Jim Calio

In 1986 a Mumbai-based businessman named Capt. C. P. Krishnan Nair decided to start a hotel company. He named it Leela, after his wife. Nair, then 64 and at the age when most men think of retirement, had been a very successful exporter of Madras fabric during the 1950 and...

I like to think of it as "The Little Engine That Does," an old black steam engine that hauls passenger cars up a steep mountain, only to return and do it again, time after time, year after year.

The place is northern Germany, and the train in question is called...

Lying facedown in the water, my mask slightly foggy and the snorkel bobbing above my head, I am looking for fish. I'm somewhere out on the Great Barrier Reef, having flown out there from Hayman Island, a private resort in the Whitsunday islands. The trip took about 45 minutes on...

The answer to the first question is, yes, Soweto is where they had all those riots. But the answer to your second question is no, Soweto is far less dangerous than you think, especially now that tourism has begun to flourish.

In the last few years, Soweto, like many...

The hyena was dying.

It was sitting by the side of the road with its back turned toward us. It looked, at first, as if it was just ignoring us; as though it had had a big meal. We stopped our 4x4 to look, no more than ten yards...

I finally found a moose in Paris.

I had been searching for one for quite a while in the US and elsewhere, but no luck. Then, on our last day in Paris, I found it.

Let me explain. I am talking about a T-shirt....

Wang Chi Feng is a master kite-builder, a craftsman who has been making wind-born marvels since he was six years old and learning at the knee of his father, who was taught by his father, who was an artisan to the last emperor. During the Cultural Revolution, Mr. Wang was...

This is the story of a determined woman, of a badly wounded cheetah and a dream.

The woman is named Sarah Tompkins. She and her husband Mark own Samara, a private game reserve in South Africa. It's on the Eastern Cape in an area called the Great Karoo and...

Africa gets under your skin. At least it got under mine. I've only traveled there three times -- once to Zambia and twice to South Africa -- but each time I return with that feeling that I can't wait to go back. It's something I can't quite put my finger...

Here, hold the horse," said the aging groom. "I'll be right back." And with that, he handed me the lead rope attached to the halter of Secretariat, perhaps the greatest racehorse of all time, winner of the Triple Crown in 1973. Who can forget his 31-length victory in the...

Why is Iran our enemy?

Why are we in Afghanistan? Can anyone answer this?

...Osama bin Laden. It's what George W.Bush was hoping for, that trophy that would somehow justify his invasion of Iraq, the "coonskin on the wall" as Lyndon B. Johnson used to say when talking about victory in Vietnam. Now, in a curious twist of fate, it's what Barak Obama must...

Let's call it what it is--a perpetual campaign. I know, I know, Obama said specifically in his State of the Union speech that that's not what should be going on in Washington, but it is. It's naïve and pie-in-the-sky to think otherwise. The Republicans have figured it out and with...

If this was a football game, and sadly it's not, what President Obama did in his speech on the war in Afghanistan would be called a "hip fake": A player gets the ball, feints in one direction to make the defenders think he's coming their way, then runs in the...

It was snowing lightly outside in Beijing, but inside we were warm and toasty. We had just taken a cooking class in the Peninsula's kitchen, and we were preparing to head for the dining room to eat what we had made. On the way, we saw the executive chef waving...

Sooner or later, we will have to talk to the Taliban. It's inevitable, so why delay? It's clear that we cannot "win" in Afghanistan in the traditional since of "winning" -- that is, wiping out the enemy. The Afghans know that the U.S. will some day be leaving their country,...

It's an eerie feeling walking through the halls of the former Stasi headquarters in Leipzig. The building, which once housed the dreaded East German secret police until that country's dissolution in 1989, has been preserved as a museum, but that doesn't keep the ghosts away.

The building, known as the...