By Cara Tabachnick

Excerpted fromTravelers' Tales Central America

What's in that soup?

It had been three months since I'd washed my hair, two months since my underwear got stolen off the laundry line, and six days since I last changed my outfit, so I felt sufficiently ready to attend my first Rainbow Gathering/Full Moon Party. It was to take place on the shores of Lago Atitlan in Guatemala. We were looking for Bob's tepee somewhere between San Pedro and Santiago. Because it was a favorite gringo hideout, it didn't take long to secure a boat at an astronomical price. As we approached the spot a giant tepee appeared with leaping figures dancing around, visible in the setting sun. Our friendly boatman's face quickly changed to disapproval.

By Natanya Pearlman

Excerpted from Travelers' Tales Central America

A Caribbean interlude casts a spell.

You never know at what point in a journey something will make an impression on you. This particular afternoon in Honduras, the afternoon that things started to look a little different to me, we were in a van bumping along a dirt road, following the edge of the Caribbean out to a tiny Garífuna village named Miami. A few nights earlier, I’d had my first exposure to the Garífuna culture. Sitting on the hard cement ground of the Copán Ruinas town square, I had watched as a Garífuna dance troupe performed their traditional song and dance, called punta, providing an incongruent yet dynamic finale to a Mayan archaeology conference. After I’d spent three days learning about the Mayan Indians, a somewhat shy people, out roared the Garífuna—the women big-hipped and large-bosomed, the men taut and muscular, all moving together in a breathtaking display of sensuous rhythmic prowess, beating drums, pounding feet, swiveling hips, loud and passionate and vibrant.

By Martin Mitchinson

Excerpted from Travelers' Tales Central America

Many years later he really did run off and join the circus.

When I was a child I dreamed of tall ships and circuses. I ran over open fields, swung on ropes across ravines, and I told far too many lies.

Now in my mid-thirties, drifting along the coast of Honduras, I join a circus and can finally appreciate the wisdom of a child’s dreams.

It is a poor circus, an open-air circus with scrap-lumber bleachers and torn tarps for walls. A circus with no tent to house the show, no truck of their own to move locations—only tin roofs over two-by-fours for sleeping, canvas flaps for privacy, pots of watery stew cooking over a wood fire, and an abundance of children wading about in the tall grass of a vacant lot.

By Steve Wilson

Excerpted from Travelers' Tales Central America

Is the volcano crawling with bandits?

It began with German Frank banging his fist onto the table in our hotel kitchen. He was drinking cheap orange wine as he did every night, seeking visions of our future.

“Pacaya!”

“What?”

“Pacaya! We climb Pacaya!”

“Okay, calm down. We’ll climb it.”

“Pacaya! Pacaya! Pacaya! Pacaya!”

This was not unusual. We had followed the sound of Frank’s voice from town to town through Mexico and into Guatemala.

By Lela Stanley

Excerpted from A Mile in Her Boots edited by Jennifer Bové

“Excuse me while I drop my trousers,” Alex said from a few paces behind me. The sound of Velcro unsticking followed this announcement.

I kept my binoculars trained on the trees above, trying to see if their leaves had “winged rachises,” a concept I had only encountered in theory before this job. But it was hard to discern the leaf structure in the midday glare.

By Tom Joseph

Excerpted from Travelers' Tales Central America

Fishing is more than sport—in Belize it can mean becoming one with the tides.

“Tim. They right in front of you. See ’em? Big school, Tim.” Hussein stood at my right shoulder, pointing. He didn’t even have his polarized glasses on.

I pulled my hat down and peered into the turquoise water of the Belizean lagoon, trying to distinguish between the brown swirling clumps. Shouldn’t be that difficult—the one that was the school of bonefish should be moving. I cast at one.

By Larry Habegger

Excerpted from Travelers' Tales India

At 4 a.m. Calcutta is quiet. There is little activity in the streets: a few rats scurry in the gutter searching for food, clambering over the mounds of sleeping people who crowd the pavement. Calcutta quiet is rare. The congestion here seldom permits the city to relax.

The only sounds now are the creaking of the rickshaw, its beaten wood grating like old bones under my weight, and the patter of the dhoti-clad rickshaw-wallah's feet echoing off the buildings as he pulls me toward the bus stand. He flicks his head sideways to look at me out of the corner of his eye and mutters something without breaking his rhythm.

By Larry Habegger

A friend of mine sent me an email a few days ago to say he'd received a parcel from India.

"The package was a classic Indian affair with hand-sewn burlap and globs of melted wax for seals," he wrote. "Cool."

I haven't seen such a parcel in years and that simple message took me back decades in an instant. In the late '70s I'd been traveling in India for several weeks and I had some souvenirs I wanted to ship home to lighten my load. The postal clerk in Darjeeling wobbled his head and explained that the box I had taped securely needed to be sewn with cloth and sealed with wax before he could accept it.

By Ken Matusow

Strange things happen in the thin air of high altitude

Do you believe that dreams come true? With a graduate degree in applied mathematics and a career in computer science, I generally don't. But many years ago I had a strange experience, so odd that the details remain fresh in my mind.

On the morning of December 31, 1979, I lay on a wooden pallet shivering with cold, hunger, and exhaustion. Every breath I attempted turned into a gasp for air as I suffered from a mild case of altitude sickness. I lay curled up in my sleeping bag at 13,500 feet in the Horombo hut on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro.

I had reached the summit the previous day and was on my way down, looking forward to meeting some friends for an end of the decade New Year’s celebration in the tourist town of Arusha. Arusha was going to be a treat, for it was only marginally in Africa. Although strategically situated in Tanzania between the mega-tourist attractions of Kilimanjaro, Ngorongroro Crater Game Park, and Nairobi, Kenya, Arusha served as a kind of Americo-European oasis. Restaurants served semi-edible food; shops were sometimes partially filled with goods; almost-new autos and taxis managed to drive on semi-paved roads. Tourists walked the streets at night retelling stories of lion and leopard, elephant and rhino. With a cold Tusker beer in hand a few of these travelers boasted of their ascent of Kili. I looked forward to being one of them.

By Michael Buckley

Excerpted from Travelers' Tales Thailand

Travel can be a form of escapism as addictive as drugs. The monks at Wat Tham Krabok seem to have an answer for both.

Wat Tham Krabok, 7 a.m.: Thirty young men are kneeling in two long lines, heaving their guts into buckets—the sound of violent retching shatters the air. A motley crowd of monks and onlookers is banging drums and cheering them on. And why, you ask, cheering them on? Well, this all has a perfectly rational explanation: we’re spectators at the world’s most unorthodox—and successful—cold turkey program. It’s an awful way to start the day, but in this 15-minute session, Thai heroin addicts are given a vile brown liquid that induces vomiting, and then consume a pail of water. The session is supposed to rid the body of toxins.