Portable Pour Over Coffee

I mentioned in issue 227 that I bought a French Press for my five weeks in Peninsular Malaysia, but I left it behind when it was time to get on a plane again. Now in Chiang Mai, I bought some disposable pour-over coffee packets that come ready to use. They work well because they adjust to any size mug and only require hot water. They are made of paper and cardboard and open up from a flat packet. I found these that are similar on Amazon, but some other brands end up costing $2 – $3 per cup, which seems excessive. Bring that down by buying your own coffee to put in empty filters that pack up flat ($5 for 50) or pack a reusable collapsible version that will work for larger tumblers.

Priciest Travel Spots

You can probably guess a few countries that are vacation budget-busters, but travel insurance company Squaremouth crunched some numbers to find out for real which ones really will drain your wallet the most. The airfare part of the score is from the USA, so keep that in mind, but the top 6 were Greenland, British Virgin Islands, French Polynesia, Antarctica, and Switzerland. Some of the others might surprise you though since the people living there are far from rich, like four countries in Africa where tourists are paying a bundle for safaris. (Average daily trip cost in Botswana: $1,526.)

Worldwide Wi-Fi on Delta Airlines

The first airline to offer Wi-Fi worldwide to its loyalty members is Delta, as it just completed the project to get its Asia-Pacific flights connected, the last ones on their list. The only planes where you won’t be able to log on for free if you’re a SkyMiles member are the 5% that are narrow-body regional planes, though they will be included eventually as well. See the details here.

The History of Religions

How It Evolved is a project dedicated to showing the evolution of the world’s major religions, with audio chapters you can listen to in depth or a timeline chart showing one or all of them stacked up in parallel. The timeline is especially enlightening when you consider the game of Broken Telephone or Chinese Whispers, when one person says something in the ear of another and it goes down the line. (The end result from the last person is usually comically different from the original.) How much changed in the 300+ years of oral storytelling between when Jesus died and the New Testament books were published for the first time? Or in the 500 years between the death of Buddha and the first recorded teachings? That’s before all the divergent changes and branch-offs still going on today.

---

A weekly newsletter with four quick bites, edited by Tim Leffel, author of A Better Life for Half the Price and The World’s Cheapest Destinations. See past editions here, where your like-minded friends can subscribe and join you.

11/5/26