Sometimes, when you dream of a trip for a long time and begin planning far in advance, you wonder if everything will live up to your expectations. In our case, our adventure to Southern Africa (May 20-June 11, 2018) was almost everything we wanted it to be, and we returned home excited about having taken one of our best trips ever.

Making plans

I began planning this trip about a year and a half in advance. As part of my research, I looked at articles on the International Travel...

Rain, heat and humidity were constant companions for my wife, Iris, and me on our May 2018 trip to Trinidad & Tobago, Suriname, French Guiana, Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

Wilderness Explorers (phone 202/630-7698 from the US, wilderness-explorers.com) in Georgetown, Guyana, organized the Trinidad, Suriname and French Guiana portion of our trip, and Voyages Lumière (phone +00 509 3607 1321, voyageslumiere.com) of Port-au-Prince organized visits to Haiti and the Dominican...

It was dawn when the soulful call to prayer woke me up, lifting me from my bed, the ethereal quality of the cries wafting into my window like the scent of a freshly baked cartoon pie. Suddenly, a train clattered by underneath my window, breaking the spell.

I was waking up in Istanbul, near the old city walls of Constantinople. Despite the fact that I had just gotten back to sleep after waking up at 3:30, suffering from the dreaded effects of jet lag — having recently arrived...