American Airlines said Wednesday it wants to cut 13,000 jobs as part of its bankruptcy filing, a move analysts say could lead to shuffled or canceled flights, longer waits and poorer customer service.... It also plans to terminate employee pension plans....

These changes may result in longer lines for ticketing and checking in and more frequent exchanges with overworked, grumpy employees, experts say. “You could be in a real mess,” says Edward Hasbrouck, author of The Practical Nomad, a travel book series.

By far, however, the biggest risk for most fliers is that American might reschedule or eliminate their flights, analysts say....

For more of my advice on this, see my article about the American Airlines bancruptcy and my FAQ about Airline Bankruptcies.

Yersterday I analyzed a deceptive travel deal that was much less of a discount from the regular price than it was advertised to be.

Today I'll look at the flip side of the coin: What happens when you are offered a price that's much more of a deal than the company might have meant to offer?

Should you accept such an offer? Should you feel guilty if you do? Will a travel company honor a "deal" that turns out to be better than they thought it was? And what can you do, politely, to make sure that they will honor such a price?

Here's a case study of what happened to me with a recent hotel/resort reservation:

First, the advertisement that exaggerates the "regular" price and the discount being offered:

In December, Groupon advertised a one-day online sale on vouchers, each voucher redeemable for a package including:

• 2 airline tickets around the world;
• 3 excursions along the way with a "value" of up to $500 for each excursion; and
• miscellaneous bells and whistles including a steamer trunk(!), 2 safari hats, in-flight food and drink, and one piece per person of checked baggage on each of the flights.

You might think that the "Groupon" name implies that customers are getting a discount in exchange for a group purchase, but this was anything but a "group" deal: Two coach/economy-class vouchers (each good for a pair of tickets) were offered for US$10,000 per voucher, and one business-class voucher for US$20,000.

All three of the vouchers Groupon offered were sold, including a coach-class voucher bought by Melissa and Trevor, a couple in Santa Fe planning to use them for their honeymoon trip around the world later this year.

Neither the coach nor the business-class price of the Groupon package was a terrible deal compared to the regular prices of its components.

What's problematic are the claims on Groupon's Web site that the $10,000 coach-class voucher had a value of $20,000 and was an "Epic Deal" being offered at a 50% discount.

In fact, as discussed below, this was at best a US$15,000 (not $20,000 as advertised) value in coach class, and at best a 33% (not 50% as advertised) discount from the normal price.

How much would this package have cost without the Groupon?

I'm honored that Wayne has just posted a review of the new 5th edition of The Practical Nomad: How to Travel Around the World in his Southern Cone Guidebooks and Moon Over South America blogs. Wayne's review is worth reading as a general commentary on spontaneity in travel and the life of a working travel writer, but also has this to say about my book:

One person who’s adapted to the times is my travel-writing colleague Edward Hasbrouck, probably the best-traveled person I know, who’s just released a new fifth edition of The Practical Nomad: How to Travel Around the World.

The Practical Nomad is exactly what it says: a nuts-and-bolts manual on traveling abroad – not necessarily literally "around the world" - for extended periods of time. It is not destination-oriented; rather, it offers suggestions on how to get the best out of whatever destination you choose. I recall that, after renting our apartment in Buenos Aires, he and his companion Ruth Radetsky found plenty to see and do in muggy subtropical Posadas - a city that foreign air travelers rarely even see and most overlanders visit only long enough to change buses for Iguazú Falls. To quote a phrase from the classic People’s Guide to Mexico [one of my favorites as well - EH], "Wherever you go, there you are."

That said, The Practical Nomad offers informed tips that, given Edward’s background as a professional travel agent and right-to-travel activist, are far more reliable that the scuttlebutt rumors I used to get from other travelers whose paths I crossed. They are light years better than any crowd-sourced information on the Internet, even though I might quibble with some of his details....

The Practical Nomad focuses on topics such as getting time off for foreign travel and financing it, flights and other transportation options, the bureaucracy of documents, visas and border crossings, and especially tech suggestions. Edward also writes the informative blog of the same name, "The Practical Nomad", which focuses on freedom-of-travel issues but also provides perspective on topics such as The Amazing Race "reality" TV show.

Thanks, Wayne, and happy travels!

Mine was delivered yesterday, so yours might have been delivered a few days ago, or might still be on its way. Check your recent mail. It's easy to mistake these postcards for junk mail. (Click the images below for a larger version.)

[outside of self-mailer postcard (unfolded)]

[inside of self-mailer]

These settlement checks being sent to credit, debit, and ATM cardholders are the final act in a legal drama that I first wrote about in 2008.

By a bizarre coincidence, I spent yesterday in Judge Seeborg's courtroom watching a jury be selected for an entirely unrelated Federal criminal trial in which I might be called as a minor witness for the defense. (One night several years ago, I was awakened by the sound of shots outside. I called 911 in case anyone needed medical treatment. I saw nothing, and that's all I know.)

I haven't, so far as I can tell, been properly served with a subpoena in that case, but I had been told by defense counsel that someone from the US Marshal's office had filed a false (and perhaps fraudulent and/or perjured) return of service.

This sort of sewer service is illegal but common. I showed up in court anyway, in an abundance of caution (as lawyers like to say), to make sure there was a record of my voluntary appearance and to bring the possibility of misconduct by the Marshal to the attention of Judge Seeborg and the U.S. Attorney.

I had to wait around until almost 2 p.m. before I got to tell my story to the judge, after which I came home -- leaving behind an FBI agent who followed me down the courthouse corridor calling out, "Mr. Hasbouck? Mr. Hasbrouck? I just want to ask you a few questions...." Right.

Imagine my pleasure and surprise a little later in the afternoon when one of my lawyers sent me a copy of Judge Seeborg's initial rulings in my own case. This was the decision I'd been waiting for since September, and was filed about an hour after I appeared before Judge Seeborg in the (unrelated) third-party criminal matter. Go figure.

Anyway, Judge Seeborg's order addresses some significant Privacy Act issues of first impression. The order grants some of my motions and some of CBP's, and orders us to confer on next steps including additional searches by CBP for responsive records.

I'm very grateful to the work of my lawyers and to the First Amendment Project interns who also worked on the case.

I've posted an analysis of the ruling and its implications in the Identity Project blog (PapersPlease.org).

These issues aren't limited to San Francisco. Wherever bicycles are banned from the main motor-vehicle highways -- which typically follow the straightest and most level routes -- it becomes even more critical to ensure good conditions and reasonable through routes for bicyclists on those roads that remain accessible to bicycles, especially the "old" highways and the "frontage" roads along Interstate highways, freeways, and railroad lines.

If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area and/or care about bicycle transportation, read on. (If not, you probably want to skip the rest of this article.)

Listen (on the air or online) and call in with your questions and comments.

[click arrow icon at left of slider above to stream archived audio, or click here to download as MP3 podcast]

By way of background, the PreCheck (pre-crime?) program, formerly labelled with the ironic acronym "ESP", is the latest incarnation of a concept that just won't die. I've been writing about the registered traveller idea since the TSA and selected airlines rolled out its first predecessor in 2004, most recently when the private franchisee who operated another version of a traveller registration program went bankrupt in 2009.

Before you sign up, you might want to read the TSA's notice of the records it keeps about people in the PreCheck program and the regulations exempting the TSA's files about registered travellers from the requirements of the Privacy Act for accuracy, relevance, rights of access to files about yourself, and accounting for disclosures of these records to other government agencies or third parties.

(You can hear my previous interview with Patt Morrison from the same show on KPCC last year here.)

"Reisefreiheit" (Freedom to Travel)

Ironically, the final episode in which The Amazing Race 19 returned home to the USA from Panama was broadcast on the same day that Manuel Noriega, the dictator deposed and kidnapped to imprisonment in Florida during the US invasion of Panama in 1989 (a story perhaps best told by David Harris in Shooting the Moon: The True Story of an American Manhunt Unlike Any Other, Ever) returned home to Panama (and continued imprisonment there) at the end of his 22-year involuntary exile.

"The Amazing Race 20" is being filmed now (let me know if you spot the racers or the production crew!) and will be broadcast in the USA in the spring of 2012.

The US version of the The Amazing Race always starts and ends in the USA, and is open only to US citizens. The concept has been franchised to other countries and regions, for citizens of those places, but most of the other versions of the race, such as "The Amazing Race Asia" and "The Amazing Race Latinoamérica", travel only within those parts of the world.

To be fair to the producers of the TV shows, that's not just because audiences in the USA or elsewhere don't want to see "foreigners" in the cast. Having non-US citizens in the US version of the race would greatly complicate the producers' task, and could lead to audiences being disappointed if a popular team were eliminated because they were denied entry to some country on the route, or delayed at immigration, because of their citizenship.

Even if a non-US citizen made it into one of the final three teams racing back to the finish in the USA, the extra time that it takes for non-US citizens to clear US immigration, at that critical point in the final leg, would almost certainly keep them from the million-dollar first prize.

Immigrants to the US know, but native-born US citizens often don't realize, just how much easier it is to travel with a US passport than as a citizen of almost any other country. (Yes, there are exceptions, but they are few, and include only a small percentage of the world's population.) It's hard for citizens of most countries in Latin America, Asia, or especially Africa to get visas to visit the USA, the Schengen zone in Europe, or other wealthy countries. It's easy for US citizens to take our privileged position as travellers for granted.

Even in some other countries whose citizens can now travel the world fairly easily, memories of past surveillance and control of travel are much closer to the surface than in the USA -- and opposition to current US travel surveillance and control schemes has been much greater.

This has been most obviously true in Germany and Austria, where the control and surveillance of people's movement by the Nazis, the Stasi (East Germany), the Berlin Wall, and the Iron Curtain (with Austria as one of its most important front-line states) have not been forgotten.

Much of my work for the last decade, even before I started working with the Identity Project on travel-related human rights issues, has concerned the use of airline reservations or Passenger Name Record (PNR) data as a tool for government monitoring of travellers, compilation of "travel history" dossiers linked to our identities (and access to the dossiers already compiled by travel companies and other businesses), and control of our movements on the basis of our identities and those linked dossiers.

While the more visible intrusions into our liberties, such as the laying-on-of-hands by TSA checkpoint staff, have been lightning rods for public reaction against the growing homeland security state, there's been no significant outrage or even debate about the US government's less visible, but more fundamental, assumption that they are entitled to record and control where we go.

Neither the Bush nor the Obama Administration has bothered to ask Congress to approve this "domestic Guantanamo" of individualized files about the lawful travels of tens of millions of US citizens; a permission-based regime of travel controls (with a default of, "No"); and no-fly orders issued in secret, by administrative fiat, without possibility of judicial review even when they pertain to US citizens.

But neither has Congress -- happy not to be held responsible for whatever happens, one way or the other -- demanded a chance to debate or vote on any of this.

In Europe, on the other hand, there's more public awareness of US government use of PNR data than there is in the USA. And there was extensive debate in the European Parliament about whether PNR data from the EU should be included in these US schemes, even before the new Lisbon Treaty reorganizing the EU gave the EP formal veto power over the proposed agreement with the US on DHS access to European PNR data.

My visit to Europe this past October began in Brussels, where I was invited to give a briefing to European Parliament staff and advisors hosted by Eva Lichtenberger, Austrian Green Party Member of the European Parliament (MEP) and member of the EP Transportation Committee (TRAN):

Then it was on to Berlin, where I saw the former Berlin Wall being replaced, on almost exactly the same site, with new US "Homeland Security" perimeter fortifications.

On one side of the Brandenburg Gate, the Berlin Wall has come down and there are no armed guards in sight, even with the Reichstag (once again Germany's parliament building) just a block away.

Only a line of bricks in the street and plaza (here making a right-angled turn at the left edge of the bike lane on the street that passes in front of the gate) shows the path of the barrier formerly maintained and patrolled by armed East German border guards:

On the other side of the gate, a new barrier with a new set of armed US guards and sentry boxes closes off the plaza from the area in front of the new US Embassy to Germany. The columns at the right edge of the photo below, where the new US barriers begin, are the end of one wing of the Brandenburg Gate:

Later that afternoon, a few blocks away on the other side of the Reichstag, I had an hour-long meeting with Germany's Minister of Justice, Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, and several of her aides and advisors:

With Frau Minister Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger and Austrian independent MEP Martin Ehrenhauser

The Bundesministerium der Justiz is located in what was once East Berlin, on the site of the East German government's international press center. Like much of Berlin, the building was gutted and completely rebuilt after reunification, and only the facade remains original. But it was behind that facade that the government announced, at the end of a press conference on 9 November 1989 (I was in Paris, and arrived in Germany for the first time a few days later) that East Germans would be allowed to cross any of the country's borders -- "effective immediately". That was the end of the restrictions on travel that, I've been told, were for many East Germans the most-hated aspect of the old regime.

As the Ministry's translator was escorting us out of the building after our meeting with the Minister, she walked us through the memorial to "Reisefreiheit" -- freedom to travel -- on the ground floor on the site of that historic announcement. The building isn't open to the general public, but the installation by Ulrich Schröder, "Die Verkündung der Reisefreiheit" ("The Proclamation of Freedom of Travel"), is visible through the windows from the public sidewalk on Mohrenstraße:

The next day -- after an evening event at one of Berlin's foremost hacker-spaces, the c-base -- I accompanied MEP Ehrenhauser to Vienna, where he and his staff organized several briefings for journalists and activists.

At one of those meetings, an older gentleman reminded his fellow Austrians of how innocuous it might have seemed for Jews, for example, with "nothing to hide", to have their then-legal religion identified in government records in the early 1930s.

Which of the PNR data now being mined by the US and other governments as the basis for no-fly decisions -- telephone and credit card numbers, whether you asked for a Kosher or Halal meal, who you shared your hotel room with and whether you asked for one bed or two -- will someday in the unpredictable future, as the limits of what is tolerated change, become the basis for action against you?

In late November, after I returned to the US, the Identity Project published the complete text of the proposed US-EU agreement on DHS access to PNR data, which the European Commission was still keeping secret and allowing MEPs to read only in a sealed room where they weren't allowed to make copies or take notes. That prompted another wave of negative publicity in the European press, especially the German-language press. There was more criticism of the proposed EU-US agreement from European politicians, especially from Germany and Austria, and from a coalition of European (again, especially Austrian and German) and US civil liberties and human rights organizations.

This week the Council of the EU will vote on whether to approve the proposed agreement. If, as expected, the Council approves the proposal (the German and Austrian governments, particularly their Ministries of Justice, reportedly have reservations but probably don't have enough votes to prevent Council approval), it will go to the European Parliament for debate and a vote in January or February on whether to ratify it. How that vote will go, especially in the face of an unprecedented US lobbying campaign in Brussels and Strasbourg, remains unclear.

I'm pleased to have played some role in helping inform European opposition to these attacks on everyone's freedom. I'm glad that European activists and politicians are doing their part to try to keep us free. But these are fundamentally US government initiatives that are being globalized, and what's most needed is for freedom-loving US citizens to exercise the rights that we still have, and demand that Congress and the President put an end to secret dossiers about our travels and secret decisions, each time we want to fly on a common carrier, about whether to give the airline "permission" to let us on board.

Not until we speak out and demand action, here in the USA, will the DHS Automated Targeting System files about us follow the files of the Stasi and the SS into the dustbin of history. And not until they are destroyed will the potential for abuse of these files be ended.

[Update: On 12 December 2011 the Council of the EU voted to approve the proposed PNR agreement with the US. Not having enough votes to block the deal, Germany and Austria abstained from the vote. Now the proposal will go to the European Parliament for a vote in January or February of 2012.]Austria

The outcome of this week's episode of The Amazing Race 19 was determined by yet another challenge in identifying the signal amid the noise: The racers were told that their clue could be found somewhere on the patterned and printed costumes of a troupe of dancers, and had to figure out which of the various words and images held the key.

The Christian snowboarders, who as professional athletes had dominated the race thus far this season, were eliminated after they misread the word "Balboa" on the coins the dancers were wearing as indicating the Balboa district of the Panama City, at the entrance to the Panama Canal. In fact, the word "Balboa" was merely the name of the unit of Panamanian currency, and wasn't the clue at all. The racers' clue was printed elsewhere on the dancers' dresses: the words "Panama Viejo" -- the site of the original colonial settlement of Panama City -- and a picture of one of the structures in those ruins.

Especially if you don't know the language, and sometimes even if you do but are less than fluent, it can be difficult to tell which of the words on a sign are the significant ones. Do the words someone is pointing out to you on a map translate as the name of your desired destination, or as "You are here"? If you can, try to get a local person to write down directions for you, rather than relying on correctly transcribing them in an unknown language.

The more interesting feature of this episode was how the racers got to Panama. To make their way from Brussels, they were instructed first to take a train from Brussels to Amsterdam, and then to fly from Amsterdam to Panama City.

There are many cheap flights between Brussels and other cities in Europe. After my most recent visit to Brussels in October, I flew out on Easyjet to Berlin. But most of the cheaper airlines serve the distant "Brussels South Charleroi Airport" (CRL), not the closer "Brussels National Airport" (BRU) at Zaventem. Even from Zaventem, there are few direct intercontinental flights.

Brussels is, however, near the mid-point of the high-speed rail line between Paris and Amsterdam. From central Brussels, it's less than an hour and a half on a direct train -- faster than flight connections -- northeast to Schiphol Airport (AMS) or southwest to Charles de Gaulle Airport (CDG), each of which has extensive intercontinental services. So it's actually quite typical for a journey around the world from Brussels to start out on one of these trains.

But why is there a daily nonstop flight between AMS and PTY? It's not like there's a large Panamanian expat or immigrant community in Holland, or an especially large number of Dutch tourists in Panama.

Airline routes normally follow trade routes and the profitable first- and business-class traffic they generate. Maritime business relationships between Rotterdam -- the busiest port in Europe -- and the Panama Canal probably explain why Amsterdam is the only European city with direct airline service to or from Panama.

But that's still not enough of an explanation. With the exception of Brazil-Portugal services -- some of the shortest trans-Atlantic flights -- direct flights between Europe and Latin America or the Caribbean are rare (and Asia-Latin America flights are almost nonexistent). Until a decade ago, most passengers travelling between those regions took for granted the necessity (even if they found it a nuisance) of changing planes in the USA, typically in Miami or New York if travelling to or from Europe (or Los Angeles en route to or from Asia).

The expansion of direct Europe-Latin America flights, including the existence of services like AMS-PTY, has been driven primarily by changes in US visa and immigration practices since 11 September 2001. Costs in money and harassment imposed by the US government have enabled airlines that offer direct services to charge a premium for avoiding the US. And that premium can make the difference in whether it's profitable to fly such a route.

All provisions for transit of the US without a visa have been abolished, and the fee for a US visa of any sort -- even the transit visa required merely to change planes in the US -- has been increased to US$135 (plus the cost of travel to a US embassy or consulate for an in-person visa interview). That means anyone subject to US visa requirements, including almost all Latin Americans, will be willing to pay at least $135 more to fly on any route that avoids the US.

Some people can't get visas to the US at all, while others aren't even allowed in US airspace. A few weeks ago in Brussels, I had lunch in the European Parliament with Paul-Émile Dupret, a policy advisor on the staff of the Parliament whose Air France flight from Paris to Mexico City -- nonstop -- was diverted because the US wouldn't allow any plane carrying M. Dupret to overfly Florida. The Air France pilot told M. Dupret, with an apology, that he's the subject of a US "no-fly" order. But M. Dupret has never seen the order himself, and the airline isn't allowed to show it to him and wasn't told why it was issued. He's been trying to find out why the US thinks he's a terrorist [sorry, the video interview with M. Dupret is in French with Dutch subtitles, having been produced for the Belgian audience of that country's 2010 Big Brother Awards], but more than a year later he's received no official information, and is still just guessing at the reasons.

People like M. Dupret -- innocent foreigners on foreign-flag airlines trying to travel between foreign countries, who were passing through or over the US only out of necessity -- are among those most threatened by current efforts by the US government to extend its surveillance and control of air travel even further, to flights throughout the rest of the world.

What does this mean for travellers? See my updated FAQ about Airline Bankruptcies.

American Airlines' press releases and statements to customers today have carefully avoided the fraudulent claims most of their competitors have made when they have gone bankrupt. (I know their p.r. department has read my FAQ and this blog, so maybe they've learned from my criticisms of other bankrupt airlines.) Rather than making false "promises" about what it "will" do, AA has thus far talked only about what it "expects" to do. Qualified kudos.

By filing for bankruptcy protection, AA has admitted that it is insolvent, and has placed its future in the hands of the bankruptcy court. Whether it will be allowed to continue to operate flights, honor tickets, pay refunds, or redeem frequent flyer mileage credits is now up to the bankruptcy court, not AA management. AA can make no promises about what the court will do.

The most important thing for travellers to understand is that the bankruptcy court will make its decisions on the basis of what it thinks is most likely to pay off as large a fraction of the airline's debts as possible, not on the basis of what is in the interests of travellers.

When you buy tickets for future travel, you are making an unsecured interest-free loan to the airline, in exchange for the promise of future transportation. Airlines rely on advance ticket purchases as a significant source of financing. Ticket holders should therefore be considered creditors: They should be represented on the "creditors committee" in the bankruptcy proceedings, and their interests should be considered by the court. Unfortunately, this rarely if ever happens.

The bankruptcy also places the world's largest airline databases of reservation and frequent flyer records at risk. If the bankruptcy court decides at any point that selling the airline's assets would generate more money for its creditors than allowing it to continue to operate, the court's non-discretionary duty will be to auction those records of everywhere you and every other AA passenger has ever travelled, and everything that has earned you AAdvantage miles, to the highest-bidding data mining or marketing company. No law in the USA protects this data from sale. And since nothing in AA's tariff or contractual conditions of carriage protects the privacy of this data, the court would not be allowed to consider traveller privacy in conducting the bankruptcy auction of AA's customer data.

If you don't like that idea, tell Congress to enact a privacy law applicable to commercial travel records.

After 19 seasons, The Amazing Race finally made it to Belgium. But at least they did it right, spending almost all of a two-part episode visiting both predominantly Francophone (Walloon) and international Brussels as well as Dutch-speaking small-town Flanders.

Some notes on what the racers did, what they didn't do, and more generally about Brussels as a destination for travellers:

Arriving in Brussels, all the teams of racers made one of the common mistakes of visitors to major European cities: They failed to realize that there are multiple mainline train stations serving the same city.

Brussels is relatively small, and all of its major train stations are connected -- unlike those in, say, London and Paris, where you have to buy a separate ticket and change to the subway to make your way between mainline stations. Nevertheless, there at least four major Brussels stations (depending on what you count as "major") served by international trains.

High-speed TGV trains from Paris (including direct trains from Charles de Gaulle Airport), Eurostar trains from London (via the Channel Tunnel), the Thalys from Amsterdam, and most other international trains all terminate at the Gare du Midi (South Station). So it's easy to assume, as the racers did, that this is the most convenient station, and to get off there before trying to figure out how to get to their ultimate destination.

But Central Station is, not surprisingly, closer to the center of downtown and to many tourist hotels and hostels than is the Gare du Midi. And train tickets marked "Brussels" are valid to or from any station in the city, even if it involves a connection. Eurostar tickets sold as "Brussels" are actually valid to or from anywhere in Belgium, at no additional charge!

If you're going to the European Quarter, and coming from the north (from the Netherlands or from Brussels Airport, or from northern Germany like the racers), there's no need to go all the way to the Gare du Midi or to waste time and money backtracking by taxi. Get off earlier at the Gare du Nord, and change to a train to the Gare de Luxembourg, which is hidden directly under the plaza where I was standing when I took this picture, between the main building of the European Parliament (EP) and the Place de Luxembourg:

The original aboveground station for trains to and from Luxembourg and Strasbourg, the Gare Leopold, was seen briefly as the racers ran by. For a while it was a politically embarrassing squat, but with the expansion of the EP building to provide offices for Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) representing new EU member states, it has now been incorporated as an essentially ornamental part of the facade of the EP complex. Alternatively, from Brussels Airport (Zaventem), there's a direct bus to the Place Lux.

What I find most striking about the European Parliament complex is its openness to the surrounding public streets and plazas, in dramatic contrast to post-9/11 Fortress Washington -- even though the EU has had its share of domestic terrorism, and protesters including the Indignados (the European predecessors of what became the "Occupy" movement in the US a few months later) have periodically marched on this and the other EU buildings.

The racers' first task was to find a clue on a bicycle leaning against this stretch of railing alongside the EP building:

The bike with the racers' clues was parked just on the other side of this bridge between wings of the EP building:

This really is a public road that anyone can drive a private car or small truck down through the EP building. And you can really leave a bicycle chained to these railings on the public walkway under the bridge, without having it removed or coming under suspicion of being a would-be bicycle bomber:

Unfortunately, the racers only picked up a clue from the basket on the parked bicycle, and didn't get to ride the bike to their next destination. Even more unfortunately, that's the fate of most US tourists.

Brussels has a growing network of Villo! "bikestations" with a distributed fleet of shared rental bikes. For a small weekly "membership" fee, you can pick up a bike from any of these locations and return it to the same or any other station. The system is designed as an alternative to walking or taking a bus or the subway, not for all-day rides. So there is no charge (beyond the membership fee) to use a bike for up to half an hour at a time, and progressively higher fees for longer rentals.

Once you figure out the system, and once there is critical mass of bikestations, a system like this can work quite well. On recent visits to Washington, for example, I've found the Capital Bikeshare cheaper and more convenient than the Metro for many cross-town trips within the District.

In Brussels and Paris, however, the bike-rental kiosks only accept "chip and pin" credit or debit cards, which are standard in Europe but still essentially unobtainable in the USA. There's no way to buy a membership or use the system with cash payment or a US-issued credit or debit card without a "smart card" chip. The contractor who operates the system , J.C. Decaux (known in San Francisco as the franchisee that operates public pay toilets here!), told me they are aware of the problem but don't see it as worth the expense to create a workaround for US visitors. [Peter Rukavina points out that even Canadian banks now issue chip-and-pin credit cards that can be used throughout Europe. Just not US banks.]

The racers' clues sent them off to Flanders, where they had to find the Muur van Geraardsbergen. The reason random passerby-by knew of, and could direct them to, this particular small street is its fame (it's even the title and subject of a hit Dutch pop song) as a fixture on the course of the "Ronde van Vlaanderen" bike race. It's a small hill, but steep, with a grade that maxes out at almost 20% and a surface of rough-cut stone Belgian block ("pavés"). Whether on a country lane or in a city square, cycling on pavés shouldn't be taken lightly. They are included in bicycle race routes as a deliberate torture-test for riders. Perhaps it's just as well that here again, despite the connection of bicycling to their clues, the racers didn't actually have to travel by bike.

The largest festival in Belgium may be the annual 24h vélo de Louvain-la-Neuve in October, which combines elements of Oktoberfest (with Belgian beer, which many consider the world's best), music and dance festival, and Burning Man meets Bay-to-Breakers meets 24-hour bike race. Aside from beer and bicycling (and moules and frites, and the Belgian waffles the racers had to learn how to make), what's the attraction of Belgium?

In the course of my work on travel-related civil liberties and human rights issues, I've spent a week or so in Brussels, consulting with members and staff of the European Parliament, in each of the last five years. I don't really stand out as a tourist there, regardless of which side of the linguistic lines that cut through Belgium I'm on. I speak some French, and Walloons recognize Hazebrouck as the name of a town across the current border in France. For their part, Flemings recognize "Hasbrouck", the spelling used by the American branch of my family after they emigrated to the Dutch colonies, as a Dutch spelling. My family name even has a meaning if its etymology is assumed to be Dutch, something like "rabbit marsh" or, as the Flemish immigration inspector told me last month when I landed in Brussels, "swamp of the bunnies." So I'm good with everyone, as long as I don't dispute their assumptions.

Flemish and Dutch people who see my name in writing are often surprised that I don't speak Dutch, and my father told me years ago of having had the same experience with Dutch-speaking international business colleagues. When I told the same immigration inspector that my ancestors had been Huguenots who spoke French rather than Dutch, he launched into a stern lecture: "If they spoke French, it was because they were forced to speak French by the French occupiers! You have a Flemish name. You are Flemish, not French. You need to know who you are."

Fortunately, the communal conflict that constantly threatens to divide Belgium rarely poses serious problems for visitors. Nuisances, yes, but nothing that's likely to put you in danger. Its best consequence for visitors is that the English language in Belgium is neutral ground between French and Dutch. As such, English has an acceptable local role as a political compromise that's very different from its role as a purely "foreign" language in other countries where there's a single national language. On top of that, the unspoken (and politically unspeakable) reality of the European Union institutions is that their de facto working language is English. So there are tens of thousands of Eurocrats in Brussels who live their lives largely in English.

To the Bruxellois, someone speaking English isn't necessarily English or American but could as easily be a European expat from Slovenia or Sweden. Not everyone speaks English (Dutch speakers in Brussels are more likely to speak English than Francophones), but I've never gotten a negative reaction in Brussels to asking, "May I speak English?" Just be aware that every building, place, or street has both a French and a Dutch name. Sometimes they are merely different phonetic renderings of the same sounds, but sometimes the names in the two languages are completely different.

Brussels is one of the few places I've visited where I immediately felt that I could comfortably live. It's human at both macro and micro scale, manageable to get around yet not tiny, and greatly enriched in culture and diversity, relative to its size, by its role as the capital of the EU. "Brussels" as shorthand for alien orders from EU authorities is generally a dirty word in the rest of Europe. But the European Quarter is only a small part of the city, and Brussels has retained its own distinct identities even while playing host to EU enlargement.

At the risk of falling into stereotypes (but how else can one characterize what one finds attractive about the "vibe" of a place?) and offending both Walloons and Flemings, Belgian food, intellectuality, manners, and ways of doing things seem to me to be a pleasing middle ground between French flair and Dutch pragmatism. And the prices of both food and lodging, for reasons I can't fully fathom (please add your speculation in the comments) seem to be significantly lower in Brussels than in most other large European cities I've visited recently.

Belgium doesn't have much of a distinctive image to American tourists, who can only tell where they are because, If it's Tuesday, this must be Belgium. The main downtown hotels are oriented toward business travellers, not tourists, which means that they have lots of vacant rooms during the summer and around holidays when the Eurocrats and lobbyists are on vacation. That makes Brussels a good point of entry for U.S. tourists, to soften the sticker shock when you arrive in the Euro zone.

To avoid depressing the local market of Europeans used to paying much higher prices for hotels than Americans, the distressed inventory of hotel rooms in Brussels is typically offered through discounters in the US. Even when travelling on business and not wanting to stay in a hostel, I've rarely had to pay more than US$100/night through Hotwire or Priceline -- sometimes substantially less -- for rooms at four-star downtown hotels in Brussels that would cost at least twice that in other European capitals or even provincial tourist centers. Restaurants in Brussels are similarly expensive by US standards but cheap by European, and particularly by French, ones., and the Belgian waffles the racers had to learn how to make), what with a distributed fleet of shared rental bikes. For a small weekly

The Amazing Race 19 moved on from Africa to Europe this week without looking back. But if you tried to follow in the footsteps of the "reality" TV show, you'd probably have brought back more than just memories, souvenirs, and photos from your visit to Malawi.

As we saw on TV, the water in Lake Malawi looks clear and inviting. Let that be a lesson: You can't tell whether water is safe to drink or to swim in by how it looks to the naked eye.

One of the most widespread and serious of parasitic diseases, known as schistosomiasis or bilharzia, is endemic to Lake Malawi and all of the other lakes of the Rift Valley of eastern and southern Africa. The disease is caused by blood flukes (worms) that are carried by freshwater snails, enter the human body from the water by borrowing through the skin (eek!), and then reproduce within blood vessels and the body, mainly the liver, by feeding on blood.

Like malaria, schistosomiasis/bilharzia is rarely directly fatal, but if untreated it can persist indefinitely, producing a variety of chronic and debilitating effects. It takes days or weeks before symptoms become apparent, so it's often misdiagnosed in travellers when symptoms don't appear until well after they have returned home to a place where it's uncommon.

Among diseases caused by parasites, schistosomiasis/bilharzia may be exceeded only by malaria in its global impact on health. But unlike malaria, it's not something most travellers know to worry about. And it's not an infection for which there is any easy prophylactic treatment. (There are treatments for the disease, if you are infected, but only after the fact.) The only way to take precautions against infection with the parasites that cause this disease is never to swim or wade in potentially infected water. This includes any body of open fresh water in Africa or other infected regions -- lake, river, or irrigation ditch -- regardless of what local people tell you.

It's a major coup for promoters of the tourism industry in Malawi that The Amazing Race 19 included a challenge that required swimming in Lake Malawi, without mentioning the risk of schistosomiasis/bilharzia.

Medical researchers have reported that substantial percentages of Peace Corps volunteers, expatriate foreign citizens, backpackers, and other tourists who have lived in or visited Malawi show evidence of infection with the parasites that cause schistosomiasis/bilharzia.

Recognition of the risk of this waterborne disease would obviously be fatal to beach resorts along Lake Malawi. Some resort owners tell guests that that their particular part of the lake is safe, or give them prophylactic doses of antibiotics to take after their visit. But I wouldn't rely on advice from people with a financial interest in denying or minimizing the inherent danger.

Before you swim or wade in lakes, streams, or other fresh water in an unfamiliar part of the world, consult your own doctor and read the advisories about schistosomiasis/bilharzia from the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. Their advice is clear and unequivocal: "Avoid swimming or wading in freshwater when you are in countries in which schistosomiasis occurs."

This week's episode of The Amazing Race 19 was a lesson in Africa, poverty, and bicycling.

First the teams of racers made their way by bus from Lilongwe (the capital and one of the two major cities of Malawi) along the highway toward Lake Malawi to Salima. Then one member of each 2-person team was dispatched on a bicycle as a local "taxi" to carry a pillion passenger across town.

Along the way, even one of the racers who had visited Africa before was surprised by the poverty they saw. Why was that?

Were the racers seeing the poorest parts of the country? No, not at all. Tourists rarely do, in any poor country, because the poorest places are typically poor in part because of poor access to transportation. Paved roads in sub-Saharan Africa are few and far between. By definition, anywhere in sub-Saharan Africa visible from a paved road -- even in the "bush" between towns -- is a highly privileged place. Proximity to a road, even an unpaved road if it's passible to trucks and buses, gives significant advantage over locations hours' or days' walk from any road.

Along the route of The Amazing Race 19, as in other places I've been in Africa, poverty made itself visible along the highway most conspicuously in forms of locomotion. The paved Lilongwe-Salimi-Lake Malawi highway is reportedly one of the country's best. Yet the vast majority of the traffic visible along the road in the scenes broadcast on the race was on foot.

Bus service was available: We saw that the racers were riding local buses, not tourists- or foreigners-only buses. But most people couldn't afford even the cheapest motorized ride on any bus or truck, and weren't riding animals or bicycles but walking. Those lines of pedestrians along every road, walking to cover long distances (often while carrying heavy loads of cargo) are one of the most typical sights of Africa and indications of local poverty.

Poverty remained visible in the form of local transportation the racers experienced in Salima. I've often seen motorbike or tricycle-rickshaw taxis, but rarely two-wheeled bicycle taxis. The existence of a bicycle pillion-passenger "taxi" industry suggests both that many people can't afford a bicycle of their own, and that the bicycle taxi owners can't afford to upgrade their vehicles to faster motorbikes or to tricycle rickshaws that can carry several passengers at a time, or much more cargo than a two-wheeler. (The big drawback of two-wheeled "taxis" is the difficulty of balancing on the pillion with a large pack, much less with more than one piece of luggage.)

Is Malawi much poorer than other African countries that US tourists are more likely to have visited? To some degree, yes, but I don't think that's the explanation either. Most of the people in every sub-Saharan African country are very poor.

What may be more important is that Malawi is a country with relatively few rich people (unlike, say, South Africa), so the enclaves where poverty is out of sight are smaller, and even wealthy tourists are more likely to get out of this "bubble" and to encounter the ways of life of more ordinary people, or at least to see them from their vehicles as the racers did.

It's all too easy to forget how little relationship what most tourists see has to the reality of life for most local people. Wealth or poverty, of course, is only one of the possible differences. Destination resorts, like "gated communities" for wealthy locals, work hard to keep reminders of what life is like for their staff out of sight and out of mind for their guests.

The isolated locations of safari "camps" inside parks or reserves where most housing is forbidden serves a similar purpose, so that many visitors on wildlife tours -- probably the largest segment of tourists from the USA to Africa -- have almost no exposure to African human life. If they encounter poverty briefly, they are likely to see it as an exception (as it is on their visit), and not to be alerted to the normativeness of African poverty.

One of the potential advantages of bicycling as a mode of travel is that it can take you off the main tourist routes and, because it is seen as a vehicle for the less wealthy, may break down some of the social barriers between rich foreign visitors and poor local hosts. The best account of travel in Malawi that I've read, for example, is in Dervla Murphy's The Ukimwi Road, in which she recounts her solo bicycle trip, eschewing paved highways and their truck traffic (and the large towns through which they pass) for unpaid side roads (and the people who live and travel along them), from Kenya to Zimbabwe.

Fences and gates, however, aren't the only possible dividers between local life and what visitors see. Geographic segregation between economic classes is routine almost everywhere, including the USA. Economically mixed residential neighborhoods or business or shopping districts are the exception.

The tension between rich people's desire to have low-wage labor close at hand and their desire to keep poor people's lives, homes, and communities out of sight of the rich has played out differently in different places and times.

One extreme has traditionally been India, where it used to be impossible for even wealthy foreign tourists to avoid encountering poor people. I remember riding in a motor-trishaw from upscale Connaught Place in downtown New Delhi to the international airport at night between rows of "street sleepers" along the verge of the highway, and seeing families living in the shrubbery planted as ornamentation around a jogging path at the base of a high-rise condo tower in Mumbai. This is changing: India is increasingly following the model set by the USA and Brazil (as brilliantly described by Teresa P. R. Caldeira in City of Walls) of "gated communities" and increasing fortification of the divide between spaces for the rich and those for the poor.

The other extreme has traditionally been South Africa. Black people were present everywhere as workers, even inside White people's homes, but a key goal of apartheid was keeping them otherwise out of sight of White people. Looking down from an airplane, a character in André Brink's masterful novel, An Act of Terror, describes seeing, "Now and then the double stain of a town: houses on large square plots set in a grid of broad streets; and to one side, apart, the identical matchboxes or the conglomeration of shacks and shanties where the blacks lived. How clear and exposed the anatomy of apartheid, he thought ... visible even from ten thousand metres up." When I first read this, I took it for hyperbole, and assumed this description was becoming obsolete. But when I flew over South Africa, a decade after majority rule and the end of legally-mandated segregation, this was still what it looked like from the air.

Describing the continuation of her journey in her next book, South from the Limpopo, Dervla Murphy complains repeatedly about how, in South Africa, she had trouble finding food and lodging because only the tiny White "dorps" -- often too small to offer any services -- were shown on most maps, while the ten-times-larger Black townships with which they were inevitably paired weren't shown on maps and were deliberately located just out of sight of the White community or the main road, and could be found only by asking Black passers-by.

A tourist with a car might simply have driven on to the next larger town, never knowing what was over the rise. But someone on a bicycle, for whom that wasn't always an option, had to search out the hidden reality of the "locations" where most of the people in these regions live.

It's an extreme case, but an important reminder of how selective and misleading the picture we get of a country as visitors may be, especially if we follow the road most travelled.

I was in Europe for the last two weeks while The Amazing Race 19 made its way from Borobudur (Indonesia) through Phuket and Bangkok (Thailand) to this week's destination of Lilongwe (Malawi).

The biggest issue for the racers in these places, however, was one they could have faced anywhere: how much and in what currency to pay for taxi rides.

Two of the last three episodes of The Amazing Race 19 were non-elimination legs, but the one team eliminated lost out because they ran out of money for taxi fare, and had to walk to the finish line at the "pit stop".

If you're not in the race, the best way to avoid overpaying for taxis is generally not to use them at all. Occasionally, especially for a family or small group of friends, a private taxi may be cheaper than individual fares for a shared airport transfer service. But most of the time, even three or four bus or subway fares add up to less than what a taxi would cost.

If you do take taxis, though -- as at times we all must, either because we're in a hurry or because we can't find our way where we're going on our own -- how can you avoid ending up like the eliminated racers, who blew their whole budget for the day on taxi rides?

Here are some tips you can use anywhere:

What currency should you pay in?

With rare exceptions, you'll get the best price if you pay in local currency. U.S. dollars are the most universally accepted currency, and the best way to carry a stash of emergency cash, but you're better off changing them into local currency, if you can, before you try to spend them. Pay in dollars and, as a rule, you'll have to pay more. That's what happened to those of the racers who had no Thai Baht to pay their taxi drivers in Phuket.

That's not unreasonable, and shouldn't be a surprise. Most people in the USA recognize that the Canadian dollar is a reasonably stable and freely convertible currency. But even in border communities in the USA where Canadian currency is (grudgingly) accepted, it's taken at a substantial discount from the interbank exchange rate you see in the newspaper or online. That doesn't mean that all US merchants are out to rip off Canadian visitors (although some are). Rather, it reflects both the nuisance value and cost to business of keeping track of Canadian currency separately, and the substantial transaction costs of converting it to US dollars, especially in small amounts.

You'd be very lucky to get a cabbie to let you pay your fare in Canadian dollars even in a border city like Detroit, and you'd have pretty much no chance in Chicago or New York.

Since one of the places you're most likely to need to take a cab (or to spend local currency for a bus or train ticket) is when you first arrive in the country, it's best to try to have at least a small amount of local currency -- enough for a taxi ride to your hotel, and for a meal if you can't get local cash until the next day -- in hand before you arrive. There's usually an ATM at the airport or international train or bus station when you arrive in a new country, but there's always a chance that it will be out of cash, out of order, or incompatible with your card (an increasingly common occurrence with machines that only take "chip and pin" cards and don't accept chipless U.S.-issued "swipe and sign" cards).

If you travel to another country regularly, and the local currency is reasonably stable, it makes sense to keep some cash in that currency for your next trip, other than converting it all back to U.S.dollars (or whatever your local currency is) each time you come home. I keep envelopes in my safe deposit box with US$100 or so each of Canadian dollars, British pounds, and Euros, for example.

On the other hand, if the currency is unstable or you don't expect to return, you are best off exchanging it for U.S. dollars or the currency of your next destination within the country. Weak currencies generally get harder to exchange and are discounted more heavily the further afield you go. The racers, for example, probably should have exchanged their Indonesian Rupiah for Thai Baht (or U.S. dollars) before leaving Indonesia, rather than waiting until they got to Thailand.

If you're going somewhere new, especially if you're arriving at a provincial airport or less busy border crossing and/or at an hour when currency exchanges might be closed, it's worth trying to change at least a small amount of money with a fellow traveler before you arrive.

I'm not just being U.S.-centric when I speak of U.S. dollars. Whatever you think of the long term stability of the USD, you'll almost always lose less changing money between other currencies by way of U.S. dollars than by way of any other intermediate currency. And even Euros, while they are accepted almost everywhere, still don't retain as much of their value through multiple currency conversions in most of the world as do U.S. dollars. For an around the world trip, everyone from Australians to Japanese to Swiss to Brazilians carries some of their money in U.S. dollars.

How do you know how much to pay for a taxi ride?

It's much easier said than done, but the obvious answer is that you should always agree in advance on what to pay, either agreeing that the charge will be according to the meter (or derived from it in an agreed-upon way, such as by a late-night percentage surcharge multiplier or the addition of a specified flat extra charge for luggage, late-night service, etc.) or agreeing on a specific price.

Meter surcharges are common, and the notice of them -- if any -- in the cab isn't necessarily in English. There are many places where nobody goes by the meter, and some where it would be impossible for a taxi driver to survive if they charged according to the meter. So the mere existence of a meter, even if it's working, isn't a guarantee that the driver is willing to take you where you want to go for the price on the meter. You need to agree, in advance. Point to the meter, and get the driver to say "yes" (or make sure you understand whatever else it is they do say if it isn't just "yes") before you get in.

If you haven't agreed on a price in advance, you can't really object to whatever price is demanded of you when you get to where you're going. A taxi driver isn't bound by what some other driver charged you, or someone else, for the same or what you think is a similar ride, or by whatever your guidebook says such a ride "ought" to cost.

What if you and the driver don't have any language in common? Get some intermediary to translate -- again, before you get into the taxi. Sometimes a passer-by or fellow traveler will be able to help translate both your destination and the negotiation of a price. I've had an English-speaking good Samaritan on the street not only explain to a taxi driver where I wanted to go, but curse the driver in the local language, apologize for his greediness, and find me another taxi when the first driver wanted to overcharge me for being a foreigner.

Though you may pay more for a taxi booked for you by the staff at a hotel, you're more likely to get where you want to go and less likely to be charged more than what was agreed to. On the street in a place where you don't understand the language of all, it's often worth going into a hotel or some other business where there's likely to be someone who speaks English when you need a taxi. Be prepared, however, for the possibility that they might call a nondescript "gypsy" cab (or a friend with a car who could use the extra income) rather than a metered taxi.

At some airports and similar locations, there are taxi dispatching services to assist with translating directions and negotiating prices. At the airport in Phuket, for example, the racers all used a service that charges 100 Baht (a little more than US$3) more than the meter amount. The dispatch service also keeps a record of the run, which at least in theory keeps the driver from trying to rob or abduct the passengers without getting caught.

Similar services that I've used at the airports in New Delhi and New York charge a flat fee based on the zone of your destination, to prevent the driver from running up the meter by taking a circuitous route. In both those cities, the zone rate has often seemed to be less than than what the meter would have been, based on my experience with metered rides in the opposite direction to the airports.

A taxi dispatcher (or the help of some other translator at a hotel or on the street) is still no guarantee that the driver will correctly understand your desired destination. If you can, have the dispatcher or whoever is helping you arrange a cab write the destination down for you in the local language. That way you can show it to passers-by if you need help finding your way.

Sometimes you'll have problems getting to your destination no matter what you do. In New Delhi, we kept having trouble getting to our hotel by taxi or auto-rickshaw even when we were dispatched from the airport or by someone who could translate from English. Eventually we figured out the sources of the problem: (1) We were staying at the smaller and less well-known of two nearby hotels with similar names (the YWCA International Guest House rather than the YWCA Family Hostel), and (2) our hotel gave its address (in English) as being on "Parliament Street", but the official name of the street has been changed to "Samsad Marg" and the name "Parliament Street" remains in use only as the colloquial label for the police station that houses the New Delhi police headquarters, central booking, and holding cells down the block from our hotel. Since we didn't look like people likely to be trying to get to the jail, taxi drivers tended to completely disregard our protestations that we really did want to go to Parliament Street, and took us instead to the other YWCA hostel where they thought we must really want to go.

Finally, although it's hard to tell from the editing of what was broadcast ("The Amazing Race" isn't an educational video, it's a commercial entertainment show), it looked to me like some of the racers including those who were eliminated may have increased the price of their rides by chartering what were normally shared vehicles for exclusive use.

It's an easy mistake to make, especially in places where there's no clear dividing line between a "taxi" and a "bus", where similar vehicles are used for both purposes, and/or where shared services where you pay per seat (what we think of as a "bus") are referred to as "taxis".

In Thailand, the racers were riding in pickup trucks fitted out with benches in the bed for passengers. As we've seen before on "The Amazing Race", vehicles like this operate by a variety of names in many countries. Typically, they follow more-or-less fixed routes, with more-or-less fixed and locally well-known prices per passenger for specific journeys.

Sometimes -- regardless of whether the vehicles in use are converted trucks, vans, minibuses, or sedans like those we think of as "taxis" -- these are referred to locally as "taxis".

Although they are often overloaded and dangerous, these shared-ride, fixed-price, fixed-route "taxis" are often the most common or only available mass transit. And they are usually so cheap that foreign tourists don't need to worry too much about how much the price will turn out to be, and therefore often get in without asking the price for a specific route.

The problem is that it's often possible to charter one of these vehicles to go to someplace that's not on its regular route, to leave immediately even though it's not yet full, and/or to carry only your party rather than as many passengers as could be crowded in.

It's one thing to pay for an extra seat so that you can keep your luggage inside the vehicle rather than having it tied on the roof, or to pay for four fares instead of three so that your group can have the entire taxi to yourselves and leave right away. But if you don't realize what you are doing, and ask the driver of the truck or van if they go to a particular place, you may find yourself having inadvertently agreed to a special off-route charter of the entire vehicle, for which you may be charged (quite legitimately) 15 or 20 fares if the truck or van would normally carry that many people.

It's for this reason that I've occasionally seen phrasebooks or guidebooks that translate how to say that you don't want a special charter. If your ability in the local language isn't up to that, and there's any possibility that the vehicle you are boarding might hold one more person or isn't already going to where you want it to take you, it's especially important to make sure you have a clear mutual understanding before you start out as to how much you will be expected to pay. If you don't, you shouldn't be surprised if, like some of the racers, you are told that you "owe" US$150 for what you thought was a short ride in the back of an open truck that you thought was serving as a public bus. Maybe the driver is trying to rip you off, but maybe not.