June 2009

by Julie Skurdenis

by Deanna Palic

by Lew Toulmin

by Wayne Wirtanen

This month I’m going to discuss several aspects of today’s travel insurance scene.

STA Travel and travelers over 35

by Teresa O'Kane, San Jose, CA

In Koh Chang, Thailand, we met an 18-year-old Canadian girl who told my husband, Scott, and me about the Tiger Temple outside Kanchanaburi. “You can touch tigers!” she said.

Bruce Hardy wrote of his memories of Trieste, Italy (April ’09, pg. 39), which he last visited in 2001, and it was asked if anyone had been to the city recently. We were there in August ’08, and it was everything Mr. Hardy wrote about and much more. Had we only known, we would have stayed more than two days.

There are two marvelous castles: Miramare and Duino. We had time to see only one, so we chose Miramare (€4 admission). An excellent audio guide was available.

My wife, Verne, and I took a tour to Egypt and Jordan in November ’08, staying in a number of excellent hotels. In each hotel as well as on our Nile riverboat, the beds were fitted with thick comforters. We were not comforted. We found it difficult to maintain an adequate temperature during the night, being either too hot with it on or too cold with it off.

Comforters must be more difficult to maintain than sheets and blankets, yet they now seem to be widely used in Southeast Asia, South America, the Middle East and even at many hotels in the United States.

In the article on the Azores in the April ’09 issue (“Far Horizons,” pg. 72), the writer states, “Today Pico is regarded as one of the best whale-watching venues in the world, with a viewing season running from April to October.”

I have no doubt the author was told this, as multiple people told me the same during a visit in September ’08. Of course, most of them had never been anywhere else but the Azores. One was a local guide, who then casually mentioned that I was lucky to have seen a whale, as she had been whale-watching three times and never seen one.

The first thing our local guide asked my wife, Nancy, and me when we arrived in Chennai, India, was the departure time of our flight to Bangkok two days hence. After a month of travel throughout India without a hitch, we wondered about his question.

The next day he advised us to be at Madras International Airport (MAA) at least three hours before our scheduled departure (our flight left at midnight around Dec. 23, 2008). We thought this to be a bit excessive, but we followed his advice; in fact, we arrived at the airport 3½ hours before our scheduled departure.

On an independent trip to Venezuela with two friends in December ’08, we visited Mérida.