Travel

At Vienna's Sudbahnhof station, I caught the 7:58 a.m. train to Graz and, via Maribor in eastern Slovenia, to Zagreb, Croatia. From flat Austrian farmland the train ascended into the mountainous southeast.

The road from Bagan to Inle Lake claws its way up a series of white-knuckle switchbacks from the hot, dusty floodplain of the Ayeyarwady River into the rugged mountains of central Burma's Shan Plateau.

By Jens Ourom www.jensourom.com Aphrodite. Apollo. Hermes. Poseidon. Zeus. You. One of these individuals is unlike the others. However, all possess the unique opportunity to dwell upon Mount Olympus, whether it is for a night, or eternity.

The Malikha-2, with her long sleek hull and gleaming white superstructure, looks conspicuously out of place among the motley fleet of rusty barges and workboats tied up at the Mandalay waterfront.

The Norton bombsight was said to be so accurate that a WWII airplane could plop a bomb into a pickle barrel from 10,000 feet.

It was still dark when the clang of monastery bells joined the chorus of roosters crowing in the new day. I slipped out of bed, made a cup of the hotel’s ersatz coffee and took it out to our second floor balcony.

When Helen Mabey returns to her home on Great Barrier Island from a few days in Auckland, New Zealand — two hours away by car ferry — she’s relieved.

www.cultureworx.photostockplus.com Although first visited by an adventurous surveyor by the name of David Thompson back in 1810, for the last 100 years Jasper National Park has been known by the first name of fur trader and post manager Jasper Haws.

Lazily winding up California’s scenic Highway 101, a few hours north of the steep cable car-lined streets and barking sea lions of San Francisco, we arrived at Humboldt Redwoods State Park, home to earth’s oldest and tallest residents.

From our perch atop the Oriental Pearl the freighters on the Huangpu River below us look like toy boats in a sparkling fairyland of light. On the opposite shore the floodlit buildings of the Bund cast upside-down reflections on the night water.