Destination: Central America
I’m Saving Money for My First Long Trip. Where is a Good Place for First-Time Vagabonders to Go?
by Rolf Potts | 06.29.05 | 3:36 PM ET
Vagabonding traveler Rolf Potts answers your questions about travel
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Yahoo! BuzzLonely Planet at 30
by Jim Benning | 12.29.03 | 9:46 PM ET
Jim Benning celebrates three decades of groundbreaking independent travel guides
Enrique’s Journey
by Michael Yessis | 09.30.03 | 11:56 AM ET
On Bombs and Backpackers
by Jim Benning | 12.16.02 | 4:20 PM ET
Time magazine’s Michael Elliott has crystallized our thoughts perfectly. In an eloquent essay in the Dec. 16 issue, he laments the chilling effects the latest terrorist attacks in Kenya and Bali could have on global backpackers. “Few modern social developments are more significant and less appreciated than the rise of backpacker travel,” he writes. “The tens of thousands of young Australians, Germans, Britons, Americans and others who wander the globe, flitting from Goa to Costa Rica, from Thailand to Tasmania, are building what may be the only example of a truly global community.”
But the bombs targeting tourists threaten all that. Elliott himself discovered Europe 30 years ago by hitchhiking around each summer. “I learned more from those trips than from years in school, and I’d begun to look forward to the day when my daughters would light out on their own ventures—to go see their relatives in Australia or hike in Tibet or do things in Bali that they wouldn’t want to tell Dad about,” he writes. “So add one more reason to hate what the terrorists have done: they’ve stolen our dreams.”
A Room with a Shark View?
by Jim Benning | 11.14.02 | 11:24 PM ET
Travelers may be asking for just such a room soon if 28-year-old hotel visionary Karl Stanley has his way.
Stanley is planning to build an underwater hotel that drops a whopping 1,000 feet below sea level and features, among other amenities, a bubbling hot tub. “I think that would be the ultimate luxury,” he tells National Geographic Adventure. “You’re hanging out in the Jacuzzi looking out a four-foot window at 800 feet, seeing sharks.”
Given Stanley’s track record, it could happen. He started building his first submarine at the age of 15. Not only did it work, but it now takes tourists down more than 700 feet off the Honduras coast. Stanley’s hotel would be a quantum leap from Key Largo’s underwater hotel. It drops just 30 feet.
A Young Girl’s Introduction to Poverty
by Jim Benning | 01.07.02 | 12:44 AM ET
Lonnae O’Neale Parker’s 7-year-old daughter, like a lot of American kids, was growing up measuring her worth by her collection of electronic gadgets, Powerpuff Girls and all things Barbie. “Look at these fragile children,” Parker thought to herself, “with their underdeveloped sense of self-reliance and overdeveloped sense of entitlement.” So she took her daughter, Sydney, on a month-long visit to Guatemala, in part “to dematerialize my material girl,” she writes in a recent Washington Post story. Her touching account of their trip details Sydney’s introduction to a way of life very different from their own. In one instance, a beggar asks Sydney for her Coke, and Parker wrestles with just how to explain the grinding poverty to her child. “I’m not sure I had the words to let a 7-year-old know how bad off you must be to beg for soda from tourists,” Parker writes. “Some things, I decided, my child would have to process on her own.”
Pura Vida
by Cara O'Flynn | 07.31.01 | 12:59 AM ET
When life as a teacher at Escuela Otto Kopper takes yet another wild and embarrassing turn, Cara O'Flynn learns to deal with it Costa Rican-style
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