Soup and Snorkeling in Tunisia

WORTH A TRIP: January's Conde Nast Traveler has several destinations to ornament your dreams: Easter Island, Italy's Dolomites and Gjain, a gorge in Iceland filled with wildflowers. But we couldn't resist Susan Hack's portrait of Tunisia, which "casts itself as the Arab world's most tolerant and progressive nation." Lacking the vast oil reserves of its North African neighbors, it prospers nonetheless, thanks primarily to textiles and tourism. Old courtyard houses have been converted into boutique hotels, and one settlement was appropriated by moviemakers to be Luke Skywalker's boyhood home in "Star Wars." (It's now a bit of a tourist trap.) Traveling widely, across deserts and through olive groves, Hack pauses to soak in a spring-fed natural Jacuzzi overlooking the Mediterranean, where she has just snorkeled. She shops in the markets of Tunis, where merchants invite you up to the roof for the view -- then block the way down, making you look at their rugs. She also eats well: bird's tongue soup, for example, and sticky desserts with honey, dates and pistachios. Not that modern Tunisian life is always sweet: "Tunisian women are the most evolved in the Arab world," says a local sculptor, "but we suffer because the men didn't evolve with us."

WORTH A FLIP: Piazzas and pizzas, canals and cathedrals -- that's some of what National Geographic Traveler got when it asked 17 Italy-based photographers to contribute to "My Italy." Monks loiter amid the spires on the rooftop of Milan's Duomo; businessmen walk undeterred through ankle-deep water at high tide in Venice; Sicilian cowboys gallop along a dusty trail below Mount Etna. And Lake Maggiore's Isola Bella is a pictorial cool breeze, welcome in any season. . . . In Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province there lives a people with fair skin, blue or gray eyes and, in some cases, blond hair. The lost tribe of Malibu? No, Smithsonian says these folks claim descent from the armies of Alexander the Great, who stopped there on the way to India 23 centuries ago. Resisting many of Pakistan's religious customs, they maintain a more liberal mode of dress as well as faith in the powers of wizards and snow fairies. And a passion for polo. . . .

Rubber Duckie, you're the one -- the one to inspire Donovan Hohn's engaging ramble in Harper's, down several fascinating paths. Fifteen years ago, 7,200 Floatee toy ducks (plastic, actually) were swept overboard from a container ship in the northern Pacific. Some are still out there, bobbing and smiling in the waves, occasionally to wash up in unexpected places. Hohn rides the ferry to Sitka, Alaska, combs the beaches there, contemplates the complex mechanics of ocean currents, and laments both the stubborn refusal of plastics to biodegrade and the fading illusion of childlike innocence, as symbolized by those affable ducks. . . . Remember Y2K and how relieved you were to get through it? Not so fast. Wallpaper* reminds us that under the Ethiopian calendar, it's still 1999 and the millennium party has yet to start in Addis Ababa. . . . In travelgirl, Denise Dub? signs on for a sort of a yuppie "Rawhide," a twice-yearly cattle drive for weekend wranglers organized by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department in Big Bend country. She learns how to ride and helps round up longhorn calves for branding. (The branding itself seems to bother her more than it does the calf.)

WORTH A CLIP: Outside's photo of safari guide Grant Reed with a chokehold on a none-too-pleased black mamba is an enticement for some people, we suppose, and for them the magazine profiles a new breed of African safari. From Ethiopia to Tanzania to South Africa, you can "make your Hemingway fantasies come true" with the help of guides like Reed, who not only understand snakes and other wildlife but also appreciate the effects, good and bad, of tourism on local communities. . . . Or maybe the beasts you want to see have fins. Scuba Diving polled subscribers for their favorite dive locations. Bonaire nails first place under Caribbean/Atlantic; Palau and Yap tie for first in Pacific/Indian. New Providence in the Bahamas earns special mention for shark diving "and realizing that you're no longer at the top of the food chain."

WORTH A (DEFIANT) NOSH:"A small but determined underground has emerged," proclaims Peter Jon Lindberg in Travel + Leisure. Absinthe drinkers, foie gras eaters, smugglers of Spanish hams and unpasteurized French cheeses -- they view themselves as rebels battling FDA, USDA and environmentalist auntie-ism. Are they heroic crusaders -- or merely jerks? Should we be alarmed now that New York has banned trans fats, because "next they're gonna come for our ice cream and potato chips"?

-- Jerry V. Haines