Columns

Dear Globetrotter: Welcome to the 369th issue of your monthly overseas travel magazine.

“Chicken or fish? Menthol or regular?”

A German entrepreneur, Alexander Schoppmann, is planning to start up Smintair (Smoker’s International Airways) early next year, with daily service between Düsseldorf (his hometown) and Tokyo.

Düsseldorf has the third-largest population of Japanese in Europe, more than 15,000, after London and Paris. In Japan, 49% of men and 14% of women smoke. One quarter of Germans do. So Schoppmann is confident there are plenty of people who would take the...

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Dear Globetrotter: Welcome to the 351st issue of your monthly overseas travel magazine.

“. . . this publication is a gold mine of information from the well traveled that could otherwise take hours to find.” That’s what E’Louise Ondash wrote in her January 20th “Hit the Road” column in North San Diego County’s The Coast News.

She continued: “. . . it does a great job as a person-to-person forum (‘Two seniors considering a trip to the North Pole. How do we get there?’) and travelers’ bulletin board (‘I attended the Chelsea Flower Show in London and found it a big disappointment...

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by Julie Skurdenis

I travel to Lithuania often, most recently in June 2005. Every time I visit Vilnius, its capital, the first place I head for is the square next to the Cathedral just at the edge of the Old Town. It’s here that I watch an archaeological miracle taking place: the rebirth of a palace destroyed over 200 years ago.

It’s something I could never have imagined when I first visited Lithuania in 1977 when it was still under the domination of the USSR. At that time the Cathedral had been turned into an art gallery and there was no thought of the palace that once...

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(Part one of two)

Bolivia is a land of former fantastic riches and present poverty. A major part of the country is steaming Amazon lowlands. Most tourism is to the nearly 3-mile-high Altiplano, with the highest capital in the world, La Paz, and the highest airport in the world. On an 8-day trip in October ’04, I stayed in modern 5-star hotels with room rates in the $40-$50 range.

Amazing Lake Titicaca, the highest navigable lake in the world, has floating islands made of reeds along its shorelines. Traditionally, homes have been built on these islands by indigenous Andeans....

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Dear Globetrotter:

Welcome to the 367th issue of your monthly overseas travel magazine.

SAS Scandinavian Airlines System has introduced a “biometric security check” on domestic flights in Sweden. That’s tech talk for reading the fingerprints of people checking bags in and then, by taking new readings at the gate, making sure those bags belong to the passengers boarding the plane.

SAS claims that personal privacy will be maintained: the stored fingerprints will be deleted once they have been used.

New technology enables airline passengers to use their own...

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Dear Globetrotter:

Welcome to the 370th issue of your monthly overseas travel magazine.

January 2007 is when new rules would have gone into effect requiring all cruise passengers returning to the U.S. from Mexico, the Caribbean, Bermuda or Canada to show a passport, but that deadline has been pushed back to June 1, 2009, by legislators, who inserted a provision into a Homeland Security Department appropriations bill.

The requirement on having a passport for a land border crossing, which was to have taken effect in 2008, has also been postponed.

Air passengers,...

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After years of trying on every ocean, in numerous ships and on dozens of islands, I finally saw it. On Feb. 6 of this year, from the waterfront patio of the Fort Young Hotel in Dominica, I finally saw the fabled “green flash.” It was bright green, sort of twinkly, very surprising and very brief. I was elated.

Some of you know exactly what I am talking about, but for those who don’t, the green flash is a sunset (or sunrise) phenomenon usually observed from ships and sometimes on shore in the tropics around the world. It is a very brief flash of green that appears right at the sun’s “...

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Previously I have written on the subject of one of the rarest categories of all touring offerings in the U.S. outbound travel marketplace: the long-haul, single-destination group tour (LHSDGT), in this article to be referred to as LT. The LT was defined at that time as a group tour of three weeks or longer that focused on a single overseas destination.

Over the many months since the original article appeared (Sept. ’04, pg. 106), I have received a surprising amount of reader comment on the subject, most lamenting that there are not more such offerings available.

Chile...

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