Cruise

Holland America Line’s 2011 repositioning cruise of MS Volendam from Singapore to Vancouver, BC, took 35 days, departing Singapore on April 14 and arriving in Vancouver on May 18.

Dear Globetrotter:

Welcome to the 428th issue of your monthly overseas travel magazine, the one largely written — in all candidness — by its subscribers.

by Philip Wagenaar (First of two parts)

By far, the company most recommended by those who responded to our “Person to Person” request for a good, reliable guide in Cape Town, South Africa, was Africa 2000 Tours (Knysna, South Africa; phone +27 44 3841262), owned and operated by Gill and Graham Maskell. What a find!

Alicante is a small city on the Costa Blanca, part of Spain’s Mediterranean coast. It is a popular stop for many of the large cruise ships traveling between Barcelona and Málaga.

Dear Globetrotter:

Welcome to the 427th issue of your monthly overseas travel magazine.

I welcome your comments and observations on this first topic.

I read with interest the article by Lew Toulmin about motion sickness (June ’11, pg. 59). I have always been prone to motion sickness, though it has lessened with age, as he mentioned it would. (However, I’m not sure it’s not picking up again.)

Boats are the worst, for me, and I had never cruised until a few years ago when I sailed from Philadelphia to Bermuda. For just a short trip on a big boat, “All will be well,” friends assured me.

My friend Eileen Mine and I took the 13-day “Eastern Europe & the Black Sea” river cruise with Grand Circle Travel (Boston, MA; 800/959-0405), May 1-13, 2010. Including round-trip air from Raleigh-Durham airport, it cost $3,564 apiece.

Aboard the River Concerto, we sailed over 1,100 miles on the Danube, with visits in Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria and, finally, Romania.

I took the 14-day cruise “God Created the Kornati Islands,” aboard the 350-passenger Aegean Odyssey, with Voyages to Antiquity (Ft. Lauderdale, FL; 877/398-1460).

The trip, Aug. 23-Sept. 7, 2010, was booked through TravLtips (Flushing, NY; 800/872-8584). (TravLtips, known for booking freighter cruises, has started booking cruise liners but only for cruises of two weeks or more.)

I have some observations about the security we experienced during our May 4-24, 2011, cruise from Dubai to Italy, including a transit of the Suez Canal and port calls in Oman, Jordan, Egypt and Israel. My husband and I were on the “Three Seas Adventure” aboard Seven Seas Voyager of Regent Seven Seas Cruises (Ft. Lauderdale, FL; 877/505-5370).