Read part 1 of this story here.

The automated gates chug and clatter open as a jeep, its windows ribbed with steel, noisily announces its arrival in the tiger park. Without the usual gaggle of tourists to impress, the occupants of a neighbouring jeep toss out a skinny pheasant as the driver shouts obscenities at a dozen lounging Siberian tigers.

One tiger finally takes notice and lunges at the fluttering fowl, which has enough brains to scuttle under one of the jeeps. The tiger, neither as sharp nor as small as the pheasant, slams into the vehicle with a thud. And as the hulking beast shakes off the dust and disappointment of his failed attempt, the pheasant dashes into the brush. The striped leviathan promptly settles back down, seemingly deciding that the prey isn't worth the effort.

And why not, for these tigers are already well-fed, particularly by the 300,000 tourists who flock every year to the tiger park at the Hengdaohezi Feline Breeding Centre on the outskirts of Harbin in northeastern China's Heilongjiang province.

On a nondescript street near downtown Harbin, the Double Mountain Local Products Wholesale Center offers the usual array of kitsch items stripped from the wilderness: deer antlers, pelts and dried starfish. A request for tiger wine, a traditional brew of corpse-steeped cheap liquor with dozens of reputed medical benefits, raises a stern eyebrow from an employee who informs me that as such concoctions are illegal, they are not available at the store.

But at the mention of American money, a store manager intervenes - $100 would buy two bottles, and true to the employee's words they are not at the store; they will be delivered via courier. Doubts about the brew's authenticity are shooed away.

The manager is certain the bottles are the genuine article because, she says, "they came from over at that tiger park". She is referring to the Hengdaohezi Feline Breeding Center on the outskirts of the city. By most accounts, that tiger farm is an enviable success. Started in 1986 with 8 Siberian tigers, it is now home to 800 of the big cats. Compare that with the estimated 150 Siberian tigers in US zoos. The largest tiger-breeding facility in the world, Hengdaohezi - like its cousin down south at the Wolong Panda Reserve - has learned the art of churning out cubs, 100 this year alone.

First off, I'm the type that is happy to be alone. Sometimes groups get on my nerves. Sometimes, I feel like I belong with the crowd just fine. Other times, being in a group gives me the feeling that I am wearing the wrong style clothing. Instead of a cocktail dress, I've worn jeans or vis versa.

I seriously had not a clue of what to expect when I headed off to Mexico to help build houses. I barely had time to pack. When my daughter and I were heading out the door, I couldn't find the left shoe of the pair I planned to wear when I wasn't hammering and sawing. I gave up and grabbed another. What I have found, in general, that it is hard to do good-deeds on ones own. My biggest successes have been when I am part of something bigger than myself.

For this good-deed trip, we had to be at the airport by 6:00 a.m. to hook up with the group scheduled for the Southwest Airlines flight two hours later. There was comfort in being handed a list of the people in my travel group and their name tags by one of the trip leaders. I felt hooked in with a purpose, a reason to be along, and not like one of those body parts that we don't really need. I had on the right clothes. It didn't matter that I was only in charge of keeping track of five people besides myself. The words, "Here's your travel group," roused me from my early morning bleary state of a lack of sleep.

The search for authenticity is central to postmodern traveling. Nobody, or almost nobody, wants to be the token tourist and be treated as a token tourist.

Many destinations around the globe are starting to figure that out. Instead of assuming that "rich Westerners" want to sleep at the Marriott and sample foreign culture only by sipping a "theme martini", places like Thailand know that more and more travelers want to experience the authentic life average people of Thailand are living: feeding pigs, planting vegetables, harvesting fruits. Swapping places, if you will.

The Guardian has an interesting article about the "community tourism" phenomenon. The author spend time with the "mountain people" in Ja Bor in north west Thailand, a three-hour drive from Chang Mai "on a road of endless hairpin bends".

Visitors apparently "stay in a local home mattresses on the floor with outside washing facilities or in a large dormitory-style building, and are fed lavish amounts of food from the villages ubiquitous rice fields, its fish farm, organic vegetable garden and from the nearby forest, nurtured by sparkling streams. Close to a waterfall is a delicate bamboo shrine to thank the spirits for carrying water to the rice fields. And then there is coffee production. Dried by the sun, roasted over an open fire and sifted on bamboo platters, this arabica coffee bears a Fairtrade label and gets sold to Starbucks."

Aside from the Starbucks piece, it sounds blissful.

When I read about giant panda Ling Ling's death in Japan, besides confusing the Ling Ling that visited the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. in 1972 with the Ling Ling that just died at the Ueno Zoo in Tokyo, (see post) I also found out that there are only 1500, or thereabouts, pandas in the wild. That feels a bit alarming. That's a smaller number than the number of students in many high schools in the U.S.

With the Ueno Zoo without a panda, perhaps they might get a loaner. Zoos do loan animals. In 1987, China loaned the San Diego Zoo two pandas that procreated. Now the San Diego Zoo has the most giant pandas than any other zoo in the United States. Head to the Giant Panda Research Station if you go here.

Where else can you see pandas? Here's what I've found so far.

• At the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., the Giant Panda Habitat is a place to experience panda life and learn about a panda's life cycle.
• The Memphis Zoo has a panda pair, Ya Ya and Le Le. The CHINA exhibit highlights the pandas and other animals from this part of the world.
• The Atlanta Zoo, the 4th zoo in the U.S. with giant pandas has a mother and her cub.
• At the Adelaide Zoo in Southern Australia, you'll be able to see pandas in 2009. The hope is that Wangwang and Funi (male and female) will mate and the zoo will be able to have a role in the conservation of these animals.
• The Madrid Zoo has a panda pair on loan for the next ten years.

This is the second post of a 2-part series. Read the first part here.

The swamp here could be the stuff of nightmares. Because this happens to be the rainy season, which lasts from October to March, the trails are meant to be waded, not walked. Yet I am utterly stuck, knee-deep in pungent red mud with stagnant water up to my waist. Ellen Meulman, a PhD student from the University of Zurich, doubles back to pull me out of the quagmire. It takes a few hard yanks. "Be careful," she says. "You can disappear in these waters." Thoughts of leeches and king cobras vanish, replaced by a more immediate fear.

We've been slogging and hacking through the jungle for nearly three hours, on our way to rendezvous with today's observation team. The field staff hustles day in and out to arrive at the nest-site before dawn and do not return until after dark. In between, they track the individual behaviors of the orangutan in excruciating detail: Is the subject playing with a neighbor? Eating, and if so, what? Vocalizing? Using a tool?

The orangutans here already know some remarkable tricks. They've learned how to fashion a seed-extraction stick to crack open the prickly shell of the Neesia fruit. The theory goes that this rather complicated skill developed from simpler abilities to use tools to dig for honey, fish for termites, and scoop for water. Yet primatologists know little more than that these smarter-than-we-thought apes possess culture; the pressing question now is to figure out how it's acquired and transferred.

Forget for a moment the dreadful conditions in this miserable Sumatran swamp, which include being eaten by tigers (seven in the surrounding area last year). Just getting here is an ordeal in itself. Start by taking the 1,400-kilometer flight from the capital, Jakarta, to Sumatra's bustling northern port, Medan. Then it's a grueling twelve-hour ride straight across the island's dramatic mountains-and poorly maintained roads-to the Indian Ocean, where a puttering speedboat will be waiting to make the hour-long trip upriver.

If all goes well, you arrive at camp for the daily rationing of rice and canned mackerel. This is assuming you secured the four permits required for a visit to this hidden corner of Leuser National Park, a World Heritage Site.

Yet despite the remoteness or food or the fact the Suaq Balimbing field station is in the middle of a flooded swamp, the scientists here couldn't be happier at their return. "We were all waiting for this place to reopen," Andrea Gibson, a PhD candidate at University of Zurich who had to delay her orangutan fieldwork by three years because of the station's hiatus, said to me.

I have become enamored with Cash and Treasures, the Travel Channel's show dedicated to digging up things and making money while you're at it. For the last three weeks, I've caught the Wednesday night, 10 PM episode and picked up some ideas for places to stop on our trip west this summer. The number of treasures one can dig up in the United States, Cash and Treasure's primary focus, is impressive.

Unlike a lot of other travel shows where one wonders if the world has any children at all, new host Kirsten Gum, who is the replacement for Becky Worley who had twins, chats with kids in every episode. Gum heads to family friendly places where kids are as welcome as adults to pick up digging tools and have at it. Gum also seems to enjoy the kids she is talking with, and for the most part, doesn't use them as photo ops. They are given time to talk about what they are finding. At the dig spots, Gum delves into the history of the area and why whatever is being mined is considered worth finding.

Along with finding out where and what to dig, people who tune into the show can find out how to make some money off their finds. Gum takes her stash of whatever she's found during that particular episode to people who show her how to clean it, mount it and turn it into jewelery. Many of the businesses have been in operation for years and the people who run them are experts. Since each place Gum has visited is worth a detailed mention stay tuned. One place will be the focus of one post. Gems, bones, gold and fossils are on the menu.

A thrilling ride down the "Camino de la Muerte," or "Death Road," has become a popular adventure destination in Bolivia. I, personally, get nauseous just looking at the photo.

A 56-year old U.S. tourist, Kenneth Mitchell, was killed here in mountain-biking accident after tumbling from his rented bicycle and falling down a 200-foot cliff. Mitchell is the 12th cyclist to die on the road in the last decade.

The highway east from La Paz, the world's highest capital city, winds dramatically down the face of the Andes, dropping 11,800 feet in just 40 miles. According to IHT, the narrow dirt track earned its nickname for the frequency with which Bolivian buses would plunge off its 3,300-foot cliffs, killing hundreds a year until a new paved highway opened 2007.

The cause of the accident is unknown. Mitchell's bike, left behind at the cliff's edge, was in perfect working order. Strange.

Traveling isn't always green. As Iva pointed out, it's pretty difficult to feel good about the time we spend in planes. And the UN calculates that in 2007 there were about 900 million international travelers; that means travel is having a bigger and bigger impact on the environment. Beyond giving up travel altogether, what can we really do in order to make our favorite pastime greener?

The ladies over at Go Green Travel attempt to answer just that question today as they kick off their 25 Days to Green Travel series. The series will cover the basics; the who, what, where, when, why and how of green travel. Over the next 25 days they will post about green ways to prepare for a trip, green things to do while traveling, and even what do to on your return trip home.

In honor of Earth Day, the series' first post is entitled 31Reasons to Travel Green: In Pictures. If you have ever had any questions over why to travel green, this gives a pretty poignant visual answer. Do yourself an Earth Day favor and check it out here.