Tour de World

Why stop at just a cruise? Add on a land tour and venture into the heart of the countries you’re visiting.

By Matt Hannafin

Let's play a game and pretend you live in, say, Salina, Kansas, close to the geographic center of the United States. From Salina, Southeast Alaska is about 2,100 miles away, the Champs-Élysées is 4,650 miles, and the Great Pyramid of Giza is 6,700 miles. Point is, you're a long, long way from a lot of things, so if you take the time to go there, you probably want to stay a while and see everything you can. That's the basic idea behind cruisetours — that and the fact that cruise ships aren't really good at going inland, where a lot of the world is located.

Cruisetours are no mystery in and of themselves: They're just a cruise plus a tour, in either order. Mystery seeps in, though, when you start looking at all the cruisetour options — dozens and dozens of them, listed one after another on the cruise lines' Web sites as if you really have the time and energy to sort through them all.

Here, then, is a primer, a short reference guide to both the most popular and most distinctive cruisetours in some of the world's most popular sailing regions, along with the most prominent lines that offer them. In addition to these tours, many lines also offer occasional pre- or post-cruise trips to other destinations, from India's Taj Mahal to . . . the Great Pyramid of Giza.

Alaska

Sad but true: Even if you saw everything there was to see on your typical Inside Passage/Southeast Alaska cruise, you'd still only have experienced about one twentieth of the state. A full 550,000 square miles of it would still be terra incognita — which is a shame because that incognita is pretty incredibilis, boasting some 5,000 glaciers and 17 of the 20 tallest mountains in North America.