Picasso reinterprets Velázquez' 1656 “Meninas,” enlivening it with cameos by his dachshund, Lump, and evoking, around Canvas 23, the sinking my-5-year-old-could-do-that philistinism Picasso is famous for.

But it is telling that Picasso's and Dalí's best work is not here. The bulk of their careers were spent elsewhere, and their masterpieces reside in places like Madrid, Paris and New York. “In those cities,” Mr. Borja-Villel said, “art is displayed in a colonial way. But there is no sense of empire here. Barcelona is a capital with no country. It has nationalistic pride but no trophies.”

Free from the ponderous shadows of iconic masterpieces, Barcelona's art scene is broad and eclectic. “It's a rich cultural space, but fractured,” said Josep Ramoneda, the founding director of the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona. The center opened its doors in 1994 to provide a focal point for creative energy in the city. “There were many groups doing things here,” Mr. Ramoneda said, “but they weren't connected.”

During the Franco government, expression was tightly controlled. Spanish art had skipped a generation by the time democracy was restored in 1978. “Modernity did not exist here,” Mr. Borja-Villel said. “We went from Franco straight to postmodernism.”

The Macba building is an impressive space that combines well-thought-out exhibition halls with airy public spaces. It is fronted by a courtyard that resembles a skate park: university students gather there amid the clatter of plywood decks and bustling outdoor cafés.

This is quite a change for a neighborhood once synonymous with port city seediness. “Twenty years ago,” Mr. Borja-Villel said, “you could not come here with a clean shirt.” Barcelona's revitalization was initiated with the 1992 Olympic Games. The early stages of its makeover, chronicled in dreamlike black-and-white by the photographer Manolo Laguillo and on display at Macba when we visited, bring to mind contemporary Beijing.

Art itself has played a key role in Barcelona's renaissance. Since the Olympics, 11 major art institutions have opened in the city. The complex in El Raval that includes Macba and Centre de Cultura Contemporània, two universities and a forthcoming library of contemporary art, was conceived as a “curatorial area” that would spur the transformation of the neighborhood.

By all accounts it is working: the area is lively, and the urban ecology that moves inexorably from artists to real estate developers to trendy professionals seems in full swing. Bookstores, boutiques featuring local designers, restaurants, small galleries and workshops, and the icily hip Casa Camper Hotel surround the museums.

But if art has changed the city, the new face of the city is also changing art. Last year Barcelona's government spent 96 million euros on the arts, confirming institutions like Macba, which opened in 1995, as major centers of cultural gravity. But institutionalization raises new questions about the role of art in the city's life.

“It is an equilibrium,” Mr. Ramoneda said. “The government pays for a play that is critical of it, but I get no political interference: there is a tradition of respect from those who fund art.”

Perhaps as a result, Barcelona lacks a robust private art market. About a dozen private galleries line a few tony blocks of Carrer Consell de Cent, just around the corner from Antonio Gaudí's Casa Batlló on Passeig de Gràcia. The handful of galleries manage a reasonable range of styles, mostly from established Spanish artists like Andrés Rábago, who as El Roto is a well-known political cartoonist. We saw his cleanly executed, nearly decorative portraits of Spanish workingmen at the Galería Jordi Barnadas. But for the most part these galleries lack life.

Until recently, the most lively arts scene in Barcelona was in the streets. But earlier this year, the city painted over most of the vibrant graffiti and stencils that had made Barcelona a requisite stop on the worldwide street art circuit, suggesting to some that institutionalized art in Barcelona is eating its young. (Cryptic black-and-white “BNE” stickers are still plastered around the city: “Kilroy Was Here” for the post-globalized artsy hipster set.)

“Artists here are the lost souls who ended up on these shores and want to express something,” said Rigo Pex, a freelance curator and musician who is also on the staff of le cool, an online events magazine based in Barcelona. With its night life, cheap food and drink and formerly cheap rent, the city has been a magnet for young people in the past decade. It became a meeting ground for artists from around Europe and the Americas — a ferment played out on the city's walls, and among ambitious arts collectives of every stripe. “Locals are easygoing,” said Mr. Pex, who is from Guatemala. “It's the visitors who have all the energy.”

But while the arts institutions have played a part in developing this scene, it is entering a new phase. As rents get higher, is development doing away with the very conditions that inspired Picasso's “Demoiselles D'Avignon”?

In a city more than 2,000 years old, how could it not be so? La Rambla was a riverbed. El Raval was a red-light district. Santa Mònica was a convent. Now it is an art space. One day it will be something else. “Es lo que hay,” said Mr. Pex, repeating a refrain of resignation: It is what it is.

Instead, up-and-coming art in Barcelona is gravitating into a shifting milieu of scrappy galleries. Almost all of them have other sources of revenue — clothes, a cafe, books. And many of the artists also do commercial work, a concession that would be familiar to Picasso, who drew menus for Els Quatre Gats at Carrer Montsió 3, where, at age 17, he had his first exposition.

Hole-in-the-wall gallery cafes like Miscelänea continue that tradition, but with Wi-Fi. If the big institutions like Macba and the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona thrive in part because of their formal connections to other institutions around the world, these leaner outfits are able to do the same via MySpace and Flickr.

When I visited, the two-person Barcelona collective BTOY was playing host to ByLOA, a show of international street art at its most lyrical and polished. More visible galleries like Iguapop and Dudua in El Borne provide outlets for both street-inflected art and more readily consumed spinoffs like books and jewelry. Iguapop, for example, is a long, white space in which gallery walls crowded with international up-and-comers like Mike Giant, Aiko and Miss Van stare down a retail side selling streetwear from Stüssy and Adidas.

Taken together, Barcelona is an ideal place to dip into many simultaneous currents of artistic expression. The juxtaposition makes it possible to see the connection between, say, Dalí and the Berlin transplant Boris Hoppek's droll “Bimbosculptures” at Iguapop, or Picasso's canvases and BTOY's stencil constructions. In Barcelona, they are brought together by an introspective rather than monumental quality.

“The purpose of art,” Mr. Borja- Villel said, “is to understand the world in which you live better. It's not about spectacle, but about understanding.”

VISITOR INFORMATION

The best openings and current shows are listed in le cool, an online guide at www.lecool.com/current.html. The company also publishes an alluring clothbound guidebook to the city, “le cool changed my life.”

At street level, the Centre d'Art Santa Mònica (La Rambla 7; 34-93-316-2810; www.centredartsantamonica.net; free admission) houses an information center on the city's arts scene. Be sure to pick up the latest ART Barcelona guide (www.artbarcelona.es).

Articket BCN includes entry to seven major exhibit spaces, including Macba, the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, the Fundació Joan Miró and the Museu Picasso for 20 euros, or about $27 at $1.38 to the euro. Available at participating museums or (34-93) 326-2948; www.articketbcn.org.

A guide to private galleries throughout Catalonia can be found at www.galeriescatalunya.com.

SEEING ART

Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (Montalegre 5; 34-93-306-4100; www.cccb.org; entry 6 euros)

Fundació Joan Miró (Parc de Montjuïc; 34-93-329-1908; www.fjmiro.cat; entry 7.50 euros)

Fundació Suñol (Passeig de Gràcia 98; 34-93-496-1032; www.fundaciosunol.org) is a private collection of modern art newly open to the public; entry 4 euros.

Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (Plaça des Àngels 1; 34-93-412-0810; www.macba.es; entry 7.50 euros.)

Museu Picasso (Montcada 15-23; 34-93-319-6310; www.museupicasso.bcn.es; entry 6 euros) has a collection of more than 3,000 works by the artist. The line to enter snakes down a narrow street in the Barri Gòtic.

BUYING ART

Dudua is a gallery and shop at Rossic 6 (34-93-315-0401; www.duduadudua.blogspot.com) that specializes in crafty artwork. It is the place to pick up a crocheted hot dog.

Galeria Jordi Barnadas (Consell de Cent 347; 34-93-215-63-65; www.barnadas.com) is part of the stretch of galleries along Consell de Cent.

Iguapop Gallery (Comerç 15; 34-93-310-0735; www.iguapop.net) plays host to shows by up-and-coming practitioners of international street style, and sells clothing and art books.

Miscelänea (Guardia 10; 34-93-317-9398; www.miscelanea.info) is a loungy cafe and gallery in El Raval.

MAKING ART

Artists Love Barcelona (www.artistslovebarcelona.com) is a small gallery near Macba that also runs workshops and art-intensive weeks for visitors. Five-day “painting holidays” start at 890 euros, and include accommodations and some meals.

WHEN you were a toddler, you needed someone to tell you what to taste. Cheerios, yes. Dirt, no. Electrical outlets, no way.

As an adult, you presumably don't need much help, though occasionally a sommelier comes in handy. So the idea of a food tour may seem odd: why pay someone to tell you what to eat?

In short, because it's a way to participate in, and not just observe, life in New York City. And with the right guide, it can be almost exhilarating.

Still, it's not for everyone. If you check Chowhound.com before your e-mail, can distinguish single-origin chocolate made in São Tomé from that made in Tanzania, or have 28 bottles of hot sauce sizzling in your cupboard, you're probably savvy enough to set out on your own and make the city your cafeteria. But for others — visitors, especially — the tours are well worth it.

Below are reviews of recently tested tours from five companies. They often sell out, so reservations are recommended.

What seemed doomed to be the lamest of the five, the Original Greenwich Village Food Tasting and Cultural Walking Tour run by Foods of New York, turned out to be the most entertaining. Michael Karp, one of several guides for these daily excursions, has lived in the Village for 22 years, and it shows. He knows everyone, loves pranks and off-color jokes, and points out all kinds of secret spots, from the narrow entranceways that lead to hidden houses to the best-smelling grate in town (funneling up kitchen smells from the restaurant Risotteria).

And, of course, there's food: samplings include pizza, cannoli, rice balls, fresh-from-the-oven chocolate-chip cookies and fine cheese (from Murray's, no surprise). You don't get to eat at Palma, a French-Italian restaurant, but you do get to peek into its farmhouse kitchen.

The Slice of Brooklyn Pizza Tour is run by an equally talented M.C., Tony Muia, who appears to have been brought to life from the pages of a 1950s pulp novel set in Brooklyn. His Chuck Taylor All-Stars, white T-shirt, tattoos and fuhgetaboudit accent are almost too good to be true.

On this tour, the only one that uses a vehicle, you eat two full sit-down meals, one each at the beginning and the end of the tour. There's Grimaldi's (again, no surprise), for a blackened, thin-crusted Neapolitan version, and L & B Spumoni Gardens for unusual Parmesan-over-sauce-over-mozzarella Sicilian slices. But the tour isn't just about pizza.

Between stops, from Dumbo to Coney Island, Mr. Muia and his DVD player work in well-polished tandem. Among other things, Mr. Muia introduces and then plays clips from films shot in Brooklyn at the moment you arrive where the scene was shot. As you drive under what is now the D line in Bensonhurst, you're watching “The French Connection” chase scene; 86th Street in Bay Ridge means John Travolta strutting his stuff in the opening of “Saturday Night Fever.”

New York Chocolate Tours runs two of the more tempting tours: the New Cuisine Chocolate Tour and a Luxury Chocolate Tour. One of the guides, Bert James, doesn't have the wackiness of Mr. Karp or Mr. Muia (a negative for the tour, but probably a boon for his social life), but he is energetic and knowledgeable.

Now, $70 seems like a lot to pay, but at each one of five stops, you'll be eating about $5 worth of chocolate. Measured in Hershey's Kisses, that would be unspeakable gluttony, but at shops like Charbonnel et Walker, at Saks Fifth Avenue, that amounts to two dainty pieces to be savored. The tours are mainly in the eastern part of Midtown and on the Upper East Side.

A different kind of tour, one that scours the city in search of ethnic foods, is put on by NoshWalks. Your guide, Myra Alperson, is neither showy nor polished; her tours feel more as if you're on a walk with a friend. There are so many tours — Bensonhurst for Turkish, Russian and Chinese food, for example, or Borough Park on a Friday as various Jewish populations, from Yemeni to Uzbek, prepare for the Sabbath — that each runs only occasionally, so plan ahead.

Finally, the New York Institute of Culinary Education offers a different kind of experience. The tours take place in one restaurant, with behind-the-scenes secrets and details revealed by the restaurant's chef or an institute instructor. On a recent tour of Hill Country, in the Flatiron District, with the executive chef Elizabeth Karmel, participants could see the wood-fired (but gas-assisted) smokers and could pepper the pit master with questions as huge briskets rotated within. One of this fall's institute offerings is a tour of Il Buco in the East Village with the chef, Ignacio Mattos, on Oct. 13.

But the institute also runs delicious-sounding food tours, led by accomplished food writers and culinary historians, into ethnic enclaves.

So if you would rather stuff yourself on the run, rather than in a chair, that might be a better choice.

VISITOR INFORMATION

Foods of New York, $40; (212) 209-3370; www.foodsofny.com.

A Slice of Brooklyn Pizza Tour, $65; www.bknypizza.com; reserve with Zerve, www.zerve.com; (212) 209-3370.

New York Chocolate Tours, $70; www.sweetwalks.com; reserve at www.zerve.com.

NoshWalks, $33; (212) 222-2243; www.noshwalks.com.

ICE on Location Tours, New York Institute of Culinary Education, $70 to $95; (212) 847-0770; www.iceculinary.com.

Bulicame is one of the natural sulfur springs that dot the province of Viterbo, near Rome. They were discovered by the Romans in the fourth century B.C.

"IT'S an inferno in here,” yelled a middle-aged woman as she plunged into a foul-smelling hot spring in central Italy. She wasn't the first to compare these scorching sulfur baths to Hell. In Canto XIV of “Inferno,” Dante wanders past a pool oozing with boiling red water and is reminded of these thermal spas about an hour north of Rome “whose waters are shared with prostitutes.”

In truth, Bulicame is actually far from Hell. Situated on the outskirts of the Viterbo — a provincial capital where popes once took refuge — the Bulicame sulfur springs bob with pleasure seekers whose only sins may be self-indulgence and a proclivity for smelling like rotten egg.

The countryside around Viterbo is studded with Roman ruins and sprinkled with these so-called wild spas: natural springs that bubble up from the ground and spill into artificial basins in the middle of fields. In most cases, there are no entrance fees, no towel services and no changing rooms. The only things you need are a car and a little geography lesson.

Of the half-dozen wild spas in the region, the best known may be Bulicame, but it's not the most popular. Several are closely guarded secrets, which is why I was glad to be sitting across from Giovanni Faperdue in the Gran Caffè Schenardi in Viterbo (Corso Italia, 11; 39-0761-345-860; www.caffeschenardi.com), a gilded high-ceiling 19th-century cafe in the city's historic center. Mr. Faperdue, a journalist for the local newspaper and the author of six books on Viterbo's history (including one about the sulfur springs), is passionate about the city's mineral-water-rich landscape.

“In a sense, the springs like Bulicame are volcanoes of water,” he said, referring to the former volcanic craters that serve as the steamy water's source. “In ancient times, the spas in Rome were heated only by fire,” he added. “So when the Romans came to Viterbo in 310 B.C. to conquer the Etruscans, they took notice of the naturally hot springs.”

The Romans built huge complexes around the springs. Bulicame may be the easiest to find, just off the main road as you head toward the town of Tuscania. The four pools, of varying temperatures and sizes, are set into a gentle white knoll. Heaps of steam waft from a fenced-off hole atop a hill that channels 140-degree water to the pools.

Couples arrived carrying slippers, bathrobes and water bottles across a field. Perhaps it was my bare feet and boxer shorts that pegged me as a novice, but as I stood on the sidelines wondering which of the four pools I should dip into first, someone in the largest, swimming-pool-size bath offered a tip: “The smaller pools nearest the source are the warmest.”

I glanced at a bigger pool, where a man in skimpy bathing trunks was smearing greenish mud across his face and flipping water onto his enormous belly. I walked to a smaller pool, dangled my toe in the steaming hot water and plunged in.

After an hourlong soak — my skin smooth and soft, my mind at ease — I understood the addiction. The sulfurous water gushing from the ground around Viterbo is said to be therapeutic. The locals say it's particularly good for the skin, the respiratory system and aching bones. The Etruscans and Romans also believed in its curative properties. And after several popes in the Middle Ages were believed to have been cured of chronic back pain after a dip, Viterbo's baths became a near-obligatory stop for travelers on the Rome-to-Florence route.

Although the region's numerous sulfur springs draw from a single water source, each spa has its own personality and devotees. Another popular wild spa is Bagnaccio, which sits at the end of a long gravel road a few miles from Bulicame. This three-basin spa is known for its lively social scene, which, for the uninitiated, is a lot like crashing a private pool party. “You see the same people every day,” said one of the chatty regulars sitting in chest-high water. “It's like the coffee bar in the morning, but we happen to be sitting in smelly water.”

Le Pozze di San Sisto, about five miles south of Viterbo, may be the plushest, thanks to its civic-minded bathers. And Terme dei Papi is the most commercial, with its campuslike structures and spa product line.

The thermal baths around Viterbo weren't always so inviting. Until a few years ago, the pools were littered with trash. Taking advantage of the parasite-killing sulfurous water, farmers would bring their livestock for a dip, sometimes even lowering horses or sheep into the pool as people were bathing.

That began to change after Mr. Faperdue wrote a series of articles about the spas for the local newspaper. “It caused quite a scandal,” he said. Local residents, unaware of the state of the spas, were outraged. A volunteer force sprang up to police the springs.

At Bagnaccio, regular bathers now pay voluntary annual dues of 12 to 18 euros (about $16.60 to $25 at $1.38 to the euro) to keep the pools clean. Le Pozze di San Sisto went a step further: it became a members-only cultural association (annual dues of 15 euros, plus a 10-euro initiation fee). Unlike Bagnaccio, San Sisto checks for memberships at the door, which may explain why it may be the cleanest and most family-friendly of the wild spas.

“I liked the spa so much, I bought a house nearby just to be close to it,” said Mario Bracci, a resident of Rome who is the president of the San Sisto cultural association. “When the condition of the place was worsening, I decided to do something about it, so that's when we formed the association.” With 25,000 members, Le Pozze di San Sisto offers perks other area spas do not: a bar, changing rooms, picnic tables and seminars on yoga, crystal therapy and massage.

For spagoers seeking even more amenities, Terme dei Papi, or Baths of the Popes, a few miles west of Viterbo's historical center, offers up-market comforts in exchange for a more sterile atmosphere. Terme dei Papi now charges 10 euros to float in its sleek 100,000-square-foot pool. Much of the original medieval architecture has been replaced by charmless structures where Swedish massages and mud baths are administered by stern women in medical garb.

That may explain why spas like Bulicame seem to hold more appeal for the locals. In addition to being free, its commercial-free atmosphere and ancient Roman ruins infuse the bath with history. Besides, Dante's journey through “Inferno” and Bulicame eventually led him to “Paradiso.”

IF YOU GO

GETTING THERE

Viterbo is about 50 miles north of Rome. The two-hour train ride from Rome's Ostiense railway station departs hourly and costs 4.10 euros, or about $5.65 at $1.38 to the euro (www.trenitalia.com). By car, take the SS2 Cassia Bis straight to Viterbo, about one hour.

SPAS

Bulicame (corner of Strada Provinciale Tuscanese and Strada delle Terme): A 10-minute drive from Viterbo's historical center, it has four baths of varying degrees and a smattering of Roman ruins. Free.

Bagnaccio (from the S2 Cassia north, take the S7 toward Marta and turn left at Via del Garinei, a gravel road): A members-only bath, it has three pools that attract chatty and friendly regulars.

Le Pozze di San Sisto (Cassia south, toward Vetralla; 39-3286-893-884; www.lepozzedisansisto.org): About five miles south of Viterbo, its natural landscape and plush amenities brings spa lovers from all over the area.

Terme dei Papi (Strada Bagni 12, 39-0761-3501, www.termedeipapi.it): A mile or so from Viterbo, this famed spa is the most commercial of the bunch.

HOTELS

The Hotel Niccolo V at Terme dei Papi (Strada Bagni 12, 39-0761-350-555, www.termedeipapi.it) has 23 spacious rooms, some overlooking the thermal pool, starting at 120 euros.

By ALISON SMALE

LIKE many of the best things in life, this one came along by chance — though it had been hiding in plain sight.

On a witheringly hot summer day a few weeks ago, our niece and daughter had chickened out of the trek to the Eiffel Tower, and the long wait to go up it. But a friend recalled that it was open at night, and, indeed, to my surprise I learned that you could ride up as late as midnight.

So we set off, and hit the tower line around 10 p.m. As during the day, the lines snaked away from the elevators at the north and east pillars, and the stairs in the south pillar. But you weren't wilting in heat, forced to buy bottled water or ice cream at exorbitant rates from nearby stands. Nor was the wait quite as long — an hour or so, better than the 90 minutes you can expect on the average summer day in July and August, when the tower attracts up to 31,000 visitors during the hours the elevators are open.

The crowning pleasure was, of course, the view that unfolded at the second stage. There you are, 377 feet above Paris, with the illuminated bridges sparkling in the Seine's reflection, the cleverly illuminated tricolor fluttering above the vast crystal roof of the Grand Palais, the summer Ferris wheel turning above the Tuileries gardens, tossing shadowy light onto the Rue de Rivoli and toward the Louvre. Notre Dame, the Arc de Triomphe, Sacré-Coeur, the Invalides, the Panthéon, St.-Sulpice — all these famous monuments laid out in a visual feast.

Sure, by day, this is a spectacular view. You see in detail how Paris has preserved its ancient core, cleverly consigning the architectural gems or monstrosities of the late 20th century to the city's outer reaches, where they cannot sully the wonder of the heart. You appreciate, too, the hint of the Mediterranean that is part of Paris's lure: the buildings are pale, like many across Southern Europe, with streets running like dark rivulets across the cityscape.

At night, however, there is a seductive magic to the glittering spectacle of Paris. And there is mystery, the hint of romance and adventure, in all those dark spots dotted with lamplight and the odd burst of neon color from stores and theaters. What is going on down there, in between the lights?

For the complete thrill, you must go to the summit (elevator access to the top is limited, so to be sure of making it in time, get to the tower line by 9 p.m.). That puts you roughly 1,000 feet above all this. On a rainy night, your head is literally in the clouds, which scud across a sky riven by the spotlight that rotates continuously from the apex, adding another aspect to that view.

Everyone is beguiled: Waldemar Neufeld, 40, on his third visit to Paris from Koblenz in Germany, simply rolled his eyes when someone asked what was different at night. “Everything.” The Cisneros family, from Montclair, N.J., was enthralled. “I think it's great; you just see it all sparkle,” said Claudia, 9, her eyes radiant. “C'est très, très, très bien,” gushed her mother. Even a more cynical spectator, a middle-aged Russian named Valentin who noted proudly that “I am from St. Petersburg, so you can't surprise me with much,” conceded: “I got what I wanted. This is how it should be.”

At the summit, there are clear, helpful guides to all the monuments you can see, and reminders of how far you are from home: 9,739 kilometers from Tokyo, for instance. You gaze in at replicas of Gustave Eiffel's office and apartment on the tower, where, on Sept. 10, 1889, the year the tower was built for the World's Fair, Eiffel received Thomas Edison, who brought a model of his recently unveiled phonograph. And, yes, you will feel the tower sway.

There are so many marvels to a nighttime visit, but here are two more.

First, the elevator ride up and down, through the illuminated lattice work of the tower itself, and the even greater pleasure when it is lighted — a giant flashing sparkler with 20,000 light bulbs, for 10 minutes, on the hour every hour till 2 a.m. (1 a.m. in winter). The ride makes you appreciate the true genius of Eiffel's tower: it is an engineering marvel and an aesthetic masterpiece, its curls and swirls echoing the filigree stonework of Notre Dame's rose windows, or the carefully wrought balconies of all those buildings along Haussmann's boulevards. You can see this by day, but much more clearly at night.

Secondly — and this too is true by day, but enhanced by the cocoon of darkness — it's a chance to savor all those people around you. I have traveled a lot, but can think of few spots where you will see so many different people from across the planet as you do here. Lovers kiss. An aging Chinese woman in a wheelchair marvels, while a young South Asian man in another wheelchair strains upward so his friend can snap his face against the backdrop of that nighttime view. You will hear Hindi, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, German, oh, yes, English, Swedish, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean and, of course, Chinese.

It is also here that you appreciate how fast mass tourism has grown. Last year, the Eiffel Tower had a record 6,695,000 visitors, according to Carole Baudry, of the Société d'Exploitation de la Tour Eiffel, the private body that runs the tower. That is one million more than in 1997. When the Chinese (already 4 percent of the annual visitor total) really start traveling en masse, will 15 hours a day be enough to accommodate all those rightly longing to see one of the wonders of the modern world?

VISITOR INFORMATION

The Eiffel Tower is open daily (www.eiffel-tower.com). From June 15 to Sept. 1, the elevator is open 9 a.m. to 12:45 a.m. Stairs are open 9 a.m. to 12:30 a.m. Last tickets are sold 45 minutes before close; last trip to the summit is officially 11 p.m. but may be earlier depending on weather and crowds. Around the Easter and May holidays, these hours also apply. Otherwise, from Jan. 1 to June 14, and Sept. 2 to Dec. 31, the elevator is open 9:30 a.m. to 11:45 p.m.; stairs, 9:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m.

Elevator to summit: 11.50 euros (about $16 at $1.38 to the euro); 6.30 euros for children age 3 to 11. To second stage: 7.80 euros; 4.30 euros for children. The first stage, which features a movie on Eiffel Tower history, is 4.50 euros; children, 2.30 euros. Disabled people with papers attesting to disability go at reduced rates, as does one accompanying person. Wheelchairs are not allowed to the summit.

RESTAURANTS

Altitude 95 (telephone 33-1-45-55-20-04), on the first stage, has a panoramic view over the Seine and the Trocadero. Appetizers start at 11 euros, and main courses from 17 euros (for a vegetable plate); salmon fillet with asparagus risotto is 24 euros; and a two-course fixed-price lunch is 26 euros. The Jules Verne (33-1-45-55-61-44), on the second stage, is pricey; at least 100 euros a head for dinner; lunch menu is 65 euros. Reservations for dinner are needed at least six weeks in advance.

More suggestions on what to do and see in Paris can be found at nytimes.com/travel.

IN October of 1852, a French clergyman saddles up a fine cream-colored mule and rides south out of Santa Fe. As the new Catholic bishop of the territory of New Mexico, he is embarking on his first visit to Indian pueblos.

“His great diocese was still an unimaginable mystery to him,” wrote Willa Cather in her novel “Death Comes for the Archbishop.” “He was eager to be abroad in it, to know his people.”

Isleta Pueblo, 13 miles south of Albuquerque, looks almost familiar to the bishop, with its startlingly white church, its clustered town and its acacia trees of the same blue-green color he knew in the south of France.

The scenery turns strange, though, as he rides west with his young Indian guide to Laguna Pueblo, and he begins not to believe his own eyes. Clumps of wild pumpkin look “less like a plant than like a great colony of gray-green lizards, moving and suddenly arrested by fear.” What seems at first to be bright waves of sand turn out to be petrified rock, “yellow as ochre” and dotted with ancient juniper trees.

By the time the travelers approach Ácoma, the third pueblo, they are passing colossal rock mesas, jutting upward 700 feet from the sandy plain. These formations look so bizarre to the bishop as to seem not part of nature at all, but rather like “vast cathedrals” or the remnants of a monumental city.

Today, these three pueblos are connected by freeways. Isleta and Ácoma have their own casinos. But each community still preserves its ancient identity. Eighty years after Cather's novel was published and more than 150 since the events she recounted, it is possible to use her narration as a visitor's guide. One warm March day, paperback in hand, I found my way to all three pueblos, grateful for Cather's sensitivity to the great beauty and mystery of the Southwest and for her ability to bring to life the characters who had encountered one another in the same landscape so long ago.

Cather's portrayal of Jean Marie Latour (her fictional name for the real-life bishop, John Baptist Lamy) paints a complicated but very romantic picture of New Mexico in the mid-19th century, just after its annexation to the United States. Despite its fictional embellishments, her book provides a realistic account of the bishop's efforts to replace the lawless and profligate Spanish priests of the territory, his visits to a beloved Navajo chief, his friendship with the Old West explorer Kit Carson and his dream of building a cathedral in Santa Fe.

But it is the trip to the pueblos that reveals the most about the bishop's predicament in the new country, because it imagines how he felt as he first entered the strange world of the Pueblo Indians. In Cather's telling: “When he approached the pueblo of Isleta, gleaming white across a low plain of gray sand, Father Latour's spirits rose. It was beautiful, that warm, rich whiteness of the church and the clustered town. The church and the Isleta houses were made of adobe, whitewashed with a bright gypsum.”

Today the pueblo houses are earth-colored, but the church is still pure white, its surface still regularly refinished. With its plain walls and heavy iron bells, it is an archetype of humble Southwestern style.

The church would have looked a little different in the bishop's day, and even then not as it did when it was first built in 1613. The roof and choir loft of the original building — a simple, long, high-ceilinged sanctuary — were destroyed in 1680, when the Pueblo Indians rebelled against the Franciscan missionaries. Rebuilt on the same walls in 1716, the church was given two wooden bell towers, now gone, which the bishop would have seen.

Leaving Isleta, Father Latour and his guide, Jacinto, ride through a sandstorm on their way to Laguna Pueblo, passing by the lake for which the village was named. That lake is dry now. But the 300-year-old mission church of St. Joseph remains precisely as Cather described it: “painted above and about the altar with gods of wind and rain and thunder, sun and moon, linked together in a geometrical design of crimson and blue and dark green, so that the end of the church seemed to be hung with tapestry.”

The bishop says Mass at St. Joseph's, but retires with Jacinto to the rocks north of the village to camp for the night. As the sun sets, the two men have the briefest of conversations about the stars and then lapse into their accustomed silence, contemplating the night sky.

“There was no way in which he could transfer his own memories of European civilization into the Indian mind,” Cather wrote of the bishop, “and he was quite willing to believe that behind Jacinto there was a long tradition, a story of experience, which no language could translate to him.”

The two continue their ride west, across the low plain among the great mesas, and the bishop is struck with the way each of the rock towers seems to be “duplicated by a cloud mesa, like a reflection, which lay motionless above it or moved slowly up from behind it.”

On the freshly paved highway through the same territory, just before reaching Ácoma, I passed another mesa that once had been inhabited, but was a ghost town even by the time the bishop rode by. As Jacinto explains in the novel, “the stairway which had been the only access to it was broken off by a great storm many centuries ago, and its people had perished up there from hunger.”

How, the bishop asks, did the people come up with the idea of living hundreds of feet in the air on naked rocks with no soil or water?

“A man can do whole lot when they hunt him day and night like an animal,” Jacinto says. “Navajos on the north, Apaches on the south; the Ácoma run up a rock to be safe.”

Ácoma is no longer the community it once was either. Ácoma families keep houses there as weekend and vacation homes. But the tribe has decided not to outfit the mesa top with electricity or running water, and it now lives mainly in a village on the valley floor. To reach the top now requires signing up for a guided tour, and taking a bus ride up.

For the bishop and Jacinto, a rugged rock stairway with primitive steps and handholds is the only route. When he reaches the top, the bishop is amazed at the white two- and three-story dwellings clustered together on the 10-acre pueblo, with “not a tree or blade of green upon it.” And he is alarmed at the sight of the mission church.

“Gaunt, grim, gray, its nave rising some 70 feet to a sagging, half-ruined roof, it was more like a fortress than a place of worship,” Cather wrote.

The bishop wonders why such a big church had even been built there in the early 1600s: “Powerful men they must have been, those Spanish Fathers, to draft Indian labor for this great work without military support.”

The priests forced the Indians to carry up not only building materials for the church but great quantities of earth for the churchyard cemetery.

“Every stone in that structure,” the bishop mused, “every handful of earth in those many thousand pounds of adobe, was carried up the trail on the backs of men and boys and women. And the great carved beams of the roof — Father Latour looked at them with amazement. In all the plain through which he had come he had seen no trees but a few stunted piñons. He asked Jacinto where these huge timbers could have been found.

“ ‘San Mateo mountain, I guess.'

“ ‘But the San Mateo mountains must be 40 or 50 miles away. How could they bring such timbers?'

“Jacinto shrugged. ‘Ácomas carry.' Certainly there was no other explanation.”

The Ácoma woman who guided my tour seemed to regard the building of the church with the same outrage. The Indians resented the missionaries' demands on their ancestors to such a degree, she remarked, that the Ácoma today speak only English and their native language, but never Spanish.

The Indians clung to their ancient religion even as they genuinely cooperated in the Catholic rituals. The practices still go on side by side. A short walk from the mission church is the pueblo's sacred kiva, its white-painted outdoor ladders angled northward, toward the place from which the ancestors came.

When the bishop says Mass in the church, he finds it difficult to go through the ceremony. “Before him, on the gray floor, in the gray light, a group of bright shawls and blankets, some 50 or 60 silent faces; above and behind them the gray walls. He felt as if he were celebrating Mass at the bottom of the sea, for antediluvian creatures; for types of life so old, so hardened, so shut within their shells, that the sacrifice on Calvary could hardly reach back so far. ...When he blessed them and sent them away, it was with a sense of inadequacy and spiritual defeat.”

Father Latour waits until the next day to descend. That night, he sleeps in the loggia in the corner of the priest's cloister. “He was on a naked rock in the desert, in the stone age, a prey to homesickness for his own kind, his own epoch,” Cather wrote, “for European man and his glorious history of desire and dreams.”

VISITOR INFORMATION

HOW TO GET THERE

Isleta Pueblo is a 15-minute drive south of Albuquerque on Interstate 25. Laguna is a half-hour drive west of Albuquerque off Interstate 40 (exit 114), and Ácoma is 20 to 25 minutes farther west from Laguna. To reach Ácoma, take exit 102, turn south and drive through mesa country for 11 miles. Park at the visitors center.

WHERE TO STAY

The pueblos are close enough to Albuquerque that it is convenient to stay in hotels there. But the Sky City Casino Hotel in Ácoma, 11 miles north of the old mesa-top pueblo, has modern, clean and comfortable rooms for $89 a night (888-759-2489; www.skycity.com).

To get a flavor of the bishop's favored New Mexico landscape, stay on the grounds of his old getaway. The sprawling Bishop's Lodge (505-983-6377; www.bishopslodge.com), three miles north of downtown Santa Fe, has preserved the simple little white wood-and-stone chapel and rooms where Bishop John Baptist Lamy planted orchards and spent his retirement. Today, the 450-acre resort offers horseback riding, pool swimming, tennis, extensive walking trails and, in the spa, massage therapy. Rooms range from $200 to $1,500.

WHAT TO SEE

St. Augustine Church (505-869-3398) at Isleta Pueblo and the San Jose Mission Church (505-552-9330) in Laguna are both open to the public. (No charge but donations are accepted.) The only way to see the old Ácoma mesa-top pueblo and its mission church of St. Stephen is to take a guided tour (800-747-0181; www.skycity.com). Buses drive visitors to the top of the mesa, and the tour of the church, cemetery and surrounding homes and cisterns takes about an hour. The cost is $12 for adults, $11 for seniors and $9 for children. A $10 permit is required to carry a camera.

The Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi (505-982-5619) in Santa Fe, whose construction was planned and overseen by Bishop Lamy, is a block east of Santa Fe Plaza and open to the public.

WHERE TO SHOP

The best place to buy Ácoma pottery, distinguished by pale pink clay and delicate designs, is on the mesa top. Individual artists sell directly to visitors from tables on the tour path.

In Isleta, Pueblo Indian pottery and other arts and crafts are on sale at Josephine Padilla's Hummingbird Gift Shop (505-869-3941), a short stroll from the mission church.

Yannis Kolesidis for The New York Times

POTENTIAL PLAYGROUND An arid region of Crete that is the proposed site of the Cavo Sidero resort development.

By JOANNA KAKISSIS

ONE of the Mediterranean’s prized stretches of virgin coast lies on the eastern tip of the Greek island of Crete — more than 6,000 acres of land on a craggy peninsula dotted with scrubby bouquets of thyme and sage. If all goes as planned, a group of international investors will turn that land into Cavo Sidero, which is already being promoted as the largest eco-friendly luxury tourism development in southeastern Europe.

On paper, Cavo Sidero looks like the ideal confluence of traditional elegance and environmental respect. A brochure shows watercolors of whitewashed village homes and photographs of starfish, birds and a father and his young son surf fishing. Local environmentalists, however, say water-starved Crete cannot support this $1.6 billion year-round resort, which would include hotels, vacation homes and golf courses.

The debate over the project reflects a concern throughout the Mediterranean, which is now facing drought and scorching heat waves: can a resort built on fragile land be ecologically sound?

“In the Mediterranean, where there’s still a dynamic tourism industry, sustainability is crucial,” said Gabor Vereczi, environmental quality chief in the sustainable development department of the United Nations World Tourism Organization, based in Madrid. “Unfortunately, there are many developments going up in very arid areas. If they want to survive, it’s just good business sense to make sure all environmental safeguards are followed rigorously.”

Indeed, signs of an environmental crisis are everywhere in the region. Parts of Greece, Cyprus, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Turkey are facing desertification, or the degradation of once-fertile soil, because of overbuilding, overgrazing, poor water resource management and an explosion in hothouse agriculture.

Many hoteliers and developers say they have already adopted greener practices. For instance, the Vila Sol Spa and Golf Resort in the Algarve region of Portugal and the Amathus Beach Hotel in Limassol, Cyprus, are touting their water management operations, while the Grecotel chain in Greece is experimenting with water-efficient organic farming in raising food for its hotels. Key Resorts, which operates the Mosa Trajectum resort near the southern city of Murcia in Spain, is promoting “100 percent ecological golfing”; its courses are built on biodegradable foam that is said to reduce water evaporation.

Dolphin Capital Partners, an Athens-based private equity firm specializing in real estate developments in southeast Europe, is working with resorts in Greece, Cyprus and Croatia that will have on-site desalination and wastewater treatment plants and use native plants for landscaping. One Dolphin project, Sitia Bay, is set to go up near the Cavo Sidero site.

“If you are somewhere with water problems, like eastern Crete, you cannot make the area all green, as if you’re recreating Norway,” said Spyros Tzoannos, Dolphin’s asset management director. “You have got to work with the natural environment.”

The Minoan Group, the developers who are planning Cavo Sidero, spent about 2 million euros on an environmental study and also pledged to build desalination and wastewater treatment plants. They say their golf courses will be filled with seashore paspalum, a salt-tolerant grass, and with local flora instead of grasses that require a lot of water. The developers have also partnered with a British-based environmental organization, Forum for the Future, and plan to educate vacationers and homeowners at Cavo Sidero on responsible water use.

“The last thing we want is for people to come here and drive through a desert,” said Christopher Egleton, president of the Minoan Group.

The Greek government strongly supports the project, which includes six villages with traditional homes, villas and apartments as well as hotels, sports facilities, restaurants and shops on about 1 percent of the site. The rest will be set aside for trails, nature areas and three golf courses. When the developers presented their plans earlier this year, the Greek tourism minister, Fani Palli-Petralia, said it would be “one of the greatest projects ever carried out in Greece.”

The Cavo Sidero land belongs to Toplou, a wealthy monastery that owns much of the land in eastern Crete, where it grazes goats and cultivates olives. Philotheos, the monastery’s abbot, has long wanted to invigorate the local economy with more tourism. In 1994, a foundation of which the abbot was a founder agreed to lease the tract, more than 6,000 acres, to the Minoan Group (then called Loyalward Ltd.) for 40 years with an option for 40 more years, in exchange for 10 percent of the gross annual revenue.

But many environmentalists and residents do not want the project. “We don’t want to be in the position of running out of water because it’s being pumped to the tourists there,” said Manolis Tsantakis, an Itanos council member who voted against Cavo Sidero.

Scientists say Greece’s water reserves could dwindle by a quarter by 2030 because of rising temperatures and a decrease in rainfall. The situation is especially sensitive in Crete, which faces chronic droughts and where half of the island is at risk of desertification.

Mr. Tsantakis and other critics of the project would rather see the site used for a public cultural park or not developed at all. They have taken their appeal to Greece’s highest court, which is set to hear the case late this fall.

Mr. Vereczi of the United Nations tourism organization says assessing the ecological viability of luxury developments can be difficult because it’s hard to define exactly what “eco” means in this context.

For many ecotourism devotees, “luxury is the opposite of eco,” said Antonis Petropoulos, director of the Athens-based Ecoclub, an international network of affordable lodges that focus on nature. In Spain, for instance, Ecoclub’s sole member is Mas Lluerna Eco Farm in Catalonia, where visitors live on an organic farm and surrounding wetlands and cook on solar-powered ovens.

Those looking for affordable ecotourism accommodations in the Mediterranean can check with groups such as Sustainable Travel International in Boulder, Colo., and the British-based Responsible Travel, which screen their member hotels for ecological responsibility. The European Union also awards “eco-labels” to accommodations that meet several guidelines, including limiting water usage and waste production. But the eco-label has gone to only a handful of operators, including Sunwing resorts in Greece, Cyprus and Spain.

“Part of the problem is that sustainability is a difficult thing to measure,” said Brian Mullis, president of Sustainable Travel International, which is working with Leading Hotels of the World to draft eco-certification guidelines for that organization’s 440 member hotels. That will take at least a year, said Kristin Glass, marketing director for Leading Hotels of the World.

Meanwhile, the Rome-based Luxury Camps and Lodges of the World offers an international directory of 89 small-scale “eco-luxury” options. Enrico Ducrot, the organization’s president, says he hopes more leisure resort developers in the Mediterranean get serious about sustainability.

“Unless a new model of sustainability is adopted,” Mr. Ducrot said, “it is hard to know who is just talking and who is the real thing.”

Thomas Fuchs

FOR a vacation to Italy in June, Dominique Linchet had packed everything she thought her family of four would need when they arrived: toiletries, bathing suits, dental retainers. But when they stepped off their Alitalia flight in Rome, the suitcases they had checked were missing.

After filing a claim with the airline and being reassured by an Alitalia employee that they would be reimbursed for half of the expenses incurred because of the delay, the family frantically shopped for bare necessities.

“Underwear is not easy to find in Rome,” said Ms. Linchet, an associate professor of French from Birmingham, Ala., “except for the high-end kind.” Finding clothes that would fit her husband, whom she describes as “a big American guy,” proved difficult as well. “It wasn’t like going to an American mall and finding what we need at the Gap,” she said.

The Linchets ultimately spent 2,300 euros (about $3,250 at $1.41 to the euro) on everything from bathing suits to tennis gear as the days passed and the bags remained lost. “I think we were pretty good at just buying what we needed,” Ms. Linchet said. “At the same time, we had to buy enough so we could have a nice week of vacation.” She added, “When you think about it, 2,300 euros for four people is not outrageous, but it was about $3,000 more than we had planned on spending.”

Finally, nine days into the trip, the Linchets were reunited with all of their luggage, thanks in large part to repeated visits to the airport to search for their belongings.

But as August wore on, they still hadn’t yet received any compensation for their inconvenience in June. “What is the airlines’ responsibility in such a situation, and what are the travelers’ options in making sure that this responsibility is fulfilled?” Ms. Linchet said.

It’s a question on many travelers’ minds these days as reports of mishandled luggage continue to increase. The top 20 domestic airlines mishandled 7.92 checked bags per 1,000 passengers in June, higher than both June 2006’s 6.30 rate and May 2007’s 5.93 mark, according to the most recent Air Travel Consumer Report issued by the Transportation Department.

The answer largely depends on the carrier. Most will pay for reasonable expenses you incur while your bag is missing, but specifics are often vague. For example, if you are traveling away from home on United, its Web site says, it “may consider up to 50 percent reimbursement of the necessities purchased, taking into account your ability to use the new items in the future.”

Other airlines state that they will attempt to return your luggage within 24 hours but make no promises about reimbursing you for your costs. Northwest is among the most straightforward. Its Web site states that a customer whose luggage is delayed may request a free toiletries kit at the airport and reimbursement for personal items purchased as a result of the delay, limited to $50 for the first 24 hours and $25 for each additional day of delay, up to $150 per ticketed passenger. Alitalia says it refunds all expenses incurred by clients during the period they are without luggage. The airline is investigating why Ms. Linchet has not yet received reimbursement.

Airlines are required to pay valid claims for luggage that is never returned, but the Transportation Department doesn’t specify how much. In fact, liability rules favor the airlines, not the passengers. For a trip within the United States, an airline can invoke a ceiling of $3,000 a passenger on the amount of money it must pay, up from $2,800 before Feb. 28, according to the “Fly-Rights” guide of the Transportation Department (airconsumer.ost.dot.gov/publications/flyrights.htm).

On international round trips that originate in the United States, the allowable liability limit is set by a treaty called the Montreal Convention at roughly $1,500, depending on the exchange rate of the dollar against foreign currencies.

When Air France misplaced her bag for her entire weeklong trip in Europe last month, Rebecca Bernstein, 13, from Bergen County, N.J., spent $564 to furnish herself with clothing, luggage and toiletries. Her father, Peter A. Bernstein, a marketing communications consultant, paid for the items and eventually received an apology letter and a note saying he would be getting a check for the full cost.

BUT that was only after he made multiple long-distance calls to the airline’s Paris office (after being turned away by the stateside customer service office), wrote a letter to the airline detailing the issue, and eventually tracked down the assistant to an Air France executive to hear his case.

“All in all, not exactly a ringing endorsement of Air France,” Mr. Bernstein said. His advice for getting the airline to pay up: Go through the appropriate channels to start with. Keep a diary of what you’re told, and include the names of people you speak with. “If that’s unsatisfactory, call headquarters and ask to speak to the secretary of whoever is in charge,” he said. “Then you say, ‘O.K., here’s what I’ve done.’ ”

His daughter’s lost bag eventually made its way to Mr. Bernstein after she returned home. “A guy shows up in a station wagon loaded with bags and proceeds to drop off a green bag,” Mr. Bernstein recalled. “My daughter’s is black. I look at the guy and say, ‘You’ve got to be kidding. That’s not her bag.’ ” Mr. Bernstein ended up digging the right bag out of the back of the vehicle.

For those who don’t mind paying for convenience, companies with names like Luggage Express, Luggage Forward and Virtual Bellhop will pick up and deliver bags, bypassing the airline baggage system altogether. Prices vary depending on a bag’s weight, destination and shipping time.

Luggage Express charges an average of $89, for example, to send a duffel bag weighing up to 40 pounds one way ahead within the United States, with three to five days of shipping time. Overnight delivery costs $137.

You can also buy travel insurance to protect yourself if your bag is lost or delayed. American Express, for example, charges cardholders $5.75 a trip for up to $500 against loss or damage to your checked or carry-on bags and up to $200 for replacing personal items when bags are delayed six hours or more.

Nikos Tsanos, the writer’s guide to fly-fishing in Greece, casts on the Kalarritikos River in the mountains of Epirus, the northwest region of the country.

MY search for trout fishing in Greece began on the slopes of the Taygetus Mountains of southern Greece where Spartan boys once toughened themselves for battle against the Persians at Thermopylae.

Not finding fish in the Evrotas River, which waters the oranges and olives of the Spartan plain, I pushed farther up into the mountains of the Peloponnesus, the big peninsula that gives Greece its characteristic shape. I followed maps and my instincts and asked questions of local villagers and others, who responded with puzzled looks. Fly-fishing for trout in Greece? Greeks catch their fish in the sea, often with spear guns and sometimes with dynamite.

Ever since I had first looked on the rugged peaks that define the Greek landscape, I was seized with the romantic notion of catching a trout in an ancient mountain stream, home to some of Homer's woodland nymphs. It seemed a preposterous notion at first, but finally my journey was rewarded in Epirus, about 180 miles north of my starting point, in the northwest corner of Greece.

I found cold crystalline rivers that flowed through glorious oak-clad mountains and held a lot of wild trout. It is trout fishing as Lord Byron would have imagined it: a wild and rugged land, softened here and there with touches of classical antiquity. I had stumbled into a fisherman's paradise.

On one section of the Louros River in Epirus, I cast my fly in the eddies created by the ruins of a 2,000-year-old Roman aqueduct, which had carried the river's sweet water 30 miles south to the ancient city of Nikopolis. Octavian built the city to commemorate his victory at Actium in 31 B.C.

My guide through the region was Nikos Tsanos, 41, a serious fly-fisherman and the owner of a door and window plant in Ioannina, capital of Epirus. He owns a fine collection of fly rods and reels, reads widely on fly-fishing in the United States and Britain and has organized a small group of fishermen, Greek and British, in the area to protect the fishing.

He and I met one morning at one of the many pleasant lakeside cafes in Ioannina. As with many things in Greece, planning a fly-fishing trip begins with strong coffee and a cigarette. Mr. Tsanos explained to me that Epirus offers freestone streams (rain and snow fed) and limestone streams (spring fed). It also produces an astonishing variety of insect life for fly-fishermen. The rivers have regular hatches of mayflies, caddis and stoneflies. “This is the Montana of Greece,” he said.

It is also close to the place where fly-fishing was born. Scholars say the first reference to the sport was by a Roman in the second century A.D. who described fishing with feathers in a river in a region near Epirus.

Fishing the area's limestone streams requires skill. The water is clear as pane glass, and the brown trout are easily spooked. They are also highly selective, taking only the flies that imitate insects, in size, color and shape, that naturally occur in the stream.

As a cool breeze came to us under our cafe umbrella off Lake Pamvotis, we planned to meet again in the evening to catch the insect hatch at dusk on the nearby Louros River.

At dusk, Mr. Tsanos picked me up at my hotel, and we drove to the village of St. George, which shares its patron saint with many Greek villages. A hole pierces the mountain above the village, and in the hole stands a cross, visible for miles. The old story, he told me, is that St. George flew through the hole on his horse, an event that gave the village its name. The Louros River flows below the hole and the cross.

If there is a more visually seductive place to fish, I have never seen it. The river gurgles past the village, under giant and sinuous oaks and through the Roman aqueduct. It is a scene from an Italian Renaissance painting. Unfortunately for me, I couldn't hook a fish as Mr. Tsanos landed one brown trout after another. At dark, we called it quits and decided to meet early the next morning for a trip to the Kalarritikos River.

“Tomorrow, you will catch a trout,” he assured me. “The river is a nursery of trout.”

He was right. In 40 years of fly-fishing in North America, I have never fished a stream that was both more beautiful and more productive. We drove about an hour over hairpin roads through the deeply cleft mountains. We parked at an iron bridge that spanned the stream and scrambled down the steep rocky slope to the silver band of water.

Mr. Tsanos offered me his British-made rod. It was a lovely super-light rod designed for this kind of finesse fishing. It was a generous offer, and I couldn't resist.

Our plan was to fish from the iron bridge upstream to an ancient stone bridge below a monastery that seemed magically fastened to the side of the mountain. It was about a half mile of water, and it would take us all day to cover it.

The river wended through a narrow gorge, rushing here and pausing there, to form an ellipsis of small waterfalls and quiet pools. The water was as cold as refrigerated gin, and the sun was so bright in the sky of sheer blue that the fly seemed to dissolve in the light when I lifted it from the water.

Mr. Tsanos soon began catching 10-to-12-inch trout on a big cream-colored dry fly. I was going fishless with my fly, an Adams Irresistible. “Here, try this rod and fly,” he said. “Maybe you will like it better.” He handed me his favorite rod, a stiff nine-footer that was perfect for reaching the far end of the pools.

I began picking up trout, gorgeous colorful browns, with vivid aureoles of yellow, orange and blue.

We had lunch in a vale of oaks that were placed like dancers among the boulders and then we made our way onward, climbing a high bank and looking down to a deep pool of transparent blue water and white stones. We could see three very large trout — one possibly six pounds — moving along the bottom. We knew they would be hard to catch on a dry fly, but we tried anyway. No luck.

We reached the old stone bridge, a marvel of stones, mortar and ancient engineering. We said goodbye to the stream and ascended to have a look at the monastery. “The men went there for a religious life and to get away from the Turks,” Mr. Tsanos said. “Who could reach them there?”

I had to agree: the monastery gripped the cliff like a piece of moss. It was a series of cells cut into the stone with individual doors and a rope that ran down to the path, so that food could be passed up to the monks.

Below the monastery, a stream flowed directly out of the rock of the mountain — the rock appeared to yawn, and from its yawn a stream poured out. Exhausted but pleased with our successful day, we kneeled and drank the delicious cold water with our cupped hands. I imagined the presence of nymphs.

If YOU GO

Ioannina can be reached on a 45-minute flight from Athens on Olympic or Aegean Airlines, which have several flights a day, or by car (a six-hour drive). You'll need to rent a car either in Athens or Ioannina to reach the rivers and the classical, Byzantine and Ottoman historical sites of Epirus.

Because the fishing is hardly known outside the region, there is no established guiding industry. For information on where and how to fish and local conditions, send an e-mail message to Nikos Tsanos at tsanos1@otenet.gr. You should bring your own equipment, though Gerontas Gun and Tackle Shop in Ioannina offers rods and flies. No fishing license is required.

A wide range of hotels is available in the city, including the Epirus Palace (30-26510-93555, www.epiruspalace.gr), Du Lac (30-26510-59100, www.dulac.gr) and Hotel Olympic (30-26510-25147; www.hotelolymp.gr), which range in price in price from about 125 euros to 150 euros a night (about $175 to $210 at $1.41 to the euro). You can also choose a clean, adequate small hotel or pension near the old section of the city. I stayed in the Egnatia Hotel (30-26510-25667) and found it better than adequate. It advertises a rate of 65 euros a night.

There are a dozen or more restaurants on the lake promenade, and you will be among many people, old and young, enjoying the soft Greek night outdoors. A high-end meal is 25 euros, and many excellent meals can cost far less. Be sure to leave room after dinner so that you can walk along the lakeshore and sample the bakeries that stay open into the evening.

Lou Ureneck’s memoir "Backcast: Fatherhood, Fly Fishing and a River Journey Through the Heart of Alaska" will be released next month by St. Martin’s Press.

Vámosi Gergő
2007. 08. 15., 8:45Utolsó módosítás: 2007. 08. 15., 8:46eszközök:

Azt szeretné a főváros, hogy wifizni lehessen egész Pesten. A móka 4-5 milliárdba kerülne, amit a rendszert kiépítő cégekkel fizettetnének meg. Ők fizetős felhasználókban reménykedhetnek, mi pedig abban, hogy több lesz az ingyenes szolgáltatás, mint a fizetős. Az önkormányzat még maga sem tudja, mi lesz az álmokból, de a nagy sebsességre már esküszik.

A főváros önkormányzata már egy éve tervezi, hogy vezeték nélküli internettel fedi le Budapestet. Az elképzelés lényege, hogy a budapesti közterületeken - utcákon, tereken, parkokba - ingyen lehessen internetezni a villanyoszlopokra szerelt wifi-jeladók segítségével. A város egész területét lefednék, de úgy, hogy ez egy fillér közpénzbe se kerüljön: a hálózatot a tendert megpályázó internetszolgáltatók építenék ki és üzemeltetnék, a főváros csak a helyet és a hotspotok működtetéséhez szükséges áramellátást biztosítaná számukra a kandelábereken.

Mi lesz ingyen?

A tendert megpályázó cégeknek az ingyen wifi mellett nyújtott fizetős szolgáltatásból lenne bevételük, vagyis ebből kellene kitermelniük a hotspotok telepítésének és üzemeltetésének költségeit. Azt azonban még nem tudjuk, hogy pontosan mire lesz jó az ingyenes net, és miért kell már fizetni. Az önkormányzat a tervek szerint a közérdekű információkhoz, tömegközlekedési menetrendekhez és az e-ügyintézéshez szabad hozzáférést biztosít majd a felhasználóknak, ezen felül a városháza dönti majd el, hogy milyen oldalakat lehet ingyenesen letölteni.

Ikvai-Szabó Imre városfejlesztésért felelős főpolgármester-helyettes határozott igennel válaszolt arra a kérdésünkre, hogy a wifi-hálózat kiépítése után ingyenesen lehet-e majd internetezni a városban. A tervet elővezető politikus szerint a fizetős szolgáltatások elsősorban tartalomszolgáltatást jelentenek, de ezzel kapcsolatban egyelőre nem árult el többet, viszont azt is hozzátette, hogy az ingyenes netezés idejét vagy sebességét semmiképpen nem szeretnék korlátozni - mint ahogy azt sok szolgáltató teszi, aki pénzért árulja a gyorsabb, tetszőleges ideig használható wifi-kapcsolatot.

Telefon helyett is használná az önkormányzat

Az utca emberének nyújtott szolgáltatás mellett az önkormányzat is használná a várost lefedő wifit, mégpedig a "digitális városüzemeltetéshez". Ez azt jelenti, hogy a közigazgatásban, az önkormányzati szerveknél dolgozók kommunikálhatnának rajta keresztül, de alkalmas lehet közlekedési és forgalomirányítási információk, vagy akár térfigyelő, rendszámtábla-figyelő kamerák képeinek továbbítására.

A városházán jelenleg egy wifis telefonszolgáltatást tesztelnek, amely a drágább, vonalas- vagy mobiltelefonokat válthatná ki (legalábbis részben). Ez az a szolgáltatás, amit az üzemeltetők fizetős extraként is nyújthatnának: Nyugat-Európában létező modell, hogy az arra alkalmas készülékkel - wifis mobillal, PDA-val vagy laptoppal - a felhasználó a rendes netelérés díjánál olcsóbban Skype-olhat, ami még az esetleges fizetős netes telefonhívások díjával együtt is kevesebbe kerül, mint a mobilozás.

Milliárdokba kerülhet a város lefedése

A legnagyobb kérdés, hogy a szolgáltatóknak megéri-e belevágni a főváros által elképzelt projektbe, vagyis lesz-e vevő az ingyenes wifi mellett a fizetős változatra, amelynek az egész beruházást el kell majd tartania. Ikvai-Szabó szerint a szolgáltatásra "nagy igény van", és sok beruházó érdeklődik a tender iránt - beleértve olyanokat is, akik még nincsenek jelen a hazai piacon. A Magyarországon 300 hotspotot üzemeltető Wiera szerint akár egymillió forintba is kerülhet egyetlen kandeláberes jeladó, a teljes hálózat kiépítésének költségeit pedig a Világgazdaság 4-5 milliárd forintra becsülte.

Egy ilyen beruházás megtérüléséhez legalább 5-7 évre van szükség - mondta az [origo]-nak Strelisky Ádám, a Budapesten közterületi hotspotokat is működtető Ace Telecom ügyvezető igazgatója. A cégvezető becslései szerint is elérheti akár a 7-800 ezer forintot egy olyan, akkumulátorról működtetett hotspot, amelyet a közvilágításnak szánt éjszakai áramról töltenek fel, nem is beszélve arról, hogy az akkukat egy-másfél évente cserélni kell. Emellett az engedélyeztetési adminisztráció miatt is igen bonyolult lehet a vezetékes internet elvezetése az azt rádióhullámok formájában továbbító hotspotig.

Hotspotért a magyar nem fizet

Strelisky saját tapasztalataik alapján azt állította, lehet igény az utcai wifire, bár wifis ügyfeleik legtöbbje jelenleg csak a cég időkorlátos ingyenes szolgáltatását veszi igénybe. A magyar wifizők közösségét tömörítő HuWiCo képviselője, Türk István viszont már szkeptikusabb a tervvel kapcsolatban: szerinte az ingyen wifire csak a belvárosban, a turisták és üzletemberek által sűrűn látogatott területeken van igény, ahol egyébként is vannak hotspotok, és fizetős szolgáltatást a magyar felhasználóknak szinte lehetetlen eladni. A társaság pár hónappal ezelőtti kérdőíves felmérése szerint Magyarországon még mindig csak egy szűk réteg használja a nyilvános hotspotokat, és ők sem nagyon hajlandók fizetni ezért: inkább az ingyenes lehetőségekre vadásznak.

Ráadásul az önkormányzati ingyenwifi-tervének konkurenciája lehet a Fonera-mozgalom is: a spanyol kezdeményezéshez csatlakozó felhasználók egymással osztják meg a vezeték nélküli internetet. Igaz, ezt a megoldást a szolgáltatói szerződések tiltják, és sok Fon-tag arra sem figyel, hogy a routerének jelerőssége az utcán is elég jó legyen, ne csak nála, a lakásban.

Kevés a nemzetközi tapasztalat

A budapestihez hasonló, nagy területet lefedő önkormányzati wifi-szolgáltatás több nagyvárosban működik, de rendszerint a város turisztikai vagy üzleti szempontból kiemelten fontos negyedeiben. Londonban háromféle megoldás létezik: a metropolisz pénzügyi központjában, a Cityben egy fizetős rendszer szolgálja ki az üzletembereket, a turisták a Temze partján reklámokért cserébe wifizhetnek ingyen, Islingtonban pedig a főutcát rakták tele hotspotokkal, és számítógépeket is osztottak az ott lakóknak, hogy élénkítsék az e-gazdaságot.

Az ingyen wifis városok sorában ott van még Madrid, Frankfurt, Párizs, Stockholm és Helsinki is, nem is beszélve San Franciscóról és több amerikai nagyvárosról, de mindezek a kezdeményezések még túl fiatalok ahhoz, hogy megalapozott következtetéseket lehessen levonni az eredményeikről. Arról pedig ősszel tudhatunk meg többet, hogy nálunk egyáltalán mi valósulhat meg a nagyszabású tervekből, amikor a tenderkiírást nyilvánosságra hozza az önkormányzat.

[origo]