Gifts to Take You Places : A whole earth catalogue of the season’s best gear for actual or armchair travelers : Hacking Away at a ‘Virtual Vacation’ : Inexpensive computer networks help one homebody taste the pleasures of foreign travel.

Hungry for foreign adventure but too short on funds to indulge my longing for it, I hit upon a solution. If I couldn’t afford a vacation, I could at least experience one vicariously, by reading the accounts of fellow travelers’ adventures that I knew were a staple of many public computer networks.

Lacking experience with public networks, I thought my “virtual vacation” could be effortlessly achieved: I’d turn on my computer and modem, connect myself by phone line to networks carrying travelers’ tales and sit back as these wayfarers regaled me with their stories of joy and woe, their moments of high drama, their epiphanies on foreign soil. What I discovered is that while such gripping accounts do exist on the networks, they are no easier to find than, say, a good steak in Bombay. Even virtual travel’s thoroughfares, I learned, sometimes turn out to be blind alleys, requiring such resourcefulness to locate what one seeks that the virtual vacation comes to resemble rigorous travel itself.

However, to those looking for a distinctive but moderately priced travel-related holiday gift, my meandering may yield a bonus. While air fare to even the closest foreign capital may be prohibitively expensive, a month’s enrollment on one of the computer networks I found rewarding costs less than a foreign visa, and requires no gamma globulin shots.

Depending on the service, the gift-giver may need to buy an initial software package and/or pay a modest monthly fee to enroll the recipient in the network. Then, users generally are billed for time on the system in amounts ranging from less than $1 an hour to $12 or more for signing on to certain special services. Some networks have no hourly fee. Subscribership has other privileges, including the opportunity to post one’s own travel observations, reports, anecdotes, recommendations and warnings.

I started my tour by perusing the huge networks such as CompuServe, Prodigy, GEnie and America Online, each of which lists 190,000 to 1.7 million subscribers. I think of these behemoths as the computer equivalent of large chain hotels, bristling with service but bland and nearly interchangeable, leaving the visitor not with the sense of having traveled but of never having left home.

Consider, for example, CompuServe, which rivals Prodigy as the world’s biggest computer network. By linking up with one of the travel databases (Eaasy Sabre, Worldspan Travelshopper or OAG Electronic Edition), I can make reservations on any of 650 airlines, at 27,000 hotels or 57 car rental agencies, and I can read hundreds of messages left by CompuServe’s Travel Forum members about their travels around the world. Unfortunately, while many of the messages carry practical information useful to people planning trips, the vast majority hold no interest for the vicarious traveler. All too often their authors seem inexperienced both in travel and writing; the result is postcard prose that conveys nothing more than a vague sense of being awe-struck in unfamiliar surroundings.

The CompuServe posting I most cherish, entitled “Impressions of a Moment in Soviet History,” was written by a British aviation enthusiast who found himself on tours in Moscow during the abortive coup of August, 1991. Surefire material, right? Well, not exactly. As the coup unfolded, he doggedly carried on with his planned visits to airfields and aircraft design offices, while noting “the weird sensation of being completely cocooned from the events around us.” At last, early on the third morning of the coup, he had something dramatic to report. “At 1:45 I woke up to the sound of tanks rumbling past the hotel,” he wrote. “After a busy day yesterday, I really cannot be bothered to get out of bed to watch them!”

Good travelers know that their pleasure usually multiplies once they forsake well-known tourist haunts to follow crooked and untrampled paths in search of the unexpected; in like manner, it wasn’t until I strayed from the big computer networks that I found travel reports with a measure of charm and idiosyncrasy. True enough, the small networks do not offer travel services like CompuServe’s, and navigating their electronic byways sometimes requires knowledge of arcane computer codes, but then, tolerance of inconvenience and familiarity with strange languages are valuable assets to travelers. It is as true on the networks as in real travel that the yield is more contact with people who speak with some authenticity.

Many of the self-appointed traveler-authors I read displayed a disturbing naivete, but occasionally on the smaller networks that trait appeared in altered form, as a kind of winning guilelessness. For example, not one of the posters I read on the big networks displayed the panache of Daniel Swerdlow, a frequent contributor to the “Elsewhere Conference” on the tiny (600-subscriber) Echo network in New York City. Swerdlow, a telecommunications engineer who frequently travels to South America, is fond of typing his posting into his laptop computer as he flies from one foreign capital to another; after landing, he uploads his reports by telephone to the network in New York. His postings are heavy with blow-by-blow descriptions of life in the first-class cabin, a venue he regards with beguiling wonderment.

I am beholden to Swerdlow for the revelation that at least one airline provides first-class customers with “personal videocassette recorders” in case they do not like the offerings on the movie screen. “I don’t wanna go to sleep!” he wrote on an 11:05 p.m. laptop entry during a Miami-Sao Paulo flight, just after he discovered the VCR. “The VCR is the thing I thought was just a cassette player,” he noted, going on to explain that the “little color LCD screen swings out of the front of the armrest and the miniature video cassette goes in a deck on the side. Altogether there are more doohickeys on my armrest than Capt. Kirk ever dreamed of.”

Swerdlow is a coffee aficionado, whose estimation of a country depends mightily on the quality of the last cup of java he’s imbibed there. In Colombia, whose coffee consistently fulfills his expectations, he reported with satisfaction, “My Spanish is limited to a word here and there but I know the important stuff: “Cafe con leche, por favor.”

I had to roam farther afield to find what turned out to be my favorite network, the Sausalito, Calif.-based WELL (short for Whole Earth Lectronic Link). With 6,000 subscribers, who seem to consist in equal numbers of writers, computer experts and “Deadheads” (devotees of the Grateful Dead rock music group), WELL feels like a popular youth hostel, making up in energy, personality and a sense of shared experience what it sometimes lacks in manners. I cannot imagine a rival on the big networks (or, for that matter, in guidebooks) to this earthy account of a meal in Japan written by Howard Rheingold, a computer writer and WELL regular:

“The first thing that happened, post-midnight, after my arrival, was to go to a place where they served the fish ALIVE! You have to understand that I am a disgustingly finicky eater when it comes to seafood. I simply don’t eat it. Never have. Every time I try it, I gag. But I knew I was going to be in the land of sashimi and was determined to be a good anthropologist. So we go into this restaurant and they ask me if I like Japanese food. What am I going to say? That the stuff makes me wanna puke just looking at it? So I say that I am open for adventure. So they bring a fish that is NAILED to a wooden plate. Half of it is sliced into sashimi that you PEEL OFF and eat. The other half is wriggling and gulping and blinking. Jeez. Then they brought on the squid sashimi, served draped over a LIVE SQUID, which is pulsing and blinking. Then they cook the squid, thank god. Then they bring a dish full of smaller-than-finger-size LIVE EELS (or something kinda eel-like). You have to CAPTURE them with your chopsticks. You can bite down and mash their brains and thus render them inert, or you can swallow them and FEEL THEM WRIGGLE all the way down.

“I didn’t puke. I ate everything on my plate. I smiled. I said it was delicious. I actually started to like raw fish after a while, and it helped that I knew that even if it was raw, at least it was DEAD!”

More contemplative travel writing also has its place on WELL, most impressively in the form of a posting by Corey Fischer, an actor and writer for the San Francisco-based Traveling Jewish Theatre. Here’s one of many poignant passages from his 4,000-word posting about the company’s 1990 tour of Hungary and Czechoslovakia:

“I’m walking through the narrow cobblestoned streets of the old city (of Prague) when I see a big black Cadillac limousine with American flags flying from the front fenders. One doesn’t often see cars like this in Prague. I am curious. I peer into the rear passenger window and find myself looking into a pair of dark eyes surrounded by a head of dark hair. The eyes hold me for a moment before the car backs up, turns and make its aggressive way onward. Then it hits me: SHIRLEY TEMPLE! Our ambassador to Czechoslovakia! Who else could it have been? The person I’m seeing with my mind’s eye is not, however, the ambassador; no, it’s Shirley Temple the prodigious child of Hollywood. The tap-dancing changeling herself. Here in the twisting medieval streets of old Prague at the end of a century. I find this sighting strangely moving. Bubbles of laughter erupt in my chest.

“In the middle of this chuckling, as I turn a corner, I find myself face to face with a weeping woman who is being held and comforted by another woman. Her face streams with tears. This woman is as raw and exposed as Shirley Temple is protected and insulated. She is as sad as Shirley is cheerful, as helpless as Shirley is powerful. In my mind, they will always inhabit this moment together, ignorant of each other.”

Now at last I have been transported, and, satisfied, am ready to go home.

GUIDEBOOK: How to Hook Up

Computer networks containing information about travel include:

America Online, Vienna, Va., (800) 827-6364, with 190,000 subscribers. Cost is $5.95 a month for Macintosh computer users, $7.95 for IBM personal computers or clones. New subscribers receive two to five hours’ free usage per month, depending on the type of computer. Thereafter usage fees start at 10 cents per minute.

CompuServe, Columbus, Ohio, (800) 848-8199, with more than 1 million members. Cost is $39.95 for the software package, then $7.95 a month for basic service, with no hourly fee. It costs $12.80 an hour to link up with certain special services, including Travel Forum.

Echo (a.k.a. East Coast Hang Out), New York City, (212) 255-3839 (modem 212-989-8411), with 800 subscribers. Cost is $18.95 for the first 30 hours per month ($12.95 for students and senior citizens), $1 an hour for the next 30 hours, then monthly usage is unlimited.

GEnie, Rockville, Md., (800) 638-9636 (modem 800-638-8369), with 300,000 subscribers. Cost for basic service is $4.95 a month; the fee for linking up with special services, such as OAG Electronic Edition Travel Service, is $12.50 per hour of usage in prime time (8 a.m.-6 p.m. local time Monday-Friday) and $6 an hour during non-prime time.

Prodigy, White Plains, N.Y., (800) PRODIGY (800-776-3449), with 1.8 million subscribers. Cost is $49.95 for the software plus one month of the service, then $14.95 a month, with no hourly charge.

The WELL (Whole Earth Lectronic Link), Sausalito, Calif., (415) 332-4335 (modem 415- 332-6106), with 6,000 subscribers. The cost is $15 a month, plus $2 per hour of usage.