World Tourism Blog

AS the sun sets over the Atacama Desert in Chile each reliably cloudless night, dazzling ruby red and garnet hues paint the volcanic Andes Mountain peaks in the eastern skyline, deepening almost imperceptibly until they are indistinguishable from black.

That would be the grand finale at many resort areas. But here, it is merely the opening act.

After the nearest star had set one evening last August, I peered through the Meade 16-inch telescope in the 15-foot observatory of the Hotel de Larache in San Pedro de Atacama to see the main attraction: the doppelgänger Alpha Centauri stars that, without the benefit of magnification, look like one; the misty, yellow Swan Nebula; and the Scorpio Constellation’s bi-winged Butterfly Cluster.

This remote desert, roughly 800 miles north of Santiago, offers some of the clearest views of the Milky Way in the world, making it a natural home to a cluster of high-tech research observatories used by international astronomers. With the opening of a mini-observatory at Hotel de Larache two years ago and several other resort stargazing programs, it has also become a vacation spot for amateur stargazers like me.

The resorts at Atacama are no outliers. Stargazing has increasingly become an alternative to traditional after-sundown dining and drinking at hotels and resorts. Call it night life for nerds.

“For people who live in the cities — and more than half the world’s population does — the only way to see the stars in safety and in comfort without worrying about what might happen in the dark is at a resort,” said Rick Fienberg, a spokesman for the American Astronomical Society, based in Washington. He noted that the International Year of Astronomy in 2009, celebrating the 400th anniversary of the first use of a telescope by Galileo Galilei, brought out millions of people around the world for stargazing events.

I first encountered stargazing tourism several years ago at the Hyatt Regency Maui Resort and Spa in Hawaii, a 40-acre resort with sweeping views of Kaanapali Beach. Instead of drinking mai tais at the bar or attending a luau, I joined Eddie Mahoney, an astronomer, who led our group of 12 to the roof of the hotel’s nine-story main building. The relatively high perch and resort lighting — designed to angle down rather than shine up — preserved the dark setting for his three 50-minute nightly public stargazing sessions ($25 a person).

Mr. Mahoney oriented us by pointing out the North Star, the Big and Little Dippers and the constellation Orion, all visible to the naked eye, of course. But what appeared to be a fuzzy cluster in the sky became clear with binoculars: they were the seven stars in the Pleiades Group. And moving to the 16-inch reflector telescope, far-off planets come into the sharp focus you see in Hubble Space Telescope images: Saturn and its rings, as well as a quartet of Jupiter’s moons precisely lined up beside it.

Newly in possession of a 14-inch computerized telescope, Mr. Mahoney still leads stargazing sessions, which he started 10 years ago. Some 6,000 gazers a year take his sky tour, according to the resort management.

Reducing light pollution and caring for a planet is an undercurrent of his talks. “I remind them that Earth is a starship, and we are just passing through,” said Mr. Mahoney, who distributes — what else? — Starburst or Milky Way candies after the show.

That sense of floating through the galaxy is underscored in the western United States, where low population density and favorable weather combine to make for particularly starry skies. At Northstar-at-Tahoe Resort near Truckee, Calif., Tony Berendsen of Tahoe Star Tours leads summer stargazing programs that merge science and the arts, incorporating poetry readings, string quartet concerts and talks by a visiting astrophysicist. Near Scottsdale, Ariz., the Boulders Resort abjures the science of astronomy in favor of the lore of astrology in its “Dining With the Stars” dinners held three times each year, on the summer solstice and the spring and fall equinox dates.

I had a chance to stargaze out west firsthand this spring during a visit to Colorado. After a day of whitewater kayaking I took part in a decidedly low-tech session at the new Viceroy Snowmass, an opulent 173-room resort on the Snowmass ski slopes near Aspen. Instead of using an observatory or even a telescope, guests sat around a bonfire on the pool deck, faces facing heavenward as the leader, Marieta Bialek, pointed out constellations and planets visible above the mountains.

With the planet Venus shining in the west, the overall order of the night sky emerged as the evening progressed. Taking in the panoramic view of the sky was more meditative than scientific, but rewarding nonetheless, especially when a shooting star streaked by.

“There’s a mystery and wonder about it,” said Ms. Bialek, leaning back in her chair to point out the constellation Cassiopeia. “Many people find comfort in the stars. As things are changing around them, the stars stay steady.”

That steadiness was evident in the Atacama region of Chile, where there is little night life to compete with the twinkling sky after dark. Nearby resorts that feature stargazing include Tierra Atacama, a stone’s throw from Hotel de Larache, and Alto Atacama lodge, which offers guided stargazing nightly, except during full moon phases that wash out the viewing.

By ELAINE GLUSAC

At the Northstar-at-Tahoe Resort near Truckee, Calif., summer stargazing programs merge science and the arts.

WE had awakened before dawn to get a jump on the desert heat and rolled out under a headlight moon, pedaling fast in the cool morning of the Dolores River Canyon. There were no cars, not out here. There was only the sound of bike tires on asphalt, the river’s murmur, the cascading song of a canyon wren and that beginning-of-the-world smell of river mud in the blue morning. Horses nuzzled the rough cottonwoods by the riverbank. Pale sandstone walls rose up around us and caught the colors of sunrise.

A day like this couldn’t last. “You know what Dolores means, don’t you?” our guide, John Humphries, had asked us earlier with his I’ve-got-plans-for-you grin. “It means sorrow, or pain.”

Soon enough, I would know exactly what he meant.

We were on Day 2 of our five-day, 400-mile cycling trip with Lizard Head Cycling Guides through some of the most remote and spectacular canyon-country roads in the Four Corners region of Colorado, Utah and Arizona. The opening of a few hotels in the last five years has helped unlock this region as a point-to-point cycling destination in a way that wasn’t previously practical. Though I’m a cyclist with more enthusiasm than experience, for years I’d wanted to see this area of the Southwest from a more intimate vantage point than the window of a rental car.

Now, at Mile 91 — right about the time I was ready for a beer and a bunk — the road bucked upward, a 2,000-foot climb in nine miles, and tilted so steeply in stretches that the downhill lane had a runaway truck ramp. The desert sun roared overhead. And at our backs the pleasant cottonball-cloud chaos of so many Southwest photographs was coagulating into the contused, lurid purple of a thunderstorm.

As thighs bellowed and heart valves squeaked, I began to question whether I’d been ready for this week’s most taxing moments. For the next nine miles I ignored the views I’d come for and studied the white line at my wheel as I slogged toward the crest of Tin Cup Mesa.

Yet whenever things seemed a bit grim, I was learning, there was always something redemptive, if only I could find the energy to look up. This time it was blooming globemallow and smiling prairie sunflowers that lined the roadside like spectators. I mashed the pedals and pushed higher.

On the previous morning, John had stood in a parking lot in Grand Junction, Colo. He had some wisdom to impart before anybody went anywhere. “We’re going to be riding in some areas that are very remote — very remote,” said John, who is both lead guide and Lizard Head’s owner. “There are areas out here where there’s nothing. So if you’re way ahead of the aid wagon, remember to have enough water.”

He wasn’t exaggerating. Following little-trafficked byways, our route would at times parallel the San Miguel and Dolores Rivers; swing past the ruins of Hovenweep National Monument and the rock bridges of Natural Bridges National Monument; dip into Arizona and Monument Valley; and do a flyby of the staggering goosenecks of the San Juan River, before finally turning north and plashing to the finish line in the wave-licked shoreline at the north end of Lake Powell at Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. With more than 400 miles of spinning and about 20,000 feet of climbing in five days, it promised to be an undeniably stout ride, especially for a novice cyclist like me. Fortunately, riders had the option of trimming each day by hopping into the “sag wagon” that provided aid and lunch.

OUR group of a dozen was perhaps better prepared than most to handle the week’s trials: In the peloton we had an orthopedist, an anesthesiologist and a cardiology nurse practitioner. And if things got really dire, Warren Moe, Manhattan psychotherapist and bike racer, led the pack. All were avid cyclists in their fashion, from Muriel, a consultant from Saskatoon and a randonneur, or long-distance cyclist, who regularly bikes 200 miles or more in an outing (and who came with Robert, her college-student son), to 11-year-old Aaron, who was working on his bicycling merit badge for the Boy Scouts and was riding a tandem with his father, Kip, the orthopedist. Most were veterans of weeklong rides, and knew a thing or two about the pain that’s concomitant with the pleasures of five days in the saddle: before going anywhere, two riders, Mike McDonald and Bruce Tenenbaum, took “before” pictures of their beer bellies, to compare with the svelte forms they hoped to acquire by week’s end.

By CHRISTOPHER SOLOMON

Robert Garven in Monument Valley in Arizona.

Imagine you’re the hero in one of those old movies, desperately lost in a windswept desert, undulating dunes stretching to the horizon. Out of water, tongue parched and skin blistered, you drop to your knees. Vultures circle overhead. (O.K., maybe you’re in a comic strip, not a movie.) Yet there, in the distance, is a crystal blue pool – no, wait, dozens of them – and you push forward, fantasizing about diving in, slaking your thirst, soothing your miserably sunburned skin. It’s a mirage, of course. Dozens of perfect blue pools don’t just magically appear in the desert.

Except in Lençóis Maranhenses National Park, a sort of inverse-logic desert tucked away by the Atlantic coast of Maranhão state in northeast Brazil where what seems a hallucination is actually real.  The barely off-white silky sands and endless cool oases of the Lençóis are such a visual stunner that, with apologies to Rio de Janeiro, the Canadian Rockies and my ex-girlfriends, they may be the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.

The 570-square-mile park has long been on my must-visit list, but it shot right to the top when I realized my that Frugal voyage from São Paulo to New York would begin in June. That’s the perfect month to visit: the recently ended rainy season has filled the lakes, but the July and August crowds haven’t yet filled the hotels. It’s also the right time to visit the Maranhão’s state capital, São Luís, which has a special way of celebrating Brazil’s annual Festas Juninas, or June Feasts. It’s all about dancing oxen, but more on that later.

The whole thing can be done on the cheap. I found one-way fares to São Luís from Rio or São Paulo as low as 269 reais (about $150, at 1.76 reais to the dollar)  on the Brazilian airlines Gol and TAM, and there are regular buses(29 reais) that run the four-hour route from the São Luís bus terminal near the airport to Barreirinhas — the tourism base town for the Lençóis. (Just coordinate your flight with the bus schedule, or you might end up like me, landing at 1:30 a.m., bribing the night clerk of a 0.001 star hotel near the airport to let you crash unofficially for 20 reais, and then staggering off to catch the 6 a.m. bus.)

My first order of business upon reaching Barreirinhas was to find a reasonably priced pousada, Portuguese for a small hotel or inn. The winner was the six-room Pousada São José, a bargain at 55 reais a night for an air-conditioned room and a relaxing restaurant and bar area that backs up to a creek and is surrounded by tropical vegetation. The mother and son who recently took over the place, Roseli Aparecida Farias and Bruno Valentin, were chatty, helpful and dedicated; Ms. Fariasalso contributes her homemadepapaya marmalade to the included breakfast of fruits, breads, eggs and juices that was nicer than the price suggested it should be.

The first afternoon, I took a standard 50-real tour to the nearest big lagoons in the Lençóis, including Lagoa Azul, Lagoa do Peixe and a few others. My group was all Brazilian, which makes this a good time to note that Brazil has many charms, but a multilingual tourism industry is not one of them. But here,  gorgeous white sands and dipping in lakes that makes the blazing sun almost irrelevant don’t require narration.

Many visitors stay based in Barreirinhas the whole time, heading out on tours to other lagoons, or on boat trips or to play with monkeys. But organized tours are not my thing, and those that I would have liked to do — a plane over the Lençóis, or an all-terrain quad-bike trip through them, were way beyond my $70 (123-real) daily budget.

Instead, I followed advice from friends in São Paulo and took an eight-real boat tripto a smaller, quieter town between the park and the Atlantic Ocean: Atins. On the boat, which I shared with a local couple, their 2-year-old grandson, the crew and a few sacks of rice and manioc flour, my fellow passengers recommended spending the next night in Canto de Atins, a tiny settlement a 90-minute hike from Atins. It’s known to travelers almost exclusively for the fresh grilled shrimp Luzia Diniz Santos serves to hungry adventurers at tables in her family’s home, but what most people don’t know is that same family also rents out rooms for just 20 reais ($11) a night.

That doesn’t get you much, materially speaking anyway: a small room with bed and hammock, use of an outhouse and outdoor shower, electricity for a few hours a night via generator, and coffee and toast for breakfast. It’s not so much a step up from camping as a step sideways. But Luziaand her family live in a landscape of utter calm, under the palms on a strip of sandy prairie between the ocean and the dunes of the Lençóis.

Also in Canto de Atinsis an excellent tour guide named Cláudio, who for 30 reais the next morning took me out hiking on a solo tour of the lagoons near Luzia’s place. We climbed down and up and across the dunes, the only sign of other living creatures the entire time an unattended herd of goats crossing in front of us. The lagoons by Canto de Atins — like most lagoons in the Lençóis — are so rarely visited they don’t have official names. That’s my kind of tour.

But the best was yet to come. As I lunched on Luzia’s famous shrimp (O.K., but nothing to blog home about) two quad bikes arrived, one carrying a guide and another carrying a Brazilian couple who had paid 320 reais ($181) for the day trip. While the couple dug into some shrimp, Luzia called me over. “You want to go back to Barreirinhas the exciting way?” she asked. And soon I had paid 30 reais($17) to catch a ride on the back of the guide’s bike, and was coasting over the dunes, and luxuriating in nameless, gorgeous lagoons, for 90 percent off the going rate for a quad bike tour.

After a final night in the Pousada São José, it was back to São Luis on Saturday for a taste of the Festas Juninhas. In much of Brazil, they take on a country flavor, often accompanied by the old-timey, accordion-based sound of forró music. But São Luís does it a bit differently. There’s plenty of forró, and other dances both Portuguese and African in origin, but the main attraction is a tradition called “bumba-meu-boi.” It’s a curious musical and theatrical combination revolving around the legend of a ranch hand named Francisco whose wife gets a craving to eat the tongue of their employer’s pet ox, or boi. Dedicated husband that he is, Francisco kills the ox, the ranch owner is furious, and so on and so forth, but Indian shamans are called in, the ox is resurrected, and everyone celebrates.

Dozens of groups put on wildly varied bumba-meu-boi performances, but all feature the same characters, dressed in festive, ornate attire reminiscent of Carnival. The Saturday night I was in town I hit up two of the main venues: the grand stage at Praça Maria Aragão, attended by thousands, and the other in Reviver, the historic district, which had three more intimate stages. (A third spot, the Arraial da Lagoa de Jansen, came highly recommended, but I didn’t make it there.)

I loved bumba-meu-boi for three reasons. First, the spectacle itself was amazing in that it was unlike anything that I’d ever seen but it was easy enough to recognize the main characters in the drama playing out onstage. Second, I didn’t spot any other foreigners, so I felt that I had stumbled onto something new. Third, it was all free.

And thank goodness, because I had decided to blow 110 reais ($62) of my daily budget at the pousada Portas da Amazônia, in a gorgeously (if only partly) restored 1839 building in Reviver. The utterly huge rooms had the cool original, creaky window shutters, and beds and towels of such luxury that any low-end traveler instantly realizes will not be his for long.

I chose Portas over the much cheaper option: a hostel just 25 reais a bed, in part beacuse Roseli and Bruno in Barreirinhas had suggested it, and in part because I had bargained them down via phone to 110 reais from 139, which would at least leave about 15 reais to spend the rest of the day.

And that turned out to be easy. I had had a big free breakfast my last morning at Pousada São José, and held off for an early dinner at one of the food stands selling heaping plates of local cuisine to those attending the bumba-meu-boi performances.

For 8 reais ($4.50!) I got a pile of arroz de cuxá, a rice with herbs that is perhaps the most famous local dish, and a choice of three entrees. I went all shellfish: a crab pie of sorts, a shrimp stew called camaroada, and mussel-like sururu in the shell. Conclusion: filling and full of soul, but no chance Maranhense cuisine becomes the next big thing. The highlight of this state has nothing to do with food – or the tongues of pet oxen, for that matter. It’s the mirages come true.

By SETH KUGEL

The Lençóis Maranhenses, near Canto de Atins, Brazil.

India is a rich land in terms of both natural beauty as well as cultural heritage, and this is what eco tourists actually look for in their trip. Hence, all those interested in eco tourism have tremendous scope in India. You can visit the ancient cities, hill stations, remote villages, desert areas, wildlife parks to witness the diversity of India as an eco tourists destination. The beauty these places exude and the significance they hold in our lives have made them tremendously charming.

An eco tourism trip in India will not only bring you face to face with the exemplary creations of nature and man but will also cultivate in you an awareness about the importance of all these elements in our lives. It will also arouse in you an understanding of the importance of keeping our environment clean and beautiful.

And all this is not without fun as the eco tourism destinations in India have numerous ways to make your trip entertaining and memorable. All these places have a very different terrain and style of living as such a visit to these places is definitely going to be one of the most enjoyable trip in your life. Nothing else can be a better option for those who love nature and environment as dearly as their own entertainment.

By Indialine

Elephant Safaris in Kaziranga National Park, Assam.

If what you need is a long walk in the desert, the Banyan Tree Al Wadi is the place to take it.

The hotel officially opens this month in Ras Al Khaimah, a wealthy statelet of the United Arab Emirates. The Banyan Tree’s canopied bedrooms and tented villas evoke all the romance of 1001 nights, outfitted with flat screen TVs and private plunge pools. Each unit looks out onto ghaf trees and desert dunes.

The hotel is set on a wildlife preserve that hosts native birds, Arabian oryx, and different breeds of gazelle. The property is designed such that you could wake up to an oryx grazing just beyond your bedroom window. The staff offer guided bike tours of the preserve, and an on-site Falconcy Center mixes education and interaction for guests interested in native birds. The downside of vacationing in the desert habitat is an exposure to the elements; summers are excruciatingly hot, and the occasional sandstorm can keep guests indoors.

The hotel décor is a kind of Zen Arabesque, mixing Thai and Middle Eastern accents. The Moon Bar, a rooftop lounge, serves drinks and water pipes with a view of the sunset on the sand dunes. An exceptional Thai restaurant, Saffron, overlooks a watering hole designed so that the preserve’s animals can join you for dinner.

By LARA SETRAKIAN

The Banyan Tree Al Wadi officially opens this month in Ras Al Khaimah, a wealthy statelet of the United Arab Emirates.