Most of you probably already know that numerous sightings of yeti – the fabled abominable snowman of yore and lore -- have been reported recently in western Siberia. As recounted in Yahoo! UK news, "According to 15 witness statements by Siberian locals in the Kemerovo region, 7-ft tall, hairy, manlike creatures have been spotted wandering the Mount Shoria wilderness, with one man even claiming to have saved a yeti from drowning in a river while hunting.

"Villager Afanasy Kiskorov in Tashtagol reportedly witnessed the yeti activity first-hand. He said: 'Their bodies were covered in red-and-black fur and they could climb trees. The creature was screaming in fear after falling into a swollen mountain river.'

"Despite the alleged sightings, no photographic evidence as yet confirms the existence of the 'abominable snowmen.'

I'm in heaven. It's a sunny early-summer morning and I'm sitting in a cobbled corner of Zurich's Old Town in the third floor salon of the elegant Conditorei Schober. Placed just so on the table before me is the most beautiful multi-layered latte macchiato I've ever seen: creamy-caramel-colored on the bottom, a deeper brown in the middle, and a very deep dark almost chocolatey brown on top, beneath a glorious alpine crown of foam. Arranged beside it is a flaky pain au chocolat, browned to a delicate crusty-crunch on the outside, with fine flecks of chocolate oozing from the soft folds within. As I bite through the layers of croissant, I can feel each one, multi-layered like the latte but at the same time soft and yielding.

As if these perfections weren't enough, there's a French chanson in the air -- and then there's the room itself!

On the opposite side from where I sit, one entire wall, perhaps 20 feet in length, is covered in panorama wallpaper that showcases fanciful scenes of Greek and Roman columns, the Egyptian pyramids and sphinx, and assorted minarets, spires, turrets, and crenellations. All these are set in a faded, soft-hued, sunset landscape, with palms and green clumps of trees and a silver river undulating through. In the foreground, partly blocking these scenes, branches and bushes burst with bright pink and purple blooms that look as if they are about to spill out of the wall.

More romantic scenes cover the wall behind me – the remains of an amphitheater, ruined columns, and dusky peaks receding into the background, and in the foreground a luxuriant profusion of plants spilling over my shoulder. The wallpaper's palette is echoed in the upholstery on the settee where I sit and the two armchairs that flank the settee, all covered in a luxuriously soft gray-green material with a gold design motif.

Beneath the panorama opposite me, a red leather banquette runs the entire length of the wall, with eight square tables and one chair set at each. Another five tables, two round and three square, are arranged on the floor between. In the corners of the room two-foot-tall studded brass pots hold real palms. An ancient coat rack presides at the entrance to the salon, a gray-green Roman-style column commands the middle, and two cascading, beaded, candle-crowned chandeliers regally oversee the entire scene.

All in all, it's like falling into a dream.

Gallery: Zurich's Best Cafe -- Conditorei Schober

Once upon a time, the cheapest, most convenient way for travelers abroad to write to friends and family back home was the aerogramme. This ingenious creation was a razor-thin, super-light, roughly 6-x-11-inch sheet of blue-colored paper that was designed to be folded into thirds, creating six postcard-size panels (both sides of the paper were used).

One of these panels was pre-stamped and printed with dotted lines for the recipient's address; four of the panels were blank, to be used for writing your message; and in the Greek aerogramme that lies before me now, the other panel features a photo of whitewashed buildings rising up a rocky brown hill against a deep blue sky.

Adjoining the stamp-and-address panel were two gummed flaps; when you finished your message, you licked and folded these flaps to seal the note. Then all you had to do was drop the aerogramme into a mailbox. No weighing, no paying, no standing in line. This was the height of epistolary convenience when I lived in France, Greece, and Japan in the 1970s.

If you're tired of cold, bitter winter weather, Just Go With It – the new Adam Sandler-Jennifer Aniston film -- might be just the antidote. It's a frothy, fizzy, cocktail-with-a-paper-umbrella kind of warm-hearted comedy set in a lush tropical setting – and who couldn't use a little of that right now?

The script isn't Oscar-winning material, but it does what it needs to: A single L.A. plastic surgeon (Sandler) pretends to be unhappily married so he can score with sympathetic women. When he meets a woman he thinks he really might want to marry, he has to prove to her that he's going to divorce his wife. He coerces his long-suffering single-mother-of-two assistant (Aniston) to play the role of the wife, her kids get thrown into the ruse, and soon everyone ends up at the Grand Wailea resort on Maui bonding as a prelude to ending one marriage and starting another.

If you love Jennifer Aniston and/or Adam Sandler, you'll probably like this movie. And if you love Hawaii, as I do, you'll definitely get your aloha fix from the scenes shot on Maui and Kauai. The massive Grand Wailea gets diva treatment, with eye-candy shots of its verdant sprawling grounds, luxurious lobby, sumptuous suites, and enticing pool. There's also a great extended luau sequence that shows dining on the lawn under the stars, complete with tiki torches and hula dancers. And speaking of hula, one of the best scenes in the film is an indoor hula competition where Jennifer Aniston ends up squaring off against Nicole Kidman. Yes, you read that right: Nicole Kidman, doing the hula. And doing it hip-shakingly, grass-skirt-twirlingly well, I might add.

Matt Goldberg joined Lonely Planet as CEO in March 2009. Before joining Lonely Planet, he was senior vice president of digital strategy and operations for Dow Jones & Company in New York, where his responsibilities included leading business operations for The Wall Street Journal Digital Network. I spoke with him in November.

DG: Why did you move to Lonely Planet?

MG: First of all, to be selected to lead a company that was so important to me personally in my own travels and that plays such an important and meaningful role in the world by encouraging and empowering people to go out and experience the world, was nothing short of humbling. When I pinched myself and realized that I received the offer, there was no question in my mind that I would sell my house in the worst economic climate in history, pull my children out of school, and move 12,000 miles away -- because to my mind, there is no company more deserving of its reputation than Lonely Planet. It's going through an incredible period, like any content company in any category, and I'm passionate about one question: How do esteemed media brands, products and services make the successful transition through this period of extraordinary technological innovation? I have spent my career thinking about that question, and I am putting all of my energy into helping Lonely Planet make that transition successfully.

DG: Has your sense of Lonely Planet's challenges evolved very dramatically since you joined the company?

At the beginning of the new movie "The Tourist," a mild-mannered American schoolteacher is sitting alone on a train from Paris to Venice. A mysterious and beautiful English woman approaches him, sits in the open seat across from him, and engages him in conversation. Soon they're drinking wine and flirting over an elegant dinner on the train.

When they arrive in Venice, they are briefly separated, but when the teacher is poring over a map near St Mark's Square, the beauty pulls up in a sleek motorboat and whisks him off to the Doge's Suite at the five-star Hotel Danieli, where they end up in a long kiss.

This so closely resembled my own first experience as a tourist in Europe that I thought the movie was a documentary. But then I realized that in this version there were no pigeons in St. Mark's Square. Now that's bending the truth a bit too far.

William Dalrymple is one of the West's pre-eminent India experts. He is the author of seven works of history and travel, including In Xanadu, The Age of Kali, City of Djinns, which won the Young British Writer of the Year Prize and the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, the best-selling From the Holy Mountain, White Mughals, which won Britain's most prestigious history prize, the Wolfson, and The Last Moghal, which won the Duff Cooper Prize for History and Biography. He divides his time between New Delhi and London, and is a contributor to The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The Guardian. His acclaimed new book, Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India, is an eloquent investigation of India's multi-faceted modern spiritual life through intimate portraits of nine everyday practitioners. He graciously conducted this email interview from his farmhouse south of Delhi.

Don George: How did you first get interested in India?

William Dalrymple: I first encountered India when I arrived, aged 18, on the foggy winter's night of the 26th January 1984. The airport was surrounded by shrouded men huddled under shawls, and it was surprisingly cold. I knew nothing at all about India and came initially simply because my best friend at the time was interested in discovering it. I had instead wanted to go on an Assyrian archaeological dig in Iraq, but then Saddam Hussein closed the British School of Archaeology and I found myself with nine months to fill, so I bought an air ticket and pitched up. It was a complete revelation.

My childhood had been spent in rural Scotland, on the shores of the Firth of Forth, and of my school friends I was probably the least well travelled. My parents were convinced that they lived in the most beautiful place imaginable and rarely took us on holiday, except on an annual spring visit to a corner of the Scottish Highlands even colder and wetter than home. Perhaps for this reason India had a greater and more overwhelming effect on me than it would have had on other more cosmopolitan teenagers; certainly the country hooked me from the start. I backpacked around for a few months, and hung out in Goa; but I soon found my way back to Delhi and got myself a job at a Mother Teresa's home in the far north of the city, beyond Old Delhi.

In the afternoons, while the patients were taking their siesta, I used to slip out and explore. I would take a rickshaw into the innards of the Old City and pass through the narrowing funnel of gullies and lanes, alleys and cul de sacs, feeling the houses close in around me. In particular what remained of the Red Fort of the Great Mughals kept drawing me back, and I often used to slip in with a book and spend whole afternoons there, in the shade of some cool pavilion. I quickly grew to be fascinated with the Mughals who had lived there, and began reading voraciously about them. It was the Mughals that drew me into India initially.

After croissants and café con leche in the elegant restaurant of Inkaterrra La Casona, looking onto the hotel-home's green and graceful interior courtyard, I met Manuel in the sitting room. He had been infectiously smiling and enthusiastic every day, but today there was a special gleam in his eye. "Hola, Don! Que tal? Today we have a very wonderful journey planned: We are moving even further into the past, into the pre-Inca world. You will see places not many tourists see."

We drove east from Cusco toward Lake Titicaca, and for me, this already induced the frisson of exploring virgin territory. Even though the road was a well-paved thoroughfare that clearly carried thousands of travelers, most tourists confine their Sacred Valley explorations to the region between Pisac and Ollantaytambo. Driving toward Lake Titicaca, we were moving beyond Pisac and away from the tourist trail.

Our destination was Racchi, about 70 miles southeast of Cusco. John drove us through more spectacular scenery: the blue-gray Vilcanota River ribboning through yellow-green grasslands patchworked with deep green crops, all framed by snowcapped mountains; mud-brick, terra cotta-roofed houses dotted the landscape and little boys in woven caps shooshed bushel-burdened donkeys along the side of the road.

On Day Four I awoke as the sun was just starting to tint the sky, and made my way to the Aguas Calientes bus stop. With about two dozen Peruvian guides and Western and Japanese tourists, I piled into the bus for the weaving 1500-foot ascent to a place I'd been dreaming of visiting for decades: Machu Picchu. I'd finally set foot there the day before and wandered its time-bridging grounds, but I'd felt like I was missing something, the connection wasn't quite complete: I had to get there for the sunrise. As the bus jounced and switchbacked through the lightening dawn, this feeling weighed undeniably in my stomach and my head: a yearning, an expectation.

As the sky brightened, I worried that I was too late. But I had forgotten that Machu Picchu, despite its high altitude, is still a bowl surrounded by towering peaks. I raced up to the site and saw with relief that while the peaks to the west were tipped with bright sunlight, the ruins were still in shade. I made my way directly to the sun dial, known as Intihuatana or "hitching post of the sun," which sits atop a pyramid-like construct of terrace and wall in the site's northwest quadrant.

I positioned myself at the sun dial and waited, absorbing the stony stillness and the fresh scent of grass, the texture of tree. I watched the sun's rays light the peaks behind and around me, slowly getting higher and higher, closer and closer.