IT seems it's necessary to visit Venice every few years to reaffirm that a couple of things haven't changed. One, the world's favorite city hasn't yet sunk into the sea, and two, the food isn't nearly as bad as most “experts” report.

In fact, we remain aware of Venice's impending demise through reports, not observation, and the food is beyond a doubt the most underrated in all of Italy.

To many Americans, it's somehow seen as a shortcoming that all the good Venetian restaurants specialize in fish, and use less butter and garlic than in much of northern Italy, almost no Parmesan or prosciutto, and but a few spices. Yes, the cooking is limited in scope, intensely regional and seasonal; but Alice Waters has been proclaimed a genius for cooking this way.

It all seems strange at first, but then you remember that Venice was the seat of an empire, and is unusual even in a confederation of former city-states. They do their own thing there, and they do it so well that you can eat variations of the same dishes over and over and keep enjoying them.

And if Venice's good restaurants are expensive, there are swell places to stay that are not, and you can walk almost everywhere, saving tons of money on taxis. To eat well, you must go to the right places — not the pizzeria at the base of the Accademia, or any place in St. Mark's Square. And the right places are either the bacari (the neighborhood wine and snack bars) or the undeniably pricey old reliables and their imitators.

Time after time this year, I found the best cooking in Venice restaurants at the same places I'd found it during my last lengthy visit, more than 10 years ago.

The general recommendations are these: Avoid places with tourist menus, eat loads of fish and drink white. (That you can walk everywhere allows you to freely imbibe the excellent local wines, like Soave, which in general is like no Soave you'll get in the United States.) In the good places you'll be served shrimp — or prawns or any of the dozen or so local names for that family of crustaceans — that make you think no other shrimp should exist.

One place new to me, and serving my favorite version of slightly updated traditional Venetian food at a relatively reasonable price, is Osteria di Santa Marina (Castello, Campo Santa Marina 5911; 39-041-528-5239; www.osteriadisantamarina.it). It is a cute but not funky joint with rough-plank wood walls, glass-front dark wood cabinets, hanging metal lampshades, and windows overlooking the lovely campo.

I was interested in the 55-euro tasting menu (about $75 at $1.37 to the euro) but not in salmon carpaccio, so I asked the waiter for a substitution. After lengthy and intensely amiable negotiations, with many suggestions on his part, I wound up with a customized tasting menu, the majority of which was substitutions.

When I ate just half of every dish (I'd lunched at Da Fiore), they discounted the bill 25 percent. “It's just the way we do things here,” my waiter said.

This in a city widely considered to be filled with thieves.

What I ate was super: black sea bass ravioli in mussel-clam broth, beautifully hand shaped and pinched on top, like dim sum; perfect black barley risotto with mushrooms, zucca (pumpkin) purée, and a couple of first-rate grilled scampi; grilled octopus on a bed of potatoes mashed with olive oil, along with cold, slow-cooked tomato — a surprising touch that worked — and a garnish of lardo (cured fat) tangled with a wafer of black bread; zucca saor (saor is the local marinade, usually of raisins, pine nuts, oil, vinegar and onion) with thin fried slices of artichoke and soft shell crab.

Then there was the inevitable, ubiquitous, emblematic and wonderful fritto misto, served on greaseless brown paper and featuring the local tiny soft-shell crab, about the size of a silver dollar — crisp, light, hot, irresistible. I liked the desserts, too, especially the almond nougat with chantilly, raspberries and pistachio ice cream, and the lemon sorbet with licorice.

That was the most ambitious and perhaps most enjoyable meal I ate in Venice, but it was not necessarily the best. That honor would have to go to the popular, deservedly hyped Da Fiore (San Polo, Calle del Scaleter, 2002; 39-041-721-308; www.dafiore.net), which, despite its tuxedoed staff and expense (figure at least 100 euros a person for three courses plus dessert and a moderately priced bottle of wine), is friendly and not at all stuffy. From the moment I tasted the amuse-bouche — shrimp broth with orange peel — I was sold. The food restores faith.

This was followed by crostini with the most tender and delicately flavored shrimp, wrapped in thin slices of lardo with a little rosemary, and then a plate of lightly fried and ultra crisp vegetables: red onion, Treviso (the local radicchio, served everywhere in season), celery, broccoli, asparagus and zucchini. Was there lemon?

“We don't do that here,” I was told. “Maybe you'd like a little pepper?”

Did I say Venetians do their own thing?

With the exception of a few vegetarian items and a duck breast, the menu — which changes daily — was all fish. I next had bigoli, whole wheat pasta with sardines and caramelized onions, unfortunately in a slightly silly thin bread bowl.

Next up was fried eel with celery and blueberries. I thought this, too, might be contrived, but I wanted the eel. It didn't disappoint: the fish was gorgeously filleted, with its deep-fried and edible skeleton around the outside of the plate like a necklace. The sweet, perfectly cooked fish was so hot and crisp I nearly burned my mouth; the celery was shredded, lightly drizzled with good olive oil and salt; and I had to admit the blueberries found a place there, their sweetness offsetting the bitter celery.

A hot-and-cold Roman-style dish of puntarelle with anchovies underneath and striped bass baked with bread crumbs on top was nearly as dazzling.

Another perennially highly rated spot is Fiaschetteria Toscana (Cannaregio, 5719; 39-041-528-5281; www.fiaschetteriatoscana.it), abundantly decorated with Venetian glass lamps, amusing prints and painted plates from restaurants all over Italy's north. Upon entering this overly bright, elegant and relatively small place — there might be 40 seats — you see a refrigerator case with the offerings of the day's fish.

But, as I learned chatting with the waiter, there are often other options. “We have a few monkfish cheeks in the kitchen,” he told me, as if I'd be a fool not to seize all of them.

I ordered a plateful, and they were served, not unexpectedly, perfectly fried and about 30 seconds out of the oil. I next sampled the tiny, sweet razor clams, like most of the food there ungarnished and served as if they needed nothing else, which was indeed the case.

A fine salad, made on the spot, featured tiny arugula and Treviso; grilled white polenta was as good as it can be; and, finally, there was intensely flavored fresh black pasta with local lobster. I drank a full-bodied, fat, rich Soave (Pieropan La Rocca, 2004), which I finished with a fantastic selection of cheese, all from northern Italy.

Nor could I resist the custard fried in butter and sugar, which is prepared in the dining room and scents the air with such a strong aroma that I'm quite sure 10 customers a night who normally forgo dessert cave in and order it. (It's worth the splurge.)

At Toscana as well as elsewhere, most customers arrived between 7:30 and 8 p.m. — Venice is known to be an early-eating town, to the delight of many Americans — and by 8:15 the refrigerator case was emptying out, and the waiters were suggesting fewer dishes, certainly not the monkfish cheeks. There were maybe five minutes between courses; it's all completely understated, efficient and minimalist, if not cheap (like Da Fiore, around 100 euros a person).

In each of these restaurants, the waiters had been friendly, English-speaking and helpfully suggestive. That trend continued at Al Covo (Castello, 3968; 39-041-522-3812), where I nearly fell in love with the gentleman who served me, initially because he sold me on a cheaper bottle of Soave than my first choice, 8 euros instead of 30, and then because he told me exactly what to order. And he was right.

Al Covo is venerable and much loved, a funny little place with tables outside, a pink terrazzo floor, cushioned benches lining the walls, leather chairs, gauzy curtains and, in lieu of flowers, various vegetables in vases on the tables. I seem to remember it being inexpensive when I was there in the mid-90s, but now, like everything else, the price has ballooned to around 75 euros a person. (The exchange rate, obviously, is working against Americans; a restaurant this good for $75 a person including wine, anywhere in the States, would be unique.)

I started with a tasting of stockfish (dried cod) dishes, all very sweet and mild, with lovely textures: a kind of brandade on polenta; a light stew with tomatoes and peppers; another with anchovies. I then moved on to pasta with shrimp sauce, made with local shrimp and very intense. (It was between this and a plate of mixed seafood, which looked equally fantastic, but I was on a pasta roll.)

The salad was of arugula, radicchio and celery, a nice combo; it was mixed by the waiter, and I swear when I asked for salt he scoffed. It was followed by local sole, simply grilled, with olive oil; this he boned for me. Dessert was a kind of nut-crumb-spice cake, with a not-overly-sweet caramel sauce; I liked it.

Finally, there was Osteria Vecio Fritolin (Rialto, Calle della Regina, 2262; 39-041-522-2881; www.veciofritolin.it), supposedly the last of the original fritolin, fry shops specializing in (what else?) fish. It's an unpretentious little place (you can eat well there for about 50 euros a person), with an appropriately small menu that presumably procures its fresh fish from the nearby Rialto.

I had been sent there with this message: you will eat fritto misto all over Venice, but you won't eat it better than you will there. This turned out to be the truth.

The fritto misto comprised tiny whole cuttlefish; whole baby sardines; a triglia (red mullet, known as rouget in much of the world); several sizes of shrimp, some whole, some not; nicely fried zucchini; and fried polenta. All the frying was expert, and in olive oil. That the rest of the food didn't measure up was more a comment on the high quality of the fritto misto than on the deficiencies of everything else.

If all this doesn't appeal to you, you either don't like fish, vegetables, pasta and polenta, or combinations of the above, or you don't like fried food (which can, with effort, be avoided, though why you'd want to I can hardly imagine). If it does appeal to you, go — there's a pretty good city to look at while you're walking to the restaurants.

Marko Kecman/XAOC/ostphoto

The Exit Festival in Novi Sad, Serbia.

DESPITE recent events hinting at its resuscitation, the Cold War pretty much conked out for good 18 years ago. For music fans in the former Eastern bloc, the demise of the old regime brought about an unexpected benefit: the arrival of rock and techno music festivals on a huge scale previously reserved for May Day celebrations. More recently, Western festivalgoers have begun to take notice of these concerts, drawn not only by the acts, but also by the alluring ticket prices and the unfettered enthusiasm of the audience.

Over the next two months, a half-dozen big concerts will bring international stars to countries that were once locked behind the Iron Curtain, a place where rocking out was a near impossibility, if not outright forbidden. In large part these festivals are considerably cheaper than their Western European equivalents, despite often being much larger: a ticket for the seven-day Sziget Festival in Hungary, for instance, is 37,500 forint ($193 at 195 forint to the dollar), while the Reading festival in England clocks in at three days for £145 ($290 at $2 to the pound). Each show gets you Razorlight, Nine Inch Nails, Gogol Bordello and Unkle, among other groups. But Sziget also includes hundreds of additional performances from the likes of Madness, the Chemical Brothers, Tinariwen, Laurent Garnier and the Good, the Bad and the Queen, as well as lots of local talent.

And there’s an easy-to-overlook bonus: crowds here have loads of enthusiasm and precious little snark.

“Outside of South America, I’d say that people in Eastern Europe are the most joyous crowds to play to,” said Tony McGuinness, one-third of Above & Beyond, the electronic music superpower. “With Poland and the other countries joining the E.U., there’s a great sense of optimism there. Whoever’s on, whatever D.J.’s playing, if it’s good music, they love it.”

Above & Beyond will have to wait until July 7 to feel the love at Creamfields Poland in Wroclaw, where they will perform with the Prodigy, Vitalic and a slew of other dance and electronic acts. But this week, Poland kicks off its festival season on June 29 with Open’er, a three-day party featuring noise-rockers Sonic Youth, neo new-wavers Bloc Party and two sets (one instrumental) from the Beastie Boys, all happening at the Baltic Sea port of Gdynia.

Electronic or rock are hardly the only options: Other concerts around the region this summer include folk, funk, punk and a whole lot of world music — in short, pretty much everything.

I attended my first post-Velvet Revolution music festival in 2005, paying the last-minute equivalent of $20 for a ticket to a concert series in pastoral southern Bohemia, about 90 minutes from Prague. There, joining a group of friends, I relaxed in an old and wrinkled but sturdy Communist-era tent we had taken with us (camping fee: $0) before checking out a six-hour show that began with head-banging Metallica covers from the Finnish cello quartet Apocalyptica and culminated with a barrage of psychotic karate kicks from the moody rocker Nick Cave. Somewhere in the middle were Czech electroclash and punk bands, two immense stages, separate techno and hip-hop tents, hair-styling salons, tattoo and piercing artists and tons of food vendors. More notable, there was a very friendly feel wherever you turned. Unlike the mud of Woodstock, the mosh pits of Lollapalooza and the chaos at Altamont, the scene here was clean, strangely placid and oddly familial. There was plenty of alcohol, but no visible drunkenness, plenty of bouncers but no bouncing, just a bunch of people of all ages having a great time.

A similar ambience can be expected at a much larger Czech festival: Rock for People, July 4 to 7, which takes place near Hradec Kralove, about 70 miles east of Prague. This year’s lineup includes punk and post-punk groups like the Killers, the Hives and the Toy Dolls, as well as world music greats like Mory Kanté, the Guinean master of the kora harp.

There are so many other great festivals around the region that choosing just one seems impossible. Beyond Creamfields and Open’er in Poland, there’s the Pohoda Festival in Slovakia, the very name of which is akin to “cool,” a fitting label for a showcase of Air, Basement Jaxx, DJ Shadow and Cansei de Ser Sexy, among others. Or there is the Exit Fest in Novi Sad, Serbia, with more Beastie Boys and Cansei de Ser Sexy, as well as such disparate musicians as Robert Plant and Snoop Dogg, though presumably not together.

And then there is Sziget in Budapest., on Obudai, an island in the Danube, Aug. 8 to 15. Sziget functions less as a music festival than as a kind of small-scale United Nations, bringing in musicians from Iceland (GusGus) to Cameroon (Manu Dibango) and most places in between: Japan (Gocoo), Finland (Varttina), Russia (Leningrad), France (Sergent Garcia), Mali (Salif Keita) plus dozens of acts from Britain and the United States.

Though the big acts create the headlines, there’s plenty of good stuff on the smaller stages scattered around, according to Erik D’Amato, the American editor of pestiside.hu, an online magazine based in Budapest.

“If you want to see something different, you have to seek out the little tents with different stuff,” Mr. D’Amato said. “There’s always a Roma music tent, and there’s jazz and local bands that just show up and play. And you have to see Kiss Forever, which I would say is the world’s finest Kiss cover band.”

Despite the throngs — Sziget had almost 400,000 visitors last year — Mr. D’Amato says that the festival pulls it off very well.

“The last time I went, you could still get a taxi out at the end of the night,” he said, referring to 2005. “It’s pretty well organized. But if you want to do it right, you should definitely camp there. It isn’t as terrifying as it sounds, assuming that you don’t start on the last few days.”

At that point, he said, the island turns into “a central European version of Max Yasgur’s farm.”

Though today’s festivals are longer, larger and probably much louder, none of them appears likely to ever become the generational touchstone that Woodstock was 40 years ago, in part simply because of the surfeit of options.

As odd as it may sound, there are now almost too many festivals showing too many bands in the former Eastern bloc.

By the Time I Got to Hradec Kralove

Prices are for tickets bought in advance; they may cost more if bought at the site.

Open’er, Gdynia, Poland; www.opener.pl; June 29 to July 1. Acts include Sonic Youth, the Roots, Dizzee Rascal, the Beastie Boys, Muse, Groove Armada, Björk and Bloc Party. Tickets are 249 zloty ($86 at 2.9 zloty to the dollar) for all three days, 269 zloty with camping included.

Rock for People, Hradec Kralove, Czech Republic; www.rockforpeople.com; July 4 to 7. Acts include the Killers, Basement Jaxx, the Hives, Flipsyde, the Toy Dolls and Mory Kanté. Tickets are 740 Czech koruna ($34 at 21.8 koruna to the dollar) for all three days with camping available for an additional 50 koruna.

Creamfields Poland, Wroclaw, Poland; www.creamfields.pl; July 7. Acts include the Prodigy, Above & Beyond, Vitalic and Fisz & Emade. Tickets are 37 euros ($50 at $1.36 to the euro).

Exit Festival, Novi Sad, Serbia; www.exitfest.org; July 12 to 15. Acts include the Beastie Boys, Cansei de Ser Sexy, Lauryn Hill, Robert Plant and Snoop Dogg. Tickets for four days are 78.50 euros ($107 at $1.36 to the euro) with camping an additional 15 euros.

Pohoda Festival, Trencin, Slovakia; www.pohodafestival.sk; July 20 and 21. Acts include Air, the Hives, DJ Shadow, Junkie XL, Tata Bojs and Gipsy.cz. Two-day tickets are 1,199 Slovak koruna ($46 at 26 koruna to the dollar).

Sziget Festival, Budapest, Hungary; www.szigetfestival.com; Aug. 8 to 15. Acts include Razorlight, Chris Cornell, Chemical Brothers, Faithless, Madness, Nine Inch Nails and Pink. Tickets for all seven days are 37,500 forint ($193 at 195 forint to the dollar), including camping, with one-day tickets 7,500 forint.

SAY Bali and most people think paradise. There are stunning sunsets, sculpted rice terraces and a temple on almost every corner. And for less-spiritual seekers, this steamy Indonesian island also has great surfing and a rollicking nightlife. Sure, it's gotten pretty touristy, especially on the pub crawl along Kuta Beach, where beer-swilling Australians rule. And while recent terrorist bombings have rattled Bali's blissful pace (it is a Hindu-majority island in a Muslim-majority nation), they have done little to temper its popularity or discourage super-chic resorts from being built. Paradise, after all, is as close as the nearest temple, finding yourself on your knees with a blue flower pressed between your fingertips, asking for blessings from Brahma or one of the other gods.

Friday

3 p.m.
1) MONKEYING AROUND

There's nothing like 200 macaques grooming each other, snuggling together and nibbling on small bananas to make you realize you're not in Kansas anymore. To find the Sacred Monkey Forest Sanctuary (Jalan Monkey Forest, Padangtegal, Ubud; 62-361-971304; www.monkeyforestubud.com) drive an hour north of Kuta Beach to the town of Ubud, often called the cultural heart of Bali. The monkeys, the town's most beloved residents, live in a dense, jungley stretch of green at the southern edge of town, complete with its own temple. A word to the wise: Leave your snacks at home and don't buy any bananas on the way in unless you enjoy being mauled by possibly rabid little tykes. When it comes to bananas, the monkeys will win. Admission is 10,000 rupiah, or about $1.10 at 9,270 rupiah to the dollar.

4:30 p.m.
2) FOUR HANDS BEATS TWO

It's said that labor is cheaper than electricity on Bali, so why not book a four-handed massage at Spa Hati (Jalan Raya Andong 14, Peliatan, Ubud; 62-361-977-578; www.spahati.com), a stone and thatched-roof compound at the edge of town. Add in a lulur body scrub — a traditional Javanese blend of rice flour and herbs — for 90 minutes of rapture (225,000 rupiah). Afterward, the unhurried staff lets you relax for as long as you want in the hot tub, listening to little frogs make big noises in the rice paddy next door. And about that cheap labor: spa profits help support the Bali Hati Foundation, which runs community programs, including a school for local children.

7:30 p.m.
3) DANCE, DANCE, DANCE

Bali is brimming with fire dances, mask dances, trance dances, monster dances and puppet shows, all of which have been refined over the centuries to the point that eyeballs, fingertips and toes all move in elaborate choreographed precision. On a typical night in Ubud you can take your pick from a half-dozen different shows. It's worth ducking into the Ubud Palace (Jalan Raya Ubud; 62-361975057; 80,000 rupiah) to watch good and evil duke it out in the Barong dance. Set in a Balinese-style pavilion, the dance is performed by two fat guys whose choreographed fight scenes draw inevitable comparisons to the WWF.

9 p.m.
4) GO FOR THE GRILL

For tasty Balinese food in a relaxed setting, expatriates flock to Naughty Nuri's Warung (Jalan Raya Sanggingan, across from the Neka Art Museum; 62-361-977547), a cozy hangout opened by Isnuri Suryatmi and her husband, Brian Kenny, who grew up in New Jersey. It does justice to classic Balinese dishes like chicken sate (27,000 rupiah) and nasi goreng — Indonesian fried rice with vegetables and meat (17,000 rupiah). But the main draw of this grubby little warung, or food stall, is the grill. There are succulent pork chops, steaks from Australia and even great hamburgers — and something uncommon in Asia, a good microbrew: Storm Pale Ale (12,000 rupiah).

Saturday

9 a.m.
5) GET DOWN IN THE RIVER

Most of the super-luxury hotels in Ubud are built along the top of the gorge that the Ayung River runs through. There's a good reason for that: the views are gorgeous. Down on the river, climb aboard a rubber raft and watch the thick vines, low-flying swallows and waterfalls go by. Bali Adventure Tours (62-361-721480; www.baliadventuretours.com) runs 90-minute trips down the river starting at $60 for a morning trip that includes a basic lunch of rice and egg rolls.

2:30 p.m.
6) MUSEUM MILE

Ubud's artistic appeal is, for the most part, historical. Its reputation dates to the 1930s when Western artists and intellectuals like Walter Spies, Colin McPhee and Rudolf Bonnet moved in, boosting the local arts scene and sparking foreign interest in this tiny island. To understand that history and see some fine examples of Balinese art, start at the Neka Art Museum (Jalan Raya Sanggingan, Campuhan; 62-361-975074; www.museumneka.com), which was founded in 1982 by Suteja Neka, an art dealer whose son now runs the slick Komaneka Fine Art Gallery (Jalan Monkey Forest; 62-361-976090; gallery.komaneka.com). For some high camp, make a quick stop at the Blanco Renaissance Museum (Jalan Campuhan; 62-361-975502; www.blancobali.com); the only thing grander than the peccadilloes of Antonio Blanco, a Spanish painter who settled in Bali in 1952, was his ego.

5:30 p.m.
7) BEST SHOW IN TOWN

Ubud closes early. By 11 p.m., everyone is home, leaving the streets to bands of marauding but basically harmless dogs. If you want to make a night of it, head south to Seminyak, a sophisticated beachside alternative just north of Kuta. The hour-long taxi runs about 150,000 to 200,000 rupiah ($16 to $22). For a front-row seat for the dazzling sunset, grab a chair at Breeze, a sleek beachside bar and restaurant at the Samaya Hotel (Jalan Laksmana; 62-361-731149, www.thesamayabali.com), and order a glass of wine (about 70,000 rupiah). The teak deck juts out so close to the surf you can almost feel the foam from the breakers.

7 p.m.
8) BUST THAT BIKINI

When the last ray of sunlight has faded, head next door for dinner at La Lucciola (Kaya Ayu Beach, Temple Petitenget, Kerobokan; 62-361-730838), a popular beachfront spot, for rich Italian fare like prawn and snapper pie with truffled potatoes (125,000 rupiah) and orecchiette with pancetta and gorgonzola (80,000 rupiah). There might be a line, but don't worry. Sit at the bar for free hors d'oeuvres and watch the frangipani flowers fall around you.

9:30 p.m.
9) BLING IS THE THING

Ratchet things up among the macramé-clad, flash-bulb popping babes at Ku Dé Ta (Jalan Laksmana 9, Seminyak; 62-361-736969; www.kudeta.net), a modern and trendy spot that faces the surf . It's shamelessly sceney — a DVD is sold showing highlights of the high season. Score a beachfront chaise and watch the waves, illuminated with floodlights, come crashing in. After hours, all roads lead to the Double Six Club (Jalan Double Six, Blue Ocean Boulevard, Seminyak; 62-361-733067; www.doublesixclub.com; 70,000 rupiah admission), which sports a giant dance floor and bungee jumping on weekend nights. But don't show up before 3 a.m.

Sunday

10 a.m.
10) ESPRESSO IT

If for some unfathomable reason you tire of Bali's thick, rich coffee, duck into Tutmak Warung (Jalan Dewi Sita, Ubud; 62-361-975754 ) for an iced latte (14,500 rupiah). It's a favorite of local expatriates — a casual, breezy place that looks out on a scraggly soccer field frequented by local kids.

11 a.m.
11) PARADISE WITHIN PARADISE

The six-hectare Botanic Garden Ubud (Kutuh Kaja, Ubud; 62-361-970951; www.botanicgardenbali.com) opened last summer — a magical park with white fairy lilies, weeping figs, a labyrinth, banana twist orchids and a miniature rainforest. Stay for lunch at the Chocolate House Cafe, which is housed in a 130-year-old jogglo, a traditional Javanese hut made of teak wood. The guava and passion fruit juices (12,000 rupiah) are garden fresh and the chicken kutu kaja, which is cooked slowly in banana leaves and served with red Tabanan rice, is a local specialty (42,000 rupiah). The menu rotates, but if it has it, don't miss the coconut and jackfruit ice puter, ice cream made with coconut milk in a hand-cranked drum.

2 p.m.
12) SARONG AS ART

Ubud is famous for art, which is probably why an awful lot of drek is now on sale. Fear not. For the good stuff, start at the Seniwati Gallery of Art by Women (Jalan Sriwedari 2b, Banjar Taman; 62-361-975485; www.seniwatigallery.com), which Mary Northmore, the British-born wife of Abdul Aziz, a prominent Indonesian artist, founded in 1991 after she was told by several Indonesian art experts that “Balinese women don't paint.” For textiles, stop in at Threads of Life (Jalan Kajeng 24; 62-361-972187; www.threadsoflife.com), which commissions local weavers to make textiles the same ways their grandmothers did, which is to say painstakingly. Even if you're not in the market for a handspun sarong for 4.3 million rupiah, it's well worth the visit.

The Basics

Cathay Pacific flies from Kennedy Airport to Denpasar, Bali, via Hong Kong. A recent Web search showed fares starting at around $1,500. From Ngurah Rai Airport in Denpasar, a taxi to Ubud costs 150,000 rupiah, or about $16 at 9,270 rupiah to the dollar. Taxis can also be hired for half-days or longer; negotiate a price in advance, but it should run about 350,000 rupiah.

Central Ubud can feel like an outdoor mall. If you're on a budget and want rice fields instead of retail, stay south of the Monkey Forest. Alam Shanti and its two sister hotels, Alam Indah and Alam Jiwa are situated along Jalan Nyuh Butan in tranquil Nyuh Kuning village (62-361-974629; www.alamindahbali.com). Rooms are $50 to $175.

For luxurious solitude, try the Four Seasons Resort Bali at Sayan (62-361-977577; www.fourseasons.com/sayan/). The hotel was built around a rice paddy, and villas come with private plunge pools. The hotel's Jati (Bahasa for teak) Bar is perched on the edge of the Ayung River and an excellent place for a sunset cocktail. Rooms start at $460.

ANTWERP wakes up late and languorously on a Sunday. At 10 a.m. on a balmy April morning, waiters were just setting up the outdoor tables along the normally bustling Hoogstraat, which leads from the Grote Markt to Sint-Jansvliet.

Here, the small Sunday morning flea market was also still getting started, as vendors unpacked items that might have appealed to anyone with a penchant for taxidermy (a haughty-looking fox walking on its hind legs was the easy favorite) or a first edition, in Dutch, of Judith Krantz's “Der Dochter van Mistral.”

Bourgeois in the best sense, the busy harbor of Antwerp has long been prime hunting ground for antiques lovers. Centuries at the intersection of thriving commerce, refined taste and access to the best of the world's markets can do that to a city.

But with the United States dollar practically drowning against the euro, the charms of this Flemish city's posh antiques shops can seem a bit out of reach. Thank goodness there's Kloosterstraat, a milelong stretch of quirky (and much less pricey) antiques shops, all-day cafes, and ethnic restaurants that physically and metaphorically link the densely packed ancient heart of the city with the tonier southern end.

Best of all, Kloosterstraat is not just open on Sundays — when most retail establishments beyond newspaper sellers and souvenir shops are closed. It becomes a daylong party that attracts locals and visitors alike.

Since the shops open at the highly civilized hour of 2 p.m., the intervening hours can be well spent recharging the aesthetic sensibilities at the handy Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten (that's Dutch for fine arts museum). The museum occupies the square into which Kloosterstraat dead-ends in the south and, given that over the centuries the local talent has included Rubens, Van Dyck and Jordaens, this is a detour well worth taking.

Back out on the street by 2 o'clock, the shops were not just open, but bursting onto the sidewalk, where many dealers had dragged some of their more commodious chairs and were transacting business on the street. Taking some sun while flipping through design magazines, the friends and theoretical business competitors Anita and Rita were quick to explain the easygoing attitude — and appeal — of the street.

“Of course the ‘real antiquaires' are up on Leopoldstraat,” said Anita, whose shop, Docks for Antiques, at No. 64, seems to sell everything from burnished mahogany furniture to garden sculptures and a few oddball 1930s mannequins. A distinct flourish in her pronunciation of the French term readily conjured images of exquisite treasures at excessively high prices a few blocks south of here.

“We're brocanteurs, selling pieces that are maybe not so old but are often very, very good,” she said. “Right now, you see lots of wonderful design from the 1950s, '60s, and '70s here.”

Rita, of the equally eclectic shop Delphic at No. 60, added: “It's a great mix — everything from kitsch to fine art. On Sundays, this is the place to be. Everyone finds something that's to their taste.”

In the carefully defined world of European antiques, brocante is a handy catchall term that means anything from vintage clothing and bric-a-brac to fine furniture and silver, typically less than 100 years old.

At Tita Flying Carpet (No. 86) it means that vintage kilims have been resurrected and resewn into graphic Mondrianesque compositions that play up the subtle color harmonies of their vegetable-dyed lambswool fragments. Were it a painting, the stunning 5-foot-by-7-foot rug in various shades of red on the wall at the back of the shop might have been titled: “Ode to Tomato Soup.”

A relative newcomer to the street is the Old and the Beautiful at No. 54, which specializes in Swedish antiques. The star of a museumlike display was a vignette with an elegantly carved Baroque armchair with original blue paint paired with a rare 17th-century “bockbord,” a massive slab of a table supported on two rustically carved tree trunks rather than four legs, that the dealer Geert de Bruuycker called “the mother of all Swedish tables” and priced accordingly at 12,500 euros ($16,828, at $1.37 to the euro).

After such a tightly edited display of clean-lined Scandinavian restraint, the packed-to-the-rafters t'Koetshuis next door at No. 52 is a like a pan-cultural tag sale with everything from a streamlined 1930s French dining set to heavily plated hotel silver and a stack of about 1,000 crisply pressed linen napkins, recently retired by a local restaurant supply company. Their original butterscotch color had mellowed by frequent washings and pressings into what can only be described as the perfect shade of wheat. At 0.50 euros apiece, I bought 50 and thus resolved a recurring dinner party woe for the foreseeable future.

Celebrating the event over a restorative coffee and delightful 3-euro feta and tomato panini at Take 5 Minutes in Paris (No. 50), I took 15 minutes of sun in the lushly planted rear patio. A neighboring table of art-world types huddled beneath a huge, fringed garden umbrella lined with a pattern of cabbage roses; the scene looked straight out of a Diane Arbus photo.

Musically, the shops on Kloosterstraat seem to be in league with one another in playing feel-good hits like “Vamos a la Playa” from decades past, no doubt increasing sales with the audio nostalgia. Between tracks of the Andrews Sisters at Erik Tonen Books (No. 48), a corgi sighed audibly as he plunked down to doze after realizing that his master was in fact going to read the entire book right there, right then.

Inside her theatrically lighted shop at No. 36, the dealer Barbara Annaert was busily greeting the stream of new and familiar faces drawn in by the gorgeous French trestle table she had cunningly matched up in the window with a set of slightly louche 1950s Windsor chairs. Sales were being made, but Barbara's role seemed more hostess than shopkeeper, although one who cheerily climbed on chairs to measure her chandeliers or snapped digital pictures to send by e-mail to clients.

Not for sale — but much commented on — was a stunning arrangement of overblown tulips the color of a tequila sunrise, adding to the sense that this was indeed a cocktail party.

But it's not all wine and roses. By late afternoon, the crowds can get thick and tempers short. On my second visit to the densely packed, tableware-centric shop Cru, at No. 19 on the perpendicular Sint-Michielstraat, my excessive touching of a set of glossy 1970s red dishes peeved the shop owner into doubling the price quoted me earlier that morning. Alerted to the discrepancy, he managed a half-smile and returned to his reading in the rear of the narrow shop. I was standing near the door, so I used it.

The meaner side of Kloosterstraat had also shown itself to Els Jansen, a onetime Antwerpener now living in nearby Ghent, who still returns to Kloosterstraat on many sunny Sundays. “We once foolishly passed on some chairs, and we're still looking for their replacements,” she said. Not one to give in to buyer's — or in this case nonbuyer's — remorse, she quickly added, “but the real fun here is just getting out and walking or grabbing a drink or a bite with friends.”

Anyone willing to heed that advice after a long day on the straat ought to head to Chez Fred (No. 83), where simple pine tables and stools outside offer a rustic counterpoint to the 300-euro sunglasses and trim Ann Demeulemeester tank tops worn by the style-conscious crews sitting at them. The menu swings in the same range — from hearty stoofvlees (savory beef stew) to tuna steak served rare with mint pesto. This being a perfect day, Norah Jones jazzily segued into Randy Crawford, whose “Street Life” got well-shod feet tapping and suntanned shoulders swaying:

“You dress, you walk, you talk. You're who you think you are.”

Well at least you've got the perfect napkins.

I CAN still perfectly recall those moments, a handful of times late in my first year here in Shanghai, when the late afternoon light was at its limpid best and the very special beauty of this city seemed distilled for me in all its clarity.

There was the scene around a blackened wok in which thick sections of river fish had been freshly deposited in dancing, golden oil, drawing a hungry and animated crowd that was more interested in focusing on matters at hand than in locking in on the foreigner with the big, old-fashioned camera who was busily taking their pictures.

There was the pudgy boy taking his time with a mass of cotton candy as he clung to a street sign post, circling it now and then like a game park carousel. He eyed me more warily, probably never having seen anything like my Rolleiflex, with its bulging eye-like twin lenses. But eventually his pink snack provided just enough distraction, allowing me to get a shot that even now feels like a ticket into a secret world.

There was the grizzled man in the wool cap and greatcoat, perfectly still, with one foot perched on his bicycle cart stacked high with mushrooms. He had parked his cart smack dab in the middle of the street, as if he were holding the line against the encroachments of a new and unwelcome kind of lifestyle: one built around honking automobiles and fluorescent-lit supermarkets.

All three of these scenes were shot on a street so obscure that I found most taxi drivers needed directions to get there. It is not that the neighborhood is so far from the center of the city. It is not. Rather, Shanxi Road, just north of Suzhou Creek, had been more or less spared the unsparing onslaught of demolishing crews that precedes the breakneck redevelopment of this city, making it a very special, if neglected place.

Standing in the middle of Shanxi Road along with its salt-of-the-earth traders in those early days couldn’t have been more of a revelation for me than if I had I stepped into a time machine and strapped myself in for a journey. Here was a slice of that increasingly rare thing in China, indeed anywhere — the authentic.

Neighborhoods like these, and the city that was built from them, were Shanghai’s unique contribution to a culture whose experience of cities was long and distinguished, going back at least 3,700 years, but which had nonetheless never seen anything like this before.

Other large Chinese cities had in fact always been more like oversize villages; the greatest of them, Beijing, being a gigantic imperial village. But Shanghai, a precocious forerunner of today’s globalization, with its influx a century ago of bankers and industrialists from the world over, was new and different. And byways like Shanxi Road with their busy grid layouts, their European-influenced housing of two-story walk-ups, their internal courtyards and endless alleyways were built to accommodate a new kind of lifestyle created for and by millions of migrants drawn by the novelty of cash-paying jobs in factories.

My love of Shanxi Road gradually led me toward other discoveries, and over the last three years, I have come to relish nothing more than finding these unspoiled outposts of the past in the middle of Shanghai’s ever thickening forest of skyscrapers and losing myself in them for hours at a time, camera in hand.

None of the neighborhoods that I began to plunge into were truly hidden. Rather, they lived on in their quiet timeless way, wholly unsuspected from just a block or two away, obscured as it were by flashy new neighborhoods composed of jostling tall structures or roped off by looping expressways. I stumbled upon one after a stroll down Huai Hai Road, one of Shanghai’s great modern shopping boulevards. The telltale sign of traditional black Chinese-style roof tiles, just barely visible, lured me down a narrow, gently winding side street, which I followed for a short distance until it spilled onto a larger street, which took my breath away.

This street, Fangbang Road, in all of its slightly shabby glory, became one of the centers of my photographic world over the next two years, drawing me back again and again, as surely as I was pulled along that late afternoon that fall day by the swift current of foot traffic of people returning home in time for an early dinner. Busier by a good measure than Shanxi Road, with small shops open to the street on the ground floor of just about every building — a fish monger chopping up his catch here, a poultry dealer depluming chickens for a customer by dunking them in scalding water there, the incessant beckoning cry of the fresh fruit and vegetables ladies — it took me a while to catch the rhythm of this place.

Eventually, though, I learned to isolate people taking a break from the bustle, and now and then I managed to freeze, as it were, those moments of absolute calm.

One of the most pleasurable of these moments happened as I came upon a shirtless young boy on a stultifying summer afternoon. He sat on the curb in front of his empty bicycle cart, having sold or delivered its cargo and wearing a look of deep fatigue.

Another day on that same street in that same season I happened upon a family at dinner, their chairs and table in the street. As I crept closer, the boy was being scolded by his mother — ostensibly about not finishing his dinner. I knelt on one knee and quietly took the shot, feeling like a privileged guest at the most intimate of rituals.

To walk these streets is to get a skewed impression of Chinese demographics. Old people are everywhere, and they form an undeniable part of the character of these places, with etched faces that speak of all the unspeakable travails of China’s modern history. With the areas I have focused on — all fast coming under the assault of bulldozers — the gazes of the elderly often seem to convey their deep sense of uncertainty, anxiety even, as the tightly knit neighborhoods where they have spent their lives are plowed under and they are moved to unfamiliar settings on the outskirts of town for the difficult climb of making a new life.

These looks, seen over and over, inevitably raise the question of how Shanghai’s people feel about the extraordinary urban redevelopment process that is under way. For the most part, they have never been asked, certainly not by the government, which executes its grand designs by fiat.

The answer, in fact, is not a simple one. Shanghai’s fast-disappearing old quarters drip with charm, but they are also full of problems, from cramped living spaces that have been subdivided over the years to inadequate heating and plumbing.

Many who can afford to move into the high-rises sprouting up everywhere are happy to do so. Others wear looks of mourning.

Over and over again, I have been asked by the people of these neighborhoods what is my purpose in taking pictures of these lives? Am I trying to show a bad side of China? To make fun of poor people?

I have no trouble answering, and my reply is effective more often than not because it is sincere. “I take pictures in your neighborhood because there is something very beautiful about the lifestyle you have,” I say. “Things may not be perfect, but there is a very special kind of community you have, and soon places like this will all be gone.”

FEW sentences in the English language are more dreaded than this seemingly innocent offer: “Oh, I must show you the pictures from my vacation.” Who wants to see endless shots of a friend lounging by a pool or in front of a monument, or — worse yet — their kids doing the very same things?

But, of course, those very same shots can be extremely useful when researching your own trip. How big is that pool? What, exactly, does the room at that five-star hotel you’re thinking of booking look like? What’s the crowd like at the so-called hot restaurant? It’s good to have documented evidence from someone who has been there.

And recently, photo-sharing sites like Yahoo’s Flickr.com and SmugMug.com have begun to let users add another dimension to their travel photos. Through a technology called geotagging, users can add G.P.S. data to their pictures, which can then be plotted on a digital map. This not only allows users to see exactly where a photo was taken, but, when uploaded to an Internet map, users can also quickly browse a trove of photos that were taken nearby, providing a kind of scattershot collage of a place.

For example, people planning a trip to Cancún can use Google Earth, a free mapping software, to zoom in on Cancún’s crowded hotel zone and click on dozens of candid photographs, from the lounge chairs at the Fiesta Americana Grand Coral Beach hotel and the pool at the Omni Hotel & Villas, to snapshots of less-crowded beaches and the nearest mall.

Plotting photos on maps also allows trip planners to “see” the terrain before booking a trip. On Everytrail.com — which lets users upload geocoded photos from their favorite hiking trails, biking routes and sailing trips — visitors can check out sights along a specific driving route in Namibia, or examine trail conditions on a hilly bike route near Palo Alto, Calif.

But it’s the odd juxtapositions of randomly plotted photos that may be the most surprising — and useful — to travelers with more obscure interests. For example, fans of graffiti can search the word, “graffiti,” and “New York City,” at Flickr.com/map, and pull up photos of freshly painted tags, all plotted with pushpins on a clickable Yahoo map. A search for “Dumbo Brooklyn graffiti,” for example, finds some 99 photos, including the infamous “Neck Face” tag, spray-painted on a brick warehouse at Jay and Front Streets in Brooklyn. Try finding that in a guidebook.

Geotagging photos brings a whole new level of context to the image, said Andy Williams, general manager of SmugMug.com, a photo-sharing site. “After all,” he said, “pictures are flat.” But the real reason geotagging is getting so popular, he added, are the bragging rights involved. “We want people to know the cool places we’ve been,” he said. “And this is a cool way to show off.”

The steps needed to geotag photos are admittedly somewhat geeky. At photo-sharing sites like Flickr and SmugMug, most users must first upload their photos and then plug in the address or manually plot each image on a map, which can require lots of zooming in, recentering and dragging, before a photo is placed on the desired coordinates.

To streamline the process, several camera makers have released models that are G.P.S.-ready, with either a built-in device or a special accessory. But they tend to be geared toward professionals and are expensive. The Nikon D2X, the company’s current top-of-the-line SLR model ($5,100), works with an optional MC-35 GPS Adapter cord ($139) that connects with a standard G.P.S. receiver (which you must also buy) to automatically save location coordinates with each photograph.

But G.P.S. is starting to show up among lower-priced cameras. The new Ricoh 500SE (about $1,000), a point-and-shoot model aimed at outdoor enthusiasts, has a built-in G.P.S. device. It’s even showing up on camera phones, including the Nokia N95, though the $749 price is still a bit steep.

Once your photos are plotted geographically, others can discover a place through your travels.

In 2005, John and September Highman quit their jobs, took their son and daughter out of school and traveled the world, visiting 28 countries and 5 continents in 52 weeks. Mr. Highman chronicled their adventures on SmugMug (at higham.smugmug.com), mainly to store photos and allow friends back home to track their progress. The project soon drew a following when others stumbled upon their photos and asked to be added to Mr. Highman’s distribution list. Now, he is working on a book, “Armageddon Pills,” that ties together his Web site and geotagged photos.

Web sites are increasingly embracing geotagging as a way to draw users. Last month, Google announced plans to acquire Panoramio.com, a photo-sharing site with more than two million images that allows users to integrate photos into Google Earth. And as photo-sharing continues to evolve, travel Web sites are recognizing how valuable images can be when users essentially act as free contributors and submit their own pictures.

Zoomandgo.com, a travel review site, recently redesigned its site around photos and videos submitted by travelers. A team of four people spent months “geocoding” thousands of hotels and attractions so that user-photos can be displayed on digital maps. A new social-networking feature also allows users to create their own travel profiles, connect with like-minded travelers, and swap tips through photos.

“Facebook meets Frommers” is how Jonathan Haldane, the founder of Zoomandgo.com, described it. Before the social-networking feature went up, he said, users spent about eight minutes on the site, mostly reading or posting hotel reviews. Now, he said, users spend an average of 18 to 19 minutes, sending messages to each other and browsing through photos and videos.

But though travel sites are embracing the flood of user-generated photos, the quality can vary. A Flickr search for the W hotel in New York City, for example, turns up a mix of candid room photos and pictures of friends eating pizza. To wade through the clutter, Stewart Butterfield, general manager for Flickr, suggests adding the words “not portrait” or “not family” in your search to weed out cheesy tourist snapshots.

Zoomandgo.com, which pays users a nominal fee for relevant photos, says it vets every submission. The site says, “As a result, you won’t see any pictures of your Aunt Sally posing outside her house (Sorry, Aunt Sally), or any videos of your neighbor’s dog Yoda peeing on a tree (Sorry, Yoda).”

Panoramio, on the other hand, has a devoted online community that tends to self-edit, and post photos only of places rather than people. “If you’re wanting to see photos to plan your trip, you’re not necessarily wanting to see a couple’s wedding photos on their beach in Maui,” said John Hanke, director of Google Earth and Maps, “You want to see the beach in focus.”

TRAVELING with pets is an increasingly common affair, as many pet owners have decided that Fido deserves a summer vacation as much as they do, and shouldn’t be left behind in a kennel while they are off lounging on a beach or taking in the mountain air.

The travel industry has been quick to cash in on this trend: many hotels now offer packages with pet beds and special room-service menus for four-legged companions.

But many pet owners still have concerns about hitting the road — or, to be more specific, the sky. More than two million pets and other live animals are transported by air every year in the United States, according to the Department of Transportation. Though rare, incidents involving the loss, injury or death of animals do happen. During June, July and August of last year, 12 animals, mostly dogs, died, 3 were injured and 4 were lost during air travel.

For tips on traveling with your dog or leaving one behind when taking a vacation, I talked with Cesar Millan, a dog behaviorist and best-selling author, better known as National Geographic Channel’s Dog Whisperer. Mr. Millan, a native of Mexico, also owns the Dog Psychology Center in Los Angeles, which specializes in rehabilitating dogs with extreme behavior problems. When we spoke by phone, he was in Miami with two dogs — Daddy and Coco — who were going to travel to Minneapolis to film an episode of the show.

Q. How do you travel with your dogs?

A. Right now, I’m fortunate to travel with two of them — a pitbull and a Chihuahua. They’re not flying with me, but we have an R.V., which is much easer for them because they’re able to meet the land. I ask the driver: every four hours, make sure they experience where they are.

Q. Do you have any advice for people who can’t take their pets cross-country by car?

A. My large personal dogs have never traveled on a plane. My small dogs have, and it’s easier because, you know, they’re next to us, right there under the seat, as they request on the airline. So it feels like they’re just doing a different activity. Of course, they’re going to feel the altitude, and so I’m going to be right there to calm them down, just to make them feel relaxed. But until I get my own private plane, my large dogs will not fly.

Q. So you always have them take the R.V. and not a plane?

A. Yes, because it’s not very controlled in the areas where they put the large dogs. I hope the airlines will get smart about it and learn that it’s business, because we do want to bring our dogs with us. But they have to be able to make sure the temperature is ideal, and ideally a human can be there just to provide some kind of comfort to dogs. I think it can be done — it’s just a matter of whether the airlines are willing to do it.

Q. More hotels are trying to appeal to pet owners with special doggy beds and room service. Does it matter what kind of hotel you stay at?

A. They don’t understand if it costs $1 or $300. They can’t make the difference between Bloomingdale’s and Kmart. What they’re going to know is what state of mind they were in when you offered that.

Q. Any tips for traveling by car?

A. Dogs are daytime animals, and my pack is so accustomed to do activities in the daytime that at least every four hours the driver stops and walks them, which is good for the driver and is good for my dogs. It’s important for a dog to know the land because in a way they’re migrating to another place. It’s important for them to see and to smell the environment. Wherever they are, it’s going to be a different temperature, a different scent and a different feeling. You want to be sure they know how to associate themselves with it in a more natural way.

Q. Is sedation an option?

A. Yeah, but again you have to condition the mind to see what the side effects are and what doses work and what medication works. It shouldn’t make them lethargic. It’s just for them to feel thoroughly relaxed. It’s like a glass of wine. It doesn’t have to make you feel angry or frustrated. It’s just to relax you.

Q. How should you choose a kennel?

A. You want to find a place where they immediately know how to adopt a dog and to make a dog really not focused on the fact that you left but really focused on what is there for him. It’s very important that professionals learn it’s a big deal for a dog to detach himself from his pack, and so the new pack has to be just as good or better than the pack he just left.

Q. What about dogs that get nervous when traveling? Is there anything you can do to keep them calm?

A. If a dog is nervous at home, it’s more likely for him to get worse in different environments. You definitely have to work, before you go on the vacation, to start learning about how you can make your dog not nervous at home. Everything starts from home. A lot of people also get frustrated when they’re traveling, and the dog is trembling or whining or drooling. But that’s not going to help the dog either. Your energy influences a lot, and once you recognize and become aware of the energy you share when your dog is under stress, then you realize, oh, O.K., I have to work on myself.

Q. Are some dogs more suited to travel than others?

A. Balanced dogs. It’s not the breed or the size. You can’t generalize that the size or the breed will make it a better travel dog. A balanced dog is always going to be a perfect dog to be around; an unstable dog, regardless of the size, is not going to be comfortable to travel with. So it’s a state of mind, not a breed or a size.

Q. Is there anything else travelers should keep in mind?

A. Once you arrive at your destination, make sure you go for a long walk before you go inside the hotel or the condominium or wherever you’re going because that will give a dog a better understanding of where they are and what the surroundings are, and that the same rules and boundaries or limitations that you might have had in L.A. exist in Florida. That will make him feel so comfortable, so at home, and enjoy his new adventure.

DAWN had just broken, and the lost city of the Incas lay empty — not a tourist in sight. From the priests’ district, the high point of the ruins, the bright green central plaza stretched along the narrow summit of a high ridge and dropped precipitously on both sides to a turquoise river thousands of feet below.

In a small chamber two feet from where I stood, the high priest had once meditated daily to seek guidance from his god. In the two-story peaked-roof structures downhill and to the left, workers had dropped off their tools at night — weary men stumbling in after a Sisyphean day of cutting and lugging stones. Beyond lay a panorama of jungle and 17,000-foot peaks. Around me was silence — and isolation.

This was Peru, but not the famous Machu Picchu. I was at Choquequirao, a sister city of similar significance built along similar lines, but harder to reach and, for the time being, still sufficiently free of tourists for a visitor to imagine, without much effort, the priests and builders, the supplicants and courtiers roaming its paths and plaza. Twenty-five years ago, Machu Picchu must have looked much like this.

Choquequirao’s builder, Topa Inca, chose his city’s site and design precisely because of the similarities to Machu Picchu, the city of his predecessor, Pachachuti, according to Gary Ziegler, an independent American archaeologist who worked on the first Choquequirao excavation. The two cities were about the same size and served the same religious, political and agricultural functions. But because archaeologists long underestimated the importance of Choquequirao, the city’s existence was known for almost 300 years before the first restoration was begun in 1993. It is still only 30 percent uncovered. The Peruvian government is just beginning to plan for large-scale tourism there.

In 2006 Choquequirao drew 6,800 visitors, according to Peru’s National Cultural Institute, more than double the total in 2003 but a little more than 1 percent of the number who went to Machu Picchu. For now, Choquequirao remains “an Inca site you can visit without a 60-person Japanese tour group and two tour guides with umbrellas and megaphones,” Mr. Ziegler had told me — a “journey for the savvy traveler.”

I was traveling with five companions: my girlfriend, an Israeli couple who were both Army veterans, a Dutch student and an Arizona bookkeeper turned vagabond. We had coalesced into a group while studying Spanish at a language school in Cuzco.

The first part of our journey to Choquequirao took us to Cachora, the nearest town. It has no direct bus service, so we went from Cuzco by cab — a beat-up station wagon that bumped and twisted over 100 miles of poorly paved road. When we arrived, well after sunset, the indigo sky was dotted with the last twinkles of alpenglow on the snow-covered Salkantay ridge, so impossibly high above us that it was easier to believe they were stars.

We dined at the Terrace of Choquequirao, a menuless two-table restaurant owned by Gilberto Medina, a thin, deferential man who talked to us over coca leaf tea. In the previous year, he told us, the town’s main road had been paved and two new restaurants had joined his. Hotels were under construction, and the first Internet cafe had opened.

In Cuzco before the trip, Pedro Tacca, the director of patrimony for the National Cultural Institute, had spoken to me about the importance of preserving communities like Cachora and the other towns near Choquequirao as tourism to the site grows. He said Peru is trying to control growth and access to Cachora to keep it from becoming another Aguas Calientes, the town closest to Machu Picchu, which is made up entirely of tourist shops, restaurants and hostels, with a railroad track — where the tourists arrive — instead of a main street. “It’s a community without personality,” he said, “horrible in contrast to majestic and beautiful Machu Picchu.”

For now, Cachora still belongs to its residents, farmers whose way of life has changed little in centuries. Invited by Mr. Medina, we went to the elementary school to see a celebration of the Festival of the Virgin Carmen. Children in flannel shirts, wide dresses and colorful mantas (blankets) performed traditional dances, sashaying, spinning and mugging for their doting parents. In the finale, a 25-foot bamboo tower of flammable pinwheels, linked by fuses made with newspaper, set off a shower of colorful sparks. The children tucked their shirts over their heads and ran back and forth under the fiery spray as if it were a playground sprinkler, shrieking with delight.

From Cachora, the trek to Choquequirao is 20 difficult miles in the mountains. Most visitors rent horses, but all of us were in our 20s, and we decided to hike, walking out of town the next morning with mules carrying our packs. The dusty road took us down a quilt of fields and mudstone houses stitched together by lines of outsize aloe plants and shimmery blue eucalyptus trees. Our legs followed the road along the winding cliffs over the Apurímac River, but our eyes stayed fixed on the Salkantay ridge to the north, now appearing in daylight like the snow-capped, protective plates of a massive stegosaurus.

After a knee-crushing 4,000-vertical-foot descent, we spent the second night at a campsite full of pleasant surprises like flush toilets, a shower and cold bottles of Coca-Cola from a woman whose family had trekked them in to sell to tourists. The next morning we embarked on the last and hardest part of the trail: eight miles and 5,000 vertical feet up.

Glad to rest, we stopped after two hours at a three-hut village called Santa Rosa, where in a thatch-roofed store Julian Covarrubias, a baby-faced 25-year-old with a faded Adidas hoodie and a neat goatee, told us he was seeing 15 to 20 tourists a day, and that was plenty for him. Five years ago only one or two a month came through. Sure, he said, he was selling more Cokes now, but his family had been on this land for over 100 years, growing sugar cane, avocados and papayas, had made it through occupation by Shining Path guerrillas in the ’80s, and didn’t want to leave to make way for government tourism projects.

We returned to the arduous trek (which government officials hope eventually to eliminate by building a funicular up the mountain) and at nightfall were setting up camp in the government campground just below the main plaza of Choquequirao. A man approached — 40 or so, with a thin brown ponytail and a button-down shirt left open above a black Tasmanian Devil T-shirt — and directed us to a different spot, saying with calm authority, “I decide who camps where.” He was Enrique Yábar, park chief of Choquequirao.

Mr. Yábar told me that if it were up to him and most of his 24 workers, Choquequirao would remain unknown until more work had been done to limit the effects of tourism. “All of us as inhabitants of the Andes,” he told me, “are directed by our gods, the mountains, and we have the mission to protect them.”

I couldn’t wait until morning to see the ruins, and neither could Avishai, the Israeli man. We hiked up and emerged out onto the open ridge top, a cold wind cutting through our fleece jackets. A wide-winged condor swung on a thermal a few hundred feet away and stopped dead, as if hanging from a mobile. We began climbing stone steps and ducking through ancient doorways like two toddlers on a jungle gym. For a precious few minutes, that ridge top, those 15,000-foot violet hills, those buildings so revered by an extinct civilization, were ours, and our sovereign desire was horseplay.

The next day, after my quiet moment at dawn, we all explored the ruins. Our mule driver knew a little about the site, but for the most part we guided ourselves. I had Spanish-language photocopies of government materials; the one book I had found in English was filled with beautiful photographs and too heavy to tote up the mountain. We saw only six other tourists.

Choquequirao, like all important Incan cities, is laid out in alignment with the movements of the sun and the stars. One building on the central plaza has nooks in which the mummies of important citizens were placed, and it is onto these nooks that the first rays of dawn fall each day.

The city’s central temple is a small rectangle on the other side of the plaza with evenly spaced depressions for altars and stone hooks where the priests hung their raiment. The most striking feature about the temple is how tiny it is; like those at Machu Picchu, it could fit perhaps 20 worshipers and had very little of the architectural grandeur of a mosque, a church or a synagogue. But then, an attempt at human grandeur here, in the shadow of the jagged jungle peak Corihuayrachina and facing arid, domelike mountains so gargantuan they make clouds look small, would seem redundant at best.

Although Choquequirao is more spread out than Machu Picchu, and therefore less photogenic, the promontory on which it lies reaches its zenith with a ceremonial hill behind the plaza, a smaller version of the rugged mountain seen in every photograph of Machu Picchu. The hike up takes just a few minutes but affords a 360-degree view of the ruins and the surrounding landscape. The curious feature of the hill is that it was scalped, flattened and denuded of vegetation by the Incas so their priests could perform rituals there.

On the other side of the plaza, the city climbs steadily uphill following a carved stone aqueduct where water will again flow in a few years as restoration progresses. It soon reaches a zigzag set of terraces resembling a giant’s staircase. Obsessed as they were with building cities on top of mountains, the Incas developed terraces like these to grow crops. Choquequirao has quite a few scattered about, long rice-paddy-like structures imposing angular order on the wild cliffs, but these narrower terraces were special. The priests probably used them to grew the special coca that figured heavily in their rituals. (Modern Andean peoples still use the coca leaf, not to make cocaine but for the mildly euphoric coca tea that appears to occupy the same space in their culture as our coffee, alcohol and aspirin wrapped into one.)

A path from the central plaza leads to the residential district, a complex of newly exposed simple four-walled houses that the jungle is already doing its best to reclaim. The place had a creepy “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” vibe, heightened by the rustling of unknown animals in the brush. That glancing-over-your-shoulder fear, the sort of adrenaline rush you hope for at ancient ruins, is still attainable at Choquequirao.

My favorite structures were the peaked-roof houses between the central plaza and the priest’s section above. Missing only the straw thatch above to be livable (and perhaps a couch or two), they were the largest buildings in the site. Inside one, I lay on my back on the neatly trimmed grass floor and reveled in the interlocking Incan stonework — and the silence. All that day, my group saw only six other visitors at Choquequirao. I could have lain smack in the center of the central plaza, which at Machu Picchu is strictly off limits, and no one would have bothered me.

Choquequirao truly is the lost city of the Incas. In the days of the Spanish conquest, Choquequirao became the principal religious center for the last-gasp Inca state, but its name does not appear in any of the chronicles of the age. Mr. Ziegler theorizes that the Incas did not want the Spanish to know it existed; in fact, they never did find the city. When it was abandoned in the late 16th century, it just shut down, tools left in place for archaeologists like Mr. Ziegler to find hundreds of years later, “like someone just turned out the light and walked away overnight,” he said. The first Westerner to visit was Juan Arias Díaz, a Spanish explorer who arrived in 1710.

Later in the day, I saw a man in a denim shirt and a broad-brimmed hat studying some papers against the low stone wall. I asked him if he was an archaeologist. He shook his head and said something in Spanish that I didn’t catch, and then tried again, saying in heavily accented English, “You know: ladies and gentleman!”

His name was John Chavez, and he was an entertainer hired by the Peruvian government to greet tourists and show them the central plaza. But he was still learning the ropes. Every time I asked a question, he looked down at his notes, which were highlighted and annotated like a high school history textbook, and then gave me an answer that was muddled, incomplete or occasionally wrong.

I found his incompetence oddly thrilling. For all the stories I’ve heard from older travelers about how the great sites of the world felt before they became household names — Angkor Wat, Prague, Machu Picchu — I finally had one of my own: “I was at Choquequirao when even the tour guides didn’t know what they were doing.”

VISITOR INFORMATION

Flights to Cuzco generally involve a change in Lima. Early July flights on LAN Peru from Kennedy Airport in New York were recently available at about $1,110.

Several travel agencies in Cuzco organize tours to Choquequirao with pre-arranged accommodation, transportation, guides and mules or horses, typically for about $300 to $400. SAS Travel on the Plaza de Armas has a good reputation (51-84-255-205; www.sastravelperu.com).

To tour on your own, hire a taxi to Cachora from Cuzco ($40 to $50 one way), leaving early in the day (or the driver won’t want to take you). You can pre-arrange a return with your driver, but it’s not necessary.

In Cachora, stay at the Casa de Salcantay, a small new hostel in a Dutch climber’s highly aesthetic home, complete with tulips ($22 a person per night, including breakfast. www.salcantay.com). Jan Willem van Delft, the proprietor, speaks perfect English and will help you arrange mules and horses ($7 to $10 a day each) and a mule-driver.

Along the trail there are campsites every few hours, some government-run, others belonging to villagers, with very small or no fees. If you don’t like one site, you have to hike a few hours to the next. If you arrange your trip in Cachora, your mule driver will be an adequate guide.

AT a glance, Barcelona's Inopia doesn't look like a place where you'd want to spend much time. More a bar than a restaurant, it's impossibly bright, with white walls and bare fluorescent fixtures. The room is small, irregularly shaped, and — save for one table that's reserved for large groups — there is barely any seating. Almost everyone manages with stools, or leans or stands — some outside, having ordered through the window.

Sounds like a recipe for disaster, doesn't it?

Well, let me tell you about the food: Inopia (Tamarit, 104; 34-93-424-52-31) offers the classic stuff of Spain — especially, but not exclusively, Catalonia. That means superb, even precious ingredients, prepared and served simply. The anchovy fillets are insanely good, and an aficionado could polish off a couple dozen. (So what if they're 1.7 euros each? So are oysters.) There are tomato salad with fresh salt cod; Jabugo ham; sliced confited tuna belly; and an extraordinarily creamy cheese (torta Cañarejal) that will destroy any notion of Spain being anything less than the equal of France.

There is nothing at Inopia — which opened last April — that is not at least intriguing. The plates of olives include the tiny, strikingly complex malagueñas. You can order ham croquettes in any tapas bar, but here they are made with jamón Ibérico, and they are vastly superior. In fact all the fried food — artichokes, sardines, potatoes (served with aioli and a lovely little house-made hot sauce) — is just incredible. The frying is done in olive oil, as it is throughout the best places in Spain, and it makes you wonder why — except for expense — this isn't always the case.

The menu is huge (in the style of many tapas bars, a percentage of the menu is devoted to pricey canned goods; more on this in a minute), and getting through it in one visit is hopeless. Actually, if you manage to get the reserved table, you have a shot, because for the 35-euro prix fixe menu, about $48 at $1.37 to the euro, you will be served until you beg the kitchen to stop. Without the prix fixe you will have trouble spending that much money, especially since there is good wine at 2 euros a glass.

The crowd is drawn not only by the food but by the fame: Inopia is run by Alberto Adrià, the younger brother and partner of Ferran Adrià, at this point perhaps the best-known chef in the world. In the summer, Alberto is the pastry chef at El Bulli, about 100 miles northeast of Barcelona, where Ferran is head chef, and his work there remains brilliant. But in Barcelona, in the increasingly hip neighborhood of Sant Antoni, he seems freer, happier and more at home, and he and his partners have created a restaurant that draws locals, friends, chefs and people from all over town (and increasingly the world). Lines form outside the door, but you can eat early, perfect for norteamericanos who don't want to wait until 9 p.m. for their first bite.

La Clara

La Clara (Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes, 442; 34-93-289-34-60) is a different story entirely. You can sit in absolute comfort, at a table set with white linens, with attentive servers changing your plates and silverware, and for about 40 euros a person, eat far beyond your fill of raciones — essentially bigger portions of tapas — of very high quality and flavor. The upstairs is sleek, bright and pleasant, not unlike trendy American bistros circa 1995. Since this is also the nonsmoking section and, to me, more attractive than the lovely but cavernous downstairs, it's perfect.

I have eaten at La Clara only once (I've had at least two visits to the other restaurants), but if it was not superb, it was very, very good. Like the ham croquettes at Inopia, the fritters of bacalao were perfectly crisp, greaseless and flavorful, an absolute joy; the tortilla (in Spain, this means omelet) with spring onion and bacalao was fresh and moist; tomatoes — with onions and tuna — were better in March than most of ours are in August. A shipment of fresh baby lamb had just arrived, so we sampled brains, kidneys and liver; the last was slightly overcooked by my standards, but the first two were as good as they can be. Some baby goat ribs rounded things out nicely.

The above list only hints at what La Clara has to offer; the menu is enormous, with probably 60 to 70 offerings, and a kitchen that seems to execute them all quite well.

In a way, both Inopia and La Clara serve tapas, but in quite modern settings. Tapas, loosely translated as “snacks,” but far more serious than that these days, probably originated when a bartender offered a few nuts or olives with the drinks he was serving, and went on from there. (Some insist their beginnings were even humbler: that bartenders covered your wine or sherry glass with a plate to keep out the flies, and then began to fill the plate with little free offerings.)

Quimet y Quimet

You can see this tradition, from its simple beginnings to its most elaborate current form, at Quimet y Quimet, perhaps the quirkiest restaurant I know (Poeta Cabanyes, 25; 34-93-442-31-42). A representative of the fourth generation of the Quim family works behind the counter in a space about the size of a standard living room. The walls are lined to the ceiling with bottles and cans, the bottles mostly of wine — some quite inexpensive, some unknown, some famous — the cans, of vegetables, seafood and meat.

(Spain produces what is probably the highest quality and most expensive canned food in the world, and many tapas bars rely on it. Though much of it is good and interesting, for the most part I don't get it, since Spain also produces among the highest quality fresh food in the world. This is as true in Barcelona — which has farms within its city limits — as it is elsewhere in the country.)

Standing in a crowd around the stainless-steel counter, glass of wine or beer in hand, you may get a piece of good bread with some garlicky beans on it, or little assemblies of ham and tuna; mushrooms, butter and tuna; pressed beef with a mix of tomato jam (this, very sweet, is fantastic) and tapenade; bacalao in a few forms; an odd, sort of New Yorkish combination of cream cheese, smoked salmon and honey; a piece of toasted bread with a mussel, that tomato jam again and a spoonful of caviar.

Mr. Quim improvises as many as a hundred types of these montaditos a night, on the spot, from the ingredients spread in front of him. There are also classic tapas like potato croquettes, fried empanadas or cheese with sweet grilled peppers, well executed. The whole meal here — you can spend as little as 10 euros, or as much as 35 (about $15 to $50), even more if you start asking for the canned goods — will take you a half hour and, though tapas are not, in theory, lunch or dinner, it's unlikely you'll go out for a “real” meal after this.

Ca L'Isidre

If you wanted such a meal, however, a likely candidate would be the most classic formal Catalonian restaurant in town, Ca L'Isidre (Les Flors, 12; 34-93-441-11-39). I have shopped at La Boqueria, Barcelona's reigning market, with Isidre Gironés, the owner of Ca L'Isidre, so I can not pretend to anonymity. But I've eaten at the restaurant several times over the years, and I know what's superb and what is less so. The advice, in sum, is this: Order the classics, don't allow the white-jacketed staff to steer you to the French stuff, and you will be bowled over.

For example: the sausages, the head cheese (from bull's meat) and the salamis are terrific. The cigales — large shrimp, served cold — are sensational. Please try the gianchette, fried tiny fish; I arrived in Barcelona after eating these babies in France, Italy, Britain and the United States, and those at Ca L'Isidre were the best. Gaspacho is creamy, with a little fresh fish and a touch of vinegar. Baby octopus in onion sauce, which sounds like nothing, is astonishing: tiny octopi in an intense, dark sauce with a little tomato, white wine, garlic, bay and not much else. A stew of bull meat — marinated for four days, cooked for one, and served on the sixth — contains a variety of meat, some tender, some chewy, some fatty, some lean, all good, in a dark, glossy sauce. Tripe with chorizo and chickpeas, spicy with pimenton, is a common dish throughout Spain; here it's the paradigm.

If this sounds like peasant food, it is, and that's where L'Isidre excels. But the appearance is of a fine dining palace, with beige walls, dark stained wood studded with sconces (they're too bright, but this is often the case in Spain), original and impressive art on the walls, a marble tile floor. It's not creative, but it's lovely and comfortable, and perhaps the best place in town for a lunch that will kill your afternoon or a dinner that will last well past midnight.

Ca L'Isidre is pricey — perhaps 70 euros or more person including wine — but it's not overpriced by any means.

Rias de Galicia

There's another place, where the atmosphere is even more grand, the food even simpler, and the bill even larger: Rias de Galicia, Barcelona's seafood palace (Calle Lerida, 7; 34-93-423-45-70). It's not for everyone. It's almost all seafood, and what's best is the odd seafood; secondly, some dishes cost 50 euros or more, just because what's on them is so rare. But if you want to try berberechos, percebes, espardenyas, teeny tiny squid, and so on, this is the place. Just be ready for a bill way upward of 70 euros a person.

Rias de Galicia's looks are old fashioned and far from stunning, though everything is of high quality, from the table linen to the service. In typical Catalonian fashion, it begins to fill up for lunch around 3 p.m., and for dinner around 10 p.m. (I wonder when Americans are going to start filling these places at 4:30 p.m., pretending they're having a late lunch but secretly craving an early dinner. Not that there's anything wrong with that; I've done it myself.)

Berberechos are small clams, rather stinky — sorry, there's no better word — and once cheap. Now, seasoned with pimenton and oil, they're pricey. Percebes are sea barnacles, simply steamed. You suck the delicious, mussel-like meat out of the shell; they cost a small fortune but everyone who can afford them takes the plunge. Espardenyas — fresh sea cucumbers — are really not all that special, except they're seasonal and rare, and much different from the rubbery stuff you've probably had in Chinese stir-fries. They're served with oil and garlic, no more.

It's not all weird. I ate turbot with fried potatoes, as simple and delicious as it would be in Galicia. A suquet — fish stew — featuring monkfish, shrimp and clams, was intensely flavorful, masterfully done.

There's more in Barcelona, literally dozens of restaurants old and new that are of a quality associated with the best-eating cities in the world. But these five should keep you happy for a short trip, anyway.

WHEN Roman soldiers founded Florence around 60 B.C., its original name was Florentia, meaning “may she flourish.” It may have taken some 1,500 years, but flourish she did — becoming home and inspiration to Dante, Michelangelo and a lot of other really, really talented people. That's a source of pride for a city that clings to its history. Wander around, and you get the sense that Florentines never got the memo that Italy's capital moved south 140 years ago. That may explain its enduring appeal to legions of tourists and art-history majors. But the city's reputation as a tourist trap in Renaissance clothing may be undeserved. Florence still has the ability to surprise, with modern art, specialty shops and trendy bars. And with a half-dozen breathtaking gardens overlooking it all, not only is the city flourishing, it's in full bloom.

Friday

3 p.m.
1) EAT YOUR DESSERT

Start on the right note. Head to Badiani (Viale dei Mille, 20r; 39-055-578-682), the best gelateria in a town full of gelaterias. What makes Badiani so popular is its Buontalenti — named for the Medici Renaissance architect Bernardo Buontalenti. According to local lore, the original recipe for Buontalenti gelato was mysteriously found among some old manuscripts by the owner of Badiani and has never been successfully copied. If the weather is nice, order a “piccolo” cup (you won't have room for more) for 2 euros (about $2.75 at $1.37 to the euro) and eat it outside with Florentines who have come to start the weekend early.

4 p.m.
2) NO TIME LIKE THE RECENT PAST

There are a gazillion museums in Florence, but only a handful postdate the Renaissance. Start your circuit with the modern sculptures at Museo Marino Marini (Piazza San Pancrazio; 39-055-219-432; www.museomarinomarini.it), a spacious and airy museum that features the work of only one Italian artist, known for his stylized equestrian statues. The museum is a Florentine anomaly: not only is the art from the 20th century, but there's also a good chance you'll have the whole place to yourself. Take full advantage. Open stairways, balconies and landings let you examine Marini's work from every angle.

6 p.m.
3) THE OTHER PIETà

No one packs a house like Michelangelo. To see the artist's Pietà in Rome, you could wrestle the crowd and try to glimpse the top of Mary's head. Or you could visit the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo (Piazza del Duomo, 9; 39-055-230-2885; www.operaduomo.firenze.it; 6 euros) and walk right up to the Pietà that Michelangelo carved just before his death. He never finished it (the woman on the left was completed by another artist). The museum, oddly empty and under the shadow of the duomo, also houses Donatello's masterpiece, Mary Magdalene, and the original baptistry door panels by Ghiberti.

9 p.m.
4) VERY HAPPY HOUR

Florentine wine bars know how to lure customers: free food. And we're not talking beer nuts. The aperitivi, as the bar food is known, may include cheese ravioli, seafood risotto, crisp artichoke salad, grilled vegetables and tomato bruschetta. For the price of a glass of vino rosso (about 5 to 8 euros), you can eat like a duke at the cavelike cantina of Fuori Porta (Via del Monte alle Croci, 10r; 39-055-234-2483; www.fuoriporta.it) or under the stars on the roof of Rifrullo (Via San Niccolò, 55r; 39-055-234-2621). For more action, you might head to La Dolce Vita (Piazza del Carmine; 39-055-284-595; www.dolcevitaflorence.com) and order a spritz (Aperol and prosecco) or a negroni (Campari, vermouth and gin). It's the favorite spot of locals who are serious about their eating, drinking and merrymaking.

Saturday

9 a.m.
5) THE SWEET SPOT

A short walk outside the center, just past the reach of the tourist swarms, is the city's best pasticceria, Dolci & Dolcezze (Piazza Cesare Beccaria, 8r; 39-055-234-5458). This tiny bakery has cases full of preciously wrapped chocolates, sweet berry tarts and everything in between. Order a frothy cappuccino and a freshly baked cornetto (croissant) at the bar while Florentine women scurry through, picking up torta di cioccolato for the evening. If you want eggs for breakfast, try London.

10 a.m.
6) FINDING RELIGION

The Museo de San Marco (Piazza San Marco, 1; 39-055-238-8608; 4 euros) makes a compelling case for living as a monk. It's a former Dominican convent from the 15th century and, today, the stone hallways are as quiet as, well, a monastery. Inside, you can see the frescoes of ”The Last Judgment” and “The Annunciation” by Fra Angelico, but the highlights are the rooms — each with a small window and a fresco painting by him from the 1400s. The frescoes depict biblical scenes meant to encourage religious contemplation by the monk who lived in the cell.

Noon
7) STONE AGE

You can't go far in Florence before you bump into something from Ferdinand I de'Medici, the grand duke of Tuscany from 1587 to 1609. In this case, it's the Museo dell'Opifico delle Pietre Dure (Via degli Alfani, 78; 39-055-265-1; 2 euros), a humble gallery of stone mosaics and inlays. In the 1500s, the museum was a workshop that Ferdinand I set up to teach craftsmen the art of stonework. And the results are impressive: mosaics of precious and semiprecious materials like lapis, mother of pearl, slate, jade and seashells and so detailed you'll swear you're looking at a photograph.

1:30 p.m.
8) THE NATIVES ARE HUNGRY

In the middle of the horrendously crowded flea market in Piazza San Lorenzo is Trattoria Toscana Gozzi Sergio (Piazza San Lorenzo, 8r; 39-055-281-941), known to its regulars as Da Sergio. It scowls on foreigners, it's open only for lunch, and the food is utterly delicious. Order what the men next to you are having: the big and juicy Florentine steak (34 euros a kilo). A click fancier is Osteria Belle Donne (Via delle Belle Donne, 16r; 39-055-238-2609), a colorful, crowded restaurant where patrons sit on stools and fresh vegetables cover every surface. Squeeze alongside the local businessmen for the arugula salad with pecorino and artichokes (8 euros), eggplant Parmesan (8 euros) and roasted chicken with peppers (12).

3 p.m.
9) EURO STARS

There is no shortage of ways to spend money in Florence. But for every pair of artfully cobbled Florentine shoes there are a dozen plastic Crocs. That is where Angela Carpio comes in (39-333-837-7210; www.personalshopperflorence.com). For 100 euros an hour, Ms. Carpio will guide you to the best shops in town. If you choose to go it alone, be sure to check out Anna (Piazza Pitti, 38-40-41r; 39-055-283-787; www.annapitti.it), about the only place a self-respecting Florentine will buy a leather jacket, and Loretta Caponi (Piazza Antinori, 4r; 39-055-213-6668, www.lorettacaponi.com), one of the city's loveliest lingerie stores. For more committed shoppers, make an appointment with Louis Passarelli, a founder of Tuscan Resource (800-761-1877; www.tuscanresource.com), which has the inside track on old-school Florentine artisans, like the silk weavers whose looms have been in use for three centuries.

7 p.m.
10) BEST IN SHOW

Fabio Picchi's Cibrèo is to food what the Medicis were to housing — impressive, famous and seemingly everywhere. There are four Cibrèos: the trattoria, the cafe, the restaurant and then there's Teatro del Sale (Via dei Macci, 111r; 39-055-200-1492; www.teatrodelsale.com), which is not only a trattoria, but also a boutique grocery, theater and private club (membership can be bought at the door for 5 euros). Snag a table close to the stage and make your way to the buffet table, heaping with olive tapenade, rigatoni with ricotta cheese, spaghetti with pesto, sautéed fennel, bean salad, rack of lamb and — when the time comes — chocolate mousse with whipped cream and wafer cookies. Around 9:30 p.m., the entertainment starts, which can be anything from a poetry reading to a Gershwin-playing pianist. As much as you'll enjoy it, nothing beats the bill — 25 euros a person.

11 p.m.
11) ANGEL OF DARKNESS

For a taste of night life, follow the sound of boisterous Italians and techno music to Angels (Via del Proconsolo, 29-31; 39-055-239-8762; www.ristoranteangels.it), where slick 30-somethings meet for midnight martinis. With its stark white chairs, high-tech mood lighting and frill-less décor, Angels might look as if it were airlifted from South Beach, but the crowd and the neighborhood — steps from the duomo — are molto Italian.

Sunday

9 a.m.
12) THE LAST SQUARE

The Piazza della Santissima Annunziata is Florence's prettiest square. On one side is the Spedale degli Innocenti (Piazza della Santissima Annunziata, 12; 39-055-20371), a 1419 beauty by the Renaissance architect and whiz kid Filippo Brunelleschi, which combines huge archways, Corinthian columns and geometric grace. A bronze statue of Ferdinand I by Giambologna is in the square's center. It depicts Ferdinand on a horse forever staring at the second floor of Palazzo Budini Gattai (www.budinigattai.com) — the former bedroom, locals will tell you, of his true love.

VISITOR INFORMATION

It is most likely that your flight will connect through Paris, Rome, Milan or Frankfurt, with round-trip fares from New York starting at about $1,200 for travel from mid-June to mid-July. From the Florence airport, a taxi into town costs about 20 euros, or about $27 at $1.37 to the euro. The best way to get around the city is on foot.

If you really want to live high, surrender your credit card to the Villa San Michele, just outside Florence in the hillside town of Fiesole (Via Doccia, 4; 39-01-852-67803; www.villasanmichele.com). This enormous palace has terraced gardens, majestic rooms with modern amenities and canopied beds — not to mention that the facade was designed by Michelangelo. Weekend rates start at 840 euros. Closed November through March.

Gallery Hotel Art (Vicolo dell'Oro, 5; 39-055-272-63, www.lungarnohotels.com) is under the Ferragamo umbrella in Florence, along with several other hotels, stores and restaurants. It serves the family name proudly — sleek, modern bedrooms, a trendy lobby bar and as centrally located as you can get at the foot of the Ponte Vecchio. Weekend rates start at 200 euros.

THE two fighters cradle their birds on either side of the dirt pit. The roosters peck sharply at the air, their instincts revved for combat. But before the referee starts the first match of the night, he grabs a microphone and addresses the 200 or so spectators.

“If there are any law enforcement officers in the house tonight, please stand up and identify yourselves,” asks the referee, who goes by the name Woodchopper.

When nobody stands, Woodchopper continues: “I just say this so we can all relax and have a good time. You know there are three bills against us in the Legislature and it doesn’t look good. All I know is they’re trying to take away something that we all love.”

The crowd cheers in agreement, then starts whooping and hollering in anticipation of another long night of cockfighting at the Atchafalaya Game Club, an arena-style pit housed in an old potato shed in Henderson, La.

The club, smack in the middle of Cajun country, is one of the biggest and busiest in the state, but Woodchopper’s words carry the strain of a tradition that is in its twilight.

In an almost literal sense, cockfighting in the United States is facing the same fate as a rooster in the pit. The final death match is being waged in Louisiana, the only state that still allows this ancient blood sport. With several anti-cockfighting bills currently being debated by the State Legislature, the only question is whether the end will be swift or drawn-out. One bill calls for an immediate ban; the most lenient calls for a three-year phaseout.

One thing is certain: legal cockfighting in Louisiana is about to fade into history. The end could be played out in weeks or months, depending on the legislative outcome, but it is only a matter of time before this generations-old slice of rural Americana goes completely underground.

For the uninitiated, cockfighting usually comes across one of two ways: primal and exotic, or backwoods and revolting. There’s rarely a middle ground. But if you’re determined to catch the last gasp of this roughhewn subculture, be forewarned: dress down, brace for blood and save moral debates for outside the pit.

Even in this last surviving outpost, the activity has been on the ropes for several years, staving off extinction through the cagey maneuvering of farm-belt lawmakers. But when Louisiana became the last legal cockfighting refuge — after Oklahoma’s ban in 2002 and New Mexico’s ban in March — the pressure became relentless.

SURE, they’re going to make it illegal, but they’re never going to stop rooster fighting,” said Chris Stewart, an avid breeder and fighter from Livingston Parish. “All they’re doing is pushing it underground, just like every other state.” Nobody here talks about traveling to Mexico, Puerto Rico, Bali or the Philippines, where cockfighting remains a legal form of popular entertainment.

In the dozen or so licensed venues in Louisiana, there is a palpable sense that the end is near. Recent crowds have been large and boisterous. Fighters, who usually pace their roosters to make it through the January-to-August season, are crisscrossing the state to enter as many events as possible. The activity has never been a big tourist draw, but Mr. Stewart said he had been getting calls every week from outsiders who wanted to experience a match before it was outlawed.

“I was pitting roosters when I was 11, 12 years old,” Mr. Stewart said in a country drawl. “It’s a heritage. It’s been handed down and handed down. Down in the lower country with all the Cajuns, it’s big-time. Just the way it’s in the rooster’s blood, it gets in your blood.”

With the clock on his passion ticking away, Mr. Stewart has been fighting his birds relentlessly. He is a regular on Friday and Sunday nights — in addition to participating at Atchafalaya — at the L’il Rebel Game Club in Holden, La., just down the road from his home. Clarence (Wooly) Bunch owns and operates L’il Rebel, a tiny but once-thriving club that he is painstakingly rebuilding after it burned to the ground in a 2004 accident.

Mr. Bunch, 61, spends his weekdays at the club with hammer and nails even as the curtain threatens to fall on his livelihood. He’s trying to add a small kitchen so his wife can fix hot food at the matches. A hand-lettered sign on the wall indicates that Mr. Bunch’s beer license is pending.

“I’m just going to keep carrying on,” Mr. Bunch said. “If they pass the bill, you’re going to see a lot backyarding just like every other state. I’m never going to get rid of my birds. It’s just not right for something to be legal and then, all of a sudden, it’s illegal.”

While Mr. Stewart and Mr. Bunch are resigned to the fate of cockfighting, Rowdy Albers is angry.

“My daughter’s 21 years old now and she’s been around it all her life,” he said. “Now she’s crying that her child won’t get to see it. Besides, they’re not animals, they’re birds.”

Mr. Albers’s breakdown of the animal kingdom is often repeated by cockers. In fact, the state uses this creative taxonomy to allow the activity, exempting fighting roosters from its otherwise sweeping law against cruelty to animals.

Cockers point out that most of the birds don’t die in the pit, although poked-out eyes and broken legs and wings are common. Even maimed, gamecocks can be used for breeding and, for the most part, live out their lives like any other chicken not destined for the dinner table.

Dale Barras, who has operated the Atchafalaya Game Club for 10 years, looks at a ban through an economic lens and sees a “lose-lose situation.”

“I have $250,000 invested in this place that’s going to be thrown out the window,” Mr. Barras said in a thick Cajun accent. “And it’s not just the pit operators. What happens to the feed stores? The supply houses? The breeders? You have to understand, people come from all over the country to fight. They fill up the motels. The waitresses get great tips. It’s going to be devastating.”

Laura Maloney, director of the Louisiana Society for the Protection of Animals, expresses sympathy for people invested in the fight game. But after years of unsuccessful lobbying, she and fellow activists are going for the kill.

“It’s cruel and barbaric and it desensitizes people to violence,” Ms. Maloney said. “This needs to be banned immediately, and for a ban to be enforceable, it needs to be a felony.”

In fact, a recent poll in Louisiana showed that 82 percent of voters favored a ban. The growing public disapproval pushed cockfighting into the shadows years ago.

Mr. Barras no longer posts fliers or other forms of advertisement for his club. And in March, following state police raids of two other pits, Mr. Barras established an age requirement of 21 for spectators and participants. The owners of the raided pits — Milk Dairy in Tickfaw and Sunrise in Logansport — were cited for illegal gambling and contributing to the delinquency of juveniles.

Lt. Rhett Trahan of the Louisiana State Police helped lead the recent raids and harbors little sympathy for cockfighters. “I’m just as Cajun as the rest of them,” he said, “and it’s sure not part of my culture.”

Henderson, home of the Atchafalaya Game Club, is a one-exit town near Lafayette, 120 miles west of New Orleans. The club, two large metal warehouses on a gravel road behind Peggy’s Lounge, has no signs and no parking lot.

But when Saturday afternoon rolls around, the grass field next to the club fills with pickup trucks as fighters unload their prized and pampered roosters. The birds, carrying revered bloodlines like Albany, Hatch and Gypsy, are carefully bred and trained for speed, cutting prowess and gameness.

Before the fights begin, the handlers move their roosters to “cockhouses” — air-conditioned stalls — inside one of the warehouses. Some of the regular fighters adorn their stalls with signs sporting their fight monikers: Final Cut, Fast Dolla, Wrecking Farm and Fowl Play.

On one recent Saturday, Mr. Barras served up 25 sacks of spicy boiled crawfish as the fighters and fans trickled in. The dress code trends toward faded denim and camouflage, tattoos and cowboy boots. The atmosphere is warm and friendly, with familiar rivals seeking each other out, asking about family members and swapping fight stories. Women are a distinct, but vocal, minority.

Spectators pay a $20 cover charge. As they enter, they walk past a snack bar featuring such South Louisiana delicacies as crawfish étouffée, jambalaya and gumbo. A small shop sells items ranging from gaffs and bird vitamins to souvenir hats and T-shirts. One popular shirt features two roosters grappling under the watchful eyes of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, all reputed cockfighting fans. As the rooster crowd likes to point out, an early biographer traced Lincoln’s nickname, Honest Abe, to his fair handling of a disputed cockfight.

As the sun fades, the fighters turn to the business at hand, posting their $150 entry fee, sharpening the gaffs and blades they attach to the roosters’ legs, weighing and tagging and fussing over their birds. As a fresh pair of fighters enters the pit, people in the crowd scream for betting action, offering wagers from $10 to $100. Through eye contact and a quick exchange of shouts and hand signals, the bet is on.

Mr. Stewart has entered the gaff competition, preferring the sharp spikes to the razorlike blades. He waits almost an hour before he’s called for his initial match, and blood splatters seconds into the fight. He has trained his lemon-hackled rooster for a quick kill, a fatal gaff to his opponent’s soft underbelly just below the wing. Instead, Stewart’s bird gets spiked in the neck and begins to get pummeled. The rooster is still game, though, so the fighters are ushered into a smaller “drag pit,” where the match will end when one bird is killed or “goes cold” and refuses to fight.

The drama continues for about 10 more minutes as Mr. Stewart repeatedly revives the sagging bird by blowing on its head and sucking blood from its beak. When the rooster finally fails to respond, it’s counted out, and Mr. Stewart carries his limp fowl back to its cage. He gives the bird a 50-50 chance of pulling through.

The loss puts Mr. Stewart in the losers’ bracket, knocking him out of the big money but putting him in position to win some underdog bets in later matches. The derby continues well past midnight, and his wife, Christine, ends up sleeping in the truck with the pillow and comforter she always brings.

Mr. Stewart eventually wins several matches, but never strings together the three straight victories needed to share in the prize money. He is beaten and tired, but his mood lifts the next day when his losing roosters perk up, even the bird with the near-fatal neck wound. The creature will live to fight another day, even if those days are numbered.

OLD-TIMERS always marvel about how much Moscow has changed since the stultifying days of the Soviet Union. That's ancient history. What's really worth marveling about is how much the city has changed in the last year or two. Few places in the world have undergone such a rapid, dizzying and cacophonic transformation as Moscow, and it shows no sign of abating. The gangster Moscow of the 1990s has given way to something tamer, more metropolitan, perhaps, but it is still brash and flashy. The city, like Russia itself, seems to be in search of its identity — embracing the past, though often ironically, while plunging full-speed ahead. What the future holds is uncertain, but meantime, Muscovites are indulging in what an energy-fueled boom has bestowed on them.

FRIDAY

4 p.m.
1) RED SQUARE RISING

A great place to see Moscow's construction revolution is on the edge of Red Square. The city fathers have torn down the old Rossiya Hotel, a giant Brezhnev-era hulk that few will miss, and commissioned a new hotel and entertainment complex by the British architect Norman Foster. The Rossiya's demise has opened the airspace around one of Moscow's most historic places, Varvarka Street. A row of some of the city's oldest churches and buildings has emerged, literally, from the shadows. Among them is the Old English Court (No. 4a Varvarka, 7-495-698-3952; www.mosmuseum.ru/eng/court), a 16th-century gift of Ivan the Terrible to visiting English traders that was restored for Queen Elizabeth's visit in 1994. There is also the Museum of Chambers in Zaryade (10 Varvarka, 7-495-698-3706; www.museum.ru/M415), where the Romanovs lived before the first of them, Mikhail, became czar in 1613. Both are open until 6 or 7 p.m., depending on the day.

6 p.m.
2) BREZHNEV'S BORSCHT

Just opposite, at No. 4 Ilinka Street, is Gostiny Dvor (7-495-698-1202; www.mosgd.ru/ru/mgd/), a neo-Classical mercantile center designed by the Italian architect Giacomo Quarenghi in the 1780s. It is now a mix of exhibition spaces, stores, restaurants and bars that includes Version 1.0 (3 Varvarka, 7-495-647-1303; www.bcc-version.com), one of the city's newest nightspots, with arguably the best cocktails around. Off the bar are a dance floor, a V.I.P. hall (a Moscow essential) and a “virtual room” with projected images of the sea and snowy landscapes. During happy hour, 5 p.m. to 9 p.m., the bar offers two cocktails for the price of one and, on Fridays, features vodka drinks. Try one called Wild Land, with pepper vodka, grapefruit, lime and passion fruit. Version 1.0's cafe serves relatively inexpensive Russian cuisine like borscht, which the menu described as Brezhnev's favorite dish.

9 p.m.
3) CAFE SOCIETY

Moscow is a city of the night, which is indulged with varying degrees of decadence and expense, usually in direct correlation. Bilingua (10/5 Krivokolenny Lane, 7-495-623-9660; www.bilinguaclub.ru) is a multistory bookstore-cafe-debate club-cinema-concert hall that is popular with the university and art-school crowd. Whatever the state of politics in Vladimir V. Putin's Russia, the bohemian intelligentsia seems alive and well, and the drinks and food are inexpensive, with draft beers costing 50 to 195 rubles, or $1.90 to $7.50 at 26 rubles to the dollar. There's live music or a political debate most nights in the second-floor bar.

Midnight
4) GILDED DISCO

A popular new music venue is Ikra (Caviar), a multilevel club in the building of the Gogol Theater (8A Kazakova Street, 7-495-505-5351). The rooms are dim, the walls lined with gilded wallpaper. In the foyer an assault rifle, bafflingly, is submerged in a lighted tank. There are two bars with DJs and a performance hall that features Russian and international musicians. Concerts start at 8 or 9 p.m., but the dance parties continue until closing, at 6 a.m. Admission varies from nothing to 1,000 rubles, depending on the performers.

SATURDAY

10 a.m.
5) IMPRESSIONIST ROOMS

Stalin's government divided expropriated pre-Revolutionary art between two museums. The Hermitage in St. Petersburg may be the granddaddy of Russian museums, but the State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts is also one of the country's greats (12 and 14 Volkhonka Street, 7-495-203-7998; www.museum.ru/gmii). Famous for its collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings, the Pushkin Museum opened an annex last August for 19th- and 20th-century art across the street from its main collection in what was the Museum of Private Collections. Monet, Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse and others now have their own rooms. The main museum holds special exhibitions, like the Modigliani retrospective running through June 17. Admission to each museum is 300 rubles for foreigners; entry to the Modigliani exhibit is 100 rubles more.

1 p.m.
6) PASTRY IN THE PARK

Patriarch's Ponds is an urban oasis (with only one pond, despite the name) not far from the ever-congested Garden Ring that encircles the historic center. It served as the opening setting of Mikhail Bulgakov's mystical Soviet-era satire, “The Master and Margarita,” which tells what happens when the Devil comes to Stalin's Moscow. The streets around it, at least those not covered in scaffolding, still evoke the period — only now there are restaurants and trendy boutiques like Manolo Blahnik. The restaurants nearby (Fish, Shafran, Aist and the charming Café Margarita, named after the novel) are popular, but an inexpensive alternative for lunch is Volkonsky (2/46 Bolshaya Sadovaya Street; 7-495-299-3620; www.volkonsky.ru). A new French bakery with a small cafe, Volkonsky sells delicious sandwiches for only 150 rubles. If the weather is fine, take a sandwich and pastry back to the park and watch the Muscovites stroll by.

4 p.m.
7) SOHO IN MOSCOW

The newest addition to Moscow's thriving contemporary art scene is Vinzavod (1 Fourth Syromyatnichesky Lane, 7-495-917-3436; www.winzavod.com), a 200,000-square-foot exhibition hall in an industrial section behind the Kursk Railroad Station. The 19th-century complex was once the Moscow Bavaria beer factory, later converted to a wine factory, or vinzavod. Though still a work in progress, it is already attracting some of the city's most prominent galleries, including a major portion of the second Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art in March. Imagine SoHo way back when. Plans include a cinema, cafes and clubs; admission to galleries is free.

7 p.m.
8) BEER AND SUSHI

It's hard to believe now, but there was a time, I've been told, when beer was difficult to find in the Soviet Union. Tinkoff, near the British Embassy (11 Protochny Lane, 7-495-777-3300; www.tinkoff.ru/en/), is a measure of how much has changed. It was the country's first Western-style brewery-pub and now has locations in several Russian cities. The mood is festive and the beers abundant (light and dark, filtered and seasonal), starting at 159 rubles for a half-liter. The interior is basic brew pub: exposed brick and fixtures. The sushi is among the best in Russia. Sashimi costs 179 to 319 rubles; the Russian rolls as much as 749.

Midnight
9) JAZZY SKYLINE

One of the most conspicuous landmarks of the budding skyline is the Swissotel Krasnye Holmy (52 Kosmodamiansky Embankment, 7-495-787-9800; www.moscow.swissotel.com), a 34-story glass-and-steel tower, topped with an inverted glass bowl, that opened in July 2005. Inside the bowl is a circular bar, City Space, that has a panoramic, vertiginous view of the vast urban sprawl. The price of cocktails is nearly as dizzying (580 rubles for a whiskey sour), but the sight of the city's lights might bring to mind the jazz classic “Midnight in Moscow.”

SUNDAY

8 a.m.
10) BATHHOUSE THERAPY

A Russian tradition (and great cure for a hangover) is the banya, or bathhouse. Part spa, part social club, the banya exposes the body to extremes of hot (in the steam room) and cold (in dunking pools of various degrees of frigidity), clearing the pores and rejuvenating the soul. The city's most famous banya is the Sandunovskiye Baths, or Sanduny (14 Neglinaya Street, 7-495-625-4631; www.sanduny.ru). There are separate sections for men and women; the men's “high,” or elite, hall has a fin-de-siècle décor of columns, carved wood and brass. Two hours cost 600 to 1,000 rubles.

10:30 a.m.
11) PERESTROIKA LIVES

Izmailovsky Market, near the estate where Peter the Great played war games as a boy, is a sprawling open-air market that evolved out of the first Soviet experiments in capitalism: the flea market. One area has been refashioned into a souvenir paradise, with stalls offering nesting dolls, lacquer boxes, art, antiques, carpets and things you cannot imagine. The market, open weekends from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., is at 73 Izmaylovskoye Shosse, but don't expect to see any sign. Follow the crowds from the Partizanskaya metro station.

VISITOR INFORMATION

Delta and Aeroflot fly from Kennedy Airport in New York to Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport. A recent Web search showed round-trip fares starting at around $1,080. Brace yourself for a gantlet of taxi drivers outside the airport, some less than scrupulous. Instead, go to the official taxi counters, or order one by phone, (7-495) 788-8889.

The Moscow Metro, which carries about nine million passengers a day, can be overwhelming, particularly to a newcomer, but it is remarkably efficient, especially compared with the city's ever-worsening traffic. Some of the stations are museum pieces themselves. A single fare costs 17 rubles; 10 rides cost 140 rubles.

Hotels in Moscow are pricey and routinely exceed $400 a night, thanks to a dearth of rooms. An exception is the Hotel Budapest (2/18, Petrovskie Linii, 7-495-621-1060; www.hotel-budapest.ru/eng/about.html), a short walk from the Bolshoi Theater, the Kremlin and Red Square. Double rooms start at 5,400 rubles, or about $210 at 26 rubles to the dollar.

A more stylish spot is the Golden Apple Boutique Hotel, part of the Epoque Hotels chain (11 Malaya Dmitrovka, 7-495-980-7000; www.epoquehotels.com/moscow.html). Rates for double rooms start at 7,840 rubles.

The other end of the scale is the Ritz-Carlton, Moscow (3-5 Tverskaya Street, 7-495-225-8888; www.ritzcarlton.com), which is set to open in June. Housed in a former Intourist Hotel, the new hotel will have 334 elegant rooms, starting at 23,000 rubles.

THE battered taxi climbed high above downtown La Paz, clattering over cobblestone streets toward the poor hillside neighborhoods where most of the city's Aymara Indians live. Then, as the pedestrian traffic thickened, I heard the sharp, clear notes of a brass band and clambered out of the cab into a mob of celebrants.

It was 4 p.m. on the last day of Carnaval for the people of the Munaypata barrio, and thousands had gathered in a plaza surrounded by squat brick buildings and dominated by the snow-crusted peak of Mount Illimani, La Paz's sacred symbol. In the center of the square, men clad in outlandishly sequined costumes swigged Huari beer and danced with cholas: indigenous women dressed in traditional black bowler hats and billowing, pleated dresses, known as polleras.

These Ch'uta dance festivities, to which an American expatriate friend had taken me, take place several times a year in the altiplano, Bolivia's high plateau, a barren region of llama herders, desert lakes and impoverished Aymara villages stretching west from the snowy peaks of the Andes. But nowhere is it more colorful than in La Paz, the country's 12,000-foot-high capital.

Here neighborhood associations and social organizations, known as fraternidades, compete to see who can put together the most extravagant costumes, most of which combine references to indigenous Aymara culture with a self-mocking twist. One group, for example, the Choleros, or Players, wore baby-blue vacquero costumes, complete with exaggeratedly flared pant legs and Pancho Villa hats. Another fraternity, known as the Intocables, or Untouchables, had decked themselves out as campy Dick Tracys, with fedoras and baggy orange suits adorned with bejeweled Andean motifs including condors and dragons. Many of the participants wore ghoulish masks with giant ears, bulbous green eyes and yellow beards. “It's all part of our tradition,” one beer-soaked member of the Intocables told me. “We all want to be the ones who get the most attention.”

A generation ago, fiestas like Ch'uta drew considerable attention from a group of young artists in La Paz. Partly inspired by the New York-based Pop Art movement, this circle began producing works filled with playful references to Aymara Indian culture: the festival masks, costumes and brightly colored fabrics that stand out sharply amid the washed-out landscapes of the altiplano. But while the Pop Art scene in New York was soon supplanted by other creative waves, it has never really disappeared from La Paz. And now the unique aesthetics of this city and the surrounding region have begun inspiring not just local artists, but also fashion designers and painters from the rest of South America and beyond.

Noted painters from the United States and Europe have come to La Paz to soak up the city's Andean atmosphere. The British designer John Galliano recently created a line based on the clothing of the Indian tribes of Bolivia and Peru, and last year the Buenos Aires fashion company Tramando introduced tops and skirts inspired by the “warmth, festivities and myths [and] rich chromatic nuances” of altiplano culture. Trixie d'Epanoux, a partner in Tramando, recently referred to La Paz as the Pop Art capital of South America.

The term is a tricky one. To some, Pop Art can refer to both the original Indian crafts and fashion designs — mischievous, bright, cartoonish and often kitschy — and to the evocations of those designs by contemporary artists. Others insist that the terminology can be applied only as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein meant it to be used — “high art” that uses elements of mass culture to make a creative statement.

“There is a marvelous, undeniably glorious repertoire of colors and forms in Bolivia, but they don't deserve the term Pop Art,” said Robert Valcárcel, a celebrated Bolivian artist, who has filled his paintings and collages with indigenous imagery. “I'm not trying to diminish the value of those cultural expressions, but to put them in a conceptual place.” Mr. Valcárcel prefers to call La Paz a “proto-Pop Art capital.”

Whatever one calls it, the sensibility is thriving in La Paz. Mr. Valcárcel is one of a handful of Bolivian artists whose work is widely displayed in galleries in other countries in South America and the United States — and though he moved to the lowland Bolivian city of Santa Cruz from La Paz 15 years ago, he has never really shaken off the altiplano influence. One evening I went to see some of his works at the lavishly decorated home of Patricia Tordoir, an English patron of the arts who has lived with her husband in La Paz for nearly two decades.

The founder of a gallery and nonprofit foundation, esART, in the affluent Zona Sur section, Ms. Tordoir has assembled what may be one of the largest contemporary Bolivian modern art collections in the world. She showed me some of Mr. Valcárcel's cartoonlike collages — a pair of fornicating Lacoste alligators, a Bolivian archangel in a billowing blue-and-orange checkerboard dress, each hand clutching a stick of dynamite (a reference to Bolivia's miners, who are prone to use the explosives both on the job and in confrontations with the government). Ms. Tordoir had also collected works spanning the long career of a Valcárcel contemporary, Gastón Ugalde. His works, including a takeoff of 1980s runaway inflation in Bolivia (a collage of a galloping steed pasted over reams of worthless Bolivian banknotes), are, she says, “the essence of the Pop Art sensibility.”

I visited Mr. Ugalde one afternoon at his studio in the bohemian neighborhood of Sopocachi just outside La Paz's center. A shaggy, bearded collagist, sculptor and photographer, Mr. Ugalde, 60, specializes in what may be the ultimate kitsch art: collage portraits assembled from coca leaf, Bolivia's most lucrative crop. (He forms patterns on the canvas by using the dark green surface of the leaf and its paler underside.)

The ascension in January 2006 to Bolivia's presidency of Evo Morales, an Aymara Indian who previously served as the head of a coca-growing syndicate in the country's Chapare region, has dramatically boosted Mr. Ugalde's profile and his fortunes. Shortly after his victory, Mr. Morales commissioned a coca-leaf presidential portrait, which now hangs prominently in the presidential palace along with Mr. Ugalde's coca portraits of Che Guevara and Simón Bolívar. Mr. Ugalde, who made his first coca portrait in 1992, told me that he was drawn to the leaf as an artistic medium because “traditionally we use coca leaf here to communicate. You chew it, you drink, and you talk. It brings people together.”

One of Mr. Ugalde's recent projects consists of a series of striking color photographs taken in the salt flat of Uyuni, eight hours south of La Paz, which juxtapose stark landscapes with uniquely Bolivian cultural artifacts. In one photograph, a transparency of Che Guevara — shot dead by Bolivian troops in the jungle near Santa Cruz in 1967 and still revered by many here — is submerged in the turquoise waters of a puddle in the enormous Uyuni salt flat. In another, Mr. Ugalde has wrapped, Christo-style, a rusting, abandoned mining train in a colorful Andean fabric, transforming a bleak symbol of economic collapse (most of the altiplano mines shut down a generation ago) into a celebration of Andean tradition. “Andeans are among the richest artisan cultures in the world,” Mr. Ugalde told me. “Now the concepts of artist and artisan have come together.”

ONE evening friends took me to Gota de Agua, a popular club for traditional Bolivian folkloric music, where artists, moviemakers and other creative types from Bolivia and abroad go to soak up La Paz's Aymara aesthetic. At midnight, it was packed: an Andean band, playing pipes and drums and wearing the distinctive peaked alpaca caps with earflaps, took to the dance floor, surrounded by Bolivian cultural artifacts — bright murals of peasants in multicolored headdresses, masks of black slave miners with pipes, red beards and helmets (the central motif of the morenada dance, one of the most popular in the annual Gran Poder festival in La Paz). Bolivian fashionistas, video artists and heavy metal rockers mingled over half-liter bottles of Huari beer and danced to both live and recorded Bolivian music.

The night I was there, a dozen young French travelers walked through the door, most of them clad in exaggerated versions of traditional Bolivian fashions — one young woman wore an African-style Moslem cap in alpaca with vertical thin strips in shades of green and gray, and a matching poncho with vertical and horizontal bands of bright colors running into each other. “We love the colors and the patterns,” she told me. Growing numbers of young French tourists were discovering Bolivia, she said, drawn by its Andean aesthetic and its changing politics. “Evo Morales has put Bolivia on the map,” she said. “We like it because it's socialist, indigenous and cheap.”

Just up the hill from Gota de Agua stands another establishment that has become popular among the artsy set: La Costilla de Adán, or Adam's Rib, a bar in Sopocachi. The owner, Roberto Cazorla Guzman, a hair stylist, opened the two-story place in what was his home. He has crammed it with curios and artifacts spanning the past century, some indigenously Bolivian, others “found art” he picked up at a flea market that takes place every Thursday and Sunday in gray, windswept El Alto, 1,500 feet above La Paz.

Mr. Cazorla Guzman took me upstairs and showed off his collection of negritas — black female dolls that originated during the Spanish colonial era when upper-class Bolivian women used African slaves as wet nurses. The dolls, now embraced as symbols of fecundity, are traditionally brought out for La Paz's annual Alasitas Festival. The owner told me that he designed his bar-club as “a house of creative inspiration.”

For all of its dazzling visual imagery, La Paz remains an artistic backwater. Government financing for artists is nonexistent, and the domestic market in this poor country is so limited that even an artist of the stature of Roberto Valcárcel must support himself by teaching. That is what troubles Mr. Valcárcel most about calling La Paz a Pop Art capital — it wrongly implies, he says, both a thriving contemporary art scene and an aesthetic that is “still imitating the New York Pop artists” 40 years late.

As an inspiration for graphic design and fashion, La Paz may be one of the hottest scenes around. But for the handful of local artists trying to survive here, it can be a very cold place indeed.

VISITOR INFORMATION

GETTING THERE

American Airlines operates flights between Kennedy Airport in New York and La Paz via Miami. Flights for mid-June were recently available starting at $600, with a two-hour layover in Miami on the way down, and stops in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, and Miami on the way back.

Last New Year's Eve, Bolivia's Congress passed a law requiring United States citizens to obtain tourist visas, but most Bolivian embassies were not equipped to implement the new requirement, and as of mid-May the law still hadn't gone into effect. Check with your local Bolivian consulate or the embassy to determine what the rules are. The currency is the boliviano, but U.S. dollars are accepted in most hotels and restaurants.

HOTELS

Hostal República (Calle Commercio 145 in the Central District; 591-2-220-2742; www.hostalrepublica.com) is a beautiful colonial-style villa that was once the home of a president of the republic. It's walking distance from the Plaza Murillo, where the presidential palace is now situated; doubles with private bath, $26.

Somewhat more upscale is the three-star Eva Palace Hotel (Calle Sagarnaga 173, Central District; 591-2-231-4885; www.evapalacehotel.com), in the heart of La Paz's bustling tourist district, is just up the street from the Plaza San Francisco. Doubles from $38.

Hotel Radisson (Avenida Arce 2177; 591-2-244-1111; www.radisson.com/lapazbo) in Sopacachi, just up the road from the United States Embassy, is a clean, modern, comfortable hotel with a decent restaurant and high-speed Internet access. Doubles from $180.

RESTAURANTS AND BARS

Bocaisapo (Final Indaburo, around the corner from Calle Jaen, in Casa Verde de la Cruz) is a popular wine bar frequented by La Paz's artists and writers. It features traditional Bolivian music and heated discussions about art, literature and Andean culture at its heavy wooden tables and lambskin-covered benches.

Costilla de Adán (Pasaje Aspiazu 743, between Calle Aspiazu and Avenida Abdon Saavedra; 591-2-241-2318) opened six months ago and quickly became one of the most popular bars in town. Its lively half-dozen lounges spread over two floors are crammed with Pop Art and Bolivian artifacts.

Gota de Agua (Calle Ilampu 837, between Sagarnaga and Santa Cruz), one of La Paz's hottest clubs, features traditional Bolivian music, both live and recorded, in a traditional Andean milieu. On weekends the beer flows and the dancing goes on until dawn. Cover charge varies depending on the entertainment, but isn't more than $2.

Los Tumbos del Sur (Avenida Costanero 60, Seguencoma District; 591-2-275-2037) serves large helpings of traditional Bolivian food, as does La Casa de los Paceños (Avenida Sucre 814; 591-2-228-0955). Dinner for two is $20 to $25 at either.

La Comedie (Pasaje Gustavo Medinacelli 2234; 591-2-242-3561) in Sopacachi, which serves French cuisine, is widely regarded as the best restaurant in town. Dinner for two costs less than $40.

LET'S free associate. If I say Capri, what comes to mind? Glamour, gorgeous views, ritzy shopping — the uninterrupted leisure of la dolce vita. And what if I say Graham Greene? Troubled faith, espionage, unforgiving, “cinematic” realism, seedy characters in sordid places. “Greeneland” can be thrilling on the page, but not many of us would want to go there on vacation.

In other words, there's good reason to assume that the 20th-century British novelist and the sparkling island in the Bay of Naples are mutually incompatible, that the two should never be linked in the same sentence. Greene, typically succinct, had this to say about Capri: “It isn't really my kind of place.”

Once a second home to Roman emperors, it's now a tourist destination, and Greene, one of the most traveled writers of all time, was temperamentally unsuited to tourism: The notion of traveling for fun wouldn't have occurred to him.

And yet he bought a small house on Capri in 1948 and kept it for more than 40 years, returning for short visits, mostly in the spring and fall, until the very end of his life, when he became too ill to travel. The house, Il Rosaio, was a rare constant in Greene's restless existence (“one of nature's displaced persons,” Malcolm Muggeridge called him). In 1978, Greene was made an honorary citizen of the town of Anacapri, and in a brief speech on the occasion, he gave the obvious explanation for his biannual pilgrimage to an island that wasn't at all to his taste: On Capri, he said, “in four weeks I do the work of six months elsewhere.”

Case closed. Writers must sit alone at a desk and write — that's the only way the books get written, and Greene wrote a great many, including 26 novels. “The End of the Affair” (1951), “The Quiet American” (1955), “Our Man in Havana” (1958), “A Burnt-Out Case” (1961), “Travels With My Aunt” (1969) — portions of all of these were written in the bare, whitewashed study at Il Rosaio. If you need further proof that the connection between Greene and Capri was essentially utilitarian, consider this: Though he wrote copiously while he was on the island, dutifully turning out his minimum daily quota of 350 words (“One has no talent,” Greene perversely insisted, “I have no talent. It's just a question of working, of being willing to put in the time”), he never once used Capri as material for his fiction.

But if you go there with his books on the brain, you'll discover the moment you arrive that Capri and Greeneland are not necessarily so far apart. From a distance, as the ferry crosses the wide bay, with Naples and Mount Vesuvius at your back, the island promises the delights of a Mediterranean paradise: dramatic limestone cliffs capped with a thick canopy of trees; a cheerful splattering of houses, white and pastel, climbing up steep hills from a harbor crowded with sumptuous yachts.

As the ferry docks, the brute logistics of day-trip tourism take over: thousands and thousands of bodies flow in and out of the port every day of summer, disembarking in the morning only to trudge back up the gangplank, sweaty and tired, late in the afternoon. The pier, with as many as half a dozen ferries swallowing or disgorging passengers, is packed alarmingly tight.

Greene had captured the feel of this kind of human tide a decade before he first came to Capri. In the opening pages of his masterpiece “Brighton Rock” (1938), he described the holiday crowds arriving in Brighton, 50,000 of them down from London for a day at the seaside, “stepping off in bewildered multitudes into fresh and glittering air.”

The air in the Marina Grande is glittering, yes, but not fresh — diesel and sunblock perfume the tawdry scene. Get out as quickly as you can — the title of Greene's second volume of autobiography springs to mind: “Ways of Escape” (1980) — and avoid centers of population until the evening, when the day-trippers have departed.

The vast majority of tourists take the funicular up to the town of Capri, where the modest, winding streets have been hijacked by high-end retail: Prada, Tod's, Bulgari, Gucci. Imagine Rodeo Drive squeezed into the narrow lanes of an Italian hill town and swept by a surging stream of visitors in sneakers and knapsacks, a ululating Babel that circulates in and out of the main piazza like a video on a playback loop.

Others take stubby orange buses and convertible taxis across the sheer face of a cliff and up and around Monte Solaro to Anacapri, the quieter of the island's two towns. It, too, has a touristy pedestrian shopping street, noticeably less chic, that peters out as it wends westward. Piazza Caprile, the small, dusty square closest to Greene's house, could be the center of any ordinary Italian village. No trace here of either la dolce vita or the day-tripping masses, only an optometrist, a fruit and vegetable store and a betting parlor. Old ladies with canes are dressed in black, woolly tights on their swollen legs; children, running home for lunch, wear smocks; grizzled men stand in doorways in groups of two and three, smoking. A spreading olive tree promises that the piazza is as it was and will be.

The street down to Greene's house narrows past the bakery, the hardware store and the self-service laundry. Bougainvillea spills over the whitewashed walls of villas, a cascade of bright flowers, cactus crowning a doorway. Around a bend, a hazy slice of the Tyrrhenian Sea in the distance is just a shade darker than the cloudless sky. Palm leaves rattle in the breeze, and from farther away comes the sound of unhurried construction. Around another corner is Il Rosaio. Near the wrought-iron gate, a marble plaque erected in 1992 by the Lions Club of Capri informs visitors (in Italian) that this was the residence of Graham Greene, honorary citizen of Anacapri. Two loud American women march by, huffing from their hike; they pass without a glance at the house or the plaque — just about the only visible trace of Greene left on the island.

At the bookstore in Capri, not one of Greene's novels is for sale, either in English or in Italian. Ask for his books and you'll be handed a copy of Shirley Hazzard's delightful, utterly unsentimental memoir, “Greene on Capri” (2000). Ms. Hazzard's affection for her cantankerous friend and his “unquiet, unappeasable spirit” allows her to be at once sympathetic toward a writer she admires and clear-eyed about his prickly personality.

Ms. Hazzard and Greene shared a favorite restaurant in Capri, da Gemma. “The unadulterated simplicity of Gemma's restaurant was a stable factor that helped make the island agreeable to Graham,” she writes. “Like many restless people, he preferred to find his ports of call unchanged.” The restaurant's namesake, Gemma, died in 1984 (and Greene took part in the funeral procession), but her family still runs the restaurant, which remains popular.

Habitually frugal, Greene liked to eat early and catch the last bus back to Anacapri — to spare the cost of a taxi. Much more pleasant to stroll back to the piazza for coffee and a grappa at the Gran Caffè (where Shirley Hazzard first met Greene) and watch the flow of passers-by. It's a place to see and be seen — not even Greene could resist the urge to scope out individuals of interest: He claimed to have spotted in the piazza a “handsome white-haired American gangster, one of Lucky Luciano's men, spending the quiet evening of his days.” Ms. Hazzard assures us that “Graham cared nothing for fashionable life,” but if you enjoy ogling people, the piazza at night is an ideal spot for it. If you need to justify your voyeurism, scan the crowd and say to yourself that you're studying Greene's method. He once told an interviewer, “When I describe a scene, I capture it with the moving eye of the cine-camera rather than with the photographer's eye — which leaves it frozen.”

It's true that enjoying a nightcap and a peek at the pastel parade does seem a long way from what the critic James Wood calls Greene's “Catholic writings” — and from his strenuous and mostly iconoclastic left-wing politics. But Capri is a long way from the cares of the world and besides, the island's tidy Baroque church, Santo Stefano, where Greene occasionally attended Mass, is being restored, the ceiling obscured by a canopy of scaffolding.

If a Mediterranean vacation seems like the wrong occasion to wrestle with Greene's favorite themes, at least one can trace his wanderings around the island. According to Ms. Hazzard, “natural beauty had erratic claim, only, on [Greene's] attention;” he was “a man largely unmoved by visual experience.” And yet his daily routine usually included an afternoon walk, often to the Belvedere Mígliera, a half-hour's amble along a pleasant track through the outskirts of Anacapri, past meticulously tended vineyards, to a lookout perched vertiginously 300 yards above the empty sea.

A walk on the opposite end of the island leads up to the sumptuous Villa Jovis built by the emperor Tiberius. Ms. Hazzard tells of an expedition there with Greene, climbing up though the ruins and looking out over “some of the loveliest scenery on earth.” In the distance, offshore from Positano, are Li Galli, tiny, rocky islands, one of which belonged at the time to the Russian dancer and choreographer Léonide Massine (after Massine's death the island was bought by Rudolph Nureyev). Greene remarked, “the place looks idyllic, but might be hell.” Ms. Hazzard dryly notes, “Graham was inclined to suspect — in some moods, perhaps to hope — that most idylls might be hell.”

After three days on Capri, I came to the conclusion that one can best summon up Greene by defying him, by matching his notorious belligerence with a stubborn commitment to all the pleasures he had difficulty embracing. Rent a little boat and circle the island, soak up the beauty (the big tour boats are cheaper, but if you spoil yourself, you'll enjoy the privacy and the freedom to anchor where you like to swim and sunbathe). Stroll out in the evening to the Arco Naturale, and stop for a glass of prosecco at Le Grottelle (Greene's third favorite restaurant, according to Ms. Hazzard). The secluded trattoria's tables are perched on a terrace 150 yards above the sea, with a view of the Sorrentine peninsula, some three miles away. As the sun sets behind you, it lights up in pink a bank of clouds on the horizon. Across the water, the village of Praiano is a dusting of white on the distant promontory. Later, if you stay for dinner, the darkened sea is mapped out by a constellation of fishing boats. A heavenly idyll.

VISITOR INFORMATION

GETTING THERE

Ferries and hydrofoils offer regular service to Capri from Naples, Sorrento, Ischia and other ports. For more information, see www.capri.com.

Where to Stay

It is never cheap to stay in a hotel on Capri. If you're after la dolce vita, some five-star hotels will set you back about 400 euros, or about $550 at $1.38 to the euro, for a double room in the high season.

Capri Palace Hotel and Spa, Via Capodimonte, 2b, Anacapri, (39-081) 978-0111; www.capripalace.com. The starting rate for a double room is 420 euros.

Grand Hotel Quisisana, Via Camerelle, 2, Capri, (39-081) 837-0788; www.quisi.it. Double rooms start at about 340 euros.

Hotel Excelsior Parco, Via Provinciale Marina Grande, 179, Capri. (39-081) 837-9671; www.excelsiorparco.com. Less expensive, less luxurious and perfectly pleasant (though noticeably understaffed). Doubles start at around 290 euros.

WHERE TO EAT

Graham Greene had three favorite restaurants on Capri, according to his friend Shirley Hazzard. Dinner for two and a bottle of wine will cost about 75 euros.

Da Gemma, Via Madre Serafina, 6, Capri; (39-081) 837-0461.

Settanni, Via Longano, 5, Capri; (39-081) 837-0105.

Le Grottelle, Via Arco Naturale, Capri; (39-081) 837-5719.

READING

In addition to Shirley Hazzard's memoir, “Greene on Capri” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000) and Norman Sherry's “The Life of Graham Greene” (Penguin, 2004), there's a solid new book about Greene's fiction — “A Study in Greene,” by Bernard Bergonzi (Oxford University Press, 2006).

AS ski season vanishes to slush in much of the country, it’s only just beginning at Tuckerman Ravine in New Hampshire. Tens of thousands of skiers, boarders and adventurers from all over the world start arriving there in late April, and work and worry the snowy proving ground until at least June and sometimes into July.

They lug their poles, skis and boards up the mushy three-mile path to the base of the ravine, which lies on the southeast slope of Mount Washington and is one of the oldest, best-known and most difficult backcountry skiing spots in North America. Then they put on their gear, pick a run, climb it, ski it (more or less), then repeat. They come for a range of reasons, from a rite of passage to prove their skiing chops, to a rite of spring they perform with their fathers, mothers, sons and daughters.

A vast, inverted half-dome, Tuckerman is the kind of place that you photograph with a panoramic lens but still can’t capture. Its volume of snowfall (it averages 55 feet in its deepest spot) and the mountain’s altitude — it’s the highest peak in the Northeast at 6,288 feet — makes the area too dangerous to ski in winter. But it also keeps the snow around deep into spring. It is an anomaly, a piece of the Rockies transplanted back East.

As his friends mowed their lawns and coddled spring flowers one Sunday earlier this month, Jay Wilkinson climbed the steepest ski slope he had ever seen. He had been determined to ski Tuckerman since he moved to Exeter, N.H., in 2002. Last spring, he hiked up in a foggy snowstorm, tried to ski down anyway, and tore ligaments in both his knees.

But this year he came back, on a day when the temperature neared 60 degrees and the sky shimmered bluebird blue. As Mr. Wilkinson ascended, digging his ski boots into the steps left by the skiers above, leaning his body against the slope before him that felt at times almost vertical, he gave himself a little lecture: “There’s only one way down. There’s no steps. There’s no chair lift. You’ve got to get down, or you’re going to fall down.”

When he finally got to his launching point on a giant boulder — and launch is the right word at this backcountry bowl — he stood in line as the skiers before him gulped and jumped the 15-foot cliff that starts the run. Two skiers ahead of him chose good spots, and Mr. Wilkinson, 39, who has been skiing for 20 years in Europe, Utah and the Northeast, made a mental note to imitate their lines. The woman in front of him, sensing his anxiety, gave him some encouragement:

“ ‘Have confidence in yourself! It’s all a matter of just thinking you can do it. Think positive, know where you’re going to make your turn — and watch me,’ ” Mr. Wilkinson said she said. “Then she just shot off and ...wiped out. In fine style, actually. But the pep talk was really useful.”

Normal spring skiing usually involves a little jump at each turn to get your skis around in the heavy wet snow — so-called hop turns. Skiing Tuckerman involves something more like “leap turns.” The best run that Sunday was made by a man who flew several feet into the air before each turn, his skis cutting into the mountainside at such a sharp angle that his cheeks looked to be touching the snow.

THE balmy spring temperatures encourage a more relaxed attitude among the skiers. At the base of the ravine that Sunday, a group of guys stood around playing a game that involved balancing a beer bottle on a ski pole, then flinging a pot lid at it (they had left the Frisbee at home).

On warm days, spectators can be found suntanning on the rocks and watching the ant lines ascend faces of the bowl that have names like the Chute, the Icefall and the Sluice. Skiers make their runs in less-than-wintry clothing, like the man wearing Daisy Duke cut-offs and another who had a rubber chicken strapped to his helmet.

A woman walked up to the gentlemen frolicking with the beer bottle, the ski pole and the pot lid and asked, “Have you guys seen any naked people?”

“Not yet,” one of them replied. “I’m hoping.”

Erin Connery and Ben Siek from Holderness, N.H., Mr. Siek’s skis having broken the week before, repeatedly climbed up the center gully and careered down the hill on a pink plastic toboggan and a neon green snow saucer. Their runs, enacted at terrifying speeds that sent them airborne with each tiny bump, drew echoing hoots and hollers from the spectators lounging on rocks around the bowl. Throughout the day, such cries of approval were reserved for two distinct groups: truly extraordinary skiers or yahoos who looked as if they had death wishes.

Tuckerman Ravine was one of the original spring-skiing spots. It was named after a 19th-century botanist, Edward Tuckerman, who studied the region’s plants. In the 1920s and ’30s, when skiing first became popular in the United States but before chairlifts and rope tows, Tuckerman was frequented by skiers from local colleges like Dartmouth and by members of the Appalachian Mountain Club.

But as skiing exploded in popularity in the second half of the 20th century with resorts, gondolas, restaurants and other amenities to make the casual skier comfortable, Tuckerman became a throwback. In a sport revered by many for its extreme contact with nature, the ravine gives skiers the chance to test themselves against the mountain, with no namby-pamby mugs of hot chocolate waiting if they get tired halfway through the run.

“It’s like skiing of old, when skiing was a really risky thing to do,” said Martin Silverstone, 53, a writer from Montreal who has been coming to Tuckerman for 30 years. “Back in the beginning, skiers were known as wackos. And this goes back to that, because you are a wacko to ski this.”

For a backcountry bowl, though, the ravine has a surprising amount of infrastructure. Two and a half miles up the Tuckerman trail, skiers reach HoJo’s, the Appalachian Mountain Club hut named for its resemblance to a Howard Johnson motel. HoJo’s sells snacks and T-shirts and provides hikers with a veranda on which to lounge and contemplate the skiing they have completed or will be attempting. On a sunny spring day, the area buzzes with activity, as skiers and boarders put on their boots or just take a break from the slushy slog. Campsites and restrooms are nearby, and many take advantage, staying up at the bowl for days at a time.

The United States Forest Service keeps another hut just a few feet away, and several snow rangers, as they are called, provide the most recent reports on potential hazards. It’s another steep half-mile up to the base of the bowl, but even there, the red coats emblazoned with the white cross of the Mount Washington Volunteer Ski Patrol make skiers feel secure, if only in the notion that if they break a leg they won’t have long to wait for a ride down.

Despite the ski patrol, rangers and crowds, the backcountry dangers at Tuckerman are very real. Volkswagen-size chunks of blue ice hung from the headwall that Sunday, threatening to fall and shatter on the boulder field below. The snow rangers post a daily avalanche update on their Web site (www.tuckerman.org), and despite their best efforts, an average of 24 skiers need to be carried out on a litter each year — with the occasional death.

Crevasses and undermined snow — in the summer, Tuckerman is a waterfall — pose additional dangers. And all the infrastructure can give visitors a false sense of confidence. “Yes, if they got hurt, there’s more people here to help them,” said Chris Joosen, the lead snow ranger, “but maybe they wouldn’t do the things they do if they were here alone.”

But they keep coming back. On Jay Wilkinson’s hike up to Tuckerman that day, he had said that he was only going to ski the mountain one day, just to get it out of his system. He would do two runs, he figured, and that would be enough. But as he sat on the rocks afterward in the waning sun, packing his gear for the hike down, he found himself reconsidering.

“My first run was good, and my second run was better; my next run might be even better,” he said. “Even though I said I was only going to do it once, I may have to do it again.”

VISITOR INFORMATION

THE closest towns to Pinkham Notch, which is the Tuckerman Ravine trailhead off Route 16, are Jackson and North Conway. Eagle Mountain House (179 Carter Notch Road, Jackson; 800-966-5779; www.eaglemt.com) is a venerable hotel 15 minutes away. Rooms start at $89 a night. For the full Tuckerman experience, there’s the Appalachian Mountain Club’s Joe Dodge Lodge (Route 16; 603-466-2727; www.outdoors.org/lodging), which sits right at the Tuckerman Ravine trailhead. For nonmembers, the nightly rate for accommodations ranges from $56 to $62.

There’s a good chance that you’ll be ravenous after a day of grappling with Tuckerman Ravine. Shannon Door Restaurant and Pub in Jackson (junction of Routes 16 and 16A, 603-383-4211; www.shannondoor.com) has 14 beers on tap, serves thin-crust pizza and has live music Thursday through Sunday. The Moat Mountain Smoke House & Brewing Company in North Conway (3378 White Mountain Highway, or Route 16; 603-356-6381; www.moatmountain.com) is a brew pub whose beers include Golden Dog Pilsner and Square Tail Stout.

IN the movies, love always seems to find its way: opposites attract, the hard-working guy marries the girl next door, and coincidence has a way of intervening at just the right moment. Life doesn’t always imitate art, as Lucille Masone Smith knows, having spent a career helping to create the artifice of film. But sometimes it comes surprisingly close.

Ms. Smith has worked on more than 30 films as producer, production manager or controller for both the big screen and television and divides her time between her Upper West Side apartment and her five-fireplace saltbox house, built in 1710, in the small town of Scotland in northeast Connecticut. She bought the house, with its beamed ceilings, plank floors and 100 acres of lush pastureland and forested hills, for $335,000 in 1986 and uses it as a place of refuge when she isn’t on location or in Manhattan.

She brought in furnishings gathered in her workplaces around the world, like the Fortuny lamps purchased in Venice when she was there in 1994 for the filming of “Only You” with Robert Downey Jr. and Marisa Tomei. Her bed is the one that was in Cher’s dressing room on the 1996 film “Faithful.” (Ms. Smith’s acquisition style, she said, is “a treasure a movie.”) Martin Scorsese gave her a bichon frisé that romped over the property. In the silence of the surrounding hills, Ms. Smith marked holidays with her brother and nephews, mourned the deaths of her parents and healed from a divorce.

Then, one day in 2004, she found what appeared to be remnants of crack cocaine use in a shed on the edge of her property. Unsure of what to do, she called a neighbor, Robert F. Brautigam, a former police chief then working as the director of basic training for the Connecticut Police Academy.

Mr. Brautigam, who somewhat resembles the actor Ed Harris, lived across the road in a former hunting lodge on 50 acres. Although their houses were only an eighth of a mile apart, and in one area their properties even abutted, the two neighbors had exchanged only occasional pleasantries. She left a message on his answering machine that began, “Mr. Brautigam, this is your neighbor, Lucille Smith.”

He was away on a vacation — a change of pace for him and an attempt to lighten a life that had been subdued since the death of his wife, Ruth, a year before on the day before their 42nd wedding anniversary. Soon after her funeral, facing heart bypass surgery, he had told his children: “If I die on the table, don’t worry about it. I’d be better off.”

After he returned from his trip, Mr. Brautigam investigated Ms. Smith’s shed and declared that it hadn’t been used in months. Relieved, and learning of Mr. Brautigam’s interest in antiques, she offered him an old safe that had been a prop in “Pieces of April,” a 2003 movie with Katie Holmes. To thank her, he began to leave by her kitchen door vegetables and fruit grown on his property. To thank him, she made a ratatouille. He stopped by and said, in his plain-spoken way, “Look, I don’t cook. But, if you like, I’ll take you out to dinner.”

They married in October 2005. A momentary sticking point was the question of where they would live in the country. Mr. Brautigam wanted Ms. Smith to move into his house. But his father, Frederick, now a lively 90-year-old, gently intervened, saying, “You can’t expect Lucille to live in another woman’s home.” Mr. Brautigam yielded (he still owns the property, however). Ms. Smith suggested that he design his own addition to her place, and their joint history in the saltbox began.

On a bright day in late April, Mr. Brautigam was putting the finishing touches on the new addition, a large, graceful study with recessed lighting, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and space for his collection of 19th-century maps and diaries. The room’s windows overlook gardens and a pond. Outside, the air was spicy with the smell of pine, and magnolia trees bloomed pink and white. Birds crowded the feeders — goldfinches, a scarlet cardinal and an indigo bunting with royal blue feathers.

Ms. Smith made tea in a silver teapot and took it to the parlor, where wood paneling that dates from the Colonial era frames the fireplace. The walls are a subtle rose color done with a technique called ragging, in which paint is applied with a rag rather than a brush. The color matches the border of the Art Deco rug.

“In the film industry, it’s important to have another life because it is so consuming,” Ms. Smith said, and even before she met Mr. Brautigam, she added, “I worked hard to have that other life.”

The house was in good condition when she bought it in the 1980s, but, like any nearly 300-year-old structure, it has always been a work in progress. Ms. Smith hired contractors to replace wood damaged from termites; she replaced every door in the house and had a cedar-shingled roof constructed. After working on the first season of “Law and Order: Criminal Intent” in 2001, she had a garage constructed in a post-and-beam design to match the house.

THE furnishings brought home from movie locations are sprinkled around the house. Ms. Smith bought the antique Chinese mirrors while working in South Carolina on “Once Around,” a film in which Holly Hunter falls for Richard Dreyfuss. The silver-framed quotes from Yeats that adorn the kitchen and a bedroom hallway came from Ireland, where she went for the filming of “The Devil’s Own” (1997), which had a cast led by Harrison Ford and Brad Pitt. Kitchen drawers hold sterling silver from Baltimore, the location for the 1994 film “Guarding Tess” with Shirley MacLaine.

The couple teased each other about all the ways they shouldn’t be able to get along. The list is lengthy. She’s a liberal; he is, he said, “very conservative.” She’s a night owl; he goes to bed early. She’s an urban sophisticate; he likes nothing more than working on the orchards he has planted on his 50 acres.

“Bob had no idea who Brad Pitt was when we met,” Ms. Smith said. “Now he does.”

“And I don’t mind shooting a deer who is ravishing my orchard,” Mr. Brautigam said. “She would put down napkins for him.”

She nodded. “The neighbors say that, as far as the deer are concerned, this is the safe side of the street.”

They laughed every few minutes. Mr. Brautigam, who retired soon after their marriage, tends to the 600 apple trees and hundreds of blueberry bushes on his property. Ms. Smith sells his harvest from a roadside stand and oversees the pick-your-own operation when she isn’t working on a film.

She is still meticulous about furnishings. For the master bedroom, one of three bedrooms and two sleeping lofts in the house, she’s ordered a rug from Nepal.

The dining room is unique. Ms. Smith commissioned an artist, Will Perkins of Ipswich, Mass., to paint the walls gold and then paint a different, delicate Asian scene on each. The walls glow, each looking like a Japanese screen.

When Ms. Smith stepped away for a moment, Mr. Brautigam leaned forward to make a point clear. “I had no desire to live after Ruthie died,” he said. “Lucille saved my life.”

Later, walking near the pond on her property, Ms. Smith grew misty on being told about this remark. “Well, I know he saved mine,” she said.

If movies were like life, they might celebrate more frequently the wisdom of love in later years, the easy affection that laughs at differences and evaporates loneliness. And if life were like the movies, one might cast two unlikely characters — a police officer and a producer, say, and put them on opposites sides of a quiet road, where they would meet out of need and make a life together out of choice.

But, of course, life isn’t like the movies.

“The immaterial has become material,” announces the East India Company’s scheming Lord Beckett (Tom Hollander) early in “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End.” He could be referring to the recent resurrection of the pirate Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush), flush with life and his expanded role in the trilogy. Or he could be speaking of his newfound dominion over the Flying Dutchman and its squid-faced captain, Davy Jones (Bill Nighy), whose excavated heart is now in Beckett’s possession.

More likely, though, the words are a subliminal reassurance from the director, Gore Verbinski. After the bloated shenanigans of the previous entry, “Dead Man’s Chest” — perhaps the only pirate movie to see the need for a Ferris wheel — Mr. Verbinski is reminding us why we should ever trust him again.

This third and perhaps final episode in the swishy, swashbuckling saga goes some way toward achieving that goal. The cannibals, coconuts and landlocked locations have been replaced by the high-seas high jinks that made the first film so enjoyable. And the palpable relief as the myriad plotlines rush toward some semblance of resolution has made everyone quite giddy; even our passion-deferred lovers, Will Turner and Elizabeth Swann (Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley), appear marginally less bored with each other. Or at least less bored than we are with them.

Filmed sequentially with its predecessor, “At World’s End” is less concerned with ends than inversions, presenting a society where the lawless practice democracy and their rulers engage in tyranny. The crown has declared a state of emergency, civil rights have been suspended, and naysayers are lined up to be hanged.

In one of the film’s most bizarre sequences, the condemned begin to sing, belting out a dirge among the rolling tumbrils and swaying nooses. (Tardy audience members may think they’ve stumbled into a performance of “Les Misérables” by mistake.) The song reaches Elizabeth, in a skiff heading for the Pirate Brethren Court in Singapore (I am not making this up), and for a while the movie becomes a watery opera with a distinctly Oriental flavor.

By the time Chow Yun-Fat appears, as the grumpy pirate lord Sao Feng — complete with an entourage of old-Hollywood coolies — the Gilbert and Sullivan vibe is beginning to wear. After electing Elizabeth pirate king (the Brethren know who wears the trousers in this trilogy), the pirates set out to clobber the British before Davy Jones and his seafood-combo crew can do the same to them.

This will require the help of the priestess Tia Dalma (Naomie Harris), whose role has clarified but whose diction remains unintelligible. “Therr is a cahst to be ped en thah end,” she warns mysteriously, mangling her vowels like a voodoo version of Inspector Clouseau.

Having blown Tia up to Godzilla size, however, the screenwriters, Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, have no further use for her; in her new incarnation as the sorceress Calypso she amounts to little more than crabs and raging wind. Considering she is afforded only one conjugal visit every 10 years —and that from a man who breathes through a blowhole — her bad temper is entirely understandable.

But what of Johnny Depp’s Capt. Jack Sparrow? Following his unfortunate encounter with a giant cephalopod at the end of the last movie, this one finds him trapped and hallucinating in Davy Jones’s Locker, an arid limbo of rolling dunes and raging heat. Because he is Jack, his hallucinations are all about himself (the real love affair in these movies has always been between Jack and his mirror), and Mr. Verbinski fills the screen with an army of mincing clones in kohl eyeliner and fancy head scarves.

Forever above the fray and beside the point, Mr. Depp’s devilish buccaneer is the lightfooted device that holds the franchise together; as he sashays from battle to bar, impervious to insult and musket alike, Jack’s very narcissism is his protection. He’s an inverse superhero.

Though the film is filled with the expected special-effects wizardry, its most stunning and surreal moments are also the most peaceful: an army of crabs transporting the Black Pearl over dunes and into the ocean, and a flaming sunrise viewed through tattered seaweed sails. A disappointing cameo by Keith Richards, still alive and flaunting the look of hard-won dissipation that reportedly inspired Jack’s personal style, is in a special-effects category of its own. Perhaps he should have rented a copy of “Performance” and taken notes from Mick Jagger.

Because of the abundance of unpleasant human characters, all of whom lie, cheat and betray one another at the drop of a flounder, the burden of creating an emotional connection with the audience must be borne, ironically, by characters whose humanity has long since evaporated. From the pathos of Davy — still playing the organ like an invertebrate Phantom of the Opera — to the tragic yearning in the barnacle-encrusted face of Bootstrap Bill Turner (Stellan Skarsgard), “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End” reminds us that great acting can transcend even the most elaborate makeup.

Even so, if the story is to continue, its creators will need more than Jack’s limp wrists and Will’s limp resolve. In the prophetic words of Barbossa, “There’s never a guarantee of comin’ back, but passin’ on — that’s certain.”

“Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has scary battles, scary monsters and even scarier rock musicians.

PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN

At World’s End

Opens tonight nationwide.

Directed by Gore Verbinski; written by Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, based on characters created by Mr. Elliott, Mr. Rossio, Stuart Beattie and Jay Wolpert, from Walt Disney’s “Pirates of the Caribbean”; director of photography, Dariusz Wolski; edited by Craig Wood and Stephen Rivkin; music by Hans Zimmer; production designer, Rick Heinrichs; produced by Jerry Bruckheimer; released by Walt Disney Pictures. Running time: 167 minutes.

WITH: Johnny Depp (Jack Sparrow), Geoffrey Rush (Barbossa), Orlando Bloom (Will Turner), Keira Knightley (Elizabeth Swann), Jack Davenport (Norrington), Bill Nighy (Davy Jones), Jonathan Pryce (Gov. Weatherby Swann), Stellan Skarsgard (Bootstrap Bill), Tom Hollander (Cutler Beckett), Naomie Harris (Tia Dalma), Chow Yun-Fat (Captain Sao Feng) and Keith Richards (Captain Teague).

IN many ways, this brunch was like a million others I’d had before: poached eggs with hollandaise sauce, fresh orange juice, coffee, buttered toast. The sun was glowing somewhere over the comfy outdoor sofas, and no one seemed in a hurry to finish up and get home.

But here at Shakespeare and Company, a cozy cafe in Dubai’s Village Mall, there were a few vital differences from my usual Sunday-morning routine. First of all, it was Friday, the Muslim Sabbath in the United Arab Emirates. Second, on a nearby couch, a mustachioed, white-robed Emirati man and a woman (in black garb that concealed everything but her gorgeous face) were on a date, chatting and flirting far from the eyes of their families — a testament to Dubai’s liberal attitudes. Finally, there was the sand. A dust storm had been kicking all day, blowing grit in from the desert just a few miles away. It coated my hollandaise like finely ground black pepper.

But even in the world of Friday brunches, Shakespeare and Company’s stood out — because it was cheap. My friend Samira Mesbahi, a curly-haired actress from Paris, and I had spent just 113.12 dirhams, or $30.82 at a fixed exchange rate of 3.67 dirhams to the dollar.

The typical Dubai brunch, by contrast, is an affair of ritualistic excess, held in the restaurant of a five-star hotel, with an all-you-can-eat buffet of gravlax, coddled eggs, a foie gras bar, and tuna belly sliced by an eighth-generation sushi chef from Osaka. Such indulgence can easily run 300 dirhams a person, not including the unlimited-Champagne surcharge.

Of course, this shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s ever heard the word Dubai. The emirate is synonymous with over-the-top artifice: the “seven-star” hotel, the skyscrapers rising from what moments before had seemed to be only tracts of sand, the man-made island chains, the indoor ski area. Frankly, I wondered how I’d afford anything at all. My wallet held only $500, or 1,835 dirhams, for the weekend, and while a host of budget options — easyHotels, a low-cost-airline terminal — are set to open in the near future, none had broken ground by mid-March, when I visited. Even the cheapest stopover deals offered by Emirates, the flag carrier, would have eaten up more than half my budget.

But searching the Web, I found a fabulous deal: Villa 08. Owned by a pair of European expatriates, the three-bedroom house is in Arabian Ranches, a gated community on the distant southern edge of Dubai. On one side of the fence are swimming pools, a supermarket, a country club and rows of nearly identical villas in the style of Arabian forts. On the other side, the vast desert and burgeoning dust storm.

Villa 08’s cheapest room was $60 a night, but since there were no other guests, I was given the master suite and the run of the house. Ah, the expat life!

From Shakespeare and Company, Samira and I drove my sand-colored Toyota Echo along Jumeira Road — a thoroughfare that reminded me of the strip-mall-saturated outskirts of Albuquerque — to Bur Dubai, the ancient heart of the city. It was here, on the banks of the Dubai Creek, that the city grew from a tiny Persian Gulf trading hub into a megalopolis fed by the idea that human beings, whatever their religion, will put aside their differences in pursuit of profit.

My destination was the Dubai Museum, housed in an 18th-century fort with tall, square “wind towers” that channel breezes to cool the interior. Three dirhams bought me entry to a series of dioramas about life in old Dubai: mannequins selling diamonds; mannequins building a dhow, the traditional Arab boat; mannequins studying the Koran. An exhibit on Bedouins blandly proclaimed that the nomads “love good deeds and hate evil.” Surrounded by simulacra, I wondered: Where was Jean Baudrillard when I needed him?

Nearby, Samira and I found a subtler refurbishment of old Dubai: the Bastakiya neighborhood. A labyrinth of low, neat buildings, Bastakiya is home to several art galleries, such as XVA Gallery, a couple of boutique hotels and the Basta Art Café, in whose calm, tree-filled courtyard we refueled with fresh lemonade and a strawberry shake (29 dirhams). As the sun began to set, we headed out into the evening, wandering through Bastakiya’s narrow, yellow-lighted passageways to the Creek, where motorboats were ferrying people across for a single dirham.

We stayed on our bank, however, and wound up in the souk, the modernized version of what might once have been an atmospheric marketplace. Most of the stalls—selling everything from textiles to mobile phones — were shutting down, but Samira managed to find amazing tchotchkes: a pink plastic mosque-shaped alarm clock and a stuffed camel that sings Arabic pop songs. Each cost 10 dirhams, but I couldn’t bring myself to buy them; instead, I munched pakoras and drank mango nectar (4 dirhams) from Al Balad Cafeteria, an Indian snack stall.

The population around the souk was overwhelmingly male, and Samira was attracting too much attention, so we drove somewhere she’d be more comfortable: the Cigar Lounge on the 10th floor of the Jumeirah Emirates Towers. As I drank a Manhattan and she a fruit shake (63 dirhams), we gazed at the blinking lights of the city. But which city—Dubai, Hong Kong, New York?

Our next stop was a birthday party for one of Samira’s friends. In the 33rd-floor apartment, young people drank beer, gossiped and stared out at the typically Dubai landscape—a highway lined with construction sites and dark, empty apartment towers. The curious thing was the mix: Filipino nurses plus Arabs from across the diaspora. A Jordanian guy told me of his family’s business troubles in Saudi Arabia; meanwhile, a Saudi guy in full robes and headscarf popped open another tallboy. It was a tantalizing hint that Dubai harbored more than I’d expected, and I would’ve stayed all night — but I was hungry.

“What pizza is to New York,” a Canadian photographer had told me, “Lebanese food is to Dubai.” In other words, ubiquitous, affordable and available all night long.

I found my Famous Original Ray’s at Al Mallah, a bustling “kebabeteria” lighted by yellow and green neon. I ordered a mixed lamb-and-chicken roll — a simple creation but unendingly complex in flavor, with the complementary meats accented by hummus, fresh pita, tart pickles and shreds of mint (11 dirhams with a fruit shake). Driving back to Arabian Ranches, I thought there might actually be something to this whole globalization business.

IT’S probably very normal for people to wake up in Dubai, realize they have money in their pockets, and set out to spend it. But for the Frugal Traveler, it’s a rare and nerve-wracking moment.

Souk Madinat Jumeirah would, I hoped, calm me. A sprawling complex encompassing a shopping center, restaurants, a theater, a resort, a nightclub and a spa, Madinat is modeled after traditional Arab fort architecture, with lots of plazas and fountains, a color scheme that ranges from sandy to beige to khaki, and “wind tower” structures that house modern HVAC units.

I began by inquiring into things I couldn’t possibly afford, like a 15,300-dirham wristwatch by Nouvelle Horlogerie Calabrese. The salesman said he’d let it go for 11,475; I said I’d think about it. At a carpet store, I asked if they carried tribal gabbeh styles; the salesman said no and turned his attention to wealthier clients. Finally, I arrived at Vivel Patisserie: The pastries had lots pistachios and almonds, and a double-layer box cost only 40 dirhams. Sold! Instead of gorging myself right there, I had a bowl of Malaysian laksa noodles at the chic Noodle House (64 dirhams with lime soda and a side of spicy eggplant), and drove off in search of more places to thin my wallet.

Halfway across town I discovered Five Green, a bright shop that sold Edwin jeans from Japan, fancy sneakers and lots of Paul Frank T-shirts — all of which I could get cheaper back home. Eventually, a clerk showed me a section devoted to Soundgirl, whose designers (she said) hailed from Dubai, and I bought a 150-dirham yellow gingham top (for my wife, Jean) whose chief distinction was that it could have been designed anywhere. Later, I learned Soundgirl was based in New York City; Jean asked me to stop buying clothing for her.

By evening, I arrived at the Mall of the Emirates, the biggest in Dubai, where I wandered among the rich tourists and richer locals (one of whom was carrying, for no discernible reason, a riding crop), hoping I would stumble upon a Zen Buddhist monastery and spend the rest of the weekend in thrifty, silent meditation.

Instead, I came face to face with Ski Dubai, the indoor ski center with a vertical drop of 197 feet, and I knew that, before the weekend was out, I would have a face full of fake snow. In fact, I would have gone in immediately, but my cellphone rang — it was Michelle, a British friend of a friend, who happened to be having dinner at Après, an après-ski-themed restaurant that looked out on Ski Dubai’s slope.

Sixty seconds later, I joined Michelle and her parents, who had just opened a decent bottle of Australian red wine. They poured me a glass, I ordered the surprisingly good New Zealand beef salad (my share of the bill: 130 dirhams), and we talked about shipping routes and the oil business while watching novice skiers and snowboarders tumble down the mountain.

Neither Michelle nor her parents wanted to join me on my next expedition, to a downtown hotel whose nightclub was reputed to have the best Congolese band outside Kinshasa. Too bad for them: Club Africana, at the Rush Inn, was a froth of energy, with the nine-piece house band, Bilenge Musica, rocking tunes that everyone in the audience, from Sudan to South Africa, knew by heart. I struck up a conversation with Julian, a British-Indian friend of the hotel’s owner, who made absurd proclamations like “You are fragmented, and that is a precious thing!” I paid for our four beers—100 dirhams—and at 3 a.m. walked out into the suddenly very sedate city.

Not many hours later, I drove to a desolate stretch of Umm Suqeim Beach, supposedly the best sand in central Dubai, and stared at distant oil tankers until the thought of fresh powder overwhelmed me. I zipped over to the Mall of the Emirates, plunked down 160 dirhams for a two-hour pass (ski pants, socks, jacket and locker rental included), bought a cheap pair of gloves (60 dirhams), and was on the lift in five minutes. Less than an hour later, I was done—the joy of snowboarding in the desert couldn’t make up for the dullness of the terrain.

What I wanted from Dubai was not preconceived amusements but the accidental by-products of globalization — like Club Africana, or the happy clash of cultures at a house party. Not only were they cheaper, they felt more truly Dubai than the multimillion-dollar attractions, and I counted myself fortunate my low budget had driven me to seek them out. With hours to go before my flight, I returned to Arabian Ranches and sat by my swimming pool and contemplated another of Julian’s koans: “You, my friend, are very, very lucky.” He was right — luck’s one thing money can’t buy.

TOTAL 1,397.52 dirhams (including a yummy 30-dirham après-ski lunch at Saj Express, a Lebanese stall in the Mall of the Emirates food court), or $380.80.

VISITOR INFORMATION

WHERE TO STAY

Shortly after my visit, Villa 08 closed. Budget-minded visitors should instead check out La Maison guesthouse (971-50-340-5066). The rate for a double room is $100 per night. WHAT TO SEE AND DO

Club Africana, at the Rush Inn, Khalid bin Walid Road, (971-4) 352-2235.

Dubai Museum, Al Fahidi Street, (971-4) 393-7151.

Ski Dubai, Mall of the Emirates, skidxb.com, (971-4) 409-4000

XVA Gallery, Bastakiya Quarter, (971-4) 353-5383; xvagallery.com.

WHERE TO EAT AND DRINK

Al Mallah, Dubai Al-Muteena, (971-4) 272-3431

Après, Mall of the Emirates, (971-4) 341-2575.

Basta Art Café, Al Fahidi Street, Bastakiya Quarter, (971-4) 353-5071.

Saj Express, Mall of the Emirates, (971-4) 341-3553.

Shakespeare and Company, multiple locations, (971-4) 329-1040.

WHERE TO SHOP

Five Green, Oud Metha, (971-4) 336-4100

Vivel Patisserie, Souk Madinat Jumeirah, (971-4) 368-6006.