GLOBAL NOMAD// For the Independent Female Traveler

If travel is on the agenda for 2012, consider a travel-inspired gift for your significant other, best friend or family member (or even yourself!). Here are a few picks that will come in handy for that next trip. To read the full story, click here.

Photo Credit: Palomar

I put my camera through a lot when I travel. It’s accompanied me while trekking in sub-zero temperatures to Everest Base Camp. And it’s been at my side while hiking in the jungles of Guatemala during the monsoon rains, protected from the elements by a zipper sandwich bag. To read the full story, click here.

Photo Copyright @ 2011 VH Media

Food is a huge part of the experience of travel — whether it’s honey-roasted crickets at a street stall in Bangkok or the best pizza of your life in Naples. As I get ready for an upcoming trip to Montreal, I’m perusing Food Lovers’ Guide to Montreal, by Patricia Harris and David Lyon. To read the full story, click here.

Photo Credit: HungryTravelers.com

Considering that DEET can eat a hole through Gore-Tex (it’s a solvent, which means it can dissolve plastics and synthetic fibers), I’m not that keen to slather it all over my body. Yet the alternative — being eaten alive by mosquitoes — isn’t all that appealing either. To read the full story, click here.

Photo Credit: iStock

Powder. Blow. Flake. Nose candy. Whatever you call it, cocaine is intimately tied to Latin America — from building empires to funding civil war. On recent trips to Colombia and Panama, I never encountered the stuff, but its influence was all around me. To read the full story, click here.

Photo Credit: Dominic Streatfeild

If you’ve ever dreamed of traveling through Pakistan (the Karakoram Highway, anyone?), or you’re an armchair traveler interested in a different perspective on the politics of this region, pick up a copy of Granta’s recent compilation on Pakistan. To read the full story, click here.

Photo Credit: Granta

When I arrived in Bogota — the third-highest capital in South America — it was cold and rainy. According to my alarm clock (which has a handy thermometer) it was only 12 C in the middle of the night, so I was grateful for the bolsa de agua (hot water bottle) the hostel provided me with. To read the full story, click here.

Photo Credit: Teva

I have a confession: Up until a few months ago, I didn’t own a smartphone. I was still using an old cell phone that required duct tape to keep it together and a pair of tweezers to remove the SIM card. I’m not a technophobe, but part of me resisted the idea of being “on” all the time. When I travel, I like to disconnect from the hectic pace of North American life. To read the full story, click here.

Photo Credit: Rough Guides

I grew up in northern Alberta (Canada’s equivalent of Siberia), and snowshoeing was part of our school curriculum. Every winter we’d head out into the woods with traditional snowshoes made of wood and rawhide lacings — something I enjoyed far more than our square-dancing class or a game our gym teacher invented that involved whipping rubber balls at you as you ran for your life across the double-sized gymnasium. To read the full story, click here.

Photo Credit: iStock

Once, while camping, I slept right through a tornado. Yet snoring — or even nasally breathing, for that matter — will instantly wake me from a sound slumber. So inevitably during a long-haul flight I’ll end up sitting next to someone who’s snoring like a grizzly bear. Or a screaming baby. Or a drunken passenger who wants to show me his collection of porn magazines (yes, true story). To read the full story, click here.

Photo Credit: Phitek