Triporati

      As a Lonely Planet author and freelance travel journalist, Aaron Anderson's travels have taken him to places such as South Africa, Tahiti, Latvia, Australia, and most recently Madagascar, where he co-authored the Lonely Planet guide to the country with his fiancee and writing partner, Becca. His other Lonely Planet titles include the Austria chapter of Western Europe, Central Europe, and Europe on a Shoestring; Thailand; and a Washington DC City Guide. He also has contributed to guidebooks covering the western states for Lonely Planet's USA and Southwest titles.
      In addition to traveling for Lonely Planet, Aaron has written about Washington DC for the Discovery Channel and the Australia Zoo for 9MSN Australia.
      Before he became a travel writer, Aaron was known to brew the odd pint with a history as a professional microbrewer at beer houses across the USA. When he's not on the road, Aaron lives in Boulder, Colorado, where he enjoys snowboarding and biking, although he often dreams of moving to a beach town and trading his snowboard for a surfboard. He counts growing a handlebar mustache, training in Brazilian jiu jitsu, and amateur bear wrestling among his lifetime achievements.

      Freelance travel writer Kate Armstrong is co-author of Lonely Planet's South America on a Shoestring; Bolivia; Mexico; Greece; Greek Islands, and South Africa, Lesotho & Swaziland. Her freelance travel articles have been published in magazines and newspapers, including The Age, Sydney Morning Herald, Sun-Herald, and The Australian. She has written several children's educational texts and a book for teenagers, All This Talk About Careers (Allen & Unwin, 2003). When she's not eating, chatting, or dancing her way around the world's diverse destinations, she has her itchy feet grounded in Sydney, Australia.

      Christopher P. Baker has written for more than 150 of the world's leading publications, including National Geographic Traveler, Elle, Caribbean Travel & Life, and the Los Angeles Times. He has authored guidebooks to Costa Rica, California, and various Caribbean islands for Frommer's, Lonely Planet, and National Geographic, among others. His many awards include the Caribbean Tourism Organization's "Travel Writer of the Year 2005." He promotes himself through his website: www.travelguidebooks.com.

      The author of more than 20 travel and nonfiction books, Sara Benson has also written for Lonely Planet's Peru and South America on a Shoestring guidebooks. Her writing has appeared in many national and international newspapers and magazines, including the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Salt Lake Tribune, Albuquerque Journal, Los Angeles Times and National Geographic Adventure. She also writes for several popular travel Web sites, including LATimes.com.

      Ryan Ver Berkmoes has written guidebooks for destinations worldwide, from England to Russia, from Sri Lanka to Bali, from the Yukon to Chicago and on to New Orleans. His publishers include Lonely Planet and numerous magazines and newspapers.

      Most Argentines couldn't pick out North Dakota on a map, but when they learn that Wayne Bernhardson was born in Fargo, all the moviegoers in Buenos Aires bow down in homage. He grew up in Washington state, though, and made his first venture into Latin America at age 13, when he crossed from San Diego to Tijuana.
      Since then, before and after finishing a PhD in Geography at the University of California, Berkeley, he has visited every South American country except Venezuela, and has lived and traveled for extensive periods in Argentina, Chile, and the Falkland Islands. He married an Argentine, owns an apartment in Buenos Aires, and has authored Moon Handbooks on Argentina, Buenos Aires (including coastal Uruguay), Chile, and Patagonia (including the Falklands).
      Wayne resides in Oakland, California, with his wife Mar?a Laura Massolo, their daughter Clio (when she's not at university in Santa Cruz), and their Alaskan malamute Malbec (named for Argentina's rich red wine). Every year after the World Series he packs his bags to spend four to five months roaming southern South America. He can be reached by email at southerncone@mac.com.

      Joe Bindloss has been writing about travel for most of the last decade. His work includes more than 50 guidebooks for Lonely Planet, Time Out and other publishers with an emphasis on London, India, Nepal and Southeast Asia. He lives in London, where he works as a restaurant critic and writes regular articles on travel and education for newspapers, magazines and the Internet. He can occasionally be seen and heard on British television and radio.

      Born in Britain and raised in South Africa, Philip Briggs caught the Africa travel bug on a backpacking trip through East Africa in 1986 and has been an addict ever since. A full-time travel and environmental writer since 1991, he is the author of ten Bradt travel guides covering destinations as diverse as South Africa, Mozambique, Malawi, Tanzania, Northern Tanzania Safari Guide, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Ghana and Uganda. Other recent publications include Southbound Guides to the Ukhahlamba-Drakensberg and Greater St Lucia World Heritage Sites, the coffee table book Africa: Continent of Contrasts (in collaboration with photograpers Martin Harvey and Ariadne Van Zandbergen) and a new Bradt guide to East African Wildlife. He is also a regular contributor to magazines such as Africa Geographic, Africa Birds & Birding, Travel Africa and Wanderlust. Philip is married to the photographer Ariadne Van Zandbergen and recently relocated from suburban Johannesburg to the Drakensberg foothills, where he lives in dotage to an assortment of dogs and cats.

      J.D. Brown is a contributor to Frommer's China and Frommer's Beijing, coauthor of Frommer's China: The 50 Most Memorable Trips, Berlitz Shanghai, Berlitz Singapore, and other books.

      Rick Carroll has published articles and books on dozens of topics related to Hawaii and the Pacific: voyaging canoes, hula, the supernatural, vanishing rainforests, endangered species, total eclipses, erupting volcanoes, tsunamis, and Hawaii's quest for sovereignty. His best-selling biography IZ: Voice of the People is a Kiriyama Prize Notable Book of 2007. His other books include Huahine: Island of the Lost Canoe, Great Outdoor Adventures of Hawaii, Chicken Skin: True Spooky Stories, Madame Pele: True Encounters with Hawaii's Fire Goddess, Best of Hawaii's Best Spooky Tales, and Travelers' Tales Hawaii.
      A former daily journalist, Carroll wrote headline stories for the San Francisco Chronicle from the Haight Ashbury to Silicon Valley, covering Black Panthers, Angela Davis, and Cesar Chavez. In 1983, he returned to Asia and the Ryukyus Islands of his youth to photograph and write about life and times on the changing Pacific Rim. He sailed the Sulu Sea with medical missionaries, encountered a New People's Army hit squad during a ceasefire on Negros Island, ventured into Vietnam with eye surgeons, photographed the first installation of the eyes of Easter Island. He profiled the King of Tonga, the Sultan of Sulu, the Premier of China, Imelda Marcos, and John Waihee, the first native Hawaiian governor. In Hawaii, he found remains of the Honolulu meteorite (it was rusted), discovered Alan Lau's' 1000-year-old herbal cold remedy for the Emperor of China (which worked) and danced the last dance at The Palace, the last taxi dance hall in Chinatown.
      "The slim Chinese girl in the clingy white dress wanted a dollar to dance, I had a dollar so we danced," he wrote. The story appeared in Travelers Tales Hawaii, which critics called "the best of contemporary Hawaii non-fiction."

      Joe Cummings began traveling in Southeast Asia shortly after finishing college, serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Thailand and teaching English in Thailand, Malaysia and Taiwan. He later earned a master's degree in Thai language and Asian art history from the University of California, Berkeley. Joe has contributed to more than 35 guidebooks, maps, atlases, phrasebooks and photographic books, including his bestselling Lonely Planet Thailand and Buddhist Stupas of Asia: The Shape of Perfection. Joe has twice been honored with the Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Award for his work on Thailand, as well as the Peace Corps Best Travel Writing Award. He makes his home in Chiang Mai, Thailand.

      Travel writer-photographer team Lara Dunston and Terry Carter have experienced over 60 countries in the 15 years they been traveling together. The Australian-born, UAE-based couple have authored, contributed to and updated 35 guidebooks for Lonely Planet, DK, AA Publishing, and Thomas Cook. That long list included some 25 books for Lonely Planet alone, contributions to coffee table books The Blue List and The Asia Book and hundreds of hotel reviews and digital content for the website. This year, the globetrotters will add Footprint, Rough Guides and Thames & Hudson to the list, along with a few more countries. They have had their travel writing and Terry?s photos published in dozens of newspapers and magazines around the globe, including National Geographic Traveler, Lifestyle+Travel, Paperplane, Get Lost, The Independent, and USA Today, along with a multitude of in-flight and hotel magazines. They write the travel blog Grantourismo for San Franciscan lifestyle site Charles and Marie. The perpetual globetrotters currently call their Samsonites and a storage unit in Dubai "home," having been on the road traveling continuously for two and a half years. Lara has juggled multiple careers in filmmaking, writing, PR/media relations, and academia. She holds several degrees in film, writing, communications and International studies, in which she majored in Latin America, and her PhD project is called "Mobility and the Moving Image" about the connections between film and travel. Terry studied photography, film and communications, and has a Masters degree in media studies; his research project was on national identity in the UAE. Specializing in the Middle East and Europe, they also write occasionally on Australia, Asia, and South America, and next year plan to settle down and split their time between Abu Dhabi and Buenos Aires.

      Connie Emerson specializes in telling readers how to get the most out of both time and money, wherever they may travel. "To my mind," she says, "a great trip involves getting maximum value from your travel dollars. Cut-rate doesn't necessarily mean bargain, nor does spending a bundle ensure a good time." Among her more than a dozen published books are Eyewitness Top Ten Travel Guide - Las Vegas, The Cheapskate's Guide to Branson, Missouri and The Family Fun Guide to Paris. When she's not traveling, Connie's at home in Nevada.

      Bill Fink is coauthor of Pauline Frommer's Italy, contributing the introduction, sections on Tuscany and Umbria, and chapters on Italian food, arts, and history. His writings on Italy have also been included in the books 30 Days in Italy and Italy from a Backpack. He writes regularly for the San Francisco Chronicle. For more information about his work see his web site.

      Fran Folsom is a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based travel writer who has written the CitySpots guide to Palermo and has contributed to nine travel guides. Her writing has also appeared in magazines: Antiques and Fine Art, Hispanic Professional, Relish, Heart of New Hampshire, Woodstock Magazine; and newspapers: the New York Post; Christian Science Monitor; Boston Herald, New Hampshire Telegraph; Boston Globe; Maine Sunday Telegram; New Bedford Standard Times; Toronto Sun; New Hampshire Telegraph; and the Maine Switch.
      She is a contributing writer for travel websites: TravelLady.com, LiveLifeTravel, the Cultured Traveler and the Heart of New England.

      Author of over a dozen Lonely Planet guides, freelance writer Conner Gorry's first foreign adventure was to Vieques at age 8. The formative experience ignited a fascination with Latin America which, three decades on, is a way of life.
      Following her mother's advice that money spent on education and travel is money well spent, Conner received a BA in Latin American Studies from NYU and an MA in Political Science from the Monterey Institute of International Studies - both unforgettable in part because of the monster monthly bills that continue to roll in. A little too much money well spent perhaps.
      After writing encyclopedias for a time and churning out features for the San Francisco Chronicle and others, she landed on Lonely Planet's roster, realizing her traveling-working dreams. Her guidebook writing duties have taken her all over the Western Hemisphere, from post-civil war Guatemala to post 9/11 NYC; up Big Island Volcanoes and down Bolivia's (and the world's) "Most Dangerous Road." She paddled her way along the Na Pali Coast in a kayak and picked along Cuba's secret beaches barefoot. She has frolicked with leatherbacks in the Galapagos and spotted Harpy eagles in Venezuela. In 2006, she finally made it to Panama.
      Conner currently calls Havana home, where she smokes a daily cigar and works as a journalist and editor for MEDICC Review, Cuba Health Reports, Cuba Absolutely, and other publications. Future travel itineraries include The Yucatan, Panama, and Ireland.

      Larry Habegger is Triporati's managing editor and cofounder and executive editor of Travelers' Tales, where he has edited dozens of books including Travelers' Tales Australia, India, Ireland, and Thailand. He is a writer, editor, journalist, and teacher who has been covering the world since his international travels began in the 1970s. As a freelance writer for almost three decades and syndicated columnist since 1985, his work has appeared in many major newspapers and magazines, including the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Travel & Leisure, and Outside. In 1993 he cofounded the award-winning Travelers' Tales Books where he has helped oversee the development of the company's publishing program and has worked on all of its 100-plus books. He is also author of the safety and security column World Travel Watch that since 1985 has appeared in newspapers in five countries and on travel web sites. Habegger is an inspiring writing teacher and coach, emphasizing the craft and art of the personal travel story. He regularly teaches at writing conferences and in private workshops. Get more information at LarryHabegger.com, TravelersTales.com and BestTravelWriting.com.

      Julie Hatfield spent 22 years as a staff reporter/fashion editor for The Boston Globe and now is a freelance writer, of mostly travel stories, for The Globe and numerous other newspapers and websites. She contributed the Seychelles chapter to National Geographic 500 Journeys of a Lifetime for October, 2007.

      Bill Hinchberger is the founding editor of the online guide BrazilMax and host of BrazilMax Radio. He is a former correspondent in Brazil for The Financial Times, Business Week and Variety and continues as correspondent for ARTnews magazine. He has prepared city and country guides for Northstar Media and Bradman's South America and hotel reviews for Star Service online. His work has appeared in Executive Travel, Travel & Leisure and other periodicals.

      Virginia Jealous is coauthor of Lonely Planet guides to Micronesia and Indonesia. Writing guidebooks has taken her from the steamy wonders of Southeast Asian rainforest to the staggering temples of Southern India to the stunning food of Vietnam. In between, she's island-hopped from tiny specks of atolls in the vastness of the Pacific - think Kiribati, the Marshall Islands and Tuvalu - to the vastness of Australia's outback where she realized that yes, this can be a lonely planet indeed. Home is wherever she is at the moment, and Australia's the place she returns to when the moment passes.

      Judy Jewell was born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland, where crossing a busy street was a typical outdoor adventure. Someone told her she could escape the Baltimore summer doldrums if she worked as a camp counselor, which turned out to be more or less true. After she broke her leg falling from a treehouse at the camp where she worked, a small cash settlement prompted her to pack up her stuff and move to Portland, Oregon.
      Her path to travel writing was not without detours (that's the safest thing that can be said about the variety of jobs she has held), but over the years she has collaborated with Bill McRae on a variety of projects, including the Moon Handbooks to Montana, Utah, and Oregon. She also contributed to 1000 Places to See Before You Die: USA and Canada and wrote the Compass American Guide to Oregon, as well as a splendid (though out-of-print) guide to Oregon's campgrounds.
      Between travel writing projects, Judy works as a technical and scientific editor (perhaps you've caught her work in the journal Avian Diseases) and teaches yoga.

     After a first career chasing news headlines for ABC Television and CBS Radio, Evelyn Kanter switched to travel writing. She has written, edited or contributed to more than a dozen travel guidebooks, including Michelin Green Guide Switzerland, Fodor's Canada, and Great Destinations: The Hudson Valley. Her articles have been published in major newspapers and magazines including the New York Times and Travel & Leisure. An outdoors enthusiast, she's a serious skier, hiker, whitewater rafter and scuba diver, which means she's a regular visitor to the places she's written about for Triporati: Switzerland, Canada and New York State. Evelyn lives in New York City.

      Steve Knopper is the Denver-based author of Moon Handbooks Colorado as well as a contributor to numerous Fodor's city guides. In addition to covering the music business for Rolling Stone for the past five years, he has been published in National Geographic Traveler, Backpacker, Chicago, Esquire, Wired, New York and many other magazines. His next book, on the record business in the digital age, is due from Free Press/Simon & Schuster in late 2008.

      A California native, Michael Kohn has spent the past ten years living and working abroad, mainly as a freelance journalist and travel writer. After finishing a degree in literature from UC Santa Barbara he packed his bags and took off for Japan where he spent nearly a year teaching English in Osaka. Itchy feet sent him backpacking across Asia for nine months, during which time he stowed away on a few cargo ships en route to New Zealand. Back in the San Francisco Bay Area Michael watched his friends jumping into the dot-com craze and decided to get as far away as possible, so he went to Mongolia to work for a local English newspaper, the Mongol Messenger. The job paid just $60 a month but it opened Michael up to the fascinating world of the Mongols, to which he has been addicted ever since. Michael's three year stint in Mongolia included freelance work with the Associated Press and the BBC, plus articles published by the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle and Baltimore Sun. His work came together in a book, Dateline Mongolia: An American Journalist In Nomads Land, (RDR Books, 2006). Michael also became interested in Gobi lore and wrote Lama of the Gobi (Maitri Books, 2006), a biography of a well known incarnate saint, Danzan Ravjaa. Michael now works as a full time author with Lonely Planet and has worked on more than 10 LP books, including Israel & the Palestinian Territories, Tibet, Central Asia and Mongolia. Michael has traveled widely in Asia, with reporting trips to Afghanistan, Burma and Nepal among others. His website www.michaelkohn.us contains an archive of some of his articles. Stories of his more recent travels can be read on his blog: www.datelineworld.blogspot.com

      Deb Miller Landau is a travel writer and journalist. Born in Nova Scotia and raised in British Columbia, Canada, Deb inhaled that first breath of salty air and was hooked on all things coastal. Her travel articles - from fishing in Belize to motorcycling through the Deep South - have appeared in numerous publications and she has written eight guidebooks for Lonely Planet publications. She has been anthologized in Best American Crime Writing 2005 and now teaches magazine writing to journalism students at the University of Oregon. She lives in Oregon with her husband and twin sons.

      Piers Letcher is a writer, journalist and photographer, living in France and contributing occasionally to The Guardian Unlimited along with numerous other travel, arts and culinary publications. He is the author of numerous books including Croatia, the Bradt Travel Guide; Dubrovnik, the Bradt City Guide; and Eccentric France. He is also coauthor of Zagreb, the Bradt City Guide, and his stories have appeared in Travelers' Tales Provence and Travelers' Tales Turkey.

      Sandy MacDonald has written three original guidebooks (Access Cape Cod, Frommer's Cape Cod, and Globe-Pequot's Quick Escapes Boston) and updated many others; for the past seven years, she has covered Nantucket for Fodor's. Having contributed travel articles to many national magazines over the past two decades, she now focuses primarily on theatre, as a critic for the Boston Globe and TheaterMania.com. She and her husband, the painter John Devaney, divide their time between Nantucket, Cambridge, and New York City.

      Bradley Mayhew is the author of over 25 guidebooks for Lonely Planet Publications including Central Asia, Tibet, Nepal, Bhutan and Jordan, and is coauthor of the Odyssey guide to Uzbekistan.

      Freelance writer and musician Rowan McKinnon has been a long-time author for Lonely Planet Publications and has written many books on the islands of the South Pacific, the Caribbean and Australia. He is particularly passionate about Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, and he's been regularly visiting there for 20 years. Rowan lives in Melbourne, Australia with his partner and children and a house full of Melanesian art. He plays bass in a band that was nearly famous in the late '80s and early '90s and still occasionally gets together for festival gigs and special events.

      Bill McRae was born and raised in the badlands of rural eastern Montana, on a traditional cattle and sheep ranch. He was born with one foot in the saddle, but with his bags packed for Paris. His first trip to Europe at 18 awakened a serious urge to see the world. He used his college years as an excuse to travel, attending universities in England, Scotland, France, Canada, and the U.S. All this traipsing around didn't make for much of an academic career, but it was a great education in life. Bill's name appears on the title page of 16 travel-related books, including guides for Lonely Planet, Frommer's and Moon Publications, with a focus on the western U.S. and northern and western Canada. Many of his books are written in collaboration with Judy Jewell. Additionally, Bill has written and edited for National Geographic, Mobil Guides, Expedia.com and GORP.com, and worked with Patricia Schultz on 1000 Places to See in the USA and Canada Before You Die.
      Throughout the years, Bill has also worked as a technical marketing writer, working with such global corporations as Adobe, SAP, Alcatel, Siemens, MasterCard, and Microsoft. Bill also helped ghostwrite an SAP business book published by John Wiley & Sons, Adapt or Die.
      Bill has a MA from the University of Kent, England in Modern European Literature. He earned a BA in English Literature from the University of Montana. He makes his home in Portland, Oregon.

      Maribeth Mellin is the author of the Unofficial Guide to Mexico's Beach Resorts.

      Joanne Miller is the author of the Pennsylvania Handbook, Chesapeake Bay Handbook, Maryland-Delaware Handbook (all Moon/Avalon Travel Publishing) and Best Places Marin (Sasquatch Press). She has contributed to Eyewitness USA, San Francisco Eyewitness Guide (both Dorling Kindersley) and "Travel Holiday" magazine. Six of Joanne's fictional short stories have appeared in national publications. She is currently working on The Richest Gal in Boomtown, a novel of old San Francisco, and a book of inspirational poetry.
      Joanne says: "It is such a gift to be able to travel, see different parts of the world, and write about it so that others may share the experience. I seek out locally owned businesses and odd little things to see because those are really why we value and cherish a place.
      "I've been traveling across America since I was big enough to hoist myself up to a car window and watch the asphalt roll by. This is an amazing country-the diversity of the landscape and the people are endlessly exciting. I have so many incredible memories: a humid evening watching fireflies swarm like found souls over a field where Civil War soldiers lost their lives; hundreds of tank-like horseshoe crabs scrabbling over the rocks in the moonlight on a Delaware beach; standing in Independence Hall in Philadelphia and knowing that the wonderful freedoms and rights we appreciate were hammered out in that very room.
      "Exercise your freedom to travel and make some memories of your own." Her website is www.InMotionInk.com. All books are available at Amazon.com.

      Charlie Morris is a professional writer and musician. His lifelong love of travel began when he went to Amsterdam at the tender age of 15. Since then he has visited 45 countries, mostly in Europe, Central America and the Caribbean basin. Many of his trips have been for business, while others have been strictly for fun. This has given Charlie a double perspective on the travel and tourism scene. His interests include languages, art, wildlife, and scuba diving.
      Charlie is the author of four guidebooks for Open Road Publishing: Switzerland Guide, Best of Costa Rica, Best of Honduras, Best of Belize.
      Charlie lives in Florida with his Swiss wife. They travel frequently throughout the US, Europe and Central America.

      Alan Murphy is coauthor of Lonely Planet's Britain, Scotland, India and North India. He has been writing and updating travel guidebooks for the past eight years and has also been a regular contributor to Amnesty International's Human Rights Defender magazine. He lives in Melbourne, Australia.

      Danny Palmerlee is a freelance writer and photographer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is the main author of numerous Lonely Planet travel guides, including Argentina, Best of Buenos Aires, South America on a Shoestring, Ecuador and Baja California & Los Cabos. His travel articles have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The Miami Herald, San Francisco Chronicle and The Dallas Morning News, as well as other publications throughout the US and the world. Palmerlee has been interviewed for the "Travel with Rick Steves" radio show and has appeared on Lonely Planet Television and local news stations. On his most recent research assignment in Baja California, he drove 4800 miles in 42 days, ate 111 tacos and was bitten by a black widow spider. His current obsession is baking bread. See his blog at www.travelburrow.com.

      Paige R. Penland is a Costa Rica-based freelance writer specializing in travel, automotive, history and science. She's currently working on her tenth book, Great Destinations Costa Rica, which will include coverage of Lake Nicaragua's Solentiname Islands and the spectacular trip down the Rio San Juan, as well as Southwest Nicaragua, including Granada, San Juan del Sur, and Isla Ometepe, perhaps her favorite place on Earth, all convenient to the Costa Rican border.
      She previously updated portions of Lonely Planet Costa Rica (2004), after which she took her first "visa vacation" to Granada and Isla Ometepe. This inspired her to write her own travel guide, A Week or Two in Southwest Nicaragua, which sold out in six months. She was subsequently hired to write the Nicaragua portion of the first edition of Lonely Planet Nicaragua & El Salvador. One of her side projects written while working on this book remains, to her knowledge, the only online English-Spanish-Miskito Phrasebook.
      She's also written or updated guidebooks for Santa Fe, New Mexico; California Highway 1; Alaska; and Florida; as well as a book on the history of lowriding, Lowrider: History, Pride, Culture.

     A Denver-based freelance writer, Eric Peterson has written and contributed to numerous Frommer's guidebooks covering the American West, including Montana & Wyoming, Yellowstone & Grand Teton National Parks, Colorado, Texas, and Ramble: A Field Guide to the USA. He has also written numerous travel features for in-flight magazines and newspapers. He's an avid camper and hiker, a lifelong Broncos fan, and rock star (at least in the eyes of his niece Olivia and nephews Mitch and Sam). His personal website is www.kindguides.com.

      Don Pitcher has written or photographed 10 travel guidebooks to Alaska, Wyoming, Yellowstone-Grand Teton, and the San Juan Islands for Avalon Travel Publishing, Random House, and Sasquatch Books. Details at www.donpitcher.com

      Globe-trotting Darwin Porter and Danforth Prince are known as "the classic Frommer authors," having written best-selling guidebooks to the Caribbean, England, Italy, Germany, and France, among numerous other titles. They travel extensively every year in Germany and France, among other countries, checking to see if what's old is still the same. They are always on the lookout for new and trendy developments in any destination. For more information, see their site, Blood Moon Productions.

      Jens Porup is a freelance writer based in Cali, Colombia. He recently coauthored Lonely Planet's guidebook to Venezuela.

      Travel writer and photographer Simon Richmond penned his first guidebook on Malaysia for Rough Guides in 1996. He followed that up by co-writing the Rough Guide to Japan and Rough Guide to Tokyo; the former won the Travelex Guide Book of the Year award and a prize from the Japanese government. For Lonely Planet he has contributed to many guides on countries as diverse as India, South Africa and Russia, to its walking guides (Australia & Britain) and to its travel literature anthology Lonely Planet Unpacked Again. For the same publisher he's the author of the Cape Town city guide and the Trans-Siberian Railway guide. For Thames & Hudson he is the author of StyleCity Sydney and a contributor to StyleCity Europe. For AA in the UK and Frommer's in the US, he contributed to four adventure travel guides on Australia, India, South America and Southeast Asia. His travel features and photographs have been carried in publications around the world including the Guardian, Independent, Telegraph and Times newspapers in the UK and the Sydney Morning Herald and other Australian newspapers, and Australian Financial Review Magazine, Vogue Entertaining & Travel, and Travel & Leisure in Australia.

      Barbara Radcliffe Rogers has written or coauthored more than 30 guidebooks, including The Portugal Traveler, Drive Around Portugal, City Spots Munich, City Spots Helsinki, and City Spots Stockholm.

      Native New Yorker Daniel C. Schechter taught English in Portugal, Spain, Puerto Rico, and Mexico City before becoming an editor at The News, the daily paper for Mexico's English-speaking community. After a subsequent job as editor of Business Mexico, the monthly magazine of the American Chamber Mexico, he became a Lonely Planet author in 1999. Since then, he has contributed chapters to ten Lonely Planet guidebooks, including the Mexico, Caribbean Islands, and Pacific Northwest guides. In addition to travel writing, Daniel translates articles for several Mexican publications, including Artes de Mexico. He currently resides in Austin with his wife Myra. See his Lonely Planet hotel reviews for Mexico City and Caracas.

      Simon Sellars is a Melbourne-based freelance writer and editor. His work has appeared in The Age newspaper's Good Weekend, A3 and travel supplements, as well as the Sydney Morning Herald, overland magazine, Inside Film, RealTime magazine, and the Big Issue.
Simon has performed extensive work for Lonely Planet Publications, and he's a coauthor of their recent Micronations and Netherlands guides. Simon publishes Ballardian.com, a website recording the career and influence of J.G. Ballard. He's the founder of Liquid Architecture, an Australian festival of sound art. As a writer Simon has specialized in travel, sound art/music, film/animation, J.G. Ballard, and in social welfare, but he continues to be inspired by everything from the topography of cereal boxes to the anthropology of non-place urban fields. See his work at www.simonsellars.com.

      Paul Smitz has coauthored a dozen guidebooks for Lonely Planet, covering destinations from the middle of the Pacific to the middle of Europe, including Australia, New Zealand, Malaysian Borneo, Brunei, various Pacific Islands, Prague, and Brussels. He has also written numerous print and online articles about his travels and other topics.

      Roberta Sotonoff is an award-winning travel junkie who writes to support her habit. She can be found anywhere - in a plane feasting on pretzels, in the water exploring the deep, destroying her body while swinging from jungle canopies or stumbling up and down mountains. At other times, she is chained to her computer trying to meet deadlines.
      Bobbi writes about a variety of travel destinations. Her specialties include ecotourism, soft adventure, the Caribbean and cities. Her work has appeared in nearly 60 guidebooks, newspapers, magazines and online sites and is a regular contributor to many of them. She is also a member of Society of American Travel Writers (SATW), and Midwest Travel Writers Association (MTWA).
      To learn more about Bobbi, visit her website at: www.robertasotonoff.com or email her at: rsotonoff@aol.com.

      David Stanley has spent much of the past three decades on the road. He has crossed six continents overland and visited 193 of the planet's 245 countries and territories. His travel guidebooks to the South Pacific, Micronesia, Alaska, Eastern Europe, and Cuba opened those areas to budget travelers for the first time.
      For his first trip across the Pacific in 1978, Stanley bought the longest ticket ever issued in Canada by Pan American Airways. Since then he has returned many times, visiting and revisiting the islands. His career as a travel writer began with the letters he wrote to Bill Dalton and Tony Wheeler, the pioneers of budget travel to Asia in the 1970s. That feedback soon led to guides of his own, published by Avalon Travel Publishing and Lonely Planet. With over a million copies sold, he's still on the road writing guidebooks.
      Though Stanley has traveled widely and become a specialist on many parts of the world, he always keeps returning to his favorite area, the South Pacific. One of the biggest treats for a guidebook writer is meeting people who are using a handbook. David researches his books incognito and the "mystery shopper" approach means he can't always admit who he is, but it's still fun hearing what unsuspecting readers think of the book. The author of Moon Fiji, Moon Tahiti, and Moon South Pacific, Stanley enjoys receiving mail from those who have used his guides. His website www.southpacific.org provides contact details. Also see his photo site, Pacific-Pictures.com.

      Richard Sterling is a writer, editor, lecturer, and insatiable traveler. Earlier in life he was a Silicon Valley engineer, but stability and respectability lost out over wanderlust. Since taking up the pen he has been honored by the James Beard Foundation for his food writing, and by the Lowell Thomas Awards for his travel literature. He has been dubbed "The Indiana Jones of Gastronomy" by his admirers, and "Conan of the Kitchen" by others. He is the author of many books, including The Fire Never Dies, How to Eat Around the World, five books in Lonely Planet's World Food series (California, Greece, Hong Kong, Spain, Vietnam), The Unofficial Guide to San Francisco, and Eyewitness Travel Guide Vietnam and Angkor Wat. He is the editor of the award winning Travelers' Tales Food: A Taste of the Road, and The Adventure of Food: True Stories of Eating Everything. He is also coeditor of the Travelers' Tales book The Ultimate Journey: Inspiring Stories of Living and Dying. He divides his time between Oakland, California and Saigon, Vietnam.

     Suzanne Swan learned Turkish in Toronto so she could pursue a journalistic and writing career in Turkey. In 1991, she hopped on the wave of Turkey's newly discovered export potential and became the Turkish correspondent for a number of trade and business magazines. After updating a minor guide book on Turkey, she was Dorling-Kindersley's main author for their Eyewitness Travel Guide: Turkey published in 2003. Suzanne has worked on the book through three reprints and a relaunch (2008). She updated and contributed original copy for the DK city guide, Eyewitness Travel: Istanbul.
     She was the tourism and editorial consultant on the Southeast Anatolian Cultural Heritage Program, a European-Union funded project in eastern Turkey. She also highlighted Turkey's cultural kaleidoscope with her book on Turkey's traditional raw-milk cheeses, The Treasury of Turkish Cheeses which was translated into Turkish and published by Boyut Yayin Group in Istanbul. A second book from Boyut (September 2007) is Hot Springs and Spas of Turkey, available in English and Turkish.
     Learn more about Suzanne's work, new projects and her amazing Med-side life on her web site: www.suzanneswan.com.

      Mara Vorhees is a food and travel writer who writes for Lonely Planet Publications. She has written or contributed to guidebooks covering Brazil, Morocco, Costa Rica, Russia & Belarus, Moscow, Trans-Siberian Railroad, New England, Boston and Washington, DC. Her stories have appeared in the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times and other publications.

      Bill Weir got his start in the travel business first by contributing suggestions to a guidebook author, then updating a guidebook at a pay scale of five cents a word. In 1984, while looking for a place to write about, he realized that a great destination lay under his feet-Arizona. Bill wrote a best-selling guide in the Moon Handbook series to his home state, then branched out with guides to Utah and the Grand Canyon. You might meet him bicycling across the Tibetan Plateau or driving an Arizona back road, or more easily at his website, http://www.arizonahandbook.com