December 2008

In his November ’08 “All Aboard!” column, Jay Brunhouse wrote about Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and described the KL Tower as having “the world’s first revolving restaurant.”

Responding to a reader’s request (Oct. ’08, pg. 94), I know of a credit card with NO 3% foreign exchange fee. Any card from CapitalOne.com has this feature. My choice is the “No Hassle Cash Rewards Credit Card.”

This one also has NO annual fee plus an excellent cash-back program, which doubles for groceries and drugs at supermarkets as well as for gasoline.

AVI BASS

DeKalb, IL

On a trip my wife and I made to Scandinavia in September ’08, we found that in Denmark, all charges made to a foreign credit card had an extra fee added to the total sale. This fee is to recoup the amount the vendor must pay the credit card company to process a foreign charge.

In our case, 4.75% was added to all charges made on our Visa card. This was the norm at hotels, restaurants, shops, government-operated museums — every place we went.

This happened only in Denmark. It didn’t happen in Sweden, Finland or the Netherlands.

CHARLES GREEN

My husband, Alan, and I took a cruise from Amsterdam to Budapest, July 22-Aug. 6, 2008, with Vantage Deluxe World Travel (Boston, MA; 800/322-6677). All in all, it was a super trip and we highly recommend it.

Shortly before departing, however, we were informed that the ship was converting all charges to euros. Given the state of the dollar at that time, this was understandable. As with most cruise lines these days, all charges on the ship could be put on a credit card, which we did.

Rick Steves, in his September ’08 article on Portugal, missed an important point when he commented on the country’s changes and the improvements in roads and road travel.

The management and staff of Rail Travel Center (125 Main. St., Box 205, Putney, VT 05346; 800/458-5394, www.rail travelcenter.com) will be retiring in 2010. They are planning to fill their last two years with old favorites as well as some new tours.

I have been on several of their tours and have always been pleased. Indeed, their “Springtime in the Alps,” which I took 10 years ago, unquestionably remains the best tour I have ever been on. We stayed in three cities and made day trips using the Swiss rail card.

At the completion of an April ’08 Silk Road tour in China, I traveled on my own from Shanghai to Hong Kong for my 15th visit since 1961. While Hong Kong has changed since the British left and is now rather expensive, it is still one of my favorite cities.

As many ITN readers know, the new, world-class international airport is located on Lantao Island and is 35 to 40 miles from Kowloon. I stayed on Kowloon, from which there are express trains leaving every 20 minutes for various locations in the former colony.

My husband, Clyde, and I were in Orissa, India, in February ’07. Like Joyce Bruck (Sept. ’08, pg. 40), we visited Lake Chilka hoping to see the migrating birds in that famous bird sanctuary and were disappointed. A few ducks swam by our boat but nothing terribly exotic or exciting. At Kalijai Temple, on an island in the lake, we saw several free-range chickens.

Our driver queried our private boatman, who reported that the changing weather patterns were at fault. It was so warm to the north that the birds didn’t bother to come south.

When my husband, Frank, and I planned our trip to India, we wondered how we would react to seeing people living in third-world slums or on the street, and to beggars, especially children. Would we feel so guilty about having the money to travel that we couldn’t enjoy our trip?