Below are highlights from the online columns — the joys, defeats and logistics of a summer spent circumnavigating the globe. If you feel impelled to follow in my frugal footsteps, be sure to say hello to Miguel in Galicia, Vlatko in Perast (Montenegro) and Kemal in Beypinar (Turkey) for me.  Lisbon seems to have been designed by and for explorers. A discovery lurks around every corner, whether it’s a peaceful pocket park, a glittering view of the Tagus or just the irresistible scent of roasted chicken from a takeout joint. I would spend two days wandering those back alleys, getting lost in the way that one only can in an old European city.  One stop was mandatory: I paid homage to Portugal’s adventurers by visiting the Mosteiro dos Jerónimos, a 500-year-old monastery where seamen would make their last confessions before sailing off to the edge of the world. The sun was out, and the monastery’s pale Manueline spires stood out against the clear sky. Better yet, because it was Sunday, entrance was free (at least till 2 p.m.).  I walked into the chapel, where a choir was singing and parishioners were shushing tourists. Just to the left was the tomb of Vasco da Gama, who had sailed from Lisbon to India at the dawn of the 16th century. Above the tomb lay his statue, hands clasped, a garland of fresh flowers below his heavily bearded chin. He looked, I thought, like someone I’d want to have a drink with.  One of the keys to getting around cheaply is persuading everyone and her mother to share their network of friends and families in faraway places. That, and a willingness to show up at a stranger’s doorstep with a smile, a bottle of wine and the conviction that, even if one’s habit is to shake hands rather than kiss cheeks, the offense will be forgiven and the fool accepted into the home.  That’s how I came to meet Miguel, on a roadside outside Bealo, a tiny village in Galicia on Spain’s verdant northwest coast. He was the cousin of a friend of a friend, and had been text messaging me all day. That night, Miguel took me to Vagalume Pensión, where I had the best octopus I’ve ever tasted — pulpo a la gallega, dressed in olive oil, rock salt and pimentón.  The next morning we set off to explore the peninsula, from the free museum at the Castro de Neixón, site of a 2,000-year-old settlement, to the dune beach and lighthouse at Corrubedo (partly closed for preservation) and on to the Castro de Baroña, the area’s largest and most impressive ancient settlement. The drive itself was marvelous — glorious green hills punctuated by villages with narrow streets and houses whose tiled walls resembled old, low-resolution Atari video games.  The busy day ended with dinner at Miguel’s, where we ate a tortilla that his wife, Pili, had made, and cheered as Barcelona managed to beat Arsenal and win the Champions League trophy. Firecrackers banged out in the streets. I sent a text message to a friend (of a friend) in the Catalonian capital: “Visca Barça!”  If anyone knows how to travel frugally, it is a college student. So I headed to Bologna, Italy’s quintessential college town. There, I indulged in all the perquisites of student life. I woke up late and ate pizza; I browsed the library at the Sala Borsa, the old stock exchange whose Roman foundations are visible through clear plastic floors; I marched through 666 arches to the hilltop Sanctuario di San Luca; and at night I met an ever-growing circle of students for aperitivi — those free spreads of pastas, veggies, bread and cheese that bars offer to drinking customers.  Several days of aperitivi, however, left me hungry for more. Besides its university, founded in 1088, Bologna is renowned for its cuisine, reputed to be the best in Italy. Its most famous dish is arguably tagliatelle al ragù, otherwise known as spaghetti bolognese. And now here I was, in the city that invented it, with my nose against the glass.  The students had one word for me: Quindici, an osteria known for its belly-filling meals at prices that won’t empty your wallet (via Mirasole 15; 39-051-331806). On my last night, three students and I managed to consume an impressive antipasti spread there — ricotta with syrupy balsamic vinegar, marinated olives and artichokes, a tub of squaccherone cheese, and a platter of prosciutto, mortadella and salami — plus a liter of the house Montepulciano. For my main course, I ordered the tagliatelle al ragù. It was the best I’ve had in a long, long time: meaty, with an intense tomato flavor and perfectly chewy noodles. The bill was 22 euros (about $28) each, by far my highest expense in Bologna, but worth every cent.  This country of 600,000 might have been a mere way station on my trip around the world — a pause on my southward leg from Croatia to Albania — but on May 21, its citizens voted for independence from Serbia, thus dissolving the last remnant of the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. How could I skip the world’s newest nation, especially when, because of decades of underdevelopment and wartime sanctions, Montenegro was reputed to be significantly cheaper than Croatia, its neighbor to the north?  Through Vlatko Bulatovic, a restaurateur in Perast and, at the time, one of only about eight Montenegrins on Couchsurfing.com (a recently relaunched Web site that allows members to offer sofas to like-minded travelers), I found a small, clean bedroom in a stone house owned by friends of his. The room was only 8 euros a night, or about $10.  The rate was no fluke. Everywhere I went in Montenegro, I found prices that were much lower than in Croatia. Rooms rarely topped 10 euros, cybercafes were a euro an hour and the Grilled Fish Index — my preferred measure of a country’s expense — dropped to 30 euros a kilo, from 45 euros in Croatia.  Affordable Montenegro will not, however, be around much longer. This country is small, and the future of its beautiful beaches and wild hills seems to include only luxury travelers. Amanresorts has won the right to operate the entire island of Sveti Stefan as a hotel, and other five-star properties are going up along the coast.  I had arrived in Albania hoping to discover an untrammeled paradise. What I found instead was a deeply weird place: a majority Muslim country where the mosques are mute but the miniskirts are loud, where horse carts share highways with Hummers, and where people shake their heads to mean yes — except that sometimes they shake their heads to mean no.  But what can you expect after almost 50 postwar years of hermetic Communism and, more recently, a mania for pyramid schemes that plunged the poor European nation into near-anarchy?  In Tirana, skyscrapers were going up while sidewalks disintegrated; the National Art Gallery displayed beautiful artwork, but rarely identified the socialist realist painters and sculptors. A cocktail at Flex (Rruga Deshmoret e 4 Shkuritit), an artsy bar-cafe, could feel like the height of cosmopolitan cool — until you had to contend with adorable but depressing street kids who would kiss your arm in hope of a 50-lek coin. When I saw a deranged man threatening buses with a brick, I knew it was time to leave.  My chest was heavy, my limbs weak and achy, my hacking cough painful and unrelenting. I had a cold — a bad one. My luck had run out.  Readers of this column may know that I’ve had phenomenal good fortune so far. But whom the gods love, they destroy. For two days, at the Hotel Tourist in Argostoli, Kefalonia’s capital, I lay listlessly in my room, rousing the energy to get up only around noon, and by 1:30 p.m. the powerful summer heat would set in and most businesses would close until evening. So I would return to Room 26, and sweatily doze till dark, afraid to turn on the air-conditioning, which I blamed for my sickness.  Cold or no cold, I had to see Kefalonia. With one day left before I was to fly to Istanbul, I rented a 50cc scooter from Sunbird (15 euros, or $19.50; www.sunbird.gr), declined the proffered helmet and set off to buy provisions. Then I found I’d lost my ATM card.  After two months of nonstop Frugal Travel, I had grown weary of tourism, of visit after visit to ancient ruins and hopelessly hip nightclubs. I had to do something — anything. I had to feel useful.  TaTuTa gave me that opportunity. The Istanbul-based organization (www.bugday.org/tatuta) places volunteers on about 70 organic farms throughout Turkey and is affiliated with World-Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms (www.wwoof.org), an international alliance of similar groups.  Every morning, Kemal and I (his only assistant) would march from his tidy stone house, where he lives alone with his cat, Simi, to the five-acre orchard on which he grows seven varieties of apples, including Topaz and Gold Star. No climbing necessary; no picking either: the four-ton harvest wasn’t until September.  Instead, we had to tie down branches according to a logic I never fully understood. Mostly, I followed Kemal’s lead, selecting a branch and waiting for his silent approval before fumbling through another slipknot. We would work this wordless way for hours in the summer heat, pausing from time to time to savor the clean air, gaze at the green hills or chuckle at the elaborate, Pavarotti-like call of the muezzin from the mosque just down the hill.  “Chut!” Bakut yelled as he yanked the horse’s bridle. “Move!” His cries echoed off the mountains around us, a threatening desert landscape I’d only seen in Wile E. Coyote cartoons. But the horse would not budge; it had found a safe spot on the perilously steep and sandy slope and was not coming down without a fight.  “Chut!” my guide commanded again, futilely. Then he turned to me, smiled so I could see his three gold teeth and said, “Extreme.”  Extreme, indeed. It was a comment that could apply to the whole of Kyrgyzstan, and it was just what I’d come here for. After a brief but invigorating mountain climb in northern Georgia, I craved more altitude, wilderness and — Mom, stop reading — the titillating possibility that I might die. Kyrgyzstan, with 94 percent of its land covered by mountains, the highest in Central Asia, seemed like the place to risk it all. So I caught a one-way $450 flight on Turkish Airways from Istanbul to Bishkek, the somnolent Kyrgyz capital, and hurriedly prepared my adventure.  Two days later, I was riding in the mountains south of Lake Issyk-Kul with Bakut, wondering if this would be the not-so-titillating end of the Frugal Traveler. It wasn’t hard to imagine one of our horses tripping and carrying us down into the chasm.  But with one final “Chut!,” Bakut’s horse relented. His steed took one nervous step, then two, and soon Bakut was leading the horse to level ground. Full of energy, he charged back up to perform the same feat with my horse. After that, it was easy — we remounted, and soon found an apricot orchard fed by a mountain spring. We drank our fill, ate almost-ripe fruit and lay down to rest in the grass.  Half an hour later, as the sun began to set, we rode back to camp for a hot dinner of pelmeni (dumplings in soup), and I sang to myself: “I’ve been through the desert on a horse with no name.”  After arriving in Urumqi, China, from Kyrgyzstan ($199 on China Southern Airways), I could have flown to Beijing for an extra $75. But I longed for the 48-hour train ride there, on which I hoped to get a people’s-eye view of life in the People’s Republic. So the following morning, I boarded the T70 (631 yuan, about $80) and found my bed: the middle bunk in a set of three facing another set of three in a car with 20 such sets, all open to the corridor. Crowded? A little, but also spotless, modern, cozy and friendly.  Early the next day, as passengers padded about in rubber sandals and sipped their morning cups of tea, my bunk slowly became a zoo. People would seek me out: the children to stare at this rare blue-eyed traveler in their midst; the adults to practice English and meet a real-life American. By afternoon, everyone was comfortable enough with my presence that I could barely wander the corridors without being asked to join a game of cards or to sit on a bunk and listen to a Uighur man strum energetic folk songs on his two-string guitar. The 48 hours went by quickly.  During the rare quiet moments, I gazed out the window at the ever-changing landscape. Finally, as we neared Beijing, the fields of corn and wheat were increasingly interrupted by factories and office parks, and the fog that had lent the mountains their mystical aura became a smoggy haze.  Ninety-one days after I took off from Newark Airport, I had returned home. Well, not quite home; I was in San Francisco for five final days of affordable fun.  Which did not, on the face of it, promise to be easy. San Francisco is one of the most expensive cities in the country. After spending hours in dingy Beijing cybercafes, I finally found a suitable hotel: the Hayes Valley Inn (417 Gough Street; hayesvalleyinn.com), a tidy-looking Victorian with weekday rates as low as $69, near City Hall. I took advantage of the $49 CityPass, which includes museum tickets and a weeklong Muni pass, discovering what one reader meant when he wrote, “It’s embarrassingly easy to have a good time here.”  One afternoon, I took the bus to the Alemany Farmers’ Market, a nest of concrete stalls enlivened with bright murals, where I drooled over the luscious Early Girl tomatoes and polymorphous squash, and thought about the recipes I had picked up on my travels: Turkish bean stews, Georgian cucumber-walnut salads and pulpo a la gallega.  From there, I hiked up dusty Bernal Hill for what one reader called “the greatest panoramic view of the city.” She was right. As I ate juicy peaches from the market and gazed out on the bridges, parks, pastel houses and glistening skyscrapers of San Francisco, I thought back to the thousands of miles I’d covered, landscapes and cities I’d explored and friends I had made and, once again, silently thanked my readers for their good advice.
Scenes from a 90-day, round-the-world road trip, in which our budget-seeking columnist sprinted through a dozen countries and some 36 cities, encountering 17 languages, some 900 varieties of dumplings, and a 48-hour train ride across China.