Chilean Volcano & Southwestern US Wildfires Impact Travel
Volcanic ash cloud drift affects Southern Hemisphere air traffic & wildfires are scorching the Southwest “It’s a Small World After All” are the lyrics to a cloying song played over and over and over at a Disneyland/Walt Disney World ride of the same name. That’s what I thought when I received a press release from Cape Town, South [...]
This Blog Is Back
The return of Travel Babel, after a time out for a cyber-makeover Did you miss me during this blog’s brief hiatus? And do you like the new look? Either my husband Ral or I took the photo at Chile’s Torres del Paine National Park. We have have shared some marvelous travels, from underwater when we went diving off the [...]
Earthquake and Chilean Tourist Destinations
Reflections on Chile; broad-stroke news of current conditions I created this blog in Santiago, Chile, during the 1996 Society of American Travel Writers convention there. The earliest posts are about the Santiago-Valparaiso area more or less in the center of this long skinny country, Puerto Natales and Torres del Paine National Park in Patagonia in [...]
Patagonian Luxury Resort Offers February Value Packages
Remota’s 4-for-3 and 7-for-4 packages offered during the Southern Hemisphere summer I am in the Lake Tahoe area right now, reveling in abundant snow. But if I wanted to go to South America, now would be the time. Remota, a specatular luxury resort lodge on the outskirts of Porta Natales near Chile’s even more spectacular Torres del [...]
"Confessions of a Travel Writer"
Travel Channel premiere of a program that’s a bit about my life Many of my travel writer colleagues are totally fabulous: smart, curious, adaptable, genuinely nice. But some are less so: demanding, complaining, self-centered, condescending. And a few are particularly unpleasant to travel with. “Confessions of a Travel Writer,” which was shown on the Travel [...]
2008 is the Year of the Volcano in Chile
Two major volcanoes eruptions since January impact national parks and resort towns In January, the central Chilean volcano called Llaima began breathing fire, sporadically emitting lava flows that turned the snow that covered upper slopes into steam and sending an ash column more than 10,000 feet into the sky, as was dramatically captured in filmed [...]
Glaciers Up Close and Personal
Article about Argentina’s Perito Moreno Glacier stirs up my own memories of a hike down Switerland’s Great Aletsch Glacier (left). “A Touch of the Arctic in Argentina, ” a front-page feature about an Argentine glacier in today’s Denver Post (originally published in Newsday), set off a torrent of memories. The headline writer’s cavalier use of [...]
Between a rock and a hard place
Writing from Santiago, a brief stop between the rock (the Torres del Paine, a trio of soaring granite towers in the eponymous national park, a designated World Biosphere Reserve, in Patagonia) and a hard place (Easter Island, with its monumental stone figures of mysterious creation). First Internet access in days, and perhaps the only computer [...]
Valparaiso
This UNESCO World Heritage Site is one of the most beautifully situated, most rundown cities I have ever seen. Located around a gorgeous crescent-shaped harbor with homes clinging to steep hills, Valparaiso thrived from the time of the 1849 California Gold Rush, when ships that had rounded Cape Horn re-provisioned in its lovely hardbor, until [...]
Cool new hotel in Santiago
This is a newborn blog, so far without any bells and whistles, but I’ve already discovered a very cool (and very new) 10-room hotel in Bellavista, Santiago, Chile’s liveliest neighborhood. The Hotel del Patio occupies the second floor of a traditional courtyard that is filled with neat little shops and restaurants. The hotel’s furnishings are [...]
