Travel Stories

It’s mid-September and something is missing in Tuscany. It’s too late for the golden fields of sunflowers and too early for the glowing foliage of vines. I settle for rounded hills poked by stone houses at the end of alleys of cypresses. Here and there, long coats of olive groves and vineyards.. →

Even Ganesha the deity for wisdom is of no tempering influence. As a result, I deal with temptation by giving in and the laughing Buddha appears to agree. Besides, if I resisted buying something in Delhi, it tempted me in Agra, the last city we visited on our train tour through Rajasthan.

Past.. →

Once upon a time, a female elephant called Effie lived at the then-downtown Oakland Zoo. Effie was used to watching the owner’s family stroll on the grounds, so one day, she did what she saw them do, she helped push the baby’s buggy.

The zoo of the 1950s is incomparable to the one of the.. →

The word maybe is out. We might see some, but there is no guarantee. We came to this spot on New Zealand South Island to see the yellow-eyed penguin, the rarest and most endangered of all penguins. Surprisingly, more of them live in this warmer climate than in ice-covered Antarctica.

Our guide.. →

Persistent and cheering children swarm around me as if they could read my mind, but the sacred vagrant cows remain unflappable. It’s our last day in India and I can’t sleep. My senses are teeming with sights, smells, sounds, and contrasts: the riches of the palaces and the mud huts of the desert.. →

I am looking at a jade bangle with the price tag of some car, and that bracelet will outlast it.

On a trip to Beautiful British Columbia, you might wonder whether this is really the place to buy authentic jade. I never visited a jade extraction site, but what I learned about the official stone.. →

We are in Sicily where we leave our sea legs on the m/s Radisson Seven-Seas Voyager to board a coach to Savoca, the mountainous location of The Godfather II. 

From the seaside resort of Santa Teresa, turning left toward the mountain immediately becomes unnerving. I hold my breath each time.. →

Streams of lights fell like incandescent snowflakes; children’s books and cartoon characters hung from small-scale hot-air balloons and parachutes. Only Santa brought more excitement to the Opryland Hotel!

Nashville is famous as the home of country music, the Blue Bird Café, the legendary.. →

We turn onto Rue des Canadiens, but we are not in Canada, not even in Québec. Ten minutes later, the forest road opens onto the National Historic Site of Canada on the plain of Douai. We are in Vimy, ten kilometers north of Arras, in northern France. On our right, the 27-meter-high twin towers of.. →