Journalists seeking time off for the holidays file long summaries of what they covered during they year. The year-enders, as they are called in characteristically unimaginative journalese, fill space in the absence of news. But like long family letters in Christmas cards they usually attract only those readers who are mentioned in them.

As the year two-thousand lucky seven draws to a close I am compelled by journalistic habit to write a year-ender about the wonderful places I have seen this year – Santiago, Bangkok, Katmandu, Ushuaia, Punta Arena, Yellowknife, Iqualuit, Pangnirtung, Penang, Malacca, Vientiane, Luang Prabang, and the ancient walled city of Lo Montang. But I will spare you (and your atlas).

Instead I want to remember a few images from my travels, most shared with my partner Pat Kvill: An albatross. A print of white bears. A broken jar. A cave hermit. The king's horseman. The empty road.

As a wise old American Indian is supposed to have said, you never learn anything traveling east and west. We did that, but mostly we went north and south. The albatross was south – about as far south as any tourist normally gets. It is the ghostly figure on a monumental construction made of laminated steel plates – the steel of hulls built in a Chilean shipyard – at Cape Horn. It is a figure of an Albatross in flight, cut out of the steel. I thought of Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Surely the designer knew the symbolism because the monument is dedicated (by the Chilean Navy) to the thousands who died there in the chaotic meeting of three oceans at the tip of South America. About 800 ships have been lost at Cape Horn since the 15th Century.

As the Cruceros Australis rounded the Cape and then rounded back we stepped into the control center, the bridge, where the captain on his high seat and his officers were sailing the 200-foot expedition cruiser. It was not a scene from Coleridge or Conrad. The sealed room was silent except for the white noise of GPS computers, radar, sonar and such. Modernism. . . .

The print was north, the high Canadian north at the Arctic Circle. The artist, Andrew Qappik, sat at his table in the coop studio in the Inuit town of Pangnirtung in a fiord on the west side of Baffin Island. He was pounding out the stencil print in blue and white. It shows a mother polar bear and two cubs hunting on the ice. They blend so closely with the white background that their distinct blue shadows seem more real than they do.

The polar bear is about to become endangered because of the late freezing and early melting of ice, on the edge of which the species breeds and feeds. Climate change in the Arctic is apparently so rapid that the polar bear will not have time to survive by reverting to the land skills of the species from which it evolved, the grizzly. You can't doubt global warming in the Arctic. We visited an old whaling station where 150 years ago in the time of Melville ice-edge bow whales (now nearly extinct) were abundant. Now, in mid August, there was no ice in the cove, no glacier on the mountain heading it. Our guide, Johavee, has seen it all disappear in his lifetime. A photo from as late as 20 years ago, taken at the same time of year, showed the cove jammed with ice.

Our objective was to backpack a few days in Auyuittuq National Park, a half hour's boat ride north of Pangnirtung. When we picked up our permits the ranger in Pang laughed at our question about polar bears on that side of the park. "You stand a better chance seeing a polar bear at the Toronto Zoo," he said. Next morning he ate his words. The sighting of a young bear hunting on land far from any ice had forced him to close the park. We got Johavee to take us to the park entrance anyway, and on the walk up the tidal plain, fresh in a line in the grey mud, were the biggest animal tracks I had ever seen – big as dinner plates, with claws. Prints of a white bear -- searching, trying to survive in an environment without the usual ice. On the way to our flights home I bought Andrew's print of white bears. It hangs in my Crestone cabin. . . .

The broken jar was on the edge of a crater on the Plain of Jars in northern Laos, unlucky target of American B52's in the early 1970's. The ancient jars, placed in groups like cemeteries on hills, are big enough to hide a human. And it is said that Viet Cong soldiers jumped in them when they heard the planes. No scientist that I'm aware of has proved the origin or purpose or the mini-monoliths. Who made them is a mystery, although how they were made is implicit from half-finished jars in a quarry. They were probably made from boulders, carved out like a pumpkins. A hollowed boulder is practically unbreakable. But the broken jar by a crater on a hilltop had been shattered in recent times. The crater was from a bomb, a boy standing by explained to me. A cluster bomb. He pointed out the small pit at the center of the crater – dug by a local farmer retrieving scrap metal, he said.

That was a dangerous business. And still is. The casings opened and just above ground and released hundreds of baseball-size "bomblets," as they are called by the international Mine Advisory Group. Those that did not go off as designed remain buried around and in the craters that still pock the hard red soil of the arid plain. They are dangerous. The MAG has estimated more than 100 Lao people a year, many of them children, are killed or injured by the explosion of UXO's (unexploded ordinance). President Johnson halted the bombing of North Vietnam after the Tet Offensive in 1968, but it's hard to stop a war machine – so the B52's and some fighters were diverted in what has been called "the secret war," although everybody in politics knew, or should have known, about it.

The war escalated in 1970 when President Nixon, with Henry Kissinger whispering in his ear, adopted the devious strategy of secret peace negotiations in Paris and an apparent cease fire in Vietnam coupled with bombing the hell out of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The Plain of Jars is said to be the most bombed piece of real estate on the planet. People tell of their grandparents living in caves for years, daring to come out to farm their fields only on moonless nights.

I got to walk along a length of the trail (the old driver remembered it, and at one point we saw the carcass of a Soviet battle tank). It was a dirt track beside a river where farmers worked with hoes in the flood plain. No comb craters. Apparently the B52's dropped their loads – like someone "sowing seeds," one famous quote goes – on more obvious targets. I wanted to think they avoided areas that might be inhabited, notwithstanding the documentation that Kissinger wanted to destroy the "social support," meaning villagers and villages, of the Viet Cong carrying supplies by night through the Plain of Jars.

But I run on. The point was an unbreakable broken jar at the edge of a crater in a hilltop cemetery of jars hit one day not long ago by a tall steel seed of destruction that gave birth to bouncing baby bomblets that keep on killing. My tour guide found me talking to the boy at the crater. The guide grinned and told a story. A farmer was visiting a friend in a neighboring village. The friend showed him his perfectly circular pond full of fish. "Who," said the visiting farmer, "told the Americans to stop before I got a fish pond too?"

The Hermit was in a cave high on a canyon wall in the Kingdom of Mustang, an independent province of Nepal dangerously near the Chinese border at the edge of the Tibetan Plateau. My wonderful Sherpa guide, Kusang, with whom Pat and I have been traveling for a decade, knew about the strange holyman, a Buddhist monk, in the way that Kusang seems to know about everything. Kusang Sherpa has friends everywhere, even in Mustang, which was closed to visitors until 1992 and is still limited to 2,000 tourists a year. The limestone cave was up a tributary of a wide deep canyon off the upper Kali Gandaki river. We walked up a steep trail, then rock stairs, to a wall built under an overhang.