BARRIE, Ontario — I arrived in this cool Canadian lakeside resort town near Toronto with educators from 40+ countries, each of us paying about $700 for six nights, seven days of room, board, and conference fees. This was the 17th annual International Education and Resource Network (iEARN) gathering for K-12 teachers and students engaged in online collaborative work. 
 
We are proof that it is possible to have a jet-set life on a do-good budget, done through volunteer work with international organizations. There are many such international non-profits (you can find many of them at National Geographic’s Global Action Atlas); but my own low-budget-jetset life revolves around two organizations: Partners of the Americas (DC-Brasìlia chapter), which connects volunteers to serve and change lives in this Hemisphere, and iEARN, which represents about 30,000 teachers and two million students in 125 countries working on projects in 30 languages…..Full story in National Geographic’s Intelligent Travel blog.

I checked: Yes, I could have booked BA-Mendoza and Mendoza-Santiago myself. (Skipping the fact that LAN still wasn’t flying into Santiago six days after the February 8.8 earthquake, so I took a bus over the Andes and forfeited my plane ticket.) (See “Chile Puede,” my NG Intelligent Travel blog about the quake.)

Even Brasìlia, where I’ve spent most of my time in the country, has become a darling of the airlines. New non-stops to Lisbon, Atlanta and Lima are departing from the capitol, with a Miami non-stop scheduled to open in November. Think about the map of Brazil for a minute and you can begin to understand what a relief that is. In the past–and still for the unknowing in the present–the route from the United States to Brazil is to fly over Brasìlia on your way to Sao Paulo, about two hours father south. Once there, you either hang out in the international airport (if you’re lucky) or catch a bus to the downtown airport to catch a plane that will fly you back north to Brasìlia.