by Brita Bishop, Dallas, TX
“You are American?” asked the young man behind me in the passport control line at the Damascus airport. “We get few Americans. You will be very welcome.”
The two men checking my passport echoed this sentiment. “American? Welcome, welcome!”
So started an exciting trip to Syria in April 2010.
For three days in May 2009, my wife, Rose, and I were shown around the Abergavenny part of Wales by good friends of ours from England, Betty and Alan Madden. The Angel Hotel was our base (July ’10, pg. 48).
December’s photo was a real stumper. It depicts a minaret of the Great Mosque in Gabès, southern Tunisia.
According to legend, near the end of the 14th century a pious woman, Penh, discovered four Buddha images floating down the Tonlé Sap river in a hollow log. To commemorate the remarkable event, she commissioned the construction of a phnom (hill) at the site and a temple atop it. The city that exists there today is named after her creation, Phnom Penh (Penh’s Hill).
by Claus Hirsch, New York City, NY
Pilgrimages fascinate me — the ritual, the pageantry, the dedication of the pilgrims, their willingness to undergo hardship and their sense of fulfillment upon the achievement of their quest. My own “pilgrimages” have been secular.
In August ’08 I was simply a traveler drawn to Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain for the annual late-July festival of Santiago, the biblical Saint James.
My husband, Bernard, and I were part of a 15-member “Iraqi Kurdistan” tour in October ’09 with Distant Horizons (Long Beach, CA; 800/333-1240). The land price for the 12-day/11-night trip was $5,860 per person.
