I’ve no idea whether there’s a book or film in the works based on this recent front page story in the Los Angeles Times, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were. It’s the story of Joe Sanderson, a Midwesterner and idealist who set off on a life of travel and adventure back in the mid-1960s and died in 1982 while fighting for leftist guerillas in El Salvador. Sanderson kept a diary that “lay neglected and unread for decades” and has been held by a guerilla vet from the war. The Times’ Héctor Tobar was apparently the first outsider to get his hands on it. 

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As a result of post-election violence, visitors to Kenya are getting police escorts from Mombasa’s airport and facing fuel shortages in the Rift Valley. In southern Chile, 54 travelers were rescued in Conguillio National Park after the Llaima volcano erupted (a ”violenta erupción,” declared El Mercurio). But it’s not all lava and chaos in travel news: Members of the Nuestros Ángeles de El Salvador marching band made it to southern California just in time for yesterday’s Rose Parade after their funding for flights fell through and they had to make a last-minute road trip—from Central America.

Nearly every country has to have a little war tourism, right? The U.S. has Gettysburg. Cambodia has the Killing Fields. Now El Salvador wants in on the action. According to the AP, the country is making the most of its 12-year civil war, which ended in 1992 and left 75,000 dead. “For a fee, former guerrillas will take visitors on tours of former battlefields or mountain hideouts, while museums display war memorabilia,” a story reports. Among the top destinations is Perquin, a mountain town where FMLN guerillas once established their headquarters. Visitors can stroll the “Museum of the Revolution,” which features uniforms and what remains of Soviet weapons. El Salvador is apparently the first Central American country to build a tourism business around its civil war history. What’s the hold up, Nicaragua? 

Beyond being the world’s most popular sport, soccer—or football, as it’s called in most of the English-speaking world—reverberates well beyond the fields and stadiums where it’s played. The sport often reflects centuries-old ethnic, nationalist and religious tensions. It’s a global business. Its fans are wildly—and sometimes violently—passionate about their teams. In short, soccer is far more than just another game. While some writers have explored the subject as part of larger works—Ryszard Kapuscinski’s The Soccer War features (despite what its title might suggest) one compelling chapter on the soccer-inspired war between El Salvador and Honduras, for example, and Paul Theroux’s “The Old Patagonian Express” includes a terrific passage about a soccer-related riot in San Salvador—other writers have devoted entire books to soccer and the culture that surrounds it. Herewith, just in time for World Cup 2006 in Germany, three great books:

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In his essay Why We Travel, Pico Iyer writes that we travel, in part, to “learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate.” I was reminded of that recently while traveling in Mexico. Aside from migration-related news, we in the U.S. see little coverage of life south of the border. But it seems that our newspapers don’t accommodate much news about Central America even when it involves a major disaster. That was brought into relief for some recently after Hurricane Stan hit Mexico, Guatemala and El Salvador.

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