After having to cancel 2020 travel plans and finally spending several days in Berlin to do the fabulous museums before joining a Viking cruise to Prague, I’d like to suggest a small hotel in Berlin, Hommage à Magritte (Grolmanstraße 32 33, 10623 Berlin, Germany; phone +49 308 9567087, hommage-a-magritte.com), which was recommended by a reader who answered my “Person to Person” inquiry in ITN.

The hotel occupies the first (our second) floor of a building in a...

My wife, Michaele, and I and another couple we often travel with booked a private 10-day trip to Madagascar through Kensington Tours (Wil­mington, DE; 888/903-2001, www.kensingtontours.com) in June 2016. It started with a side excursion to Morondava, in the central portion of the country’s west coast.

The morning of our all-day outing, we were up before sunrise and ate breakfast by candlelight, since the city’s generators were not yet running. We then drove east for a...

With much anticipation (and a little apprehension), in late February 2020 I set out for a long-awaited adventure to the Arabian Sea islands of Socotra, a small archipelago that is part of Yemen. Located about 150 miles east of Somalia and 240 miles south of the Arabian Peninsula, it is just a speck on a map.

Yemen was one of two United Nations-recognized countries I had yet to step foot in during my 20-plus years of exploring the world. Due to the continuing unrest in mainland Yemen,...