AROUND THE WORLD IN 133 DAYS

Ken Hastings doesn't mind taking the road less traveled even if it means eating strange food, sleeping on rice mats and staying in a lizard-infested hotel room.

The Cape Girardeau businessman and daughters Kara, 19, and Emily, 21, embarked on a five-month journey around the world in February. Kara returned home after two months, but Ken and Emily Hastings continued on, returning home in mid-June.

Some travel agents didn't want to mess with scheduling such an extensive trip.

"Ticketing a trip like this is a monster project," said Ken Hastings, who owns Magna-Tel, a firm that supplies magnetics to the advertising specialty industry.

Hastings said he wanted to take a long trip with his daughters before they moved away from home.

In all, the journey took the Hastings to 19 countries in Asia, Africa and Europe.

They traveled to big cities and small villages, and rode on elephants, camels and old riverboats.

For Kara and Emily, the trip began Feb. 4 when they traveled to South Korea to stay with friends.

The two sisters then went to Osaka, Japan.

They stayed with a Japanese friend of Emily's. While there, Kara and Emily ended up lost in the city's subway system where people in white gloves push passengers into the cars, cramming them in like sardines.

Their Japanese friend's mother found the two women by telephoning station after station on the subway line.

Ken Hastings joined his daughters in Taiwan, where the family stayed with friends.

It was Burma, an off-the-beaten-track kind of country, that they enjoyed the most. They liked the fact it wasn't overrun by tourists.

The former British colony, now called Myanmar, is run by a military dictatorship. "It is a time capsule, like 50 years of nothing happening," recalled Ken Hastings.

"There has been nothing done since World War II. All the old British buildings are crumbling," he said.

Kara said, "It had the worst conditions of any place we went."

In Burma, they toured Rangoon and saw an enormous reclining Buddha. They also visited Pagan, which was a major cultural center in the 10th and 12th centuries.

Over 5,000 Buddhist temples were built there, of which 1,200 still remain. Some of the temples are 10 to 12 stories tall.

They stayed in the only hotel in Pagan, a government-run affair. Their $50-a-night room had a broken-down mattress, a leaky toilet, and lizards hugged the walls.

"In places like Burma, it was perhaps best not to know what was in the food," Ken Hastings said. "They ate ox tongues and organs we don't eat."

Crowds regularly gathered around the Hastings. Ken Hastings said few Caucasian women visit Burma so his two daughters were an unusual sight.

Many people wanted their pictures taken with his daughters.

They journeyed to Singapore, a clean city where chewing gum is outlawed.

The Hastings later traveled to Egypt to visit the pyramids.

In Egypt, their taxi driver ran over a man as he tried to cross a street.

"None of us liked Egypt. It was filthy," recalled Ken Hastings.

Egyptian men regularly proposed to his daughters. The people were always pestering the Hastings to buy various items.

The pyramids are overrun with tourists. "When you go to the pyramids, there are 10,000 other people there elbow to elbow, and you're fighting for space," he said.

Kara flew home from Egypt, but Ken and Emily Hastings traveled on to Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, the Slovak Republic, the Czech Republic, Austria, Poland, Germany and England.

Much of the trip was spent in Indonesia and Southeast Asia.

In northern Thailand, Emily and Kara trekked to a remote village.

To get to the village, they rode in the back of a truck for two hours, traveled by boat for two hours and then climbed aboard an elephant for the final two-hour leg of the journey.

"My sister decided she wanted off. She jumped off the elephant," Kara recalled.

Emily hurt the heel of her foot. The trainer, in his limited English, kept repeating that everything would be all right.

In the end, Emily was helped back on the elephant and the journey continued to Lahu, a village of about eight straw huts and some 35 to 40 people.

The sisters spent the night sleeping on bed rolls in one of the huts. The next day, they went to get medical help for Emily's sore foot.

Kara walked while Emily rode on the elephant until they reached a road where they could get a ride to the hospital.

At the hospital, she received crutches and medication. But Emily soon abandoned the crutches.

"Five months is a long time," Ken Hastings said of their trip.

Even so, Hastings wants to return to the back roads of Burma.