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'Only the train can get you there,' the bartender said as we gaped at miles of forbidding, snow-covered mountains and endless miles of lonely taiga. 'With the plane, you never […]

Travel is broadening, according to the old saying, and even a brief visit to a foreign place can expand one's horizons amazingly. A trip I made to Guatemala and Honduras […]

Imagine people so wealthy that they sent their clothes from the heart of the Amazon Basin to Europe to be laundered, and built an opera house in the jungle just [...]

Only two pair of national capitals are within 35 miles of one another. Brazzaville in the Republic of the Congo and Kinshasa in Zaire (Democratic Republic of the Congo) are […]

The collapse of the Soviet empire offered, among other things, the opportunity for travelers to visit places that were once off limits, to experience firsthand cultures and climates and to [...]

When I first thought about visiting Bulgaria, I was alarmed to realize I had absolutely no associations with this Balkan country. Short of being able to spot Bulgaria on the […]

When living as a graduate student in West Berlin in 1965-66, I frequently traveled to East Berlin to enjoy the opera, theater and museums. My experience with the East was […]

In the United States an economic downturn usually means that many workers will lose their jobs. Once a company lets employees go, in most cases, all ties are severed-the company [...]

If anyone invited you to take a centipede through two countries, you might reasonably balk, unless, that is, the centipede is the Shongololo Express, which spends 16 days carting passengers [...]

As the Baltic countries moved out from under the domination of the Soviet Union, they took a sharp turn Westward and set about joining with Europe to create their future. […]

Tired from the plane trip and from my first long, investigatory walk, I flopped into bed and fell sound asleep. Suddenly, the light streaming in the window woke me. Confused […]

The article features the Baikal-Amur Mainline (BAM), a railroad track which is about 400 miles north of and parallel to the Trans-Siberian Railway. It was originally planned as an alternate route to the Trans-Siberian in the 1930s by skirting the Chinese border as it travels south of Lake Baikal from Moscow to Russia's Pacific port of Vladivostok. The Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945 brought most work on the BAM to a stop. Works re-started under Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev in 1974.