Through the recommendation of our hotel, the Four Points by Sheraton, we were fortunate to have the guide services of Emilio R. D’Angelo (phone +1 507 659 829 41 or e-mail emilio.tours@hotmail.com) on one day of our Jan. 13-19, 2010, trip to Panama.

Excluding park entrance fees, we paid $120 for our six-hour tour in his van, seeing the canal, the home of Manuel Noriega, the Old City, the craft market and the fish market, where we ate a delicious lunch of fresh-caught corvina for $5...

We were aboard the 120-passenger, all-suite Spirit of Oceanus (formerly the “Renaissance Five”) on the itinerary “Song of India” with CruiseWest (Seattle, WA; 888/851-8133, www.cruisewest.com). Booking through Worldview Travel (800/627-8726), we paid $8,500 per person, excluding international airfare but including all gratuities, a precruise hotel overnight on March 20, 2010, and a post-cruise day room on April 5. All but two excursions were included and were very good. Our lecturer and...

The following is supplemental advice for your first trip to Egypt, based upon experiences from an April ’10 trip I made with my wife and several friends. These tips and observations cover topics that either were not addressed or, more commonly, did not receive sufficient emphasis in the guidebooks and Internet resources we consulted pretrip.

These tips only complement your guidebooks. Guidebooks contain lots of good information and useful suggestions that are omitted here (e.g., don’t...