This beautiful Puerto Rico vista, snapped by Flickr user trishhartmann, was taken in Guzmán Arriba, Río Grande, toward the eastern end of the Commonwealth territory.

With temperatures dipping and daylight at a premium in the north temperate zone, this image is a reminder of the near-magical appeal of the Caribbean, and the tropics in general over the winter. If you don't sort of want to jump into this canopy of green now, you surely will by February.

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[Image: Flickr | trishhartmann]

The Cocos (Keeling) Islands are possibly the most beautiful place I have ever been.

This is strange to admit, even embarrassing. Travel writers are not supposed to make such claims. We're supposed to give information, provide historical context and show how our readers might make the journey we're sketching. We're not supposed to lose our cool and submit to the sheer gorgeousness of a particular place.

But the fact is that the Cocos Islands, an Australian external territory, are exquisite. The beaches are damn near close to perfect and the lagoon is full of exotic marine life. For anyone who has gone out of his or her way to visit deserted beaches, the Cocos Islands are the Holy Grail. And for those who have waited for hours to witness a single sea turtle clamber ashore on one or another Caribbean beach, the thousands of sea turtles simply hanging out in the Cocos lagoon will come as a revelation. The same goes for the reef sharks, of which there are an impressive number.

It's also hard to beat these islands for their remoteness. They're 1700 miles and two time zones to the west of Perth, the most practical launching pad for the islands. (It's also possible to book a charter flight to the Cocos Islands from Kuala Lumpur via Christmas Island on a Malaysian airline called Firefly, but most visitors fly from Perth with Virgin Australia.) It takes over six hours to reach Cocos Islands from Perth, with a 50-minute refueling stop on Christmas Island.

Hampi is a village in the southwestern Indian state of Karnataka, home to a UNESCO World Heritage Site and an important religious place. It is photographed here at sunset by Flickr user arunchs, who has captured a glorious fragment of time at the most poetic time of day.

We like sunsets. They're beautiful and they allow us to imagine that we're on the road. So upload your best sunset images to the Gadling Group Pool. We pick our favorites from the pool as Photos of the Day.

[Image: Flickr | arunchs]

I traveled to Beirut earlier this year with bmi (British Midland International), the East Midlands-based airline partially absorbed into British Airways in the spring. My Beirut trip was meant to be the third installment in an ongoing series called "Far Europe and Beyond," which reached a premature end in the lead-up to the airline's sale to International Airlines Group (IAG), the parent of British Airways and Iberia.

"Far Europe and Beyond" was, as its title suggests, focused on several cities along on Europe's margins and just beyond. I visited Tbilisi and Yerevan last year, Beirut earlier this year, and had hoped to carry on to three additional cities, one (Baku) within Europe and Almaty and Bishkek (see above), both indisputably outside of Europe.

BA has absorbed many bmi routes and withdrawn others. I did a little cursory research and discovered that two of the cities I originally proposed for the series (Bishkek and Yerevan) have been dropped – as has Tehran, where the Yerevan-London bmi flight I took last October originated.

Last week, in response to an email query, a helpful British Airways spokesperson confirmed that the above destinations have indeed not been included in BA's winter schedule. When I asked whether or not BA had any intention to initiate new routes to the Caucasus and Central Asia, she told me that there were no immediate plans to do so, and added that she suspected that future route development would focus on destinations further east. She also pointed out that the airline has just begun to fly nonstop between London and Seoul, an exciting development in light of the ascendance of Korean popular culture and the recent debut of a Seoul-based correspondent at Gadling.

Here's a little plea to British Airways: please bring these cities back, perhaps looped into other routes on a once-a-week basis. What about a stop in Bishkek coming back from Almaty or a stop in Yerevan en route to Tbilisi?

On my first visit to Beirut's Tawlet, I stopped to ask a shopkeeper directions. "Tawlet?" she verified. I nodded. "C'est très bon," with a delicate flutter of the fingers accompanying her très, before she pointed me in the right direction. I'd heard great things about Tawlet for quite some time. The shopkeeper's gesture was the icing on the cake. I knew the way I know my own name that this meal was going to be exceptional.

I found Tawlet at the rather inauspicious end of an industrial cul-de-sac in Mar Mikhael, an up-and-coming neighborhood with an exciting slate of new shops, some of them quite innovative.

It was still on the early side but I couldn't wait. I walked into Tawlet before the restaurant opened for lunch and sat patiently for the wait staff to finish setting things up. A Saudi television crew was taping interviews of the day's chefs. Just when my hunger had reached epic proportions, just when I thought I wouldn't be able to wait any longer, a distinguished looking man approached me in English and told me I could begin to eat. He carried himself like a proprietor. And as it turned out, he was Kamal Mouzawak, the head honcho. I introduced myself and we chatted briefly.

Mouzawak has pioneered and tended a food revolution in Lebanon. Souk El Tayeb is the umbrella organization behind his efforts. It has spawned the Beirut Farmers Market, founded in 2004, Dekenet, a farmers shop, established in 2006 and regional food festivals, which followed in 2007. Tawlet, interwoven into the other Souk El Tayeb endeavors, opened its doors in 2009.

Hayete, a budget-friendly guesthouse in Beirut, is a rare bird: stylish, in a fantastic location, and relatively inexpensive.

Budget-minded travelers who also enjoy a bit of style are usually out of luck when it comes to accommodations. Budget-friendly options generally consist of hostels, folksy guesthouses, smarmy bed & breakfasts and budget hotel chains – all honorable and fine, but only rarely stylish.

There are very few super stylish rooms in in-demand cities with rates in the $100 per night territory. Boutique and art hotels charge several times this amount in most buzzing cities. Budget hunters usually have to rely on the occasional off-season rate dip to enjoy anything approaching boutique style.

Hayete, located in Beirut's exciting, intrigue-drenched Achrafieh neighborhood, provides an exception to the rule. The place looks and feels like the setting for a photo shoot in an underground European style magazine. It occupies an old classic building, built in the early 20th century, with original detailing intact. The tiled floor is particularly beautiful.

On the walls here are several huge photographs of color-saturated Russian landscapes by Liza Faktor. The design template is clever and very contemporary, capturing several impressions at once. There is the breezy feel of the carefree 1970s in several pieces alongside a fussy mid-century sitting room aesthetic, itself unsettled by contemporary upholstery. Throughout, there's a strong sense of place.

The location is right in the thick of the Achrafieh action. Guests breakfast on a communal balcony that sits above a lively intersection, just beyond the main lounge's enormous antique aviary with its live, singing inhabitants. From the balcony, guests can spy morning traffic extending through narrow streets, old mansions, and the noises and sights of construction and renovation projects. The Lebanese breakfast (labneh, pita bread, juice) provides a pleasant, if light, start to the day.

Hayete has just four rooms. Two, with shared bathrooms, run $105 per night for a double (or $75 for single occupancy.) Two en suite rooms start at $125 (or $95 for a single). The rate includes breakfast, tax, coffee and tea from a shared bar, Wi-Fi and use of a communal refrigerator.

These nightly rates are particularly impressive in light of Beirut's hotel rate index, which is not generally easy on the wallet. While Hayete is not an extreme budget pick, its nightly rates put it in an all-too-slim category of reasonable, stylish hotels. For this alone it deserves to be championed.

[Images: Alex Robertson Textor]

What's in your bag? Mine contains my laptop, several notebooks, a folder with tickets and research notes and a beat-up middling digital camera. Flickr user nan palmero's bag, as you can see above, is rather more technologically with it.

There's nothing I like more than nerdy connoisseurship. (If you'd like an item-by-item run down of these objects, check out the photographer's own site.) I love it so much that I chose an image from the same photographer whose work I featured in last Friday's Photo of the Day.

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[Image: Flickr | nan palmero]

It's five years this month since the Eurostar began its run from the renovated St. Pancras train station. The station remains a tour-de-force of a hub. This may be the only train station in the UK that feels truly European, and not only because it connects to the European train grid. St. Pancras is densely useable and grand, with a real buzz – like a train station of yesteryear, the sort of place you might have read about as a child. Flickr user nan palmero captures some of the station's buzz in the above image.

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[Image: nan palmero | Flickr]

A wing in flight can be a gorgeous thing to behold. Last Sunday I flew from Sydney to Los Angeles on board a Qantas Airbus A380. I spent some time simply gazing at one of the airplane's enormous wings, which struck me as a triumph of engineering and design. Flickr user pkorsmok might have been similarly struck earlier this month when he snapped this image of a wing of a new United Airlines 787.

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[Image: Flickr | pkorsmok]

This Paris jogger is slender and polished even in motion, looking for all the world like he hasn't even broken a sweat. (That hair!) Captured by Flickr user Cosmic Smudge, he comes across as about two million times more stylish than most of his fellow joggers around the world. Then again, he is in Paris, and, we can only assume, is a Parisian.

Upload your best images of perfectly coiffed joggers and other cultural anomalies to the Gadling Group Pool on Flickr. We choose our favorites from the pool as Photos of the Day.

[Image: Cosmic Smudge on Flickr]