When Jean Fischer of Brevard, North Carolina, booked four days and three nights on a houseboat in the Kerala backwaters in southwestern India in April 2016, she expected to visit the types of very narrow canals she had seen when she last visited the region on a day trip in 2012, places where the boat was almost under the trees and locals could be easily observed on the banks at their daily tasks.

On her 2016 cruise-tour, however, though on one afternoon she was taken down canals so...

An article by Contributing Editor Randy Keck, “Building Your Travel Bucket List” (Jan. ’17, pg. 56), generated the following project. We asked ITN subscribers (March ’17, pg. 15) to each send in two lists of international destinations, excluding locations in Europe (which are so popular among travelers) and in the United States (which ITN does not cover).

One list was to include the Top 10 destinations that they had visited and would recommend for newer/...

Kip Sturdevan of Encinitas, California, wrote, “Several of our friends have taken walking tours on which the organizing companies had arranged accommodations and made sure the luggage would be moved every day to the next night’s lodging, thus allowing the walkers to carry only day packs. Each day’s hike tended to vary from 7 to 14 miles.

“I am 70 and my wife, 60, and I can’t get her to do anything too extreme, but hiking tours where you carry only day packs...