Posts Tagged ‘Colombia’

Award-winning journalist Maureen Orth has lived a fascinating life. One of the first women hired by Newsweek, she’s interviewed pop stars such as Paul McCartney and Bruce Springsteen.

She is currently a special correspondent for Vanity Fair magazine, where the topics she covers range from Obama’s White House to the “Craigslist murder.”
Her family life is interesting [...]

In this guest post, Lauren Quinn –the creator of Lonely Girl Travels –shares her experience traveling alone in Colombia at a time when most tourists were afraid to go there.

Lauren was one of Lonely Planet’s Featured Bloggers for 2010. Besides being an intrepid traveler who has also made sola visits to places such as  Venezuela [...]

The advice to gringos planning to travel to places like Colombia or Mexico City is always the same: try not to stand out. Don’t walk around with a big camera dangling from your neck. Refrain from wearing expensive jewelery. Try not to appear as though you’re lost.
All of these admonitions make sense, and I have [...]

Out of the approximately 2.5 million U.S. visitors to Mexico in the first half of 2009, at least 126 Americans died of non-natural causes, according to U.S. State Department statistics.
The Los Angeles Times points out that, of these, there were:

36 homicides, and
22 drownings.

The balance of the non-natural deaths resulted from accidents and suicides.
Wend Magazine [...]

As Congress continues to debate reforming the health care system in the U.S., more Americans are going to other countries to seek medical care. Recent studies indicate that Mexico and other countries in Latin America have emerged as a prime destination for medical tourists. Some major players in the medical tourism industry include Mexico, Costa [...]

Two posts last week (here and here) mentioned some disparaging remarks the author of Lonely Planet’s guide to Colombia made about Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela. The author, Jens Porup, made the unflattering characterizations of these countries in a speech in Bogota before Colombia’s minister of tourism and other highly ranked officials.
His comments generated a [...]

As Colombia begins to shed its reputation for crime and violence, it still struggles to attract international visitors. A lack of an iconic tourist attraction is chief among the country’s problems.
In a speech before the Bogota Tourism Board a couple of weeks ago, travel writer Jens Porup offered a [...]

With all the hand wringing about the upcoming flu season by most major media outlets in the U.S., there’s been little coverage of the toll that the Swine Flu or H1N1 virus is currently exacting in Argentina and Brazil.
Health officials in Argentina recently disclosed that the Swine Flu has killed 465 people.
On Sunday, Colombian President [...]

The idea was to cram everything we owned into a storage unit and head out on the road, writes August Flanagan–co-founder of Spanish learning website Lenguajero.  The goal, learn Spanish.  The destination, Latin America.

From the beaches of Mexico to the mountains of Patagonia and everywhere in between, we were going to study Spanish, immerse ourselves [...]

The Economist magazine released its latest edition of the Big Mac Index last week. The index tracks the price of McDonald’s Big Mac in the 120 countries where the burgers are sold. It converts to U.S. dollars the purchase price in each country.
The Big Mac costs $3.57 in the U.S., according to the index.
The dollar [...]