Hello. 2008 has been nuts! I’ve been on research trips for Lonely Planet to Burma, the Bronx, Russia’s Far East, Bulgaria and finally Colombia. In December, I’ll start adding more photos and videos from Vietnam and other trips.

Feel free to hit ‘Contact’ on the thumb tabs above to say ‘hello.’ I’ll be checking email fairly regularly.

Meanwhile here’s a few places my travels have taken me to that stand out despite their relative obscurity.

FOUR GREAT UNKNOWN DESTINATIONS:

Nebraska Panhandle. You can’t knock the flat, fly-over plains until you’ve walked them, and nowhere in the middle of America’s Great Plains is there more awe from walking tall grass fields past lonely outcrops of mountain or rolling sand hills than Nebraska’s western half, particularly in the panhandle.

Vietnam’s Con Dao Island. It’s not on my site (yet), but the former prison island is a gorgeous spot with some of Vietnam’s best diving, turquoise waters and untouched beaches. When visitors tire of Phu Quoc — or it gets overdeveloped — this will be next.

Russia’s Yakutsk. The capital of the Sakha Republic, farther east of Siberia by some destinations, Yakutsk is sometimes lauded as the ‘coldest city on earth.’ Even in summer its soil is frozen, by construction-wrecking permafrost that mandates all buildings built on stilts. It’s a bit gray, but during the Ysakh festival in late June, the ethnic Sakha (or Yakut) people have a weekend celebration that is like a Mongol army recreating World War II, one local told me. I last visited in 2005, when the local communist party ushered me into their tent for horse meat and horse milk.

Queens, New York. Everyone already knows about Brooklyn — New York’s hottest up-and-coming bar and dining and living scenes — but for casual visitors to New York, modest Queens has more to see and do. PS1, a branch of MoMA built from an old school, and the Museum of Moving Images (built in an old film studio next to Sesame Street’s studio) are more fun than any Brooklyn attraction. And at the unreal Flushing Meadows — with rusting relics from various World Fairs — you can see a mini New York at the Panorama exhibit of the Queens Museum of Art — every building in all of NYC accounted for. But best is the food. Queens is the world’s most diverse neighborhood — half of its residents were born abroad — resulting in a Chinatown without the tourists at Flushing, plus Romanian and El Salvadorean and Indian and Vietnamese and Korean and Greek restaurants just off the No 7 subway.