We’re very aware that all serious travelers aim to tour the Galapagos Islands, and that there is a lot of competition to take them there. With the launch of the new, 48-passenger, environmentally state-of-the-art yacht La Pinta, we offer travelers the opportunity to explore the fabled islands in good conscience – and comfort. More...

Various Options – departing December 16, 23 or 30th, 2009

For more information please call 800-777-8183

Back to top

There may be no other country on the planet that contains such a rich collection of worlds as South Africa, from the wild game lands of Kruger to the urbanity of Cape Town, with a taste of just about everything in between, including the fine vintages of the Wine Country. More...

13 Days – daily departures

For more information please call 800-777-8183

On this in-depth Okavango exploration we have ample time to savor the Delta’s subtle and spectacular sceneries, from shady, pacific lagoons and meandering waterways and riverine forests to some of Africa’s finest game viewing. More...

13 Days – daily departures

For more information please call 800-777-8183

Back to top

Our meticulously crafted Essence of a Continent is a grand introduction to Africa’s golden joys, taking us off the too-trod path to some of the country’s finest and vastest wildlife reserves. We begin in the south, flying from Nairobi to Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa, the Chyulu, for three nights at the incomparable Campi ya Kanzi... More...

12 days – daily departures

For more information please call 800-777-8183

Back to top

Tanzania’s wildlife is as rich and bountiful as any place on earth, but there is something else that commands our attention: its gentle people, its great soaring landscapes— exceptional, even for a continent as vast and soaring as Africa. More...

9 days – daily departures

For more information please call 800-777-8183

Back to top

Our specially trained guides take us from Morocco’s gleaming Atlantic and Mediterranean beaches inland to the Sahara, a sea of sand which could swallow up 22 Californias. We roam Casablanca, Rabat, Fez, and Marrakech—among other fabled places in a country filled with them. We delight in introducing our travelers to a Morocco that is behind the well-traveled scenes. More...

10 or 17 days – Call for dates

For more information please call 800-777-8183

Back to top

We spend four days on a gem of a Nile cruiser— your choice of boats includes the new, all-suite Star Goddess—and our arrangements are deluxe, including the services of a private Egyptologist. Note, too, that our trip price includes domestic airfares (not always the case), our land touring is done in private vehicles with a private guide... More...

11 days – weekly departures

For more information please call 800-777-8183

Back to top

Almost twenty-five hundred years ago Herodotus cautioned his readers, “I am going to talk at some length about Egypt because it has produced more monuments which beggar description than anywhere else in the world.” Time has only added luster (and even more monuments) to his words. You begin with two days of sightseeing in and around Cairo and the Pyramids... More...

16 Days – weekly departures

For more information please call 800-777-8183

Back to top

Of earth’s 37 billion or so acres, very few are as stunningly lovely as those we savor on this trip. And of Melville’s “attending marvels of a thousand Patagonian sights and sounds,” we’ve chosen the most marvelous—with some pride, to tell the truth. More...

14 Days – December 21, 2009 to January 3rd, 2010

For more information please call 800-777-8183

Back to top

For some of us, the Incas are rather hazily lumped in there with, let’s see, the Aztecs —no, they were up north—the Incas, yes . . . Conquistadors. Pizarro, wasn’t it? (Or was it Cortés?) Turns out we should have been more alert; these were absolutely fascinating folks, world-class builders and thinkers. And the story of their downfall is heartrending. More...

7 Days – daily departures

For more information please call 800-777-8183

Back to top

Guatemala is an often overlooked country, rich with tremendous scenery, Mayan glories, colonial grandeur, and cheery, heart-involving folks. As our Brady Binstadt says, “These are some of my favorite places in all of the Americas for a full-on cultural experience.” More...

9 Days – daily departures

For more information please call 800-777-8183

Back to top

Colombia is one of those places that needs a new press agent. Not to minimize its very real troubles, but the vast majority of the country, in addition to being lushly gorgeous and culturally engaging, is entirely pacific and cheerfully welcoming (else we would not so eagerly go there). More...

9 Days – daily departures

For more information please call 800-777-8183

Back to top

Taking advantage of the long days at the height of the austral summer, we weave in and out of sea-mountain passages and past rookeries where penguins are returning to court and build nests.  This is the perfect time of year to glimpse fluffy penguin chicks brooding on their parents’ feet or huddled together in large communal crèches. More...

11 Days – December 19, 2009 to December 29th, 2009
20 Days – December 28, 2009 to January 16th, 2010
12 Days – December 29, 2009 to January 9th, 2010

For more information please call 800-777-8183

Back to top

Our 20 years of going there have taught us that if you want to visit classic destinations like Tortuguero, Monteverde, Arenal, and Manuel Antonio, you’re well advised to stay off the beaten path, as we do in Classic Costa Rica. Even better is exploring that rarer path with our expert naturalist guide. More...

9 Days – daily departures

For more information please call 800-777-8183

Back to top

We visit many of the highlights of Classic Costa Rica, but for those of us with a taste for outings a little more strenuous, we bike, snorkel, hike, and raft, giving us a different take on the country’s natural glories. Our evenings are spent at the same caliber of restful and rewardingly comfortable lodges and hotels. More...

8 Days –December 24 to December 31st, 2009,
December 26, 2009 to January 2nd, 2010

For more information please call 800-777-8183

Back to top

We get nicely off the beautiful, but sometimes too-trod path on this 10-day Costa Rican idyll. Touching down at Liberia, in the country’s far northwest, we make a short drive to the ultra-pleasant Hotel Borinquen Mountain Resort and Spa. The next day we do a little hiking on Rincón de la Vieja volcano, then visit one of the national parks — either Palo Verde or Santa Rosa — both windows into rare and wonderfully lush biosystems... More...

10 Days – daily departures

For more information please call 800-777-8183

Back to top

This year we’re pleased to again offer a festival trip to the central Bhutanese village of Trongsa over the winter holidays. The Trongsa tsechu, undoubtedly the region’s most anticipated social event of the year, is a boisterous celebration of the country’s patron saint. Guru Rinpoche, who brought Buddhism to the Himalaya some 1300 years ago, is honored today in a vibrant, clamoring ritual of music and dance. More...

8 Days – December 20 to December 30th, 2009

For more information please call 800-777-8183

Back to top

The Nabji Trail brilliantly unfurls the kingdom’s postharvest/ winter beauties as it serpentines through central Bhutan’s Jigme Singye Wangchuk National Park. On our six-day, low-altitude trek (never rising above 5000 feet or so), we’ll camp in high GeoEx style, looked after by our crack Bhutanese trekking crews, encountering a quintet of prosperous agricultural villages. More...

16 Days – December 16, 2009 to January 3rd, 2010

For more information please call 800-777-8183

Back to top

Paradise, Eden. We use these words (and, every once in a while, the dreadfully shopworn Shangri-La) to describe Bhutan. We try to avoid gilding already resplendent lilies, but we’re committed to accuracy; as far as we and our many Bhutan travelers are concerned, a trip to the kingdom is a little like going to heaven without all the bother and expense of dying. (Thanks to the master, P. G. Wodehouse, for that line.) More...

12 Days – daily departures

For more information please call 800-777-8183

Back to top

A winter trip, when touristic solitude reigns, which takes us (and our driver and guide) to a quintet of new luxury hostelries—the superb Amans in Paro, Punakha, Gangtey, and Thimphu and, at trip’s end, Paro’s new Zhiwaling. They’ve added lots of whistles and bells in the bargain: dinner at the home of Bhutanese friends, lovely farm and school visits, prayer flag ceremonies... More...

9 Days – daily departures

For more information please call 800-777-8183

Back to top

India is more than a repository of an ancient civilization. Its tumultuous and romantic history has shaped a country unlike any other, a lively and ever-changing mosaic. Women in saris of seeming impossible combinations of colors vie for attention at bustling bazaars. Vividly painted mud-walled homes stand in stark contrast to the vast desert or the chaotic cities. More...

12 Days – daily departures

For more information please call 800-777-8183

Back to top

Nepal is where many of us got serious about our love affair with mountains, with travel, and with the varietal inhabitants of the welcoming world. In A Nepal Medley, our Michael Steigerwald, Nicole Peelle, and Keegen Brookes proudly display this much-loved land in its grand variety, offering everything from Himalayan lodge-to-lodge hikes to river rafting to visits to the country’s jungly lowlands, where tigers are still to be seen. More...

28 Days – daily departures

For more information please call 800-777-8183

Back to top

This concise introduction to Tibet and its stalwart culture concentrates on the country’s heartland: an introductory night in Tsedang and the Yarlung Valley, three nights in Lhasa, and then through gargantuan Himalayan scenery to the great temples and monasteries of Gyantse and Shigatse via a picnic brunch at famously blue Yamdrok Lake... More...

8 Days – daily departures

For more information please call 800-777-8183

Back to top

We begin our far-ranging Ozian jaunt with an afternoon tour of Melbourne, topped off with a visit to one of its beautifully restored theaters—good fun, but just the barest hint of what Mark Twain called Australia’s “surprises and adventures, and incongruities and incredibilities.” An afternoon charter flight takes us to famous Kangaroo Island, southwest from Adelaide at the entrance to the Gulf Saint Vincent... More...

12 days – daily departures

For more information please call 800-777-8183

Back to top

After flying to Christchurch, we drive up to the Wilderness Lodge at Arthur’s Pass, high in the Southern Alps, for guided walks in the beech forest, a visit to a local sheep farm, a mountain lake walk, and more. Crossing to the west coast via the TranzAlpine train, we visit Paparoa National Park’s Punakaiki Rocks, a series of enchanting limestone towers misted with the spray of geyser-like blowholes... More...

13 days – daily departures

For more information please call 800-777-8183

Back to top

SOUTH EAST ASIA
Click here for more trips in Laos

Little-visited southern Laos is bursting with ethnic diversity and color. Hills rich with unique tribes and customs, not to mention remarkable landscapes: lush green rice fields, coffee and tea plantations, surging waterfalls. We wend up to the cool and faraway Boloven Plateau, explore a host of pre-Angkoran temples, venture into the remote provinces of Attapeu and Sekong, and boat on the Mekong through the Khong Islands. More...

11 days – daily departures

For more information please call 800-777-8183

Back to top

Taking a gander at the map, we see that this zesty trip takes us neatly from Bangkok into Cambodia and farther into Vietnam, ending in Saigon. What the map will not divulge is the rarity of crossing these borders (putting this trip high on the gee-whiz scale for border-crossing buffs). More...

15 days – daily departures

For more information please call 800-777-8183

Back to top

"This is Burma, and it will be quite unlike any land you know about,” wrote Kipling. Compelling highpoints of this slumbering, courageous, kindly land: Yangon (whose Shwedagon Temple the Raj’s laureate called “a golden mystery . . . a beautiful winking wonder that blazed in the sun”); the Plain of Temples at Bagan; a deluxe cruise along the ever-shifting extravaganza of the Irrawaddy River... More...

12 days – daily departures

For more information please call 800-777-8183

Back to top

Myanmar (or Burma, if you prefer, which we often do) is a country that quickly inspires great affection. Quietly beautiful, not much blessed by its recent history, it nonetheless presents itself with what H. G. Wells called “obdurate humor.” The Burmese, despite their woes, are eager to see us and proud to showcase their country (we would not go there if we thought otherwise). More...

12 days – daily departures

For more information please call 800-777-8183

Back to top

Vietnam lures us with unstinting beauty, amiable people, and a culture that has bent to many winds, yet has remained deeply rooted.

We make our way slowly up the country’s arc, dallying in Saigon’s historic sites, temples, and markets, eating in its latest and best restaurants, sipping coffee in its sidewalk cafés, and strolling its bubbling streets. More...

13 days – daily departures

For more information please call 800-777-8183

Back to top

One of the world’s most consequential rivers, the Mekong begins its 2,600-mile course at over 17,000 feet on the Tibetan Plateau and, weaving its way through a great crunch of gorges near Gyelthang, drops into Southeast Asia, where it nurtures a passel of peoples on its way to its delta on the South China Sea. More...

12 days – daily departures

For more information please call 800-777-8183

Back to top