This two-week tour of Turkey was managed by Go Ahead Vacations, a Boston-based tour company. Susan and I had traveled using their services once before, to Italy in 2006. We decided that for a country like Turkey, with which we were completely unfamiliar, that going with an organized tour was the best way to see the most sights in a short time without having to worry about managing any of the details ourselves. . .
Wadi Rum is the landscape used in the hit movie The Martian (starring Matt Damon) and countless other movies.
Traveling on the segment from New York’s JFK airport to Israel, I was coincidentally seated next to a guy from Reno. He was an engineer named Paul, traveling to Israel for his company. From previous familiarity, I correctly guessed the company, Ormat Technologies. . .
Whenever I travel to “old Europe,” that is, the continent of Europe, I’m reminded that Europeans are much more aware of history than Americans are. They see the old cathedrals, the castles, the city walls, the statues, the artwork…all products of their long history. . .
Our fourth Viking port of call was the country of Panama, at the port of its huge modern capital, Panama City. Panama originally was part of its Southern neighbor Columbia. But American “gunboat diplomacy” separated Panama early in the 20th century into an American “protectorate”. This allowed the US to proceed with the ambitious project of constructing the Panama Canal, whose length of approximately fifty miles qualifies it as one of the greatest engineering projects in human history.
Welcome to a quick visual tour of Abu Dhabi. All of the photos below were taken in the course of a two hour bus tour of downtown Abu Dhabi, which is the capital of the seven member confederation, the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
Flying from Beijing to Shanghai, Susan and I boarded the Viking cruise ship Yi-Dun. We had the pleasure of a Shanghai city tour in which we viewed an ancient garden containing ornate buildings from the Ming and Qing dynasties.
The skyline of Shanghai is impressive, containing the world's third tallest building, the Shanghai Tower with 128 floors, at 2073 feet high. (The world's tallest building is Dubai's Burj Khalifa at 2722 feet high. The second highest is the Merdeka in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, at 2227 feet.)--source Wikipedia