A British company that I like is Exodus (Grange Mills, Weir Road, London, SW12 0NE, England; phone +44 [0] 20 8675 . . . From the U.S., book with Adventure Center, 1311 63rd St., Ste. 200, Emeryville, CA 94068; 800/227-8747). They offer basic travel that tries to give you a real flavor of the country.
Improvisational travel is challenging, exhilarating and the ultimate expression of freedom because one can go where, when and with whom one chooses on a daily basis. It’s also exciting because it varies — sometimes wildly — from its more predictable counterparts: cruises and professionally organized tours with their frequently inflexible itineraries.
I have loved to shop for jewelry most everywhere I’ve traveled!
• I bought a wide, choker-type necklace made of camel bones in the medina in Tunis, Tunisia.
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by Julie Skurdenis
by Deanna Palic (second of three parts, jump to part 1,
We took a trip to Libya with Distant Horizons (Long Beach, CA; 800/333-1240), an ITN advertiser. We were quite fortunate to have received visas, which arrived at almost the last minute. Other tours had to be canceled because the Libyans had not issued visas for those groups.
It seems the Libyan government relaxed its restrictions on visas, at least temporarily, to take advantage of the thousands of people who wanted to watch the total solar eclipse on March 29, ’06. Our group left Libya on March 27, and Distant Horizons had to pay a special “eclipse tax.”
Based on my April ’06 trip to Iran, I’d like to share three practical tips with ITN readers who are thinking of going there.
A “must see” in Bodrum, Turkey, is the Museum of Underwater Archeology, housed in the Castle of St. John. The Institute of Nautical Archeology has been excavating in the Mediterranean since 1973, and the collections displayed include treasures from a series of historic wrecks along Turkey’s southern shores. Mycenaean and Cannanite artifacts from the 12th century B.C., a reconstruction of a seventh-century Eastern Roman Empire wreck and finds from the world’s oldest shipwreck, a 14th-century B.C.