Dream Trip 2009 is up and running! For inspiration, here's another of our favorite entries from last year:

One of travel's biggest disappointments is traveling halfway around the world only to find the locals abandoning their old ways to embrace the same bits of Western culture you left at home. Sipping Starbucks instead of tea in Beijing. Going for McDonald's instead of venison above the Arctic Circle. Abandoning dashikis for second-hand T-shirts in Africa. In our ever-globalizing world, one of the biggest challenges can be finding the authentic before it disappears.

On a trip to China, Dream Trip 2008 finalist Sharon Kosboth was able to witness a bit of genuine culture--a farmer dressed in a traditional raincoat--on an offshoot of the Yangtze River that the Three Gorges dam would soon flood.

"We were on a tourist boat excursion through the Lesser Three Gorges of the Yangtze River in China," Kosboth writes. "It was a rainy, dreary day, and we were somewhat tiring of the scenery. We boarded a small boat where we found this happy young boatman. He unexpectedly put on, and then proudly modeled, a local Chinese farmer's raincoat for us. He rowed for a while and then burst full voice into a local folk song. On a gray day, in the middle of a remote (and soon to be inundated) area of the world, his joy of life radiated like a beacon."

Share your travel photos and memories in our 2009 Dream Trip Contest. You could be just a few clicks away from a $25,000 trip to anywhere you choose.