There's no better place for Americans to visit an Islamic country than Turkey. Several years ago, my wife, Sandra Wells, and I met Bora Ozkok, a dynamo whose zest for his native country and three decades of experience have made his Cultural Folk Tours www.boraozkok.com America's leading specialist in Turkey....

What if I told you the Egyptian capital of Cairo, with 18 million residents and workers in the city each day, has almost no crime of any kind? Despite the recent anti-government turmoil and rare acts of terrorism (usually in distant resort towns), Egypt is a much safer place to...

"Where the heck is Uzbekistan and why would you go there?" asked some of our friends when my wife told them where we were going in April 2008. The first question was easy to answer: it is a country bigger than California with 28 million people, a former member of...

Mention Colombia to Americans and "cocaine" is probably the first word that will spring to mind. Next might be "communist," as in the longtime insurgency. But "classical music" definitely isn't the third c-word association.

Yet the International Music Festival in the coastal resort city of Cartagena just completed...