Destination: Honduras

Enrique’s Journey

by Michael Yessis | 09.30.03 | 11:56 AM ET

The Los Angeles Times debuted a massive six-part series Sunday about Enrique, a teenager from Honduras who traveled to the United States alone in search of his mother. The series continues today, Wednesday and Friday. The Times goes all out for this story, highlighting it on the front page yesterday and today, and presenting it on the Web with maps, charts, footnotes, photos and a video interview with writer Sonia Nazario. After two installments, it looks like Pulitzer material.

“His mother steps off the porch,” Nazario writes in part one. “She walks away. ‘¿Dónde está mi mami?’  Enrique cries, over and over. ‘Where is my mom?’ His mother never returns, and that decides Enrique’s fate. As a teenager—indeed, still a child—he will set out for the U.S. on his own to search for her. Virtually unnoticed, he will become one of an estimated 48,000 children who enter the United States from Central America and Mexico each year, illegally and without either of their parents.”

Tags: Central America, Honduras, North America, Mexico

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.

Tags: Adventure Travel, Hotels, Central America, Honduras, News and Briefs