Los Llanos - Venezuela

Who would guess that the highlight of our trip to Venezuela would be three days staying in a spartan cabin on a flat 100,000-acre cattle ranch? The plains of Los Llanos cover a third of the country, from the Andes to the Orinoco. The climate is uncomfortably extreme – torrential rain and floods, followed by searing heat, wind and drought – but we have, by chance, arrived in February after the rains, and before the worst of the heat. This is the best time to visit (although, apparently, people visit throughout the year), when the plentiful wildlife congregates at dwindling waterholes. I feel I have stepped into a childhood I-Spy book in which each illustration has a fascinating, but improbable, assortment of animals and birds.

We arrive at the ranch, three hours' drive from Barinas, one of Venezuela's largest towns, late at night, bumping through pot-holes, and halting every few minutes to wake capybaras blocking our route. Hefty-headed rodents the size of large dogs, the capybaras are reluctant to budge, but eventually trudge grumpily to the verge, followed by gaggles of adorable babies.

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Mendoza - Argentina

Why go to the Napa Valley when you can fly to Mendoza, in western Argentina, drink more exotic and affordable wines, and go horseback riding across the magnificent Andes Mountains with sexy Latin meat eaters?
With more than a thousand wineries, including boutique bodegas like Vistalba, La Azul and Achaval-Ferrer, Mendoza has become one of the hottest destinations in South America, even for those who can’t tell a malbec from a tempranillo.

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Antigua

The small wooden cottage atop a steep hill has no air conditioning, but a soft breeze through louvered windows flutters the sheer white curtains at my balcony door. The trade winds that once carried tall ships from around the world to Antigua today carry to my room the smell of tropical flowers.

Andrew Michelin, whose family came from Europe to the Caribbean several generations ago, says he planned every detail of his small resort so visitors would have a true Caribbean experience. The roof of each cottage, for example, is made of galvanized metal, so if there happens to be a shower during your stay, you'll hear the sound of raindrops popping off a tin roof.

"When you first wake up, I don't want you to think even for a second, 'Where am I?"' Michelin says. "I want you to awaken and feel where you are, smell where you are, hear where you are."

That sense of place, of foreignness, of being far from home, goes a long way toward explaining the appeal of a small resort. Then too there is the intimacy that comes with being one of a handful of guests, rather than one of an anonymous crowd of hundreds moving through a high-rise megaresort.

The Cocos resort, where I spend my first two nights in Antigua, has just 19 cottages. There are no lines of people waiting to register when I arrive around lunchtime. In fact, I'm the only guest in sight, and the receptionist offers me something to drink before asking my name.

This is my Caribbean dream. When I open the door of my room, I want to see not a long hallway and a blank elevator door, but blue water and green hills. I like my flowers alive and growing, not arranged in a giant vase in the lobby. I come to escape lines, not to join them. Sure, I understand the appeal of on-site fitness centers, kids clubs, water sports, organized games, poolside fashion shows and the huge "native" buffets common in megaresorts, but I'll exchange all that for the feeling of escape from the modern world.

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Pantanal - Brazil

"Would you like to get your feet wet?" asked Chico. It was dawn over the Brazilian Pantanal and he was piloting our hot air balloon so that the basket in which we stood skimmed the trees and I could lean out and scoop up handfuls of leaves. He lowered us gently towards the lake which was black with caimans, a sort of junior crocodile.

Chico and I jumped up to sit on the sides of the basket as it hit the water. The caiman scurried grumpily out of our way. Water began to pour gently through the wicker of the basket, as the early rays of the sun glinted across the lake.

I felt wonderfully far from home and from my comfort zone. I had travelled 6,500 miles to find the hyacinth macaw, the largest member of the parrot family. Pairs of them had flown past our balloon, shrieking noisy conversation at each other. This magnificent bird, intensely blue with one yellow stripe and an orange eye, is endangered. I had come to make a television film advertising the creature's plight and seeking funds for the project dedicated to its survival.

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Patagonia - Argentina

If you listen hard, you can hear the Pacific rolling gently on to the black beach. Look out of the window, and all you see are forested mountains plunging down into the sea. In the distance, a glacier glows turquoise and blue.

Early morning in remote Patagonia can be quite unlike anywhere else on earth. On a clear day, like today, it seems like some temperate paradise.

Patagonia is one of those places that have acquired their own place in the public imagination, a mysterious province at the end of the earth, with mountains and rivers and the occasional colony of German or Welsh settlers. Few travellers go there for the very good reason that it is a very long way away and there is not much to do when you arrive.

They call this place Bahia Mala (“Bad Bay”) and we had reached it by plane, Jeep, and, for the last hour and a half, boat. On the last stage of the journey, we had been pursued by leaping dolphins, barked at by indignant sea-lions on a foul-smelling rocky island, and peered at by albatrosses.

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Cancun - Mexico

The manana attitude does not seem to exist in Cancun. The popular touist resort city has taken just a year to re-build after the devastating damage caused by hurricane Wilma.


Cancun suffered quite a blow after last October’s hurricane Wilma. Club Med has turned the misfortune into an opportunity — it’s rebuilt better than ever.


The pool area is beautiful and full of places to relax.


The snorkeling is top-rate at the Club Med resort.


One of the best activities at Club Med Cancun is Circus, where visitors can learn tricks on the flying trapeze.

— All Photos Anika Van Wyk, Calgary Sun

About US$1.5 billion has been spent rebuilding Cancun and the famous white-sand beaches have been restored, thanks to pumping in 2.7-million cubic metres of sand.

Taking the brunt of the Wilma winds was Club Med Cancun, Yucatan, which is situated at the end of
the peninsula.

But the famous resort decided to turn its lemons into lemonade.

It not only rebuilt, but the resort has dumped its party adults only atmosphere for a more upscale family friendly one. There are a new kid clubs (which will basically entertain children from dawn to dusk and beyond) and the baby welcome kit, which is waiting for guests in their room, includes a mini-tub, high-chair, crib, stroller, and bottle warmer.

You can find the full article here

Gocta - Peru - World's third-highest waterfall

This high, dry tropical Shangri-La was the domain of the Chachapoyas, a mysterious Andean race that predated the Incas. The new waterfall, dubbed Gocta after an ancient Chachapoyan village, is deep in one of the many blind valleys they inhabited between 800 and 1400 AD. You can still see their carved tombs, some with intact mummies, in the surrounding cliff walls.

According to the press release, Peru's government was hard on the case, promising safe tourist access and basic accommodations, hopefully starting in 2007 (don't count on it). Meanwhile, getting to Gocta requires bone-jarring days on terrifying roads and hours on steep and dubious valley trails. All to see a waterfall.

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Santa Catarina Island - Brazil

The world dreams of escaping to Rio de Janeiro, but what about Rio natives themselves? Ask the boys and girls of Ipanema (or many other Brazilians), and you'll find that Ilha Santa Catarina, an island just off Brazil's southern coast, tops most lists.
Brazilians speak of Ilha Santa Catarina with wistfulness, as if the few hundred yards that separate it from the mainland are a world away from their busy lives. Yet they need sacrifice little for their journey, because in just over 400 square kilometers, the island packs in nearly all that is good about Brazil — with a few bonuses thrown in.
Famously picky about their beaches, Brazilians reserve high praise for many of Santa Catarina's 42 strands, which range from cliff-hugging prayer rugs to miles-long arcs of sand. A spine of mountains, luxuriant with the flora and fauna of the Mata Atlântica (Atlantic rain forest), runs the length of the island. Near the island's center, the peaks drop precipitously to the stunning, saltwater Lagoa da Conceição — a Swiss lake transported to warmer climes.
Just to the north of the lagoon begins a miles-long forest of rare, protected pines, while to the east sand dunes — some of them hundreds of feet high — create an almost lunar landscape. And on the western shores, whitewashed fishing villages seem to have been imported wholesale from the Azores Islands.

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Puerto Vallarta - Mexico

In the steamy city of Puerto Vallarta, time shares rule. Nearly every hotel, restaurant and souvenir shop wants to sell you a slice of a beachfront condominium. And they're not easily discouraged.

We needed to escape the onslaught, but still wanted to enjoy the balmy pleasures of PV's Bahia de Banderas bay area. Luckily, there are plenty of quiet seaside villages nearby that offer refuge from the time-share storm. We walked through the streets of Viejo Vallarta until we spotted a crowd of locals waiting at an unmarked stop at the corner of Constitucion and Basilio Badillo. For $1, we boarded a bus bound for Mismaloya.

Pop-trivia hounds know that Mismaloya is where John Huston filmed his adaptation of the Tennessee Williams classic "The Night of the Iguana." Many might also recall that this was the backdrop for the torrid affair between co-stars Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Liz and Dick we're not, but we could order some tequila and aspire!

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Antigua and Barbuda

The small wooden cottage atop a steep hill has no air conditioning, but a soft breeze through louvered windows flutters the sheer white curtains at my balcony door. The trade winds that once carried tall ships from around the world to Antigua today carry to my room the smell of tropical flowers.

Andrew Michelin, whose family came from Europe to the Caribbean several generations ago, says he planned every detail of his small resort so visitors would have a true Caribbean experience. The roof of each cottage, for example, is made of galvanized metal, so if there happens to be a shower during your stay, you'll hear the sound of raindrops popping off a tin roof.

At the Cocos resort in Antiqua the accommodations are 19 beach-front cottages that rely on sea breezes to cool the rooms. Because of the limited number of guests, the staff is highly attentive and most employees know your room number if not your name.

"When you first wake up, I don't want you to think even for a second, 'Where am I?' " Michelin says. "I want you to awaken and feel where you are, smell where you are, hear where you are."

That sense of place, of foreignness, of being far from home, goes a long way toward explaining the appeal of a small resort. Then, too, there is the intimacy that comes with being one of a handful of guests, rather than one of an anonymous crowd of hundreds moving through a high-rise mega-resort.

The Cocos resort, where I spend my first two nights in Antigua, has just 19 cottages. There are no lines of people waiting to register when I arrive around lunchtime. In fact, I'm the only guest in sight, and the receptionist offers me something to drink before asking my name.

This is my Caribbean dream. When I open the door of my room, I want to see not a long hallway and a blank elevator door, but blue water and green hills. I like my flowers alive and growing, not arranged in a giant vase in the lobby. I come to escape lines, not to join them.

Apparently, I am not the only person drawn to intimate properties. In fact, the rising popularity of small hotels is the biggest trend in the Caribbean, says Richard Kahn, a consultant to the Caribbean Tourism Organization.

It's really a return to the Caribbean of old.

You can find the full article here

La Manzanilla - Mexico

Laid-back La Manzanilla is often confused with the busy port of Manzanillo, less than an hour to the south. That "a" at the end makes all the difference. Big Manzanillo has a population of more than 100,000. Little "La Manz" may have 3,500 in peak season, including winter residents, native locals and the Mexicans who come from inland, their trucks packed with inflatable water toys, kids and grandparents riding overstuffed chairs in the pickup bed.

The town lies cupped in the protected southeastern reach of the Bay of Tenacatita, and even water-sissies like me can spend hours boogie-boarding the soft, rolling wavelets, riding right up onto the beach, with a bathing suit full of sand and the kind of silly grin you see on a 6-year-old, sure of her safe delivery to shore.

I've been coming to La Manzanilla three years running, staying in beautiful beachfront suites for less than $100 a night in high season. Get off the beach and you can easily halve that. If you hit the street taquerios for $1.50 tacos or cook up a nice pot of refrieds with serrano chilis to put inside the fresh tortillas made steps down the street, you can enjoy slacker paradise on a comfy budget.

Pencil in at least a couple nights out, though. The town has a good, eclectic mix of restaurants serving traditional Mexican dishes, super-fresh seafood and chef creations such as shrimp and spinach crepes, Thai curries and octopus salad.

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Santiago - Chile

Hovering disembodied over the smoggy landscape, the snowy peaks seemed more spirit than substance — an illusion that I would soon be disabused of in my treacherous crossing of the Andes, but that was yet to come. On this September afternoon, the sun had finally emerged to sharpen the watery colors of the city, and as I topped the long climb of Cerro San Cristobal, I paused under the eucalyptus trees to rest a moment. I looked over my shoulder, and I caught my breath.

There they were, painted on the back of the sky like the backdrop of an Isabel Allende novel. Just as I had always imagined them.

Santiago is a city whose charms unfold gradually — and sometimes reluctantly, for many who abhor the traffic and the caustic gray vapor that descends and holds its inhabitants prisoner, sometimes for days. But when it finally lifts, those charms are something to behold.

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Cuba

Yes, and for the first half of the 20th century, Cuba was the holiday destination of choice for many well-heeled Americans, happy to enjoy the good life on the Caribbean's largest island at a time when many of the local people were living in poverty.

Fifty years ago today, a cabin cruiser named Granma landed in the south-east of Cuba. Her passengers were revolutionaries, including Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, who went on to win a famous victory against the island's dictator - and the US interests that lay behind him. Some Cubans (the disaffected, disinherited and dissident) say that the rot set in on 2 December 1956, and that Cuba has patently failed to achieve its potential over the past half-century. But despite decades of state communism, today Cuba offers more options for luxurious holidays than ever.

The island has far more depth and diversity than other Caribbean islands, and the culture has been preserved by the increasingly absurd-looking US economic embargo, which prevents Americans from travelling to Cuba. The Cuban people's rich heritage of music, dance and religion stands in stark contrast to the poverty into which their beautiful country has sunk - as do the new hotels, spa facilities and golf courses that are taking shape at a frantic rate, following Fidel Castro's oft-repeated acknowledgement that "Only tourism can save Cuba".

Despite embracing the tourist dollar - or, these days, euro - and the expansion of the top end of the market, Cuba doesn't yet offer the consistency of other Caribbean islands, however.

You can find the full article here

Los Llanos - Venezuela

Who would guess that the highlight of our trip to Venezuela would be three days staying in a spartan cabin on a flat 100,000-acre cattle ranch? The plains of Los Llanos cover a third of the country, from the Andes to the Orinoco. The climate is uncomfortably extreme – torrential rain and floods, followed by searing heat, wind and drought – but we have, by chance, arrived in February after the rains, and before the worst of the heat. This is the best time to visit (although, apparently, people visit throughout the year), when the plentiful wildlife congregates at dwindling waterholes. I feel I have stepped into a childhood I-Spy book in which each illustration has a fascinating, but improbable, assortment of animals and birds.

You can find the full article here

Peru's Sacred Valley

Down a rutted, twisting road, where dogs bark and children play in the dirt, lies an enclave apart from world-weary Peru.

Beyond a set of gates are two homes reminiscent of the U.S. Southwest — rich, warm earth colors, adobe-style construction, casual and slightly rustic furnishings — but with a difference: They are set in Peru's fertile Sacred Valley, where Incan nobles are said to have built their vacation homes.

Urubamba is at about 9,000 feet, about 3,000 feet lower than Cuzco, 45 miles away. It is not only easier to breathe here, but it also is easier to think in the quiet of this agricultural area, which some say is as spiritual as Machu Picchu.

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Paraguay

The sun was already low in the sky when I arrived at the 17th-century Jesuit mission known as Trinidad, deep in the back country of southern Paraguay. It was late on a warm Saturday afternoon in October, and I was heading across a grass plaza to the main church, intent on examining a richly ornamented frieze depicting chubby angels playing musical instruments. Suddenly, a Baroque chamber concerto erupted from hidden loudspeakers.

As I paused to listen, the mission caretakers told me that the music was written not by a European composer but by the Guaraní Indians who lived for 150 years under Jesuit tutelage on missions spread over an area larger than California in what today is Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil. And with that, a vanished world instantly came alive.

The Guaraní missions are all that remain of a 17th- and 18th-century utopian social experiment — call it theocratic communism for lack of a better term — that has fascinated thinkers for hundreds of years. Voltaire, Diderot and Montesquieu all wrote about the missions, praising the egalitarian impulse behind them.

From the time the Jesuits were expelled from them in the 1760s, the missions began to decline and even vanish. In our own time, right-wing military dictatorships ruled all three countries well into the 1980s, and viewed any radical social experiment, even one from the past based on Christianity, as something to be discouraged.

Thanks in part to Roland Joffe’s 1986 movie “The Mission,” there was a renewed surge of interest in the movement in the 1980s. Still, it was only in recent years that Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil began to restore and promote the missions — which, at their peak, had more than 100,000 residents and produced not just music and books, but also metal utensils and food for export — as tourist destinations.

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