Leaving Madrid, we took two days to travel to Lisbon on the Portuguese coast. Along the way, we stopped in several smaller cities for tours, meals, souvenirs, and sleep. Three of the towns, all UNESCO World Heritage Site, were particularly interesting. Segovia, the first of these smaller towns, is famous for three landmarks: an aqueduct built by the Romans about 2,000 years ago; a fantastic Gothic cathedral; and Alcazar, the real life castle used as a m...

We arrived in Madrid early Thursday morning and, after meeting our guide, Peter, at the hotel, walked through a lively historic neighborhood to the Thyssen Museum where we saw several piece of great art and had a fine lunch. Later, we met our tour group (only 19 total) for a welcome dinner in a nearby restaurant. Friday morning, we did a quick driving tour of Madrid, stopping at the ancient palace, before spending a couple of hours at the fabulous Prada Museum wi...

After four hours on a tight-fitting “speed boat” (plus 30 minutes at Vietnam customs along the river and another 60 minutes at Cambodia customs, neither of which has any line of demarcation across the Mekong), we arrived to Phnom Penh for a brief visit. We went promptly to the Killing Fields memorial, a tasteful yet somber reminder of the atrocities perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge where we were able to visit a memorial and walk among a few of the exc...

Leaving Saigon, we spent the next two and half days exploring the Mekong River Delta, traveling southwest to Can Tho and then northwest to Chau Doc, sometimes by boat and sometimes by bus, before taking a “speed boat” up the river into Cambodia, arriving in Phnom Penh. Along the way, we traveled by tourist boat to a landing where we walked along a rural neighborhood built into the jungle, surrounded by flowering plants, fruit gardens, a...

Ho Chi Minh City—still widely known as Saigon: airport codes, business names, our guide’s casual references—has become a major international city, population 8 million, full of gleaming high rises and such modern amenities as McDonald’s (the first ones in Vietnam) and 7Eleven. English and French are on many signs, instead of or in addition to Vietnamese. Walking around HCMC is not that dissimilar to walking around London. We arriv...