When in Rome—or a Roman spa—do as the local spa-goers do, with our primer on local spa etiquette.

A trip to the spa should be a relaxing, rejuvenating experience, but uncertainty about etiquette and local customs when visiting a spa overseas can be enough to get you all tied up in knots. Here’s a sampling of what you need to know when visiting spas around the globe.

Nudity
What to bare and where is probably the aspect of spa-going that causes guests the most anxiety. Understandably, being undressed with someone you’ve just met can feel awkward. It certainly doesn’t help that customs regarding nudity at spas vary from country to country.

In the United States and the United Kingdom, spas go to great lengths to maintain guest modesty. Therapists will step out of the room and give you ample time to disrobe and get comfortable under a sheet. They’ve also been trained in the art of draping and tucking the sheet to leave only the body parts they’re working on exposed.

In parts of Western Europe, nudity in a spa’s public areas is frowned upon. As Alexandra Obermair, a marketing manager at Italy’s Terme di Saturnia Spa & Golf Resort, explains, “In Italy nudity is a no-no—we are a Catholic country. People don’t even go topless in the saunas, steam baths, or thermal pools.”

This is less of a concern in some parts of Central and Eastern Europe, where attitudes about the naked human body are more casual. In Germany, for example, it is considered unhygienic to enter the (often coed) sauna, steam bath, or massage area with your swimsuit on. The theory is that toxins released during a treatment or while perspiring may get trapped in clothing. In these towel-only areas, guests are strongly urged to sit or lie on a towel. But wear anything more than fluffy terrycloth and you may be politely asked to leave.

Coed vs. Same Sex
If the idea of nudity has you running scared, take comfort in the knowledge that, in many locales, single-sex treatment areas or hours and same-gender therapists are the norm. You’d be hard-pressed to find a coed hammam in the Middle East, unless you’re at a hotel or resort that caters to tourists. Otherwise, spa areas are strictly same-gender. And, even though in a separate area, men must cover up, per Islamic law
(women are free to go naked).

The Finns, whose sauna rituals include nakedness, birch branches, and families with small children bathing together, would likely be embarrassed by a visit to the mixed-sex saunas of Central Europe. In Scandinavia,
public saunas have separate sections or different hours for men and women. According to the Finnish Sauna Society, if men and women want to mingle during their steam bath, they’ll have to do so in a private sauna.

During an Ayurvedic program in India, you may be asked to bare all but can expect that a therapist of the same gender will perform your abhyanga and shirodhara services. More than modesty, the motive is the effectiveness of the treatment—in this case, keeping guests’ energy in proper balance.

Special Cultural Traditions
Many local healing traditions have gained popularity in spas around the world. If you choose to experience these treatments in their native lands, it’s good to be mindful of their cultural significance.

Take the onsen, or Japanese hot spring. In that country, bathing is an artful ritual that is not to be confused with cleansing. It is customary to scrub down thoroughly—using soap and water from wooden buckets outside the onsen area—before entering the tub. Called hadaka no tsukiai (which translates as “naked communion”), bathing in an onsen is not about solitary relaxation. It is polite to smile, bow, and speak when spoken to. The interaction is as much part of the experience’s healing powers as the thermal waters.

At resort spas in Mexico and Central America, the temazcal is a pre-Hispanic native tradition popping up with increasing frequency. Facilitated by a guide, or temazcalera, this sweat lodge ceremony usually incorporates spiritual elements—including chants, prayers, and songs—that honor the four elements of nature and a mother goddess. It is purported to heal illnesses ranging from sinus infections to arthritis. For this experience, you should dress in loose, comfortable clothes, drink lots of water afterward, and refrain from strenuous physical activity until you’re done sweating.

Gratuity
When your spa treatments are over and you’re feeling great, you’d probably like to show your thanks by leaving your therapist a generous tip. However, though leaving a 15 to 20 percent gratuity in an envelope at the front desk is commonplace throughout the Americas and Europe, in some Asian countries, tipping is a little trickier.

According to Marie Harrison, spa director at the Landmark Mandarin Oriental, in Hong Kong, there is no standard tip amount. “We inform our guests that gratuity is not expected in the spa,” she says. “If guests want to offer, then we leave [the amount] up to the individual.”

Elsewhere in China, South Korea, and Japan, hotels and resorts strongly discourage tipping. To offset this, many establishments will include a 10 percent service fee on the bill to be divided among the entire staff. In that same spirit of sharing, many spas in Cambodia, Indonesia, and Thailand prefer that gratuities be given to the staff as a whole. Your spa journey did, after all, require a team effort.

General Dos and Don’ts
Bear in mind that all spas are unique, so always call ahead if you’re unsure about protocol. Still, some rules are inviolate from Austria to Zambia, and everywhere in between.

DO arrive on time, if not early. Jillian Wright, owner of Jillian Wright Clinical Skin Spa, in New York City, laments the late guest who saunters in late. “If our therapist is booked back to back, it’s going to cut into the client’s treatment time,” she says.

DO cancel appointments with plenty of advance notice. Last-minute cancellations will probably incur a charge, which can be as much as the total cost of the treatment you missed.

DON’T receive treatments while ill. Your sea salt scrub won’t feel good if you’re suffering from the flu. If you’ve got a longer-term illness or chronic condition, such as eczema or a heart condition, or if you’re pregnant, let the spa know in advance. Your treatment options may be limited for your safety.

DO leave your cell phone, BlackBerry, and laptop at home (or in your room). You’re supposed to be relaxing, remember? And you certainly shouldn’t be using them in the spa and disturbing other guests.

The $1.3 Million Vacation: An Asian golf outing might set some sort of new record.

If you’re bored with the links at St. Andrews and Pebble is passé, one California-based company thinks it has the golf vacation for you. This past spring, food-and-wine events impresarios Angel’s Share began offering a private jet golf vacation through Asia that may just be the most luxe — and priciest — golf excursion of your life. How pricey, you ask? How’s an even $1.3 million sound?

Designed for a group of four (although more can be added for an additional, ahem, cost), the Asian golf outing begins aboard a luxuriously appointed Gulfstream G550. The private plane — yours for the two-week-long trip — first touches down in Bali, continues to Malaysia and wraps up in Hong Hong. The itinerary is, of course, fully customizable.

“It’s really a once-in-a-lifetime kind of trip,” says Mark Russo, the former brand ambassador for McCallan who founded Angel’s Share in 2001. “We’re offering experiences you just can’t get on your own.” Exper­iences like, for instance, a stay aboard a 172-foot yacht originally built for the Emir of Bahrain as it floats in the Andaman Sea. Or an unforgettable day on the greens at the Nirwana Bali Golf Club, followed by dinner with Bali’s Prince Rai Girigunadhi at the Royal Palace, capped off with a helicopter trip over emerald rice terraces to a remote Balinese village. Those types of experiences.

Da Bears: At this fly-in lodge, everyone has salmon on the brain — including some 900-pound guys who really need a shave.

In Katmai National Park on the Alaskan peninsula, spring begins in June. That’s when the icy landscape starts to break up and droves of Pacific salmon — sockeye, chum, pink, silver and Chinook — navigate the long distance from the ocean to the tundra’s thawing tributaries.

Ask any experienced fly fisherman, and he’ll tell you: There’s fishing, and there’s fishing in Alaska. And if the 900-pound grizzlies that can be seen tearing into that rosy salmon flesh all summer long could speak, they would certainly agree. But not all lodges set up to access this mating, fishing and feeding frenzy are created equal.

Standing a cut above the rest is Kulik Lodge, a riverbank enclave located squarely in the middle of nowhere. It’s one of three renowned Anglers’ Paradise Lodges that opened in 1950, when Ray Petersen, a pioneering bush pilot and avid fisherman, set up the first tent camps to drum up business for his burgeoning airline.

These days, accommodations at Kulik (now run by Ray’s son Sonny) are 12 comfortable, modern, two-person cabins spread out over 100 acres. Top-flight amenities include a native-spruce great lodge with a grand-stone fireplace, five floatplanes, 30 boats, an accomplished chef, sauna, full open bar and all the Sage rods, Ross reels and Simms waders you’ll ever need.

You’ll know you’re headed for something special the moment you abandon the last thing resembling a road for 60 miles and board the lodge’s eight-seat Piper Navajo at the King Salmon Airport.

A 30-minute flight takes you over a kaleidoscope of forests, lowland marshes, snow-capped mountains and mile after mile of gin-clear, gravel-bottomed rivers, then deposits you at the intersection of Nonvianuk Lake and the Kulik River, where the enormous rainbow trout are so spirited, their jumping actually makes the waters look as though they’re boiling.

Afterward, you’ll be paired with a guide who will wake you each morning at 5 a.m. to take you to your fly-out destinations — up to another 100 miles into the wilderness. But don’t be too proud to have him stop at least once, just 25 miles away, at Brooks Falls, otherwise known as the Greatest Feeding Grizzly Show on Earth. “It’s so clichéd,” Sonny says.  “We were in a Geico commercial, for God’s sake.”

The Vacation That Just Keeps Going: Turns out the finest way to fly around the world in 80 days is to make it in 70.

Hopping in the Lear for a brioche breakfast in Paris is probably something you’ve done once or twice. But have you ever followed that with lunch in Gibraltar and dinner in Marrakech? Doubtful unless you’re Phileas Fogg or one of the lucky few on Air Journey’s first around-the-world jaunt.

The Jupiter, Florida–based travel planner started its private-plane caravans in 1998, when founder Thierry Pouille — at the time a traditional travel agent — arranged a one-week trip from Florida to the Bahamas for a group of European pilots and operators in their own planes.

Pouille was himself an experienced pilot who had flown solo from Spain to Algeria when he was just 16, and since that first Caribbean jaunt he’s taken 1,000 aviators with a case of wanderlust in self-fly trips to Alaska, Iceland and the Galapagos. But he’s never strung it all together.

Pouille plans to lead the fleet of 10 planes in a Pilatus PC-12, departing from Quebec City on May 14 and returning to Wisconsin, 70 days later, on July 22, a scant week before EAA AirVenture in Oshkosh (part of the reason the trip wasn’t extended the extra 10 days to cement the literary allusion).

Along the 41-stop route, the group will sail through the Greek isles, explore Pharaohs’ tombs in the Valley of the Kings, hike the Great Wall of China and, of course, munch on the aforementioned baked goods along the Champs-Élysées. “I’m French. How can I not go to Paris?” Pouille asks.

Gone Fishin’: This angler’s paradise is truly in the middle of nowhere.

For centuries, Panama’s mythic Darien Jungle has simultaneously intrigued and terrified everyone from conquistador Vasco Balboa to Romantic poet John Keats. Referred to by one sixteenth-century traveler as an “abyss and horror,” the isthmus that connects the Americas remains shrouded in mystery even today — in no small part because it’s where the otherwise uninterrupted Pan-American Highway stops dead in its tracks. But concealed in this sultry terrain of dense forest is a coastal oasis where bikini-clad fishing-show hosts and the mayor of Margaritaville reel in the big ones.

Known as Tropic Star Lodge, the clutch of low-lying guest-houses and cabin cruisers has been carved out of a 3,500-foot Pacific-facing mountain on the naturally sheltered deep water of Piñas Bay. Management has plans to extend the lodge’s cement 1,900-foot airstrip another 2,600 feet or so over the next two years, but for now, the only way in remains a 50-minute flight from Panama City aboard a twin-engine bush plane. Once you’ve touched down on the cracking, overgrown tarmac — already 100 miles from the nearest road — you board a panga boat for the last 10 minutes of your journey to the Tropic Star dock.

Of course, it’s more than just seclusion that draws the likes of Jimmy Buffett and other anglers in the know. More than 250 world-record fish have been hooked in these waters since the late 1920s, when American adventure novelist Zane Grey discovered the nearby reef that now bears his name. During prime marlin season, which extends through March, it’s not uncommon to boat 20 250- to 1,000-pounders a day. And while the giant marlin and sailfish (whose season starts in April) are all strictly catch-and-release, you’ll also likely pull in Jurassic-sized dorado and yellowfin, which the Tropic Star’s chef will gladly grill to your specifications.

With no cable, phones or town to speak of beyond a few of the native Choco tribe’s nearby huts, land-based diversions center around the pool, sunset and well-stocked bar. Rooms are simple but comfortable, and for those wanting more seclusion, there’s always the El Palacio suite. Once home to the Texas oil tycoon who built the lodge, the nine-room villa is situated 122 steps up the mountainside. And not to worry: If wrestling with several thousand pounds of fish has left you too pooped to climb, you can hop aboard the funicular railway that — like the Hawker 400s and Citation Sovereigns soon due to start landing here — will whisk you almost to your door.

The scent of mesquite trees fills your nostrils as you skim between a pair of sheer, chalk-faced cliffs, barely five feet above the cracking red clay of a dried-out riverbed. To one side of you, a platoon of miniature warthog-like creatures feasts on a breakfast of prairie grass and prickly pears. Above you, the New Mexico sun rises to greet a tranquil blue sky. No human — save perhaps those ancient Native American vision questers — has ever set foot where you are now.

You’re “aerotrekking,” a relatively new flying sport pioneered by John McAfee, inventor of the McAfee antivirus software. In 1992, the billionaire moved to Colorado, founded the world’s first IM’ing firm and became a yogi before taking charge of a band of roving aviators known as the Sky Gypsies. Since then, he’s perfected his craft — the doorless, three-wheeled contraption with an 80-hp four-cylinder engine pictured below — and built seven hangars throughout remotest Arizona and New Mexico. Officially, the Gypsies are a private club, with just 300 members and annual dues of up to $270,000, but a simple phone call (505-557-1005) will usually get you an invitation to come check them out and let them decide whether they like you.

Base camp is in the tiny border town of Rodeo, New Mexico, where you bunk in a vintage ’60s AirStream. The first afternoon is spent getting oriented, usually by McAfee himself. The big event comes at dawn, when a Gypsy guide straps you in, takes the pilot’s seat in front of you and skitters down the 8,000-foot private airstrip. You can’t see it from where you’re sitting, but this is the part that always puts one of those Jack Nicholson smiles on the pilot’s face. As you reach the canyon’s edge, he pulls back on the bar in front of him and. . . takes you both into an arcing 20-mile dive to its floor.

Days of Thunder: Enjoy the air at 30,000 feet? Wait until you try 50,000.

You corkscrew straight upward, moving at 700 mph. Past the indigo waters of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Past the green valleys of the Cape of Good Hope. Until the horizon is just a pronounced curve of pale, blue light. As your stomach lurches, a single thought floats to mind: Don’t throw up on the instruments.

Beneath you at Cape Town International Airport sits Thunder City, the world’s only private operator of fully functional military jets. Its Cold War-era squadron includes five Hawker Hunters and another five Buccaneers. But for you, only the English Electric Lightning Bravo-Bravo-Delta – a.k.a. the Big Bad Dog — will do. The 20-ton jet interceptor holdsthe climb-to altitude rceord and is capable of traveling at twice the speed of sound.

Somewhere around Mach 1, the pilot engages the afterburners. Your spine presses against the back of your seat, and you remind yourself to steer clear of the yellow-and-black handle between your legs. The only thing worse than losing your lunch at 4G, the pilots warned, is accidentally losing the cord that will eject you at that speed.

As you level off at 50,000 feet, breathing into your firmly secured oxygen mask, the $13,500 shelled out for these minutes seem a small price to have paid. High above the known boundaries of blue sky, butting up against the edge of the stratosphere, you look up at the limitless blackness of space above you. And then, an instant later, at the earth’s curvature…and your 10-mile descent.

Northernmost Exposure: At this lodge, they always leave the lights on.

Virtually every night for the next six months, the skies above Blachford Lake Lodge and Resort will erupt in shades of amethyst, emerald, gold, copper and crimson. Aurora borealis season has arrived, and this well-appointed fishing lodge near the roof of Canada is arguably the best place on earth to watch it.

Ensconced in the wilderness outside Yellowknife — also home to diamond mines and the “ice road” of recent History Channel fame — Blachford sits on a strip of lakefront that is the very definition of remote. The nearest road ends 60 miles in the snow-blanketed distance, and when conditions become too treacherous to land a plane — as they will later this month until the middle of January — the resort has to put out the be back soon sign.

Reservations at the resort include being picked up from the Air Tindi Float Base in Yellowknife’s Old Town section and whisked into the wilderness via a 20-minute flight by float or ski plane. An experienced pilot can also charter a Cessna 185, de Havilland Single or Twin Otter — the workhorses of the Canadian hinterland — and chart his own private Imax show. After touching down, you’ll settle into one of the five bedrooms in the post-and-beam main lodge or five log cabins. Bear Grylls types can explore the surrounding terrain on cross-country skis or snowshoes, or ice-fish for walleye. Whether the fish are biting or not, the resort’s Red Seal–certified chef will later prepare a feast of local delicacies: poached Arctic char, pepper-crusted tenderloin of bison and savory wild-muskox prosciutto known as miphuzola.

Then, once the sun sets — as late as 8:30 p.m. in October and as early as 4 p.m. in January — it’s time for Mother Nature’s version of a laser-light spectacular. Formed by solar wind colliding with air molecules in the earth’s atmosphere, aurora borealis is at her best in pitch blackness. That’s why the long, dark nights of October, January, February, March and April make for such prime hallucinogenic viewing. November and December are good, too. But come then, you’ll likely be watching from behind the windshield of an 18-wheel semi. Compare that to right now, when you get to lean back, half-empty glass of 18-year-old Macallan in hand, from the lodge’s outdoor Jacuzzi.