What's the best way to get around an island? Rental cars can be boring, taxis are often expensive, and a tour may be too confining. The answer: Use local transportation - which may be a pedicab in Singapore, a gondola in Venice, an outrigger canoe in Honolulu, a rental motor scooter on M¿konos, or Le Truck in French Polynesia.

Local transportation offers a big plus: "It's cheap," says Florida writer Bob Morris. "In the Bahamas I took mail boats everywhere. And another time I went from Carriacou, which is part of Grenada, to Union Island, part of St. Vincent and The Grenadines, for six bucks. It was a three-hour sail over gorgeous water in an area where people pay $1,000 a day to charter a sailboat. Of course, the sloop I was on had a mast made of bamboo and duct tape¿."

There was another little surprise, too: The captain was a smuggler. All the passengers had to crowd on deck, Morris says, because the hold was crammed to the ceiling with cartons. And what was the mysterious contraband cargo he was delivering to St. Vincent through the back door to avoid paying tax? Soda pop.

Morris's story underscores a key point of island travel: When you go like a local, you're sure to see a lot more of your surroundings. On an Asian island, for example, you might be riding on a jitney - a small local bus that follows a set route - and pass a villager who's riding a bicycle loaded with chickens, a stack of mattresses, or even a dinette set. (True story!) The point is, nothing blocks your view of island life. And because you're not behind the wheel of a rental car trying to avoid the mattress-toting cyclist, there's time to observe and appreciate the novelty of the encounter.

Local transportation also forces you to move at an islander's tempo. Slowed down, you observe things you would never have noticed from inside a mainland city taxi piloted by a driver whose philosophy of driving is basically I'm stepping on it; get out of my way.

On Ile de R¿, a French island off Bordeaux, for example, salt-making is a generations-old industry, and narrow paths run along the edges of square salt ponds. Riding a bicycle there, you'll be treated to a sublime vision as sunlight refracted through the salt crystals turns the ponds into sheets of shimmering color. The special quality of the island's light has long attracted painters; from atop a bicycle, it's easy to see why.

Want to travel true to type? If you are a romantic visiting Manhattan, that might mean taking a ride in a hansom cab through Central Park. If you're a thrill seeker touring Australia, maybe a bungee jump off a bridge. (Does that brief but exhilarating vertical journey count as transportation? You can decide on the way down.) Two types could team up in Italy: a romantic for the gondola ride, and a thrill seeker - to bargain with the gondolier.

But it's also fun to go against type. A beach bum visiting Bali can live like a well-to-do sophisticate by hiring a private car and a driver - a luxury that costs only $30 a day. Grab a couple of other impecunious pals, split the tab, and tour the island for a mere ten bucks apiece per day. In New Zealand a nature lover might get close to the elements in thrill-seeking style by going downhill the way extremist Kiwis do - rolling and bouncing inside a huge transparent ball called a Zorb. Bottoms up! In Malaysia that same nature lover might decide to seek out the romance of old Penang, exploring the highly urbanized island city in a three-wheeled bicycle rickshaw whose driver pedals from his perch behind the passenger.

When straying off the beaten path, almost any form of island transportation can lead to a memorable detour. In Sri Lanka, the island nation suspended below India like an emerald pendant on a necklace, my wife, Merry, and I once traveled upriver with a local man in a canoe. The river ran through a jungle where iridescent birds darted among green leaves as big as an elephant's ears. Eventually we reached a remote lake with a single island, where we were surprised to see that laundry - all of it saffron yellow - had been spread out on the bushes to dry. Buddhist monks lived there. We wanted to go ashore, but the boatman said it was impossible; didn't we see the sign? No Foreigners!

It seems that some young German travelers had discovered the lake earlier that year. Baking in the tropical sun, they decided to go skinny-dipping, giving the monks a view of European girls that discombobulated their meditations for months. The head monk thought it prudent to bar further visits by foreign travelers.

Hopping between islands is a fairly standardized experience. Basically, there are planes (sometimes), but more often there are ferries, which range from supermodern hydrofoils to the kind of ancient, creaky craft found in much of the developing world.

After a crossing in just such a vessel to Thailand's Ko Samui, writer and island veteran Dewey Schurman developed a savvy ferry-riding strategy. "When I boarded, I looked around and noticed that the ¿life preservers' hanging on nails around the deck were just inner tubes - and that every one of them was deflated. From then on I started carrying my swim fins on top of my bag during ferry rides. I figured that with warm water and a little luck I could swim all day, which might get me to the next island."

A few months after Schurman returned home, a ferry on the same route sank; among the survivors were two young women who managed to swim more than an hour to the island. "I always wondered," he says, "if the girls had swim fins."

Writer Joan Tapper, who has visited more than 100 islands, recalls a particularly nightmarish crossing to a Greek isle. "It was the roughest, most terrifying, Dante-esque night. People were howling as the ferry bounced around in the sea. After importuning the Madonna and who knows what else, we made it safely," she says. "Following an experience like that, you tend to realize the precariousness of island life: We generally think it's so easy to hop over to an island, but this is deceptive. And it shouldn't be that easy; it should take some work. Islands are outposts. You have to go through something to get there."

Like all seafarers, island voyagers rely on the fates and their craft. On one of his many journeys to islands, contributing editor Bob Payne traveled aboard a fishing boat that had been converted to carry passengers.

"In the Maldives they're called dhonis," he says. "Typically, they're 40 or 50 feet long and open, but with a cover to keep the sun off. On the overhead racks of the boat I was on, they had prayer mats for the Muslim faithful to take down for worship. For the nonbelievers they had life jackets. I don't know if that was by design."

Dewey Schurman tells about a surfer friend who took a creative approach to roaming the South Pacific in search of waves. "He would travel by freighter," Schurman says, "then catch an interisland copra boat, then hitch a ride by outrigger until he reached a place where he could paddle his surfboard ashore. It was a study in diminishing transportation modes."

Of course, some travelers do fly between islands, which can make the transition a blur - especially if you're winging between, say, Westray and Papa Westray, two small islands in Scotland's Orkney Islands; the flight takes two minutes.

Once you arrive on an island, you'll find other interesting local modes of transportation. On Ko Samui and other Thai islands, for example, you'll have the fun of making shorter jaunts in one of the local "long-tail" boats, named for the outboard-motor exten- sions that reach a good 15 feet from the stern, making it easy to raise the propeller in shallow water.

Riding the Tube in London, you might see a troupe of buskers performing a puppet show. Southern California's "island of romance," Catalina, has almost no cars, so visitors zip around in golf carts. There are places in the southern Philippines where the only means of transportation is still the horse-drawn carriage. And Bali's bemos, mini-pickups or minivans with benches on the truck bed and sometimes a canvas roof, are the ideal place to get close to the locals- close enough to see, for instance, a roll of rupiah bills tucked into a woman's ear piercing.

On a bus ride down the center of Sumatra, Bob Payne was looking out the window at the dense forest when the bus suddenly ground to a halt. A huge tree 100 feet tall and 5 feet in diameter had fallen across the road. "Everybody got out and scratched their heads and looked at the tree," he recalls. "Then they got down on their haunches, took out cooking pots, and started making dinner. No one seemed concerned about what looked like a long delay."

Two local loggers labored to cut a bus-wide section out of the immense trunk; when the sawing was finished, the several hundred people who had gathered to watch rolled the humongous piece of timber off the road. It had taken eight hours to clear the way, but by then Payne had adopted the locals' relaxed sense of time.

"I found it delightful," he says. "It was so refreshing to see that the world doesn't have to operate the way we think it has to in a big American city."

Island travel can also require unexpected combinations of transport. Take the Greek island of Santorini: Travelers arrive, not surprisingly, by water. Boats moor in a deep lagoon that faces a towering wall of black rock - the partial rim of a sunken volcano. (It erupted some 3,600 years ago and vaporized much of the island, leaving only a blackened crescent in the sea.) Santorini is topped with sugar-cube houses and blue-domed churches. To reach the main town, perched high on the volcanic rim, visitors ascend by funicular or climb on foot up an endless zigzagging stone stairway... or ride a donkey, as I did despite a deep aversion to all things equine. My spindle-legged steed labored up the cliff, wheezing like a bellows. And no wonder: I weigh 220 pounds. I'm also six feet, seven inches tall, so my feet actually dragged along the ground. But the donkey and I eventually made it to the top.

From that lofty perch, the whole island lay spread out before me. Its ancient ruins awaited exploration; its beaches beckoned. And that's the whole point of island transportation: to get you there, where you stand poised on the brink of discovery and adventure.