Okay, so you have read the Rick Steves guidebook and the Rough Guide to wherever it is you want to go in Europe. You have decided to see the wildflowers in one village and a museum in another and to go wine tasting someplace else, but you have no idea how to get to them all. The answer is the “European Rail Timetable” by Thomas Cook.

It gives you information on both international and local trains in 40 countries, with a nice map for each so you can see if that little village you want...

CLARIFICATION — A reader questioned the statement in the letter “China with Viking River Cruises (March ’10, pg. 29) that Chongqing is almost double the size of Shanghai and Beijing.

While the populations of the metro areas of Shanghai (17 million) and Beijing (13.2 million) are much greater than that of Chong­qing (7.5 million), the opposite is true when the populations of the surrounding “city sprawl” areas are considered: Shanghai (18.8 million), Beijing (17.4 million) and...

My husband, Don, and I stayed two nights in a ger camp in Mongolia’s Gorkhi Terelj National Park, one of the most beautiful places on Earth. We have been all over the world and had never before seen such glorious mountain formations.

One feature in the park is appropriately named Turtle Rock (right). Our 17-day September ’08 trip “China, Siberia & Mongolia” with Uniworld (Los Angeles, CA; 818/382-7820) was late in the season, but there were still wildflowers blooming everywhere...