World Tourism Blog

It was just like driving to work, except that I kept on going: From New York to Argentina, through 12 countries, for four months and more than 13,000 miles.

It’s the first leg of my overland trip around the world, an expedition that I consider the last true adventure on earth. From Buenos Aires, I will ship my car to Africa, fly across to meet it, and continue the drive, heading north to Europe, east to Asia, and finally, later this year, returning to North America.

My adventure began Nov. 15 when I gave up my apartment, quit my job as art director for The Associated Press, and set off in a ‘96 Toyota Land Cruiser outfitted with a rooftop tent, fridge, stove and portable toilet.

Since then, I’ve driven through jungles, mountains and fog, across dirt roads, desert sand and salt fields. Crooked cops tried to shake me down and bad maps led me to places where the road disappeared.

I saw monkeys in the Costa Rican rainforest, pink flamingos in Bolivia, and herds of llamas in Peru, along with pigs the size of ponies. I camped on beaches in Nicaragua so beautiful and remote that you forget you have to go back to civilization one day. I visited the Mayan ruins of Copan in Honduras, ancient tombs and painted caves in Tierradentro, Colombia, and the Spanish colonial city of Quito, Ecuador.

A story about the trip that appeared in newspapers and Web sites before I left resulted in thousands of comments on chat boards, hundreds of e-mails to me, and scores of invitations. I am grateful for the kindness, generosity and hospitality of so many strangers who provided meals and a place to sleep. Notes I posted on a Land Cruiser message board also brought people out to help. It was nice to see that there is a real community behind all these electronic messages on the Internet.

But a few offers I turned down — one from a cable TV crew that wanted to accompany me and another from a company that wanted to pay me to wear a certain jacket throughout the trip.

Many well-wishers keep track of my trip through my blog, TransWorldExpedition.com, where I post updates and photos from the road. One e-mail I received included a marriage proposal for my traveling companion, Nadia Hubschwerlin. Nadia is a childhood friend; we are not romantically tied. In my blog, I told her suitor: “I will be glad to be the witness at her wedding as long as you are a decent guy.”

It was chilly in New York when we started out, but we drove away from the cold weather, heading south on highways that roughly followed the Appalachian Trail to Georgia. We stopped in New Orleans (I am French and I wish that France had never sold Louisiana), then crossed the border from Texas to Mexico and drove southeast through Central America. We drove through Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica to Panama, where the Pan-American Highway ends at the Darien Gap.

The Darien Gap, a roadless region of swamps and rainforests that stretches 90 miles to the tip of Colombia, makes it impossible to drive the entire distance to South America. So we shipped the car from Panama to Colombia and flew there to pick it up, then drove south, through Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia to Argentina.

We camped on beaches and in parks, and often got permission to sleep on farms, where there was plenty of space and where people are accustomed to seeing seasonal helpers. In Costa Rica, there were so many Americans it was like the 51st state. We were also welcomed into homes in Guatemala, where everyone seemed to have at least one relative working in the U.S.

Sometimes we paid a few dollars for a cheap hotel or camp site, other times people let us stay for free. We would park our car, drag a table out, and begin to cook before nightfall. In the morning, we would fix coffee with the delicious beans collected across the best growing areas of Central America. We bought food in markets, and our gasoline-powered stove was our best friend along the way, especially in the cold, high mountains.

In hot, dusty places, it was hard to go without showers. We bathed every few days, sometimes in a home, hotel or campground, sometimes in a lake or with buckets.

In Cusco, Peru, for $4 a person, we rented a hotel room and looked forward to a shower. Of course in the morning, there was no hot water. That became a classic situation, as hotel owners would always promise it, but you would never get it. Hot water was our Machu Picchu: Always wanted to see it, with no success. (Machu Picchu is closed due to flooding.) Commercial Loan Workout.

This week, as the weak winter sun did its best to warm my home state of Idaho, my husband and I began looking for a place to go with our kids (ages 9 and 11) and my parents over spring break.

The kids want the beach and snorkeling. My husband and I, fancying ourselves to be veteran travelers, will not set foot in a resort. My parents, having suffered adventure travel at our hands before, prefer an experience that is authentic but not life-threatening.

With all this in mind, I turned to 80 Degrees, a new online travel planner from the guidebook publisher Fodor’s.

80 Degrees, uses a quiz to help figure out what destination will deliver the trip you are looking for. The interactive tool asks you whether you want to go off the beaten path, stay safely in a resort, or venture somewhere in between. The quiz also helps define the attractions you seek, such as beaches, casinos, or child-friendly activities. Plug in the type of travelers, be it a romantic couple or a large group, and how much money is expected to be spent on lodging. After a few more questions about where and what, the site delivers a list of appealing options.

Right now, 80 Degrees is only set up to find winter escapes where the temperature hovers around a perfect 80 degrees. The company plans to roll out a European vacation version early this year, and some options for skiers after that, with a different name to reflect cooler climates.

Meanwhile, 80 Degrees directs its users to a host of sunny getaways in Belize, Mexico, Hawaii, Costa Rica, Florida and the Caribbean.

Like all worthwhile travel Web sites, 80 Degrees makes excellent reading on its own, even if a two-week stay in Virgin Gorda is nothing but a pipe dream. The destination ideas come with an online travel guide, and those mini-guidebooks include forums with a wealth of thoughtful reviews that drill down to the minutiae that can make or break a lodging experience at a particular hotel or resort — from helpful drivers to horror stories about bugs in the oven. About 700 writers work for Fodor’s, a venerable travel publisher that covers 500 destinations around the world. The guide’s hotel and restaurant listings are independent of advertising sales, according to Fodor’s staff.

The publisher’s main Web site — http://www.fodors.com/ — is a good place for travelers to learn more about areas they already know they want to visit. 80 Degrees helps the undecided figure out where that is.

“A lot of sites, if you know where to go, they’ll tell you different things to do in a particular location,” said Tim Jarrell, Fodor’s publisher. “We’re trying to inspire you. We’ve done our job if we give you a destination that perhaps you had not considered before you took the quiz.” Home Security Systems.

Set in a private nature reserve spread over 1,000 acres of Central America’s last remaining lowland tropical rainforest in Costa Rica, Lapa Rios Ecolodge overlooks the pristine point where the Golfo Dulce meets the wild Pacific Ocean. There are no guardrails or path monitors, so there is a bit of danger mixed with paradise.

The last time I was in Costa Rica I didn’t stay at an eco-lodge, I stayed at the Hotel Presidente in San Jose. I had flown not just from Los Angeles, but all the way from India. I’m not good with jetlag, but this was especially bad, and when I arrived on the evening flight, my hosts asked me to join them in the bar for a drink. I did, and after downing an Imperial cerveza I found another on the table. Then the two spoke to each other, and I found a third. Then I vaguely remember dancing at some unknown hour before stumbling to my room, and falling naked into my bed.

Then, sometime in the deep of the night, I awoke and headed for the bathroom. I think I still thought I was in my hotel in New Delhi as I headed straight down the hall, opened the door, walked a few steps, and heard a click behind me. I spun around, rubbed my eyes and found I was naked in the hallway of the Hotel Presidente.

That’s a bit how I feel where the ecotourism movement is today — it thinks it’s in one room, when in fact it is in an entirely different one.

Having attended and spoken at a number of ecotourism conferences in the last couple of years, and listened to endless reams of dire data, I believe as the concepts of ecotourism have evolved they have become more and more analytical. More data driven; more about cost benefits analyses, about benchmarking; about quantifying guilt …

And the real motivation for ecotourism is in a room full of magic.

What is touched upon in the “Adventure with Purpose” television specials is the power of narrative, storytelling; of the romance, mystery and the danger of wild places — and these attributes argue, often subliminally, for preservation, and visitation. Most people won’t be compelled to visit a place because it uses certain light bulbs or soap or low volume toilets; or hires locals; or carbon offsets, though these are necessary and good practices.

What most folks seek, I believe, are the unfathomable shadows where the wild things are.

Too many eco-lodges and destinations have become internment centers mapped and planned with no blank spots. The trails are well-marked and monitored. The busses are built for comfort. Around the world at eco-lodge pool sides and lobbies visitors watch from a safe distance ethnic spectacles and performances, loaded with Post-it Note mysticism. The deep, rich cultures and traditions are too often reduced to dinner shows for the mobile rich. In these brief, one-sided encounters, there is little chance to understand the people behind the dances and battle cries, no real celebration of a vibrant, living culture. Visitors are offered the bread crumbs on the floor beneath the big table of cultural apperception.

In these dynamics, there is little room for true discovery.

Yes, the wilderness is vanishing, and cultures are fading, but what saves them are not dry statistics and doomsday scenarios, but rather the emotional sumptuousness and connection that comes from visitation. My job, as an ecotourism advocate, is to figure out how to inspire someone on a couch in a city watching his television or computer screen to get up and make that step and come see and feel the witchcraft of wilderness. Once so touched, travelers become the most passionate advocates for preservation, as the trees and brooks and wild things are as family.

If a place can be unmediatedly wild, without the requisite security and compliant spaces, without adult supervision, it is then faithful to our childlike imaginations of wilderness. The natural sublime is as much about awe as real danger, the peril of avalanches in the Alps for the Romantics; the risks of the rainforests in Costa Rica. The sublime attracts like moths to a flame, where we feel most alive when we can imagine our own demise.

And, ecotourism in its original manifestations was sublime, but we have moved to a different room.

Ecotourism ought to be the great, original adventure, an individual tale of privation, courage, constant vigilance and danger. Done right, it is a journey undertaken with only a fragmentary map constructed out of a patchwork of accumulated local lore and the occasional milepost marked “here be dragons.” Home Security Systems.

San Jose, CA, is a very old city, founded in 1777. Before white people came to this area, the Ohlone  Indians lived here, along the Guadalupe  River. They were peaceful Indians who lived in huts made from grasses.

In the 18th century, Spaniards came to this area. They found bears, antelope and geese. They founded the Mission Santa Clara near the river. This mission was moved several times because the river flooded. It is now on the grounds of the University of Santa Clara.

The first civil settlement in California was El Pueblo San Jose de Guadalupe  founded in November 1777. It was a farming community and they grew food for the military forces in San Francisco and Monterey. These settlers finally moved to the area that is downtown San Jose today. The first census in 1778 showed 68 people of different races living here.

San Jose was the first capital of California, named in 1849 by the people who wanted California to become a new state. San Jose promised a lot, but disappointed the people who visited here. The capital building wasn’t finished. There weren’t enough rooms for the legislators. People had to sleep in tents and the weather was rainy. The people were so unhappy they moved the capital to Monterey.

Many people came to California looking for gold. Most of them didn’t find any gold, but decided to stay here and grow crops. Prunes became the valley’s biggest crop, also apples, apricots, cherries, peaches and pears. Canneries were built to can the fruit and ship it to other places. The 1906 earthquake hit San Jose very hard. Business buildings collapsed, homes were damaged and hundreds of people were hurt and killed. When A.P. “Dutch” Hamann was city manger (1950-1969) the city’s population grew from 95,000 to 446,000 and from 17 square miles to 136 square miles.

Today this area is known as Silicon Valley because of the powerful high technology economy. It all started with Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett in a garage in Palo Alto in 1938. Today, the Silicon Valley is known everywhere as the center of the computer and software industries.

San Jose still has a diverse population. Ethnic groups today make up about 52 per cent of the city. Large numbers of Vietnamese moved here after the fall of Saigon in 1975 and Asians make up 20% of the population. Hispanics, mostly from Mexico and Central America are about 27%. National Hard Money Association