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It is a great privilege and blessing to be able to visit Portugal twice within three months, first in December on a Viking River Cruise tour, and second in March on a Go Ahead Travels tour to Spain and Morocco commencing in Lisbon, Portugal...

At every Viking port, several different excursions with local guides are offered.  We didn’t want to visit another winery or cattle farm.  So we chose a city tour which included a tango performance.  Our local tour guide began by acknowledging that Uruguay is not a tourist “destination”...

Having visited India at least fifteen times over many decades, I’ve made friends among the musical community that has enabled me to book events in advance of my visits, filling the two short weeks with musical opportunities.  Another enabling factor is my decades-long study of Indian (Hindustani) classical music, starting in 1975 at Ali Akbar College in Marin County, California.  My knowledge of Indian music has enabled me to collaborate with Indian musicians in both classical and jazz-fusion-world-music concerts...

Svalbard is a special Arctic landscape that is attracting many tourists.

In this post, based on what I learned during our Viking River Cruise from Bucharest to Budapest, I will attempt something very difficult: to explain the history of the Balkan countries in a short essay. This journey up the Danube River has been an amazing history lesson. I’ve learned that the Balkan situation is even more complicated than the Middle East, because the Middle East crisis escalated mostly in the last century, whereas the Balkan region has been at war for more than a millennium. . .

Shinto is Japan's "native" religion, dating back at least two thousand years.  The Shinto temples in Kyoto date from the eighth century, when Kyoto was the most powerful city in Japan.

The Vietnam War, as it is known to Americans, is known in Vietnam as the American War.  Vietnam has suffered through wars with the French and the Chinese.  But Vietnam's victory over the US military in 1973 demonstrated the limits of US military hardware against a people defending their home territory.  The US faced this lesson again in Afghanistan.  The United States of America's military budget is larger than the combined military budgets of the next nine countries.  We cannot trust that we will remain safe in the world solely because of our tremendous military expenditures.