Journeys

Narrated tours across the planet: great rivers, wonders of the world, explorers' routes and more.

5 to explore

Watch Journey Building the Panama Canal Before the Panama Canal, ships going between the Atlantic and Pacific had to sail around the tip of South America. A French company tried to dig a canal across Panama in the 1880s but failed. The United States took over in 1904, defeated dangerous diseases spread by mosquitoes, cut through mountains and built huge locks. The 80-kilometer canal opened in 1914.
Watch Journey The first flights across the Atlantic In 1919, airplanes crossed the Atlantic Ocean for the first time. A US Navy flying boat, NC-4, crossed in stages, and then John Alcock and Arthur Brown flew nonstop from Newfoundland to Ireland in about 16 hours. In 1927, Charles Lindbergh flew alone and nonstop from New York to Paris in 33 and a half hours.
Watch Journey The first voyagers of the Pacific Over thousands of years, the ancestors of today's Pacific Islanders sailed double-hulled canoes across the Pacific and settled islands from Samoa and Tonga to Hawaiʻi, Rapa Nui and Aotearoa New Zealand. They had no compasses or maps: navigators read the stars, the ocean swells, the clouds and the birds.
Watch Journey The Silk Road The Silk Road was not one road but a web of trade routes, about 6,400 kilometers long, linking China with Central Asia and the Mediterranean. For more than 1,500 years, caravans carried silk, tea, spices and glass, and travelers shared ideas, beliefs and inventions.
Watch Journey The spice routes by sea For centuries, ships crossed the Indian Ocean between East Africa, Arabia, India, Sri Lanka and the islands of Southeast Asia, carrying spices such as pepper, cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg. Sailors used the monsoon winds, which blow one way for half the year and the other way for the rest, to make their voyages.