Travelers' Intercom

We made it to Iceland and back! The trip my husband, Ted, and I took was a 5-day package called “Hot Springs & Northern Lights,” which we booked with Icelandair (www.icelandair.us) for Nov. 13-17, 2016. It was a spur-of-the-moment inspiration after reading Randy Keck’s series on Iceland in the October through December 2016 issues.For the two of us, the price, including three hotel nights and a nighttime tour, was $1,931 round trip out of New York. Round-trip airport/...

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On a cruise from Paris to Barcelona with Oceania Cruises, when the ship reached Oporto, Portugal, my husband and I took a 4-hour tour of the city with Oporto Discovery Tours (phone +351 911 715 594, oportodiscoverytours@gmail.com). In fact, we contracted with the tour company by email on the morning of Aug. 10, 2016, and went on the tour that same afternoon. We were with another couple, and the combined cost for the four of us was €245 (near $260).I can’t say enough good...

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My wife, Patti, and I ordered two luggage tags from RuMeID (Centennial, CO; 303/799-4256, www.rumeid.com) on the TripAdvisor store, and they have a unique feature: each RuMeID tag comes with a QR code that helps you be reunited with your bag if it’s lost.Before a trip, you log in to the RuMeID website and register your tag, then enter the names of the hotels you’ll be staying at plus the dates.Once you do that, if your luggage goes missing during your trip, anyone who finds it...

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Uzbekistan was included in a trip to the ’Stans that my husband and I were planning to take in April 2016, so we applied for visas from the Uzbekistan Embassy in Washington, DC, mailing our applications and passports to them via the US Postal Service (USPS) on Jan. 27. We tracked them, and they arrived in two days.On Feb. 9 we called the embassy and were told by a staff member that they had issued our visas on Feb. 4 and that the passports were on their way back to us. Then...

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The gold-plated Reclining Buddha is 33 meters loåçng — Penang. Photo by Robert Siebert

On a 10-night “Malaysian Peninsula & Indonesia” cruise that I took on the Diamond Princess in January 2017, the itinerary, round trip from Singapore, included full-day port calls at the island of Bali in Indonesia, at Kuala Lumpur city and Penang state in Malaysia, and at Phuket, Thailand.

This was with Princess Cruises (Santa Clarita, CA; 800/774-6237, www.princess.com). The cost of the cruise, alone, was over $8,800, which included single occupancy of a full suite....

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Small group of gorillas from the Kwitonda family. Photos by Esther Perica

Whenever I want to treat myself to a trip on which I know I will have an excellent guide, top-quality hotels and an exciting and unusual itinerary along with well-traveled and interesting fellow travelers, I book with Passport Travel & Tours, a family-owned company located near Chicago (Grayslake, IL; 847/543-6729, http://journeyswithbillball.wix.com/passporttraveltours).

I have done seven trips with them over the years and consider Bill Ball, the owner and guide for all of...

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While staying in Costa Rica for a month in January-February 2017, my husband, John Doellinger, and I spent the first week on a tour with Natural Habitat (Boulder, CO; 800/543-8917, www.nathab.com). For weeks three and four, we rented a condo in Playa Langosta, Guanacaste, through Airbnb. However, for the second week, Jan. 21-28, we were on our own in La Fortuna, near Arenal Volcano. On our first day in La Fortuna, we just wandered through town to explore. The second day, we went to...

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While visiting Costa Rica’s Osa Peninsula on Jan. 3, 2017, we had a full-day private tour off of our cruise ship near the town of Puerto Jiménez.We are bird-watchers and, two months ahead, hired an excellent nature and birding guide for the day: Royer Muñoz (ficuscorcovado tours@gmail.com) of Ficus Tours (Puntarenas Province, Puerto Jiménez, Costa Rica; phone +506 2735 5100, www.ficustours.com).We learned about him by writing to a well-known resort in the area,...

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