Here’s the second part of a longer conversation with Dopplr friend and investor Esther Dyson.

Dopplr: How has the quality of commercial aviation changed in the past few years? Feel free to distinguish between US and non-US carriers…

Esther Dyson: The quality of commercial aviation has dropped sharply – but not that much out of line with its pricing until recently. It was simply hard to get good service, and at least in the US all the carriers focused on price to the exclusion of reliability and comfort. On most foreign carriers, you could get better service – but you were paying for it. But there are still some good domestic services available: I use United’s Premium Service between New York and San Francisco and LA. It’s a bit pricier, but you can work comfortably through the whole flight, and that’s definitely worth it. That is, it’s worth it in business class, especially if you book far enough ahead. First class is not worth it.

As for foreign carriers, I like Lufthansa a lot, even though they can be a bit humorless. BA’s service has become a bit careless, but they go almost everywhere I do, so I keep using them as well. Austrian, SAS and the rest of the Star Alliance carriers are also pretty good.

Dopplr: You stay in hotels that have swimming pools. Is that your sole criterion or do you have others?

The pool is a binary criterion: whether or not there is one. After that, there are nuances: What time does it open? (Once I stayed at a Doubletree with a pool that didn’t open until 10 am. I ended up sneaking into the pool of a much nicer hotel I happened to know nearby. (I’m purposely being vague here…. I haven’t done anything so “bad” in a long time; I think it’s good for the soul to feel like a real outlaw from time to time.)

And is it large, regularly shaped, not too full of other people? The worst pools have lots of fancy obstacles – stairs that stick into the water, curves and clever shapes that waste swimming space and interrupt laps. You can easily turn a three-lane pool into a single usable lane with protruding stairs and the like. The pool here in Kampala, Uganda, is lovely and long, but it has annoying curvy edges that I keep bumping into. (photos on request for all of these) Still, I’ll swim in anything rather than miss my morning wet-reboot. Last week, for example, I was at the London Hilton Metropole, where they managed to ruin the pool with two protruding steps, diagonally across from one another, so there was no good lane to swim in.

I occasionally have swimming dreams: Usually the pool is dry, or I can’t find it and wander around in angst. And then there was the actual time (not a dream) in Munich where I was attending a DLD conference at the Bayerhof, which has a lovely pool. I saw it the evening I checked in, all decked out for a party, with beautiful deep blue tiles, a nice rectangular shape (except for steps in one corner), and suitably large. The next morning, I couldn’t even find it at first. They had opened a different entrance for the party, and now I had to take some backdoor route – but finally I found it. There was a sign saying it was closed for the party, but there was no one there, so I decided to go in. However, it was now only half full. Never mind. I jumped in quickly, half expecting someone to come along to order me out, and kept hitting the bottom, because the water was quite low. To my surprise, even though I thought I was figuring out how to swim as horizontally as possible, I seemed to be getting worse rather than better at it.

Suddenly I realized that the water was still draining. As I sat on the bottom and considered my situation, the water barely came up to my waist. So I got out, took a shower and consoled myself that at least I had gotten in most of a half hour. The whole thing was like a dream, where the water gradually drains away and I wake up. This time, I *was* awake.

I went to join my brother at breakfast… and halfway through, remembered I had left my bathing cap in the shower. once more I went into the labyrinth of stairs and doors, and this time I couldn’t even find the shower. Suddenly, though, I heard it, followed the sound, and opened the women’s shower area door. There stood a pudgy little man, fortunately all covered in bubbles, scrubbing away in the very stall I had been using. We stared at each other in astonishment. “But this is for the ladies!” I said in my best German. “Enschuldigung! [Excuse me!]” he replied. Then he turned his back for a moment and turned around again, proffering my bathing cap.

Stranger than most of my dreams!

We’re starting a series of “smarter travel conversations” today. Our inaugural posting features Esther Dyson, an investor, writer and inveterate traveller (and Dopplr friend and investor) who is currently training for the ultimate trip (about which more below). This is the first of several postings in a longer conversation with Esther.

Dopplr: What’s a rough estimate of how many miles/kilometers you’ve traveled in the past 1, 5 and 10 years? What percentage of the time are you away from your New York City home?

Esther Dyson: I really have no idea of the answer to the first question; I’m hoping Dopplr will tell me this December. As for percentage, I’d estimate I spend about 75 to 80 percent of my nights away from home. Of that, probably a third is outside the US. Again, Dopplr will tell the truth in a few months.

This coming year, things will be different: I’ll be spending most of the first three months in Moscow. It will be a new experience to spend so much time in one place!

Dopplr: You’re training to be a cosmonaut, which sounds like the ultimate travel experience. How did this come about?

Esther Dyson: It came about in a number of ways/on a number of levels. First of all, as a kid, I just assumed I’d go to the moon, without having to do much in particular to make it happen. I just took it for granted that by the time I was, say, 40, it would be a common thing. My father was involved with the space program, and we had some moon rocks at home, so I thought it was all no big deal.

Then I got a little distracted, for about 40 years, but a few years ago I started paying attention to space again. A lot of people I knew were doing the same: Elon Musk, Space-X; Jeff Bezos with Blue Origin, and so on. I ended up starting a conference called Flight School for entrepreneurs in both space and private aviation.

Meanwhile, in about 2005, I was in South Africa with a small group advising President Thabo Mbeki and his government about South African IT policy. (That’s a separate long story!) One of the group was Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Thawte (sold to Verisign), who had recently come back from a trip to the space station as the tk third “space tourist.”

One evening, we all sat around a campfire as the sun set, and 50-odd African schoolchildren were bussed in. Altogether, there were about 100 of us. Once it was dark, a screen was set up and Mark showed us his home videos from space. It was amazing! He gave a fascinating talk about his adventures, complete with clips of him floating around, catching bubbles in his mouth, and so on. The kids loved it, and I’m sure some of them decided then and there to study math and science.

Over time, that led me to invest in the company that organized Mark’s trip into space, Space Adventures. Later on, I went on a tour they organized to watch the launch of the fifth space tourist, Charles Simonyi, from Baikonur in Kazakhstan. (Simonyi wrote Microsoft Word, and now has another start-up Intentional Software, and also a foundation, as well as a website, CharlesinSpace.org.)

At that point, I started casually discussing the notion of becoming a backup cosmonaut with the Space Adventures team. Yes, I would love to actually go, but the trip to space is $35 to $40 million, whereas the backup training is only $3 million.

Whatever… I had vague thoughts that I would do this sometime in 2011 – the year that Sergey Brin is tentatively slated to go. Space Adventures was pushing for spring of 2009, but I was pretty busy.

Then another thing happened: My sister Emily had a double mastectomy. (She’s doing very well now and in fact just won a 5k race, or I wouldn’t tell you this story:) A couple of weeks later I was faced with one of those conflicts: a board meeting here, a conference there, another opportunity somewhere else. “Aaagh,” I thought, “if only I had to have a double mastectomy. I could cancel all these things and no one would complain!”

…and then I realized, good grief! I have to reorder my priorities. So in some odd way, this sabbatical in Russia is my alternative to a double mastectomy – a positive one, to be sure, but the same kind of reset-button experience. And of course, it’s also the answer to another question I think of a lot because of my work on human genetics (through 23andMe and the Personal Genome Project): Suppose you had a high chance of developing Alzheimer’s in a few years, what would you do? Why I’d go train to be a cosmonaut, of course….! and why wait to find out I may get Alzheimer’s?

(This is the first of several parts of a conversation with Esther Dyson. Photo from Esther’s Flickr Photostream, some rights reserved.)