Round-the-world airfare update

Round-the-world (RTW) air trips seem to be primarily the province of young backpackers and seniors — not too many midlife folks can take the time required for a decent trip — but anyone can at least consider the "ultimate" air journey. And airlines and independent agencies have some options for you. A new report from BootsnAll (www.bootsnall.com, http://www.roundtheworldticket.com/reports), a "One-Stop Indie Travel Guide" information source for independent travelers, illustrates and compares several of the most important options.

ONE AIRLINE: Air New Zealand is the only line that can actually do a complete RTW circuit entirely on its own, but the only available itinerary is so limited that most of you wouldn't even consider it as real RTW. That line can fly you Los Angeles to Cook Islands to Auckland to Hong Kong to London and back to Los Angeles, or the reverse, but you can't stop anywhere else. The fare in economy class is $3,199.

ALLIANCES: All three big multinational alliances — Oneworld, SkyTeam, and Star Alliance — have established RTW fares that provide a great deal of flexibility. Typically, they allow up to 16 flight segments, but with limited stops in your home country; you must stay 10 days minimum and return before a full year. The current prices generally depend on the total number of miles flown, with price breaks at 26,000 (economy only), 29,000, 34,000, and 39,000 miles. The 29,999-mile economy fare is a bit under $5,000, with another plus or minus $1,000 in taxes and fees. Oneworld also offers an optional program based on the number of continents you visit — three, four, or five; a three-continent trip starts at a bit under $4,000 plus the taxes and fees. All three alliances sell RTW tickets in economy, business, and first classes; business class costs about double the economy rates. As far as I can tell, only Oneworld offers segment upgrades from economy to premium economy. You can also do RTW with frequent flyer miles — just pay the taxes and fees.

All three alliances post online "RTW planner" engines that allow you to establish an itinerary and schedule flights. The Oneworld and Star Alliance websites allow you to price and buy tickets online, but SkyTeam only saves your itinerary and requires that you call a local line to price and buy.

RTW SPECIALIST AGENCIES: A handful of U.S.-based online agencies specialize in RTW tickets, including Air Brokers International, 800-883-3273), Airtreks (www.airtreks.com, 877-247-8735), Join Us Travel (www.joinustravel.com, 888-741-7300), and World Travellers' Club Inc. (www.around-the-world.com, 800-693-0411); all based in San Francisco. Student travel specialist STA (www.statravel.com, 800-781-4040) also does RTW. They build RTW itineraries to order, one segment at a time, by assembling a series of discounted point-to-point tickets, including some they buy offshore. Representative trip costs start under $2,000 for a simple trip. BootsnAll also found that a specialist agency could generally undercut the alliance prices substantially for simple trips, they're usually better for intermediate trips, and the only way to go for complex trips of more than 16 segments.

DO IT YOURSELF: For the simplest RTW trips, BootsnAll found that your best bet is just to log onto Kayak (or some other aggregator or OTA) and search individual flight segments.

I've done a few RTW trips and have developed some basic guidelines:

— Allow enough time — three weeks at a bare minimum, better four weeks or more. Any less and your experience will consist mainly of continuous jet lag.

— If you hate sitting up all night in an economy seat, travel westbound — you can build complete RTW itineraries without any overnight red-eye flights.

— If you like to minimize hotel costs by using overnight flights for long hauls, travel eastbound — you can arrange three or four nights on planes (feh!).

— Even if you're frugal, consider doing RTW in business class — flying 25,000 miles confined to a sardine-can economy cabin can be daunting.

GET THE GUIDE: Obviously, RTW is impractical for many of you because of the time and the cost involved. But if you can swing it, RTW could be the trip of a lifetime. If you're interested, be sure to download the BootsnAll guide.

(Send e-mail to Ed Perkins at eperkins@mind.net. Perkins' new book for small business and independent professionals, "Business Travel When It's Your Money," is now available through www.mybusinesstravel.com or www.amazon.com)

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Cuzco, Peru's often overlooked treasures

Reporting from Cuzco, Peru — —

As many a Peruvian traveler can tell you, climbing Machu Picchu is easy, especially if you take one of those tourist buses that do most of the work. It's embracing Cuzco that can be hard.

Cuzco (often spelled Cusco) usually is the Peruvian city you fly into before catching the train through the Sacred Valley to those famous mountaintop ruins at Machu Picchu. But Cuzco is much more than a gateway.

In the 15th century, it was the capital of the Incan empire, a wealthy city whose stone buildings, which still form the skeleton of the city, were chiseled and placed with astounding precision. Then in 1533, with the Incas weakened by civil war, Spanish soldiers showed up with rifles and horses to grab the gold and silver and slay those who resisted. They built a colonial capital atop the Incan city, constructing Catholic churches over the most revered Incan temples. Spain ruled until Peru won independence in the 1820s.

Nowadays, the city's population is 300,000 to 400,000, a blend of Spanish and native Quechua bloodlines, and Cuzco's stone skeleton is enveloped in one of the most muscular tourist economies in all of South America. Catering to jet-setters and backpackers alike, the city hums with swishy restaurants, cheap hostels, upscale boutiques, tacky souvenir shops and hundreds of posh hotel rooms, yet you still see campesinos bearing sheaves of barley or peddling embroidery on street corners. When the Southern Hemisphere's winter solstice arrives each June, revelers take to the streets for the Inti Raymi festival, a scene that looks like Mardi Gras with llamas.

Cuzco is not for the faint of heart or lungs, nor for the traveler who wants everything easy, tidy and genteel. Not only does it stand between you and that beloved Incan mountaintop, but it also stands about 11,000 feet above sea level — about 3,000 feet taller than Machu Picchu — because of the tilt of the Sacred Valley.

"That causes a very interesting situation in your body," guide Enrique Medina reminded me soon after my arrival in May. "Take it easy, have a coca tea and drink a lot of water."

And while you're at it, tune out the fast-talking touts and peddlers who will otherwise mar your views of native Cuzco, colonial Cuzco and even crossroads Cuzco.

This was my third visit to Cuzco in 24 years. I came home with these lessons in mind.

The streets and the museums deserve equal time.

History is so alive in the city's streets, among the throngs at the San Pedro Market and at the sprawling Sacsayhuaman ruins, it might seem a shame to spend too many hours indoors. But especially when Cuzco gets cold, you can't ignore Qorikancha (also spelled Coricancha), the former Incan headquarters that was later converted into the Convento de Santo Domingo de Cuzco or the Monastery of Santa Catalina, whose 13 remaining nuns may be outnumbered by the mannequins on display.

The same goes for the elegant Museo de Arte Precolumbino, or MAP, and the larger but humbler Inka Museum. Also, authorities last year announced plans to display hundreds of Machu Picchu artifacts, collected by explorer Hiram Bingham, in the Casa Concha mansion on Santa Catalina Ancha Street, but the timetable remains unclear.

Eat your potatoes.

Nobody knows more than the chefs of Cuzco about potatoes, corn, alpaca or cui (a.k.a. cuy, a.k.a. guinea pig). On the courtyard of the Pacha Papa restaurant, you listen to a harpist while digging into an alpaca brochette.

At the MAP Cafe, the kitchen mixes traditional and molecular cuisine, which in my case resulted in too-sweet gazpacho followed by a tasty salmon main course. At Chicha, a pricey, busy upstairs restaurant opened in 2009 by Peruvian celebrity chef Gaston Acurio, great pork medallions await.

See Barrio San Blas, and think about sleeping there.

Stand in the Plaza de Armas. Turn toward the nearest hill and march past the cathedral and up the narrow, cobblestoned street. For a hearty breakfast or lunch in the company of backpackers from around the planet, pause at Jack's Cafe on Choquechaka Street.

Then continue, and in no time you'll be in San Blas, a hillside barrio that spills down to the plaza and where global visitors mingle with Cuzco's artistic types. Grab a snack at the tiny, orange-walled Cafe de Mama Oli (199 Plazoleta Nazarenas), and peek at the lobby of the Hotel Monasterio, where rates routinely run $400 and up a night. This old monastery, built in the 1590s, was converted 47 years ago into a lodging with two courtyards and museum-worthy art. (If you go in March, stay three nights and pay upfront, you can get rooms here for as little as $235.) Then have a look at the Amaru Hostal, a block away, with pleasant, modest rooms for about $50 a night. (I wish I'd slept there instead of at the Andina Classic Cuzco Plaza, where I paid about $140 for a tiny room.)

Beware the plaza, behold the cathedral.

In pictures, the Plaza de Armas looks great — a big sun-splashed rectangle with fountains and grass and strolling vendors and benches for weary travelers. Up close, it's just as pretty, but it can be a sort of battlefield. To cross it, you'll need to fend off the school-aged girls selling woven goods and massages, school-aged boys shining shoes and forcefully hawking little paintings that will never hang in the Hotel Monasterio. If you don't want to buy, avoid eye contact and get into that big, brooding building with the green doors, the cathedral.

Begun in the 1550s and completed in the 1660s, it includes a 25-foot-high "Last Supper" painting by Marcos Zapata behind the main altar. Look closely and you'll see Christ and his disciples sitting before plates of roasted vizcacha (comparable to chinchilla). You'll also see a chapel dedicated to Our Lord of the Earthquakes, not a surprise, given that major quakes struck the city in 1650 and 1950.

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Offbeat Traveler: Moeraki Boulders in New Zealand

( Morgan Ashton )

While traveling to New Zealand this past October to visit his father, Times reader Morgan Ashton visited Koekohe Beach to see the boulders. "The fascinating thing is that it looks like your everyday beach, but then you see this pearl string of moss-covered boulders," Ashton said.

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Road-tripping in New Zealand

TANGARAKAU GORGE, New Zealand — We've all seen those "Danger — Falling Rocks" signs when driving.

But here, on the nearly 100-mile-long Forgotten World Highway, that sign several miles back that said "Do Not Loiter or Park on Ridge" takes on new urgency.

New Zealand, at age 10 million, is a relative newborn, geologically speaking. So maybe that explains why the rock faces that hug the edge of the narrow road through this canyon seem to be shedding rocks like a youngster popping out baby teeth.

Not that I've seen any fall. But the number of rock chunks that litter the edge of the pavement, which midway through the drive turns into just gravel for a stretch, reminds me to keep my eyes on the road. Easier said than done, given the eye-popping soaring canyon walls and the impossibly green landscape.

This is day three of a four-day driving trip from Auckland, near the top of this two-island nation's North Island, to Wellington at the south tip. I still haven't gotten past being wowed by the greenness of the countryside. Ireland may be the Emerald Isle, but New Zealand should be the Emerald Isles.

This country also could be the poster child for road trips. Once you get past the matter of driving on the left, you'll find polite drivers, friendly people and good roads that invite (and in many cases demand) leisurely driving through some of the prettiest country you'll ever find.

Actually, the hardest thing about driving here is narrowing down the list of where you'll go. For a country roughly the size of Colorado, there's a head-spinning wealth of choices. On the North Island alone you'll find snow-capped mountains, national parks full of hiking trails and roaring white-water, thermal pools to soak in, wildlife found nowhere else on Earth, coastlines that will make your heart ache, enchanting Maori culture, wineries, city delights and friendly roads to get you there.

South of Cambridge on the three-hour drive from Auckland to Rotorua the landscape becomes rolling, and the hillsides are awash in that intense green, punctuated by bright yellow patches of wildflowers.

Geothermal activity and Maori culture draw visitors to the Rotorua area, where roughly 35 percent of the 70,000 residents are native people. A variety of places offer Maori performances and the traditional hangi meal, cooked in underground pits by geothermal heat.

But I find Whakarewarewa Thermal Village the most intriguing because the Maori actually live here.

As I wander the village, I see a native Maori woman enveloped in steam lower a bucket into the water at a thermal pool, then take it back to her house. Elsewhere in the village, mud pots bubble, making intriguing designs.

Across town, Rainbow Springs Kiwi Wildlife Park offers the opportunity to walk inside cages holding indigenous birds such as kea, an alpine parrot; kaka; tui (there's a beer named for it); and kereru. And, naturally, you might get a peek at a kiwi, the elusive bird that gives New Zealanders their nickname.

At Wai-O-Tapu Thermal Wonderland, south of Rotorua, the smell of sulfur is in the air and steam rises from pools of all colors. The Devil's Bath glows a shocking yellowish green this day, though changes in light can alter the color.

Still farther south, Highway 1 skirts the eastern edge of Lake Taupo, the country's largest lake. On this November day (late spring down here), strong winds whip the lake into sizable whitecaps, and it resembles an inlet of the sea more than a lake. Adding to that impression farther on are headlands reminiscent of the U.S. Pacific coast.

South of the lake, Highway 47 leads to the western side of Tongariro National Park, popular with skiers and hikers because of its mountains — Tongariro, Ngauruhoe and Ruapehu — whose volcanoes are still active. When I pull into the parking lot at my hotel, a wet snow is falling, obscuring Ruapehu.

The Forgotten World Highway, between Taumarunui and Stratford, beckons the next day. After all, who can resist driving a road with a name like that?

You could spend more than a day exploring its oddities, such as the village of Whangamomona, which declared itself a republic in 1989. But remember that facilities on the route are limited, including no gas stations.

At Stratford, if you're blessed with a clear day, you might catch a glimpse of Mount Taranaki, New Zealand's Mount Fuji look-alike.

Then it's on to the west coast and the beginning of the Surf Highway. Here, as it is throughout New Zealand, you're reminded that this country's history is rooted in two cultures: the British, who colonized it, and the Maoris, who got here first. From New Plymouth, the Surf Highway plays hide-and-seek with the coastline as it passes through villages with names such as Okato, Rahotu and Oaonui.

At Opunake I pick up a bacon and egg pie (New Zealanders — and I — love their meat pies) and eat it in a little park overlooking the sea while a local does tai chi nearby.

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Garden enthusiast names her top American Edens

Jo Ellen Meyers Sharp gets around. She's a writer, speaker, garden coach and landscaper. And a traveler.

She has combined her work and her travels in "The Visitor's Guide to American Gardens" (Cool Springs Press), which describes more than 400 gardens. With locations, highlights and insights, it's handy for any garden tourist.

Here are some of her recommendations. Visit the websites for schedules, admission fees and special events:

Chanticleer Garden, Wayne, Pa. (chanticleergarden.org) Sharp rates Chanticleer as her favorite garden. Opened on an old family estate in 1993, it covers 50 acres, 30 of which are open to the public. Among the highlights: the Tennis Court Garden, the Orchard, the Asia Woods. Be sure to visit the Ruins. It was an old house that was partially demolished; some walls were left standing "to create the sense of being somewhere else."

Indianapolis Museum of Art (imamuseum.org) There are more than 150 acres of art, gardens, natural areas, a museum and a historic home (Oldfields-Lilly House). Adjacent to the museum is the Virginia B. Fairbanks Art and Nature Park, with woodlands, wetlands, meadows and a 35-acre lake. Also worth visiting is the Garden for Everyone, a multisensory experience.

Minter Gardens, Chilliwack, British Columbia (mintergardens.com) The heavily planted 32-acre garden in the shadow of 7,000-foot Mount Cheam "will dazzle your senses," Sharp promises. Among the features: 100,000 tulips each spring, woodlands and Spirit of the Woods, which incorporates First Nation cultures into garden designs. There's also a water wall ("I spent a lot of time there trying to figure out the mechanics of it," Sharp said.)

Other greats: Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square, Pa. (longwoodgardens.org) Brookside Gardens in Wheaton, Md. (montgomeryparks.org/brookside) Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park in Grand Rapids, Mich. (meijergardens.org).

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