South America

Travel through South America by country:

Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Uruguay, Venezuela

Travel through South America by popular city:

Bogota, Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro

Travel through South America by popular things to do:

Adventures in the Amazon, Falkland Islands, Iguazu Falls, Tierra del Fuego

Lonely Planet’s Blue List

by Erik Olsen on

Here at gadling, we’re all about finding new travel ideas. And equally, we’re about pointing you to places where those ideas are most abundant. Well, where abundance is concerned, I have just closed the covers on a cornucopia of ideas that, frankly, has me feeling a little exhausted right now.

Lonely Planet’s new edition of its Blue List series is a compelling page turner that, if you’re like me, will cause an immediate shortage of yellow post-its. Those post-its now cling to the inside pages of my Blue List guide, making it look a bit like a paper peacock flattened by a semi.

The Blue List guide, subtitled “The Best in Travel 2007” provides page after page of sumptuous photos and informative text about interesting places and things to do in them all over the globe. The ideas start off with a calendar section that groups together events by month. For example, December has the Festival of the Oases in Tunisia and the Hornbill Festival in India. Chances are, you’ll have to Google these for more info, but they’re a fine start.

Other recommendations in the book are broken out by activity, so if you are, for example, a fan of scuba diving, you can get a good idea of the top trips for bubble blowers. The books lists the Cocos Islands in Costa Rica and Chuuk lagoon in Micronesia among their top spots. Or let’s say you have long believed in UFOs and want to design a trip for you and your ET-loving friends? Well, you can do that, too, with their paranormal trips section.

Then savor my favorite section, called the Go List, which breaks out LP’s top picks for places to visit in the coming year. We’re NOT talking Florida and Vegas here. We’re talking about exotic, less-explored locales like Maluku, Indonesia and Gabon. Then there’s a section on gadgets and the best places to wed and dark travel and, well, more and more.

If I have any complaints, it that while the book really whets your appetite, you don’t leave feeling completly satisfied. In fact, you leave a bit hungrier than before. But as I say, maybe that’s what Google, or LP’s country-specific guides are there for. Either way, keeping to their fine tradition of helping you REALLY get out there, the good folks at Lonely Planet have done a fine job with this new book.

Best Travel Writing Anthologies

by Erik Olsen on

I am a big fan of travel writing anthologies. The nice thing about them is that you can sit down for a brief period, say a subway ride, and consume a story about someone’s adventure abroad and for just that brief period, be transported to someplace far away. The other thing about these anthologies is that the stories tend to be crisp and extremely well-written, largely because they have been selected by expert editors who have culled through mountains of stories to bring you the select few they deem worthy of publication in a book. I’ve recently taken a look art two wonderful anthologies that I highly recommend.

The first is The Best American Travel Writing 2006 edited by Tim Cahill. I brought this along with me on my Baja trip and consumed each story with relish (and a dollop of salsa…ha!). Seriously, the stories here are wonderful and they just keep coming. From Michael Behar’s thoughtful and at times harrowing piece on finding lost tribes in the rain forests of West Papua to a splendid piece on the quirky founders of Lonely Planet, this series never fails to both entertain and inspire. If you’re like me, you will find yourself constantly taking notes on new places you want to visit, let alone scribbling marginalia to remind yourself about wickedly clver turns of phrase to help your own writing. Take, for example, George Saunders hilarious journey through Dubai, where he encounters perhaps the most bizarre examples of conspicuous consumption on the planet: a series of lavish, luxury-laden hotels that belong in an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story about impossible human comforts. There is hardly a single story in this book that will not leave you either smiling or checking prices on kayak.com for flights to, say, St. Petersburg (see Gary Shteyngart’s piece on that subject).

Another fine collection comes from the good folks at Travelers’ Tales who every year compile their take on the year’s best travel writing for their Best Travel Writing 2006 anthology. I’ve read this anthology a few years running now and always find the picks both mind and soul-nourishing. They can also be quite funny. One of the great things about the editors’ choices here (the book is put together by TT’s Larry Habegger, James O’Reilly and Sean O’Reilly) is the passionate focus on story.

It may seem obvious that a “story” be the key feature of a travel tale, but the fact is, many writers tend to forget that what keeps us interested and eager to keep reading, is the desire to know what is going to happen next? TT’s Best Travel Writing is filled with tales that make you want to turn the page to find out what happens next.

Take, for example, Patrick Symmes’ “The Book”, a story that ran in Outside about a legendary travel guide compiled by vagabond Israelis that became a kind of Talmud of Travel. Having traveled myself in Latin America, I heard of this book, but more or less pooh-poohed the possibility that it actually existed. Turns out I was wrong.

Another wonderful story is Joel Simon’s “Fiji Time,” which opens with the joyful Fijian word of welcome “Bula!”, but then ends with a guy nearly getting his leg bitten off by a shark. These are just two of many, many fine stories that I could spend an entire day writing about here.

One of the great things about TT’s anthology is that the choices here are truly eclectic, and come from people and publications that are far from mainstream magazines. The America’s beset series ha a few of these, but TT does a better job, I think, of finding stuff that you’ve probably never seen.

So if you’re a traveler and are still hunting around for some good reading for yourself or perhaps a gift for a wanderlusting friend, consider one or both of these excellent books.

Andes Photo Gallery

by Erik Olsen on

Having spent over a year living in Chile way back when, I can attest that the Andes Mountains are a photographer’s dream. The scale of these towering peaks and gaping valleys are like nothing most of us know wen we think of mountains. This hemisphere’s largest mountain, Aconcagua, is in the Andes.

Indeed they are lovely, and so that is why I’d like to direct you to this nice little photo essay over at National Geographic that features a bunch of great pics of the Andes. Rather than hike these massive peaks, however, Henry von Wartenberg covered some 5,000 miles on his motorcycle, cruising along mountain passes through four countries in five weeks. From the salt flats and the altiplano to Lake Titicaca, Bolivia, the series here actually conjured up some vivid memories for me.

Removing Tourists from Your Travel Photos

by Adrienne Wilson on

There have been many vacations in my past (with the exception of Romania and Tajikistan) where I was bummed out by the amount of tourists crawling all over the walls, floors, and big toe of some famous marble statue. Trying to a take a decent photo becomes depressing and so I usually give into capturing the moment with all the tiny little speckles I call human beings dotting the shot. And if you’re anything like me, you let out a huge sigh and mumble under your breath how you wish they’d all go away, but you must also remind yourself that someone else under the giant Buddha is also wishing they could erase you too. It almost sounds like a game doesn’t it?

Eliminating other obnoxious, gawking, tourists from your photo after the fact can be difficult, but is not impossible. The first thing one must try to do is take the picture with as few people as possible. Then comes the fun part – making them all vanish! The first tip as found on the dsphotographic.com site is to use a tripod. (This is assuming you are starting from scratch.) After you’ve got some photos to play with you’ll need to take them into Photoshop and from this point you’ll need to check out the tutorial because it gets very detailed from here. Overall the tourist removal sounds like it could be well worth the effort in the end, but it will involve some amount of work.

The Traveling Guys

by Erik Olsen on

I was just browsing around and literally stumbled across this rather amazing site. Called “the Traveling Guys” it is a multi-media tour de force with an activist bent. The site is filled with maps, gorgeous photos, some interesting country-specific descriptions and video to boot.

It is the work of two guys, Lee and Patrick, who have done lots of traveling and are eager ,it seems to spread the gospel of travel…in the strictest sense of the word. The site’s stated mission is to “impact others around the globe” to promote “global change”, an admirable ,if somewhat nebulous concept…one, at least, that we can all latch onto. It does have a fairly heavy religious component, though, notably Christian, so it may not be for everyone, but I admire the quality of the design and the lovely multimedia work.