In March 2021, after being cooped up for 12 months and knowing our vaccination regimen would be completed the beginning of April, my wife, Susan, and I were ready to spread our wings and take flight. The question was “Where?”

Our first step was to contact a good friend, Jim O’Brien, owner of Native Eye Travel (Brantham, Suffolk, England; phone +44 1473 328546, www.nativeeyetravel.com), who has worked with us in the past, but many of his scheduled small-group tours...

This story began just before the coronavirus pandemic was recognized and travel was shut down, and it ended in April 2021.

The morning of Feb. 7, 2020, my wife and I were about to leave for the airport in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania — eventually to arrive in Luang Prabang, Laos, via Toronto, Seoul and Bangkok, for a tour with Wild Frontiers (Sparks, NV; 844/540-2714, wildfrontierstravel.com) — when we learned that our Air Canada flight from Pittsburgh to Toronto, Canada, was...

My husband, Paul, and I embarked the M/S Marina in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on Feb. 24, 2020, for the “Mystical Fjords” itinerary of Oceania Cruises (855/335-2588, www.oceaniacruises.com). The cruise was scheduled to end in Lima, Peru, on March 15, 2020.

A sense of unease hung over our trip, and not only because of COVID-19 fears. Civil unrest had ignited throughout Chile a few months earlier, in October, triggered by a CLP30 peso (4%) increase in metro fares in Santiago...