I'm here with Rudy Maxa, PBS's "Savvy Traveler" and host of the awards-winning series Rudy Maxa's World. His sixth season is currently airing, featuring locales such as Estonia, Argentina, and Thailand (he's already done a whopping 65 episodes).

He began as an investigative journalist at the Washington Post and then became the "Savvy Traveler" 15 years ago for public radio. He's now a contributing editor at National Geographic Traveler and his work has appeared in GQ, Travel & Leisure, LA Times, and Forbes, among other publications. If you're interested in more of what he has to say, check out his blog.

How did you make the transition from investigative journalism to travel writing? Did you always have the travel bug?

The switch was gradual and unplanned. While a senior writer at Washingtonian, the monthly DC magazine, I was asked to do political commentary twice a week on a new, national public radio show called "Marketplace." I didn't want to do political commentary, but the producer of the show persisted. He asked if I had any hobbies, and I said, 'Well, I travel all the time, and I'm always surprised at how fellow travelers don't know how to read an airline ticket. Or don't know their rights when they arrive at a hotel with a reservation to find the hotel if filled."

So I suggested a segment on consumer travel issues. I asked my friend Peter Greenberg, then writing a column in the LA Times on travel called "The Savvy Traveler" if I could use that name for radio. He kindly consented. Over a couple of years, my Savvy Traveler segment grew in popularity. I began getting writing assignments on travel subjects for national magazines. Then the every-other-week radio commentary turned into a one-hour, weekend show on public radio, "The Savvy Traveler," that I hosted for four years. Then came the television series that I own as of this season, "Rudy Maxa's World."

Our friends over at National Geographic's Intelligent Travel just told me about an interesting series of dispatches that Keith Bellows, the Traveler Editor in Chief is in the midst of. He and this year's winner of The Next Great Travel Writer contest recently touched down in Beijing and will be making their way across China into Mongolia.

Along the way they'll be sending dispatches about the experience including the Olympic games, central China and into the north, starting yesterday with their arrival into Beijing.

Bellows brings back vivid memories of my own time in China, navigating the busy streets and haggling with vendors, lost in a world of wonderful foreign people. I can still smell the streets of Shanghai and barely see through the smog of The Bund.

Apparently in light of the Olympic Games the Chinese have cleaned up Beijing quite a bit -- Bellows speaks of clear blue skies, flower pots and merriment all over the city as citizens get geared up for the games. I wonder how long this will last after this summer.

Make sure you check out Intelligent Travel to follow along with Keith and his understudy as they traverse the far east -- I'm already jealous after reading the first article.

I kind of have a thing for maps -- when I was a kid I either wanted to be a cartographer or a pickle factory (proper) -- so I perked up when I heard that the National Geographic Society had just launched Topo.com, a comprehensive database and guide for topographic maps in the United States.

Inside, users are free to browse around an interactive Google map onto which the NGS's topo database has been integrated. One can browse around updates trail and wilderness maps and ultimately customize a personal map to be printed and shipped to you.

The best part is that users can add their own video, pictures and trip reports to the site, making it incredibly easier to research a trip.

User content is still a bit low on the site, but take the opportunity to tool around your local area and see how the topography of the land around you changes. It's really interesting to see your neighborhood not from the perspective from the roads, proper, but rather from the perspective of elevation and boundaries.

If you haven't had a chance, I highly recommend you check out my new favorite show, Locked Up Abroad, on the National Geographic Channel. I stumbled across it recently and have not been able to stop watching since. Each episode chronicles the real-life stories of young men and women who have been incarcerated while traveling in countries including Venezuela, Mexico, Nepal and Thailand. As you might guess, the arrests frequently involve drugs, although other incidents include a kidnapping by paramilitaries in Colombia and gold smuggling in Nepal.

Using first-hand interviews, each story unfolds as the protagonist chronicles a series of bad decisions and rationalizations that led to their eventual arrest. What starts in many cases as a free all-expenses-paid holiday, a chance for "adventure" and an opportunity to make a quick buck quickly turns into an all-too-real nightmare. They describe endless days waiting in isolated holding cells, confusing foreign justice systems and getting caught in the crossfire of deadly prison gang wars. Interestingly enough, not all episodes involve prison - in one of my favorite episodes so far, an American sets out on a motorcycle trip across South America, only to be kidnapped at gunpoint by guerillas in Colombia. Not only does he manage to eventually escape, he also refuses to be sent back to the U.S. after his ordeal, choosing to continue his motorcycle trip to its completion. Fascinating television to say the least.

What makes Locked Up Abroad especially compelling for a twenty-something like me with a bad case of wanderlust is that the situations hit very close to home. Granted, I will never be stupid enough to accept an "all-expenses-paid vacation" to South America or try to drive my motorcycle into an area controlled by Colombian guerillas, but I do understand the mindset. Travel can skew our sense of reality, making us crave opportunities to push our boundaries and have truly unique, memorable experiences. That is for most of us, a very healthy instinct - it's only when it crosses the line between reality and fantasy that it can become horribly serious.

Check out Locked Up Abroad Monday nights at 9pm on the National Geographic Channel.

Most people that read Gadling are travelers. After talking to a lot of my more mobile friends, I see that they got interested in travel at a young age, often from their family. Turns out, a love for travel can be genetic, and chances are you come from a long, long line of travelers.

The National Geographic Genographic Project headed by Spencer Wells looks at tracing every person's journey genetically. Wells, who has authored several books on the subject of population genetics, is interested in seeing how people have arrived at their current location. Starting from African and the "one mother theory" about 60,000 years ago, this projects looks at the spread of humans over the earth and their genetic differences and similarities acquired on the way. One can even see how close to extinction the human race was.

Fantastic stories of people crossing the land bridges between continents, trekking through deserts in Africa and sailing across oceans -- your ancestors experienced this! You can follow your personal journey, through comparison of DNA, and see where you've been and what types of genes you are carrying. I was quite surprised to see my journey. I am very light skinned and fair haired and was shocked to see that I had a lot of genetic connections to Central Asia. Looking at the pictures of people sampled from that region, I saw similar features to my grandfathers and relatives.

The coolest thing about the Genographic project is that it is "people powered." It needs your participation to work. You can purchase a kit to create your own DNA cheek swab and send in your data. Wells and his team will analyze your chromosomes and compare them with their database. This will give you a personal map and story of your journey.

This project will continue to shed light on migratory patterns and evolution of humans, as a species, for years to come. It will also hopefully show people just how similar we all are and how intertwined our paths have become.

I've never been to Mardi Gras but I have beads. My first few came from a good college friend of mine who came back from New Orleans with a smile on his face and tales of forgetting that he's from a "nice" family. Not really, I do know he had a grand time and bought beads back for everyone.

Acquiring lots of beads and trinkets is one way to measure how much of a good time one had at a Mardi Gras parade. I imagine the experience is like a giant pinata that takes forever to empty--all those colors flying.

These beads have been part of Mardi Gras since 1920s when throwing trinkets to spectators started to become a feature. The original "throws" (what is thrown) were cheap glass beads instead of the lightweight plastic ones of today. [Check out this National Geographic article for a detailed history.]

If Mardi Gras beads rain your way there are some things you can do with them once you get them home. Here are directions for how to make a floor lamp. You can also knit a scarf. How about a bead dog?

I bet you could glue those beads on about anything. Buy a cheap picture frame, cover it with beads and show off your favorite Mardi Gras snapshot. That's my idea.

The fact that until about 65-million years ago dinosaurs dominated our land is as fascinating as it is unfathomable.

For anybody even remotely interested in the evolution of life forms on our planet that goes back 230 million years, understanding how dinosaurs existed is enthralling. This is why National Geographic's latest exhibition that displays original fossils of the Nigersaurus -- one of the most bizarre dinosaurs ever, is worth checking out.

Remants of which were first discovered in 1993, the Nigersaurus was bizarre because it had a long shovel shaped vaccum cleaner type muzzle that sucked up plants with its 600-teeth full jaw -- hence dubbed by some as the "mesozoic lawnmower". If broken, these teeth could regenerate rapidly as each tooth had 10 replacement ones behind them. It grazed like a cow with its head down, this was unusual as dinosaurs are known to eat from trees with their necks up long and high. At 30-feet long, you can imagine its bulk, but funnily it had fragile feather-light bones -- some of which are transluscent.

The exhibition will feature a life size reconstructed skeleton of the animal, a flesh model of its head and neck, and a cast of its brain.

The exhibition "Extreme Dinosaur: Africa's Long-Necked Fern Mower" began yesterday at the National Geographic Museum at Explorers Hall (1145 17th Street, N.W., Washington D.C.), and will run until Tuesday March 18, 2008; admission is free. For more information you can visit www.ngmuseum.org.

Out friends at Intelligent Travel remind us that National Geography Awareness Week kicks off today, and they've got a link to an awesome video of a young explorer who really knows her map!

The week-long event is a joint effort among various organizations seeking to promote and foster geographic learning. This year there is a special focus on Asia. Geography events and programing focusing on this part of the world will be sponsored by The Asia Society, The Smithsonian, Google Earth and ESRI. A good place to go for information about the week's activities is National Geographic's My Wonderful World. Google also has a page dedicated to exploring Asia.

Geography Awareness Week also includes GIS Day on November 14, a celebration honoring geographic information systems and the positive impacts of GIS technology around the world. Over 700 events are scheduled in over 70 countries.

If you read One for the Road on a regular basis, you'll note that it's pretty obvious how much I enjoy reading and writing about travel literature, guidebooks and memoirs. One of the reasons I love tracking travel books so much is that you never quite know where an interesting book about a journey is going to appear. That's why I regularly scan children's books, academic press catalogs, translated works, self-published titles and subjects where you might not ordinarily expect to find a travel-themed book. Because stories about journeys are everywhere...

And so are excellent columns that review and discover more of these books! A new one appeared on the scene yesterday, penned by a man known well for his own travel writing. Don George is the new Trip Lit columnist at National Geographic Traveler. His inaugural piece includes an impressive list of novels set in Alaska, South Africa, India, Korea, Italy, China and Ireland, as well as a fun collection of moveable feast memoirs. (I look forward to seeing what he serves up next.) Today I also read the latest issue of Perceptive Traveler, and was reminded that they always include a smart roundup of book reviews in each issue: This month Susan Griffith reviews three books, including Dervla Murphy's latest, Silverland. But what I most enjoyed was Susan's refreshingly honest review of A Gap Year or Two. Evidently, it can sometimes be much more fun to read a review of a book than the book itself.

(I borrowed the above photo from National Geographic Traveler's Ultimate Travel Library -- another awesome resource for travel literature recommendations.)

Another recent entry in the popular mega trip-list travel book category is National Geographic's Journeys of a Lifetime: 500 of the World's Greatest Trips. Compiled from the favorite trips of National Geographic writers, this 400-page collection of glossy color photos and descriptions is another daydream machine for wanderlust readers. In addition to the featured journeys, there are also secondary lists for things like the top 10 elevator rides, ancient highways and bridges to walk across.

So, can every travel experience be listed? It seems that way these days. But, as Frank Bures eloquently argued in a recent World Hum travel book column, the checklist approach to travel misses the point. Super-sized itineraries are not practical, and in most cases, just not possible. And that is a good thing. However, this book, and similar titles, are still fun to flip through. They're kind of like destination menus for travelers to pick-and-choose from -- for ideas, inspiration or discussion with others. But over-ordering should be avoided.