Too Much of a Good Thing, and Not Enough

Work had finally turned into vacation. But a site-selection event managed to find me, even at Lake Atitlán, in southern Guatemala, following a conference I spoke at in Guatemala City. I awoke at the lakefront house of my friend and Site Selection International contributor Estuardo Robles to find that some of the other houseguests had already made their way the short walk to the lakefront, across the rocks, around a school soccer field and onto the property of the gorgeous Hotel Villa Santa Catarina. The helicopters buzzing around that morning – transporting VIPs to the opening of a waste-water treatment plant for the community of ... [Read More]

Flying Tarzoo home

Many years ago, during an exploratory expedition across the upper Amazon basin, we stopped at Leticia, Colombia, a small trading post. There we met Mike Tsalikis who ran a zoo supply business. He collected all types of rare animals – with the help of local Indians – and sold them to zoos around the world. Mike gave us a tour of his compound where we saw creatures ranging from tree sloths to anacondas. Our daughter Linda was impressed with the snakes, some of which were 25 to 30 feet long. Daughter Laura was intrigued by the smallest exhibits, pygmy marmosets – little monkeys about as big ... [Read More]

Confronting natives in the Amazon jungle

These were clearly savages; they'd never even heard of Georgia Tech! Iquitos Peru is, believe it or not, an Atlantic port 2,000 miles up the Amazon River. During a brief stop we wanted to see a little of the vast rainforest that surrounded the remote town so we hired a local guide to take us for a tour in a small boat. He said he could take us up a tributary of the Amazon and show us where savage Indians lived. So, after churning upriver along a jungle-lined stream for an hour we were put ashore on a mud flat where the guide told us to wait ... [Read More]

The absolute end of the road

Many human beings are born with a strange impulse to explore.  We want to go where we have never been – better still to places where few if any people have ever gone. This may explain why I went to considerable trouble to find my way to Cape Horn, the southernmost tip of land in the western hemisphere.   First I flew to Port William, Chile, the last airstrip down south. There I boarded a ship that carried me another hundred miles and paused near the Cape. Then I got into a rubber dinghy and paddled toward the shore.  After wading through shallow water covered by ... [Read More]

A Room With(out) a View

It was the Investors vs. Journalists at the Ocean Palace Hotel in Natal, Brazil, last week, and the Investors won. Your humble correspondent did his best for the team of four U.S. journalists (and a bunch from elsewhere) who traveled to the northeast coast of Brazil (a 'quick' three-hour flight from Sao Paulo, following a not-so-quick nine-hour flight from Atlanta) for Nordeste Invest, a travel & tourism investment conference sponsored by APEX Brasil and its affiliate ADIT. The contest? Which group got the better rooms -- the ones with the spectacular views of the Atlantic Ocean and Rio Grande do Norte coastline, that is, and ... [Read More]

Easter in Guatemala

We were supposed to go to Guatemala for Christmas, but I was denied boarding when it was discovered that my passport had expired. It turned out to be a fortuitous error because we rebooked our travel for Easter and landed in Guatemala in the midst of their spectacular Semana Santa (Holy Week) celebrations. Antigua, about 45 minutes from Guatemala City, is ground zero for the festivities. The whole city is a UNESCO World Heritage  site and its cobblestone streets, pastel-colored colonial buildings and looming volcanoes are a joyous site any time of the year. But it really comes alive during Holy Week. The entire city participates ... [Read More]