Patagonia - Argentina

It is time to call Patagonia's bluff. Ever since Magellan reported a race of giants striding the shores of Argentina—perhaps pata gones, or "big feet," is the origin of the name—the hyperbolic rhetoric has poured forth. For centuries, the vast spaces of this unknown region were filled with demon winds, terrible loneliness, ferocious natives, killer thirst, desperate shipwrecks and air crashes, tales of cannibalism and evil spirits. Jorge Luis Borges sent his characters south to die. Bruce Chatwin pursued phantom dinosaurs and lost colonies. The urbane Argentine writer Ezequiel Martínez Estrada turned his back on Patagonia, insisting that "entire towns live in a somnambulant state of free love and of drunkenness. Such are the ravages of solitude."
Like New Zealand, Tasmania, and South Africa, Patagonia is a shard of the earth's most southern and ancient geology, a flinty arrow reaching deep into the Antarctic currents, an outpost in the globe's harshest sphere of ocean and ice. But this is no land of demons, nor of murder, somnambulism, or even shipwrecks. It is simply far removed and barely populated, making it a repository for humanity's collective imagination, for various and assorted extremes. I declare an end to such nightmares. The wind does not always blow at sixty miles an hour. I have even seen completely windless days in Patagonia—once or twice. There be no dragons here.

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Gocta Waterfall - Peru

Called Gocta, the 2,532-foot Peruvian waterfall instantly climbed up on the podium with Venezuela's Angel Falls (3,212 feet) and South Africa's Tugela Falls ( 3,110 feet). How did that avoid the unblinking eye of satellite cartographers?

Who cares? If it was that big and that remote, I just wanted to get there before they bulldozed a road, built the hotels and generally tarted up the place.

And so in the fall I set off on the most harrowing waterfall side trip of all: an overnight flight to Lima, a dawn hop to the northern coastal city of Chiclayo and a 12-hour drive over dicey mountain roads to Peru's impossibly secluded upper Amazon basin. This high, dry tropical Shangri-La was the domain of the Chachapoyas, a mysterious Andean race that predated the Incas. The new waterfall, named Gocta after an ancient Chachapoyan village, is deep in one of the many blind valleys they inhabited between 800 and 1400 A.D. You can still see their carved tombs, some with intact mummies, in the surrounding cliff walls.

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Easter Island - Chile

Even in the murk of a sullen, gray afternoon, the massive stone sentinels of Ahu Tongariki seem imperious, an uncompromising guard against the gluttonous sea crashing at its flank.

The shimmer of late afternoon darts through the cloudy drape in a last heady dash before the earth edges darkward. A herd of tawny horses, branded but untamed, gallops into the valley for a late-day graze. For this golden instant, the glory days of the earth's most remote island return.

How bizarre and otherworldly this rocky outcrop must have seemed to Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen, who arrived here on Easter day 1722. Many of the massive stone statues -- called moai -- might have been strewn on their backs and bellies across the rugged surface. Treeless and barren, the plot he dubbed Easter Island was -- by some accounts -- a ruin, more than halfway to dead.

Today, dozens of 12-ton moai have been resurrected with the help

of modern technology. But the romance remains, drawing explorers, scientists and tourists to ponder the mysteries of the gargantuan statues and the sophisticated civilization that built them -- and all but disappeared.

Even if you've read the books and seen the films, visiting Easter Island is stepping into a new dimension.

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São Paulo - Brazil

Just to walk around Rome or Rio de Janeiro is to know what makes those cities great. By contrast, the genius of Sao Paulo lies not in public vistas but private oases: art-house cinemas hidden in lackluster malls, dazzling nightclubs behind unmarked black doors, windowless restaurants that produce their own aesthetic microclimate.

Long Brazil's undisputed economic capital, Sampa, as Sao Paulo is known, has now eclipsed Rio as the cultural capital as well. Art follows money, of course, but perhaps Sao Paulo's blank concrete canvas has had its own attractions. In Rio, you can encounter beauty just by walking outside. In Sao Paulo, one must turn inward and create it oneself.

I come by my love of Sao Paulo honestly. That is to say, I first fell for Rio, where because of the rabid rivalry between the cities, I was systematically taught to scorn all things paulistano.

Nor were my prejudices instantly dispelled when work took me to Sao Paulo for a month this spring. Even the most partisan paulistano rails about the smog, the traffic, the crumbling sidewalks, the gaping chasm between poor and rich. To these complaints, the traveler must add the city's disorienting size, which, combined with hodgepodge urban planning, makes it exceedingly easy to become lost amid a forbidding forest of identikit high-rises.

Quickly, though, I came to understand that Sampa isn't just a place to suffer through a layover. It's also a place to train the eye and ear, expand the mind, educate the palate — and have a rollicking good time.

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Cartagena - Colombia

You’re probably still a bit gun-shy about visiting Colombia, put off by the country’s long history of cocaine-fueled mayhem. Travel qualms diminish or subside entirely, however, when you’re the guest of a trusted local who assures you that Pablo Escobar is dead and buried. Which may explain why a class of well-connected travelers has recently been alighting in the Caribbean port city of Cartagena and raving about the place upon their return.

Call them “sophistonauts” — those wide-roaming urban nomads, often third-culture kids, expats or grown-up diplo-brats who tend to live outside their countries (plural!) of citizenship and bounce around a social web connecting them to equally geographically flexible, curious confreres. The sophistonauts have not been visiting Colombia because they are braver than you and me. Nor have they been going for Cartagena’s balmy climate or the city’s peculiar colonial architecture or its rowdy history of pirates and plunder. The sophistonauts are flocking to Cartagena because they’ve been invited, in this case by proud Colombian friends eager to show off their favorite national beauty spot in full flower after decades of abandonment.

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