A cheery negotiation later, the old man running the shop had agreed to take the masks on the local bus -- a jitney typically piled beyond its roof with people, goats, vegetables and luggage -- and meet us at the airport in Doula, our goodies packaged for the plane. And there he was, right on time. The package was dog-earred but sturdy enough -- or so we thought.

Hindsight 20/20: Yes, we should have stopped at the DHL office or at least called Air France to check on luggage policies. Instead, we found ourselves in a horrid crush a few hours before flight time at the 100-degree-plus, unair-conditioned airport arguing with one ''official'' after the next.

The person guarding the lobby wouldn't let us through the initial checkpoint with such a big package -- without a $60 ''fee,'' that is. The X-ray machine keeper wouldn't let us put it in until we paid a $10 fine. The uniformed man in the next room argued that our package was too shabby; a 45-minute argument and another $75 got us new wrapping no sturdier than the original.

Finally, at the Air France desk, the supervisor told us our package fit within size requirements, but it was simply too heavy -- an issue no amount of ''fine'' could fix. Had we'd split the masks into two boxes, we'd be on the plane.

Our guide had left us in the care of his sister, a former airport worker who wormed her way beyond the checkpoint. We left the massive masks with her, handed her the last of our cash in the thin hope that she'd actually send them, and flew away from the roughest airport experience of my life.

A month later, dozens of e-mails and a few money wire transfers later, the masks hung on our porch -- all the more valued for the pain of getting them there. Even in the toughest places, a woman keeps her end of the deal.

FRIENDS AND FAMILY

Pack the patience;

sail only for the day

The Husband. People tell me how lucky I am to have a mate who travels. I'm always confounded; why would I marry someone who didn't love the road?

The relationship almost ended on our first big Travel Date, a 10-day sailing trip to Tahiti with another couple. They were sailors all; I was an adventure seeker. When a killer airfare to Tahiti bounced into the computer, we grabbed tickets and chartered a 42-foot Beneteau.

The idyll quickly dissolved in the rough-toothed grinder of conflicting travel styles: Urban Energy v. Island Ease, Books v. Buffet, Reality v. Romance.

The problem was me. In these days before laptops and Kindles, I was out of reading material before we ever weighed anchor. By 10 a.m. each day, the rest of the gang cheerfully cranked up the Jimmy Buffet tunes and sipped Bloodies; my restless city nature cried for the nearest airport.

Weighed by the responsibility of bareboat command, Captain Handsome -- that would be The Date -- became Captain Bligh. Fed up with my lack of joie de vivre, my fellow sailors put me in the dingy on a long line. I scrawled blasphemies in my journal and wondered how quickly I could dump The Date once we returned home.

More than 15 years later, The Date has become The Husband. The other couple -- then married 20-plus years -- is now divorced. Our rule: Day sails only.

TRAVEL, THE JOB

23 hotels in 18 days;

16 museums in an afternoon

Eventually, travel became my work.

A journalist by trade, I've covered hard news, politics, business, celebrities, fashion, charities, society. In the early 1990s, the planets aligned, and I began covering travel, first for The Miami Herald, then for Destination Florida, an early website co-owned by our parent company. When the site failed, I returned to The Herald, taking over as travel editor 10 years ago.

Of my ''almost 100'' countries, 40 were ones I've visited primarily for business. My aura has been ''read'' by a traditional Balinese healer, my thighs have been tortured by the grueling hike up the jagged peaks of Chile's Torres del Paine National Park, my visage was painted in my own Memoirs of a Geisha moment and my palette tickled by the inventive cuisine of Arzak, one of Spain's finest restaurants.

And while it is a great way to earn a living, traveling on someone else's dime is also something else: Work.

On vacation, you'd never stay in 18 hotels in 23 days (Scotland, England and Ireland), visit 16 museums in an afternoon (Rio), check out 80 hotels in five days (Paris), traipse through tourist-devouring snow drifts (Helsinki and St. Petersburg in January), sleep on the floor in a ''cell'' of a budget ryokan (Kyoto), visit every major attraction in some European capital in a mere three days (countless), conduct seemingly endless interviews with government officials.

And you would never, ever let readers vote on where you'd go each day as you drove 5,997 miles in 28 days from Miami to Seattle on the quintessential road trip. (Tip: Watch the cops in Kansas; the speeding ticket cost me $220, and I wasn't even driving that fast.)

AFTER DISASTER

In recent years, I've also reported on tourist haunts torn by tragedy. After the carnage, it felt important to return, to see New York and Thailand and New Orleans not only as the scenes of horrific events that kept us glued to the screen but to take their measure against memory and discover whether we might visit them again.

The South Floridian Motherland of New York was the awful first. The idea of returning to a city I once called home just a few weeks after the 9/11 attacks made me jittery. Once there, I was caught -- as we all were -- in the sadness and drama and unimagineable scenes of a New York filled with tanks and soldiers and still-smoldering ruins. Posters of missing boyfriends and wives were plastered on walls and street posts; memorials to the known dead piled up in Union Square. Yet there was something more beneath the sorrow -- an indefagitable sense of hope -- and it was a message I was glad to deliver.

Then, Thailand. Before the 2004 tsunami, Phuket was a magazine fantasy, its lazy beaches and gracious resorts a check mark on travelers' wish lists. An earthquake and its deadly wave changed all that.

Five months later, I hired an interpreter, haggled with a boat taxi and made my way to hard-hit Koh Phi-Phi. More than 5,400 people had died in the wave's onslaught, some tourists, most locals, and the sight of one devastated beach still strewn with shoes and a child's doll broke my heart. In most places, though, damage was largely swept away. The locals had mourned, then moved on, taking in orphaned nephews and rebuilding simple homes and praying for the tourists to return. In Asia, all things have their time.

And New Orleans. Before Hurricane Katrina, The Big Easy was K-Paul's etoufée and Mothers' debris biscuits, the weep of a love-sick saxaphone dancing through the French Quarter. After, it was a failure of unimaginable proportion.

When I returned three months after the storm, the city was subdued and angry -- but still undeniably New Orleans. Musician and barbecuer Kermit Ruffins was blowing his shiny brass horn and flipping ribs at Vaughans, K-Paul was simmering the etoufée, and the Quarter was open all night. But there were few tourists about, and locals were still shellshocked over the loss of everything -- homes, jobs, friends, family photos. Everything, that is, except their spirit.

WHAT WAS I THINKING?

Volcano by night, rafting

the Zambezi and other insanities

It's one thing to toss your soul to tragedy for the sake of your work. It's another to fling yourself voluntarily into two-dozen Class 4 and Class 5 rapids, climb a volcano in the dead of night or hop a cargo plane to visit cannibal tribes.

I call these ''what was I thinking'' moments. As in, What was I thinking when I signed up for a rafting trip of the Zambezi River through 24 serious rapids, followed by a half-mile hike out of the canyon on a 27-degree incline? When I paid perfectly good money for the night-hiking trip to a Guatemalan volcano spewing rock and lava? (The guide deserted us, The Husband quit, and I crept on in the dark -- alone.) When I booked the sailing trip in Turkey that turned out to be on ''a toilet afloat,'' as one of our fellow travelers called it? And how about the caving trip beneath Sequoia National Park along a rocky ledge over an bottomless underground chasm, or the early morning hike up Peru's Juana Picchu -- without water?

Truth is, most trips have a ''what was I thinking'' moment -- that instant when you wonder why aren't lying on a manicured beach with a fruit-trimmed piña colada in the company of some rich, handsome stud instead of (pick one):

• Trying to cram three tall teenage boys and a hulking husband into a mini-SUV far smaller than promised on the car rental website

• Calling the front desk in search of another room because your legs have been mauled by bed bugs

• Cursing yourself (as you slip into heat exhaustion) for not drinking more water for fear you won't find a handy bathroom.

CAMEROON

Which brings us to Cameroon. The three-week visit to the little-visited Central African nation began on Christmas Day, 2006. The Husband and I would land in the city of Doula, then travel with a private guide to the far east to see lowland gorillas in the wild, the north to see the Big Five game animals, and the west to visit tribes whose recorded traditions date to the 1300s. It would be the single most expensive vacation of our lives -- and one of the most maddening.

Before I forget, let me say that the tribal trip to the west ranks as one of the most fascinating explorations ever.

The trip east, now that was a different matter: The smart-looking SUV whose air conditioning failed the first day; the Spam-and-baguette lunches (at these prices!); broken bridges and roads spitting dust so red Georgia's shiny clay would be shamed; the bribe-seeking, AK-47 toting road guards; the $12-a-night hotel -- at these prices! -- with no water (the town's water pump had broken, and the whole village was dry, the public-works director explained to us in a local bar); the Baka (better known by the politically un-PC term, ''pygmy'') village elder in the Louis Vuitton hat; the gorillas scared away by the Dutch couple with dire intestinal revenge; the driver who refused to come down the jungle road, forcing an additional 11 kilometer hike to the tarmac; the same driver who roasted poached antelope inside the SUV engine bay (something we discovered after stopping 13 times to refill the radiator after the hose burst, causing us to miss our train to the Big Game region, causing a serious heart-to-heart with the tour operator resulting in the return of some of our cash), the return visit to the Village of No Water. . . .

Still, these travails pale against the brief encounter with the not-so-slightly stoned cannibals.

In my wanderings through Asia, Africa, Oceania, I've often stopped in villages to snap a few photos, give the kids balloons and the schools pencils, get a fleeting sense of local life and the commonalities that bind us all. Always I've been respectful, asking before I take photos. Always, the reception has been cordial, and it's not unusual for the local women to dress me up like one of them.

So we were surprised when we stopped in this small village to find our car rapidly surrounded by a throng of suspicious 20-something men. When I asked to take photos, they got downright belligerent.

An English-speaking local interpreted: the villagers thought we'd been sent by the president -- who was then running for reelection, not that there was any chance he'd lose -- to take their photos so he could perform voodoo on them. As the mob got angrier, we clearly weren't going to convince them otherwise. We took off at a roar.

Our gentle French-speaking guide, Louis, explained what he'd learned: A while back, some other white people stopped there; when several villagers got sick months later and died, the locals blamed the deaths on the long-gone white people. And the fact that the villagers we'd encountered were smoking marijuana didn't help, he told us.

``Besides, this isn't a nice place. Some time ago, the villagers became very angry with their king. So they roasted him up like a chicken and ate him.''

WHY OH WHY

Insatiable wanderlust

drives me on

People often ask why. Why go to Cameroon or Mali or the Philippines during the Marcos era; why Russia in the dead of winter; why Under the Stars instead of a steady diet of Five Stars?

How to explain? In part, I go because the cannibals, broken-down SUVs and AK-47-toting guards don't seem real -- at least not until we're face to face. (And hey, I drive on I-95, which is seriously dangerous.)

In part, because for disasters large and small (food poisoning, broken cameras, expired passports, heat exhaustion, near arrest, near drowning, broken-down cars, getting rained in at the Gobi Dessert), the rewards are simply incomparable.

Stay at home, and you'll never unearth protoceratops skeletons in the Gobi Desert with paleontologist Jack Horner (who happened to be staying in our same yurt camp), tour a traditional African village with one its dozen queens, see the sun rise over the Outback and set over Rome's Tiber River, witness an ox-pull contest in rural Nova Scotia, feel the spray of Iguazu Falls, taste the unmatched sweetness of pesto made from Genoa's distinctive basil, see Ian McKellen storm in Chekhov's Wild Honey, slide down the Great Wall in the snow with a troop of Chinese soldiers, fall in love in Hong Kong, be honored at a basi ceremony in Laos, hear Wagner in Vienna, sleep in the shadow of South Dakota's Black Hills.

Mostly, I think, I travel because I'm reminded of how little I know and how much there is to learn.

My wanderlust is insatiable. Though I've traded Africa for Mexico and Maine these past few years, it's time to go back. Ethiopia is now tops on my list (Queen of Sheba country in the north, tribes in the south), followed by a gourmet barge trip into France's Burgundy region. Then on to Colombia and Holland, Nagaland or Benin. And surely, a return to much-changed India.

Or, given the economy, maybe just a return to my brother's sofa in Washington state.

Even when you've visited a place before, there's always something new to see.

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