Travelers' Intercom

My husband and I took a 23-day trip to Thailand, Myanmar and Cambodia in October-November ’05 based on recommendations made by ITN readers.

• We started in Bangkok with the guide Tananchai Sillikasorm (e-mail tans72@hotmail.com), who was recommended by Dan Isenschmid, who answered my “Person to Person” question.

Tananchai was extremely professional, and via e-mail we planned our schedule. He arranged for a van and driver to pick us up in the airport at midnight, take us to the Peninsula Hotel, do two full days of touring and return us to the airport. Twenty days later we were...

Digital photography beats film in lots of ways. Still, there’s “lag time,” that delay after you press the digital camera’s shutter button but before the picture is recorded. On my camera, the recording process takes five seconds — and during those seconds the electronic through-the-lens viewfinder leaves me “blind.” I see only the image being recorded to the card.

On a visit to Athens in May ’05, I decided to take a picture of three leg-lifting, arm-swinging Greek sentries marching briskly in their uniform skirts to take up posts at the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior.

As they...

The killer tsunami of Dec. 26 devastated parts of Indonesia, Sri Lanka and India and even reached African shores. The total loss of life may never be known. Thailand’s six southern provinces along the Andaman Sea also were battered by the tidal waves. The popular tourist beaches in Phuket, Krabi, Phi Phi and Khao Lak suffered varying degrees of death and damage though, on the whole, much less than their Indian Ocean neighbors. In early March ’05, I visited Phuket, Thailand, 1½ hours by air west of Bangkok, as a guest of the Tourism Authority of Thailand to observe the resort area’s...