Adventurous Miriam

That is the name of a Website (www.adventurousmiriam.com) managed by a young Danish woman who loves to travel, and shares some useful advice on how to do so inexpensively. She travels mostly with her husband, and the majority of her tours seem to be to Latin America or Asia.

Miriam has some good recommendations on how to travel at moderate cost in Costa Rica, which she says is the most expensive country in Central America. First of all, go off-season, in the period May to November when it rains a lot and prices are lower. Take local buses whenever possible--a local bus from the capital San Jose to the Monteverde Cloud Forest cost just $5, compared with $50 for the same trip by minibus. The local water is perfectly safe to drink, so save on bottled water.

Buy beer at the supermarket rather than in bars, and make your own meals or eat at modest local restaurants, places such as the local chain called Soda where meals go for $3 to $6. It is a long time since I was in Costa Rica, so I'm afraid I can't offer any further useful tips. My favourite tour when I was there was to the Poas Volcano.

Miriam also offers tips on how to travel in the Phillipines cheaply, $1155 per person for two weeks visiting several different islands. Boracay is considerably more costly than most of the other islands, she says.

If you subscribe to the email alerts supplied by Travelocity (www.travelocity.com) you can discover some amazing deals. For example, a round-trip between Chicago and Kansas City for just $81 on American Airlines (www.aa.com,) provided you travel on Nov. 12 and return on Nov. 15.

However, you should be aware that in a post on one of the forums on Flyer Talk (www.flyertalk.com,) a woman writes of being on an American domestic flight where another woman was forced to spend the entire trip in the washroom because she had the bad luck to vomit. (This report is unconfirmed.) Ebola over-reaction, perhaps?