Features

We stood in rapt attention as our guide pointed out the figure of a bison on the cave wall. The artist had used the natural contours of the rock to give a 3-dimensional quality to the body of the animal. As the guide used his flashlight to outline the figure, we could almost imagine it was a torch like that used by a shaman or medicine man 15,000 years ago.

We were in Grotte Font-de-Gaume, a cave in the Dordogne, or Périgord, region of southwest France. This is one of the last caves with Cro-Magnon polychrome paintings still open to the public in Europe.

From Paris

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by Larry Taylor, Fullerton, CA

Japan is a land of contrasts: temples and technology, kimonos and karaoke, Buddhas and baseball. . . My wife and I have always thought we would like to visit Japan, but we had heard stories about high prices and difficulties getting around in the congested cities. These perceptions led us to put off a visit.

But in spring ’04 we decided to spend four days in the Tokyo/Kyoto area after disembarking from an Orient cruise on the Crystal Harmony. We would “get our feet wet,” as they say, with this short stay. As it turned out, all our preconceived...

by Dan Gifford, Arlington, VA (Part 6 in a series of 6)

On the island of Rarotonga, nothing can be built taller than a coconut tree. This inspired bit of zoning regulation sums up why we chose the largest of the Cook Islands over better-known South Pacific destinations like Tahiti or Fiji. No highrise hotels, no megaresorts, no way to accommodate hoards of people.

We owed our stop here to an acquaintance of mine, a remarkable woman named Diana Lockwood. Diana founded Pacific Islands Institute, a company that specializes in travel to Melanesia, Micronesia and the rest of the...