Private Tour

My husband and I visited Cape Town, South Africa, in October 2015. Since we had only 3½ days in this beautiful city, our time was at a premium, so we hired Emmy Levin (phone +27 082 810 6386 or email emmylevin@mweb.co.za), a licensed tour guide, to show us the highlights for two full days.
Emmy’s driver met us at the airport in a Mercedes sedan and took us directly to our hotel on the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront. For the next two mornings, at 8:30 sharp, Emmy and her driver met us at our hotel and skillfully showed us around Cape Town and its environs.

In his letter “Advice for Visitors to Bogotá” (Nov. ’15, pg. 12), Stephen O. Addison, Jr., gave a great overview of Colombia’s capital city. I can only add that my wife, Patti, and I had no difficulty getting pesos from ATMs when we were in Colombia, Oct. 20-29, 2015, and automatic teller machines are more often called cajeros automático or something similar. We found chip-and-PIN card readers to be more common in shops and hotels in Colombia than in Peru or Bolivia, where we were in late April/early May 2015.

Nine months in advance, my husband, Gary, and I (ages 70-plus) and our daughter and her spouse began planning a trip to Ireland. After much searching for tours and being frustrated with scheduling problems, we contacted ITN advertiser David McGuffin’s Exploring Europe (Middleburg, FL; 800/570-1351, http://davidmcguffin.com).

We hopped on the donkey cart at a dusty corner in the Bahariya Oasis, about half a block from our hotel. The driver of the cart spoke no English and we spoke no Arabic. The lead donkey walked with a slight limp as we started down the main road.