Marybeth Bond is an award-winning editor, author, columnist, and speaker who has lectured internationally for over ten years. Her books include A Woman's Passion for Travel, Gutsy Women, Gutsy Mamas, A Mother's World, and A Woman's World, which won the Lowell Thomas Gold Award for Best Travel Book of the Year. She is a California-based freelance writer and member of the Society of American Travel Writers. Her years of adventure travel and mountain climbing have made her a "Travel Expert" and an authority on "Risk Taking."

Marybeth is the "Smart Traveler" radio host for the nationally syndicated Outside Radio Show and the "Travel Expert" for the Travel Channel on ivillage.com, the Women's Online Network. She is a board member for Wyndham Hotels Women Business Travelers Program and was an advisor for Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. Marybeth is the travel columnist for a Northern California newspaper and ivillage.com. She can be found "live" on ivillage\travel\chat every Wednesday 8:00-9:00 PM EST.

Marybeth lived in Paris for four years and has two degrees from the Sorbonne. She also lived in Luxembourg and New Caledonia (in the South Pacific) for one year working for a division of the United Nations. Upon returning to the United States, she worked for Xerox and Honeywell in sales and marketing.

At age 29 she left her corporate job in the computer industry, put all her possessions in storage, bought a one-way ticket to Bangkok and took off. She continued to travel for two years around the world SOLO.

Marybeth has trekked across the Himalayas, the Andes, and the Alps. She has ridden camels across the Thar and Sahara Deserts and elephants through the jungles of Asia. She has lived on tinned food while sailing for two months in the Pacific and savored the finest cognac aboard the Marahaja's train: Palace on Wheels in India. She loves extremes.

Today she lives in a suburb of San Francisco, but her life is far from conventional. She continues to travel, and has been arrested at the Tibet/Nepal border, eaten wiggety grubs while trekking in Northern Thailand and yak eyeballs at a banquet served by the Chef of the Dalai Llama in Lhasa. Marybeth has two kids, a husband, and a dog, and prefers wine and cheese to wiggety grubs.

Pamela Michael is a freelance writer, radio producer, and curriculum development specialist who began travel writing just a few years ago. Her first-ever travel story, "The Khan Men of Agra," won the Book Passage Travel Writing Grand Prize and was published in Travelers' Tales: A Woman's World. Since then, her travel pieces have appeared in the San Francisco Examiner, Odyssey, Maiden Voyages, and other publications. She is the editor of the forthcoming book The Gift of Rivers and is coeditor of A Mother's World in addition to A Woman's Passion for Travel: More Stories from A Woman's World. Pamela wrote and produced a four-hour documentary for public radio on Buddhism in the United States, entitled "East Meets West," which is narrated by Richard Gere. She was also the director of the Media/Education Task Force, an international working group convened by the United Nations. Currently, she is the director of The River of Words Project, an international children's environmental poetry and art contest, which she cofounded with U.S. Poet Laureate (1995-1997) Robert Hass. It is jointly sponsored by International Rivers Network and The Library of Congress Center for the Book. She lives in Berkeley, California.