In the traveler's world it's been a bit of drama this week. Plus, there have been lessons in traveling with a wider perspective and an open heart.

On the drama end:

• Iva reported on passengers in China refusing to get off a plane because the flight was canceled.
• In his Letter from Albania series, Jeff presented an intimate look at blood feuds through the experiences of people he has talked with in his travels there.
• From Anna we heard about the drunken Swede who tried to row back home from Denmark
• Grant told us about British Airways passengers who thought the smell of curry meant there were terrorists

On the wider perspective and open heart end:

• Read Part 3 of Jerry's "Talking Travel with Patricia Schultz," the author of 1000 Places to See Before You Die. As she says at the end of the interview, "Life is short--get off the couch."
• And, after you're off the couch, pick up a copy of Sacred Places of Goddess,108 Destinations by Karen Tate who specializes in openness.

The first time I met Besnik Lame, he sat down at my table where I was having a drink and made a few rather awkward confessions.

"You see, I have some overweight," he said. "And so, I sweat a lot. It is a problem."

At that moment, two ribbons of water trundled down the side of his baby face.

"Also, see this?" He ran a hand over some stubble. "I shaved today, so it makes it worse. I hate shaving!"

None of this was an impertinence, or necessarily strange, since I had commented that Lame looked to be working hard, tending to the handful of tables that crowded the first floor of his small restaurant on a Tirana side street. Lame worked hard every day, often keeping his restaurant, not very creatively named the Grill House, open till 2 a.m. and then showing back up at 7 a.m. to start another day.

Lame liked to sit down and talk to his customers. A few more times this evening he approached. "Please, may I sit with you?" He was proud of his place, the meat dishes (which were wonderful), the homemade wine, the homemade raki that went down like hot acid.

"In my restaurant, we have a saying. You drink all you can. If you cannot pay for it all tonight, you come tomorrow."

I could get behind such a policy.

Whenever a bottle or a glass sat on the table empty, he'd come over and say, "So, what do we do about this, my friends?"

I liked the Grill House, and Lame's company, so much that I made it my home base during my time in Tirana, and the convivial nature of the place put me in a good mood and no doubt affected how I responded to Albania's busy capital.

Heading south, I passed the town of Orikum and the road soon climbed steeply into the Llogara Pass, one of those places that makes you feel very small and alone.

The road clung to a mountainside so steep that when I craned my neck up I couldn't see it top out. On my left there was a verdant valley far below and another huge wall of gray rock. The valley seemed to pinch farther up ahead, for the views were long enough that I could mark the road's progress as it snaked in and out of sharp bends.

Then, rounding one, I confronted the most dramatic and lovely stretch of road I'd seen on the Adriatic/Ionian coast: In the windshield, a ridge line the color of ash loomed over the road and it descended in a tumbling pitch perhaps 2,000 feet into iris blue water. The narrow road worked its way down the green hillside not in gentle curves but in hairpin switchbacks, like an extended mark of Zoro.

Far below, the town of Dhermi perched in resistance, some how, to the Llogara Pass' plunge to the sea.

A few days later, taking a road out of the southern city of Saranda that soon turned into one of the best in Albania -- despite having been marked in yellow on my map, signifying a track slightly better than cracked concrete -- I was again to pull neck muscles trying to take in the immensity of a light-speckled valley that stretched almost to the hill town of Gjirokaster.

In one frame, a single house sat sentry over groves and green terraces, with the patchwork valley floor running away from it in the distance.

These were scenes that revealed how much Albania, despite all its problems, had that was worth protecting.

When Agim Loci was 23, a good friend of his tried to rape a girl in their hometown of Fruhe Kruje.

The girl's two brothers thwarted the attack at the last moment. But the matter did not stop there: The girl's family wanted revenge. Loci did something surprising: He took his friend, tied him up and made him stand in a field before the girl's entire family.

"I said, 'If you want to kill him, kill him. But then his family will come and kill one of you'," Loci recalled.

"Of course, nobody was going to kill him then."

Loci told me this story in a taxi that inched through choking traffic heading out of Tirana.

We were going to meet with a few families living under the shadow of blood feuds, and I had asked him how he had gotten started as a volunteer peacemaker for the Albania's Committee for Nationwide Reconciliation (CNR), which mediated between feuding families in order to broker peace without violence.

There were at least 1,600 families in Albania today thought to be in hiding because of blood feuds.

That incident in the field had been 14 years ago, but that was the first blood feud he resolved, Loci said. He'd resolved more than a dozen in recent years, and since he was in charge of a roster of CNR volunteers throughout greater Tirana, he'd probably had a hand in many more truces.

He was currently handling seven feuds, three of which were close to reconciling.

Loci was not a tall man, but he was powerful, someone you'd want clearing the way ahead of you on an end zone run. His day job was as a bodyguard and and I would come to see how his profession colored his work with Albanian families.

In the end, he was just protecting people.

Loci received no payment for his work with families, save for a small gift they'd give him when a feud ended.

He said he was setting an example for his three children. "I want my children to have the respect for life my father gave me."

Agim Loci flashed a smile, and then a revolver, the barrel of which I'd noticed peeking out from beneath his red shirt. "In case of problems," he said.

We sat drinking coffee in the Tirana International Hotel.

Loci was on and off his cell phone, having already brandished a pile of licenses the size of a blackjack shoe for my inspection, among them: a weapon's permit, a government ID (he was a bodyguard for the justice department) and a card identifying him as an official missionary for Albania's Committee for Nationwide Reconciliation (CNR).

I was interested in the last one.

A contact in Tirana had introduced me to Loci the day before, after I mentioned that I wanted to visit some Albanian families currently living in hiding because they were caught in the murderous, "eye for an eye" cycle of gjakmarrja, or a blood feud.

CNR was a nonprofit organization of a dozen coordinators and scores of volunteers countrywide aimed at eradicating blood feuds by brokering peace between warring Albanian families.

Some 1,600 families in Albania today were in hiding because of blood feuds, though some estimates put the figure much higher. There were families that had not been out of their homes for fives years or more, instead relying on a network of friends and distant relatives to deliver food, supplies and a little money.

More alarming was the estimate that more than 1,000 Albanian children could not go to school because of blood feuds, forced instead to remain in hiding with their families.

World Vision, a Christian humanitarian organization that monitored Albania, said more than 5,000 had been killed in blood feuds since 1992.

CNR managed to reconcile about 50 feuds a year. But it also tracked 100 to 150 new ones annually.

For the traveler in Albania, all this just confirmed the foreignness of the place and seemed a damning indictment of the political and judicial institutions of a country currently being groomed by the west for eventual inclusion in the European Union and NATO, the latter having formally offered Albania membership this spring.

"It's lack of justice that brings on these blood feuds," CNR's Director Gjin Marku told me. "Albanians don't believe in justice. They believe justice is corrupted, and the state is also corrupted."

They were everywhere: gray domes surrounded by green grass, either in rows or scattershot across the landscape. Viewed from high mountain roads they had the appearance of large rocks; up close, traveling under ones that hugged hillsides, they looked like huge boulders that might fall.

They never lost their strangeness to me.

I first saw them on the road south from Durrës , heading to Vlore: one, then three, then a half dozen. After this they became more conspicuous, and I noted the different sizes, the small pillboxes and the ones as large as Quonset huts, all with gun slits. The oddest sight was to see them in the pretty valleys, in miniature, maybe a dozen of them in a row, like a small army encampment. I could not shake the impression that they looked more martian than militant, like a refuge for a character in a Bradbury novel.

These concrete bunkers, which everyone who traveled to Albania noticed, were the work of Enver Hoxha, surely a standout among the megalomaniacal whack jobs that ruled during the communist era. Hoxha seemed particularly afraid of the outside world, and had roughly 700,000 of these bunkers built -- in theory, one for every Albanian family -- in case of an invasion.

Many things the traveler encountered in Albania could some how be traced back to Hoxha's brutal, paranoid 40-year rule, when he effectively sealed Albania's doors to the rest and turned off its porch lights.

The car rounded a bend heading south, a bit outside Fier, and there he was in the middle of the road: dressed in a red shirt, a white crusher on his head. He had no legs, just two stumps that poked out of his jeans.

The road looked baked in the sun. He lunged at passing cars, hands cupped. A large bus bore down on him from the other side, and passing I looked back to see traffic in both directions and him not moving. Where could he go?

It was a fruitless, and dangerous, way to beg for money. He was stuck, doing what he could, being passed by, life having dealt him rags.

In that man I saw something of the desperation of an entire country in miniature.

I have come to Albania. Not many do, even today, 16 years after this country emerged from a particularly isolated horror show. Tourists are expected any day now, I was told, and there was justification for that optimism: Farther up the coast to the north, Montenegro was rapidly seeing its coastline cede to Riviera-style hotels and villas.

Albanian does promise some of the last unspoiled coastline in the Mediterranean. Seeming to anticipate this, places like Durrës along the coast had become a confusion of construction, haze and dust, giving way to tall, colorful tenements -- hotels? -- most seeming unfinished.

Guidebooks padded entries about Albania by saying it had "a few rough edges" or with phrases like, "Sure, it has is problems, but..."

Yet really, Albania was a ruinous country -- and probably the most interesting and least artificial place in which you could travel in Europe today.

I was with a German who said, "It's the last dark spot on the continent. "

When I arrived in Montenegro three months ago, one of the things that struck me first was how safe things felt.

What was I expecting?

Well, not a lot of armed thugs or anything. But I'd traveled enough in the former communist corners of Europe -- including past trips into the Balkans -- to notice a slightly different atmosphere than you feel in more staid places like the Netherlands or Germany. There isn't the sense of order you find in those places, and that absence piques your alertness. It's not that you are in danger at all, but you are certainly a little more aware of your surroundings.

Before coming to Montenegro, I'd last been in the Balkans -- specifically Croatia and Bosnia -- four years before. These recent months of traveling in the region has had a decidedly different feel -- Albania being a noteworthy exception.

Turns out that the United Nations is feeling pretty bullish on the Balkans as well.

The UN released a surprising report yesterday that called the Balkans perhaps Europe's safest region, saying countries like Montenegro, Serbia and Bosnia boast lower numbers of murders, rapes and petty crime than western Europe.

"The Balkans is departing from an era when demagogues, secret police and thugs profited from sanctions-busting and the smuggling of people, arms, cigarettes and drugs," the report said.

The report surveyed nine countries: Montenegro, Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia, Albania, Moldova, Bulgaria and Romania.

The report still notes the pervasiveness of corruption and organized crime activities, however.

Of course, a fair question to ask about this report in general is: Compared to what?

After all, the UN notes -- in a major nod to the obvious, it seems to me -- that regular crimes, including homicides and rapes, "across the region are by far lower than they used to be, particularly in the beginning of the 1990s." Well duh. At the beginning of the 1990s, didn't you have widespread instability and lawlessness in places like Romania, Bulgaria and Albania as they emerged out of communism? Didn't you have a regional war that engulfed Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Montenegro in an orgy of killing and destruction that lasted nearly five years?

To compare crime rates in some of these countries now to a time when crime was the only thing that counted doesn't seem to say much. It would have been more useful for the UN to note how things have changed in, say, the last five years.

If you're earning a salary in US currency and are unlucky enough to spend it traveling internationally, you know the pain of the depreciating dollar.

The rest of the world has become frighteningly expensive as the dollar continues its slide. My recent trip to North Korea, for example, was $800 more expensive than it would have been two years ago for the mere fact that I had to pay for the tour in euros. Man, did this hurt! Unfortunately, such increased costs have become a factor in many travelers' vacation plans as prohibitive prices continue to limit options.

But this isn't the case everywhere. Certain parts of the world are still "on sale" due to local currencies that even weaker than the dollar.

Countries where dollars go the distance is a handy LA Times article that explores some of these remaining bargain locations--Vietnam, Morocco, Bolivia, Cambodia, Nicaragua, Albania--and provides a fantastic short list of wonderful places that would still be worth going to even if they weren't "on sale."

I've whipped out my International Calendar to see what might be left to tell about November before it slips away from Eastern Standard Time in a few hours. What I see is a whole lot of independence days and a slew of other politically geared occasions.

• Nov. 1--Antigua-Barbuda gained independence from the United Kingdom in 1980.
• Nov. 3--Dominica gained independence from the UK in 1978. Panama gained Independence from Colombia in 1903 and Micronesia gained independence from the U.S. in 1980.
• Nov. 9--Cambodia gained independence from France in 1953.
• Nov. 11--Poland gained independence in 1918; Angola gained independence from Portugal in 1975.
• Nov. 18--Latvia gained independence from Russia in 1918; Morocco from France in 1956.
• Nov. 25--Suriname gained independence
• Nov. 28--Mauritania gained Independence from France in 1968 and Albania gained Independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1912, Panama gained independence from Spain in 1821 and East Timor gained independence from Portugal in 1975.
• Nov. 30-Barbados gained independence from the U.K. in 1966

Other than these, Tonga has had Constitution Day (Nov. 4); Russia, Revolution Day (Nov. 7); Brazil, Republic Day (Nov. 15); and Vanuatu has had National Unity Day, (Nov. 29)

My favorite happening of the bunch of events that occurred this month, though, is the Surin Elephant Round-Up in Thailand.