Columns

For years the cruise industry was a sellers’ market, with more eager passengers than cabins. But with the global economic crisis, many passengers are staying home, the cruising fleet is overbuilt and sellers are desperate for your business. This is good news if you can afford to go cruising, and at some of the discounts available you may be surprised how cheap it is.

In this column, I’ll describe how to research your cruise and some of the unusual discounts available. Throughout I will give examples on how to use the tools involved and have a great cruise at a great price.

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Its name means “mound of the dead,” but in its time Lothal was anything but moribund. It was a thriving seaport, part of one of the world’s oldest civilizations.

In the same way that Egyptian civilization developed along the Nile, Mesopotamian on the Tigris-Euphrates rivers and Chinese along the Yangtze, there arose a civilization in the fourth millennium BC in the Indus River Valley in the area that is now Pakistan and northwestern India. It was called the Harappan Civilization, also the Indus Valley Civilization after the river which gave it birth.

Two of the best-known...

by Julie Skurdenis (part 3 of 3 on Balkans)

My husband, Paul, and I had visited Lake Ohrid on a trip to Albania in 2008. We loved what we saw then. Since Lake Ohrid is shared by both Albania and Macedonia, we decided we wanted to see the Macedonian side of the lake as well on our tour of Serbia, Kosovo, Macedonia and Montenegro arranged by Bestway Tours & Safaris.

Lake Ohrid is one of the oldest lakes on Earth, together with Baikal in Russia and Titicaca in Bolivia and Peru. It is also beautiful, with villas and little villages dotting its shores.

We had just...