I was asked by Patricia Vance of GotSaga, an online community of travellers, to write a guest post for the website.

The task was easy. Out of the 15 countries we visited on this trip, five stood out the most.

Read the article to see which ones.

A little shop in Airlie Beach sells pills, herbs and powders that can get you stoned, hyper, or horny. And it’s all natural and legal.

Ian Cumming is a big nerd. He’s also a passionate traveler. These two traits combined can only result in something happy.

I’m a fan of Travellr.com, the website that Cumming, an Aussie gent, co-founded. I use it almost every time when I’m going to a new place. I have a link to it on the front page of this blog.

It’s a questions-and-answers service devoted exclusively for travelers. Ask a question about a place and it will tap into its network of self-appointed experts to answer it.

Cairns isn’t just for the Great Barrier Reef. Just two hours north is a rainforest with deadly crocodiles, virginal beaches, refreshing creeks and at least one bat.

Two hours into the sailing trip, Dave, the divemaster, brought out the pedophile jokes.

He had already riled the Irish on board (“Your body is 80 percent water, except for the Irish, which are 30 percent alcohol”) but was still several hours from touching on race (“Why is Stevie Wonder always smiling? He doesn’t know he’s black”).

It was, to be sure, an alarming start to a three-day cruise around the Whitsunday Islands.

Anywhere you go in Australia – anywhere there’s money to be made from tourists – you’ll find a heap of travel agents competing for your wallet. It’s important to shop around and compare prices before settling on one.

Not every trip we took in Oz was satisfying. The Fraser Island self-drive tour and the canoe trip on the Noosa River left much to be desired. But this is partly our fault for not asking the right questions before booking them.

Everyone – and I mean everyone – who took the canoe trip up the Noosa River got it for free. Tribal Travel, an agency ubiquitous in Australia, is throwing it in when you book other classic tours like Fraser Island on a 4WD and sailing on the Whitsundays.

While they’re clearly trying to promote this lesser-known trip, it has two major problems: a) it’s not really free, and b) it totally acts like it’s free.

It doesn’t take long to see that the eastern Australian backpacking trail, which stretches form Sydney to Cairns, is geared for the sub-30 set. Hundreds of young’uns, mostly European, flock to the Gold an Sunshine Coasts chasing sunny beaches, bountiful alcohol, and beach-beautiful bodies.

Nothing wrong with this, but it’s not for everyone. Which is the reason that travellers 30 and above are a rare sight: it’s easy for them to feel they have outgrown this kind of budget-minded tripping.

Andrew Langford, a world-touring veteran of the didgeridoo, talks about his passion for the Aboriginal instrument and how anyone can learn it.

When they can’t be bothered with sound discipline, it’s customary for parents to scare their children with fantastic lies.

In Brazil, for example, children are told that if they play with fire they will wet their beds, or that cockroaches will lick their mouths at night if they neglect to brush their teeth.

And there’s the mammoth childhood lie, one that crosses many cultures and is so ridiculous that its survival is nothing less than a miracle: that a fat old man in the North Pole is monitoring every child and delivers obedience rewards on a sleigh pulled by flying reindeer.