Travels in the Riel World

Mexico seems to have caught the attention of the New York Times. In the past week, the newspaper has published two in-depth feature stories about the country. Luckily, this enables us to vicariously explore two distinct regions of that nation.

First, the travel section published a story on travel in Chiapas as part of its Frugal Traveler series.

In Chiapas, the southernmost state in Mexico, green is never simply green. From the air, green rolls over the unending mountains, intense and damp where there are forests and nubbly like rough felt when the trees end. In the streets of San Cristóbal de las Casas, the hill town in the middle of Chiapas’s central plateau, it’s a shiny layer of Kelly spread thickly across the facade of a Spanish colonial home. In the church of San Juan de Chamula, it’s the toasted green of pine needles strewn across the floor, and it’s the thin threads woven almost invisibly into the white wool tunics of indigenous Chamulan men.

Chiapas green is the golden green of fair-trade coffee beans ready for roasting, and the translucent olive drab of banana leaves wrapped around steaming tamales, and a Day-Glo pear growing in a backyard orchard. Nowhere have I seen so many variations of Kermit the Frog’s uneasy color, and yet there was one place in Chiapas, which I visited over 10 days in October, where green served little to no purpose: my wallet.

Yes, Chiapas is cheap — as is much of Mexico, where the exchange rate has, since September, zoomed from 10 to 13 pesos to the dollar. But Chiapas’s affordability is compounded by its relative obscurity. Apart from the packs of post-collegiate backpackers experimenting with Maya mysticism and awkward hairstyles, few American tourists venture there. Perhaps it’s a fear of the Zapatista rebels, whose 1994 seizure of five Chiapas towns gained them worldwide headlines. Or maybe it’s simply the state’s inaccessibility — at least 12 hours by bus from Cancun, Oaxaca or Mexico City, and about the same by air from the New York area.

Either way, the lack of crowds means that, for not much more than $50 a day, mildly adventurous travelers have unfettered access to lovely colonial towns and indigenous cultures (Indians make up a fifth of the state’s 4.3 million people), to the ancient Maya ruins at Palenque, Bonampak and beyond, to lush, isolated rain forests, to good coffee, to quirky and affordable hotels and even to the shadowy Zapatistas themselves.

Then, the Escapes section of the Times published a story on the charming town of San Miguel de Allende, which happens to house a fair number of American expatriates.

It had been four years since I last saw San Miguel de Allende, the 16th-century colonial Mexican hill town that shelters a happy crowd of American retirees and part-time residents. I was curious about what time, trendiness and progress had done to this place beloved for its preserved Spanish colonial architecture and aura of timeless charm. Now, sitting in the jardín — the loud, leafy central plaza — I began to deduce a complex answer.

A few weeks before my recent visit, San Miguel had been named a Unesco World Heritage Site, and at a nearby table, a group of Americans were buzzing about that success. Yet from the park bench where I sat, I could see something else that was new: on the facade of one of the carefully preserved old downtown buildings was the unmistakable logo of Starbucks.

This, in a nutshell, is San Miguel these days: balancing in a moment of almost exquisite equilibrium between new and old…

While my wife and I were in San Miguel, an international short-film festival occupied half a dozen venues, the play “Shimmer” was in town on tour, a new bistro opened and there was a gala for a local charity. There was a time when Americans retired to San Miguel for its glacial pace and tranquillity. These days, it’s more like a high-end summer camp for aging boomers.

“It’s like Berkeley for retired people,” said Sally Osbon, 55, who, with her husband, Jim, 64, lives half the year in San Francisco and half in San Miguel. The Osbons, whose three-bedroom, 4,000-square-foot house is at the edge of the centro, enjoy not only the climate and the golf, but also what Ms. Osbon called the town’s “bohemian feel.”

When I first heard about San Miguel in the mid-’90s, the knowledge was shared by a friend as a precious secret. Soon afterward, on our first morning there, my wife and I ambled through the most guileless and sweet-natured place we’d ever seen, authentic right down to the donkey-drawn carts carrying water and firewood. Its appearance of being unaffected by its own beauty gave it a quality that was irresistible.

Lots to explore in Mexico, as even the NY Times has apparently discovered.

Brazil is a country that is mad for soccer (or football, as most of the world calls the sport). Now, that passionate love for the game has been permanently documented in a new National Football Museum in Sao Paulo, Brazil. What’s unique about this museum is that it not only celebrates Brazil’s star players and team accomplishments, but it also pays tribute to the sport’s role in Brazilian culture, as described in this article in the International Herald Tribune.

The museum tells the story of both sport and country, where the national pastime has come to represent and inspire the multiracial, samba-loving soul of the people. In Brazil, stuffy European soccer was transformed into “the beautiful game” of magical passing and dribbling that has won the country world renown…

Another room pays homage to Brazil’s fans. They dance shirtless, beating drums to samba rhythms on huge video screens, with cacophonous surround sound that makes you feel as if you are among the crowd.

A sport for the masses is a theme throughout. In one room, a short movie recounts how soccer in Brazil morphed from a country club sport that was socially segregated during Miller’s time, into one that took on the evolving character of the racially mixed working class that was propelling Brazil’s industrialization.

Bolivia is a fascinating nation - one of the highest altitude countries in the world and a place where past and present co-exist in various interesting ways. That’s what Patrick Symmes discovered during a recent visit, which he wrote about for the NY Times travel magazine.

Bolivia is the poorest and highest country in South America, and La Paz is its lively, fermenting main city of 1.5 million, stuck into a cleft in the Andean plateau. High and low, La Paz throngs with a slightly feudal aura, where clothing trends of the 1890s and the 1980s mingle, and politics seamlessly blends the 1960s with the 1690s.

The exotic is right at the end of the block, where at dawn, checking into my hotel, I encountered the end of an overnight festival, with wealthy women in bowler hats knocking back beers and dancing to a brass band. Then a man walked by carrying 10 mattresses on his back. There was a fistfight. Someone emptied a chamber pot from a second-floor window. Todo normal here means 17th-century cathedrals and 21st-century lodgings, witchcraft markets selling disenchantments, eco-tourists packing telephotos and storefront ‘‘mentalists’’ peddling lottery predictions to the hopeful…

There is no doubt that Bolivia is still a hard place, physically, emotionally, aromatically. Compared with the Europeanized societies of neighboring Chile and Argentina, it’s a step back in time, a rustic patchwork quilt of cultures and environments, with large swaths of the country accessible only by beaten tracks and mud roads. (Travel is what Bolivians call imprevisible, unforeseeable.)

But things are getting easier, and today’s visitor is admitted to a particularly sweet spot in Bolivia’s history, a moment when the roads are new but the ways are still old. I’ve had the classic Andean destinations of Isla del Sol, in Lake Titicaca, and the mountain town of Sorata on my to-do list for a dozen years. Yet only now have Bolivia’s stars aligned to make them not just possible, but possible with the surprising ease and unexpected rewards that mark the best days of travel in a difficult place.

In the U.S., the term “innocent until proven guilty” is so much a part of our legal culture and is so ingrained in our minds that it’s shocking to think that legal systems exist in which people are not, in fact, presumed innocent. A belief in individual rights is very much a product of Western culture, but even in the West one finds a variety of different court systems.

In Mexico, for example, individuals have not traditionally enjoyed the ”innocent before proven guilty” presumption. That situation is only now in the process of changing. As this article in the International Herald Tribune notes, Mexico is in the midst of a constitutional shift that will finally provide rights to accused persons and will overturn remnants of a legal system that was inherited from 16th century Spain.

Mexico is in the midst of a legal revolution, and Cristal Gonzalez is on the front lines. The U.S.-trained lawyer is one of a growing number of Mexican attorneys putting judges, lawyers, investigators and clerks through crash courses in justice, now that Mexico has amended its constitution to throw out its inept and corrupt legal system…

On a recent evening, the 30-year-old lawyer explained Mexico’s new rules of justice to a class of 200 professionals with the clarity of a preschool teacher: “The accused is IN-NO-CENT until proven guilty! Confessions cannot be coerced. Which means the person cannot be submitted to …?” She paused for a response.

“Torture,” several students answered in unison.

Under the constitutional amendment passed by the legislature, approved by all 32 states and signed by President Felipe Calderon, Mexico has eight years to replace its closed proceedings with public trials in which defendants are presumed innocent, legal authorities can be held more accountable and justice is equal.

Everyone knows about the Cancuns and Cabos of coastal Mexico. But there are still a few small Mexican villages strung along the country’s coastline where in-the-know travelers go to find a quiet slice of paradise. One of these places is the Baja town of Mulege, which Meredith May recently visited. She wrote about her experiences for the San Francisco Chronicle.

About two-thirds the way down the Baja peninsula on the Sea of Cortez side, Mulegé (moo-luh-HAY) is an eight-street town with no stoplights, few tourists and dozens of empty beaches in stunning coves. It’s the kind of place where the car radio will scan fruitlessly for a station, where drivers on the two-lane Mexico Highway 1 into town must stop for donkeys and snakes, and where it’s still possible to find sun-bleached cow bones among the saguaro cactus.

Mulegé still feels authentic, but the same can’t be said for many of the sleepy mission towns that are transforming into mini-Cabo carnivals, as development inexorably creeps along virtually every stretch of Mexico’s coastline…Travelers trying to stay one step ahead can find their palapa paradise in Mulegé - but perhaps not forever…

Many visitors gather to swap fish tales at El Candil, a Canadian-owned restaurant that serves burgers and chili along with a full Mexican menu. They are often joined by Mulegé’s nouveau locals - Californians who kept visiting so many times they finally bought a place and settled in Mulegé.

“It’s the sweetest little town in the world,” said fisherman Larry Deakyne from the town of Cool, near Auburn (Placer County). “It’s how I imagine Hawaii was before it got overrun with tourists.”

So, what’s a reasonably successful, fiftysomething writer to do when her kids are grown and she finds herself falling in love with Guatemala? Well, buy a house and move there for part of the year. Why not? That’s the somewhat surprising turn that Joyce Maynard’s life took a few years ago, as described in this story.

To reach her favorite place in the world, Joyce Maynard flies for five hours from San Francisco, near her main home in Mill Valley, Calif. Then she is jostled for two and a half hours in a hired minivan over dusty two-lane roads beset by construction delays and clogged by buses spewing fumes. Finally, she boards a launch for a 45-minute ride to the tiny dock near her casa.

Ms. Maynard’s two-story wood and adobe second home perches on a green hillside just outside the village of San Marcos La Laguna, Guatemala, on the edge of Lake Atitlán, one of the deepest lakes in the Americas. Three dormant volcanoes, their peaks often clouded by mist, rim the southern shore of the lake, standing guard over the teal blue water. One of them, San Pedro, is perfectly framed in the view from Ms. Maynard’s bedroom balcony, but every window has a spectacular vista.

Stone steps curve gracefully down from the house, through tall wrought-iron gates, to Ms. Maynard’s own dock on the lake, from which she takes her daily swim. On the water, pale blue launches, called lanchas, ferry passengers from village to village. Fishermen drop lines from their cayucas, small wooden dugout boats with upturned prows.

It is here, somewhat to her own surprise, that Ms. Maynard spends up to four months a year, writing and running workshops for writers.

She had no intention of owning a home in Guatemala when she set out to travel there seven years ago with her daughter, Audrey, who was studying Spanish in a Guatemalan school. On her stone patio one recent morning, a tan Ms. Maynard, wearing a magenta camisole and khaki capris, recalled the conversation that changed the course of her life. “I said, ‘I so envy you, Aud, for getting to be here and study your Spanish,’ and she said, ‘What’s stopping you, Mama?’ ” Dramatic pause. “And I realized, ‘Nothing!’ ” …

“I was writing books, I was having a career, but the biggest adventure was watching them grow and launching them into the world, and they’re launched,” she said, stretching her arms wide with an incredulous laugh. “I had a bit of a crisis figuring out what could possibly be an adventure after that.”

The adventure turned out to be San Marcos, west of Guatemala City in the central highlands. The village is poor. Its indigenous Maya population of 2,500 lives in one-room pueblos and cooks over open fires. Tiny adobe markets called tiendas stock a few staples. Women in traditional dress sit with baskets along the dirt and cobblestone paths, accepting quetzales, the local currency, for their avocados, potatoes, onions and eggs.

Ecuador doesn’t get a lot of tourist attention, save for its renown as the jumping off point to the Galapagos Islands. But there is a lot to see in this small Andean nation, as K.C. Summers and his wife discovered during a recent trip there, which he wrote about for the Washington Post.

We had it all figured out. We would fly to the capital, Quito, drive a couple of hours north and spend a week traveling south through the Andes, taking in as many of the country’s indigenous markets as we could. If we planned it right, we could hit one every day of the week…

During our week in the mountains, Adele and I knew we’d find great crafts and luxury trappings at bargain prices. What we didn’t expect was how quickly our focus would become blurred by everything else Ecuador’s Sierra region has to offer. Quito, our jumping-off point, distracted us immediately with its historic architecture and vibrant urban scene. The stunning beauty of Cotopaxi National Park drew us away from the markets and onto hiking trails and horses. The preserved colonial city of Cuenca instantly won our hearts, and we spent two days exploring its cobbled streets. And throughout the week, we caught tantalizing glimpses of an indigenous culture rich in tradition and rituals.

Let’s just say we got a lot more than we bargained for.

For such a small country (about the size of Colorado), Ecuador is remarkably diverse. Tucked between Colombia and Peru on South America’s west coast, it’s probably best known as the gateway to the Galapagos Islands. But it has three other ecosystems: the Amazon, the Pacific coast and the Andes, or Sierra, each with its own distinct climate, terrain and culture.

It was the Andes that captured our attention. Running half the length of the country, the mountains are home to a dramatic avenue of volcanoes (including Cotopaxi, the highest active volcano in the world), deep valleys, lakes and farmland.

Cultural lessons also apply to the military, as evidenced by this interesting piece in Newsweek, which shows how one soldier took cultural lessons learned as a youngster in Peru and applied them to some of his dealings with locals in Iraq. 

For Capt. Jim Marckwardt, coming to Iraq in 2005 was like being a kid again. Blackouts, water shortages, car bombs and guerrilla shoot-outs—just like his middle-school years in Peru, where his father worked for the U.S. Agency for International Development in the 1980s. Even the people seemed familiar. He was good at bargaining with Iraqi contractors.

“In the U.S., you sit down and negotiate directly,” Marckwardt says. “In Iraq you have to build more relationships. It’s very similar to the Peruvian way of doing business.” He also recognized the sense of honor that drives many Iraqis—another echo of his childhood in Latin America—and has used it to his and his men’s advantage.

There has been no shortage of press coverage in the past year or two extolling the virtues of Argentina, and specifically of Buenos Aires, which many have labeled as the hip destination of choice for current expats. The New York Times also just published a story along those lines and explored the city’s unique cultural and artistic mix.

Drawn by the city’s cheap prices and Paris-like elegance, legions of foreign artists are colonizing Buenos Aires and transforming this sprawling metropolis into a throbbing hothouse of cool. Musicians, designers, artists, writers and filmmakers are sinking their teeth into the city’s transcontinental mix of Latin élan and European polish, and are helping shake the Argentine capital out of its cultural malaise after a humbling economic crisis earlier this decade.

Video directors are scouting tango ballrooms for English-speaking actors. Wine-soaked gallery openings and behemoth gay discos are keeping the city’s insomniacs up till sunrise. And artists from the United States, England, Italy and beyond are snapping up town houses in scruffy neighborhoods and giving the areas Anglo-ized names like Palermo SoHo and Palermo Hollywood.

Comparisons with other bohemian capitals are almost unavoidable. “It’s like Prague in the 1990s,” said Mr. Lampson, who is perhaps best known for winning a Bravo TV reality show, “Situation: Comedy,” in 2005, about sitcom writers. Despite his minor celebrity, he decided to forgo the Los Angeles rat race and moved to Buenos Aires, where he is writing an NBC pilot, along with his Web novela, www.historyandtheuniverse.com. “Buenos Aires is a more interesting place to live than Los Angeles, and it’s much, much cheaper. You can’t believe a city this nice is so cheap.” …

And then there are the novelists, journalists and screenwriters, quietly tapping away in their $600-a-month apartments, seeking to make a name for themselves on Argentine soil. Nate Martin, a 24-year-old from Wyoming, moved to the city in November and took a job as an editor at The Buenos Aires Herald, an English-language newspaper, because, he says, “I didn’t want to be a waiter while writing.” For his creative outlet, Mr. Martin maintains a blog, Grating Space. Like dozens of similar blogs written by foreigners, it rhapsodizes about the Argentine good life.

From China to Cuba, governments have done their best to control technology and the internet in an effort to keep their societies from becoming too open. They’ve had some successes, but it’s nearly impossible to stop people from connecting to the outside world, as shown by this International Herald Tribune article about Cuba.

Cuban officials have long limited the public’s access to the Internet and digital videos, tearing down unauthorized satellite dishes and keeping down the number of Internet cafes open to Cubans. Only one Internet café remains open in Old Havana, down from three a few years ago.

Hidden in a small room in the depths of the Capitol building, the state-owned café charges a third of the average Cuban’s monthly salary - about $5 - to use a computer for an hour…

Yet the government’s attempts to control access are increasingly ineffective. Young people here say there is a thriving black market giving thousands of people an underground connection to the world outside the Communist country.

People who have smuggled in satellite dishes provide illegal connections to the Internet for a fee or download movies to sell on discs. Others exploit the connections to the Web of foreign businesses and state-run enterprises. Employees with the ability to connect to the Internet often sell their passwords and identification numbers for use in the middle of the night. Hotels catering to tourists provide Internet services, and Cubans also exploit those conduits to the Web.

Even the country’s top computer science school, the University of Information Sciences, set in a campus once used by Cuba’s spy services, has become a hotbed of cyber-rebels. Students download everything from the latest American television shows to articles and videos criticizing the government, and pass them quickly around the island.

Still, it does take dedication and persistence for Cubans to maintain these channels of communication with the world:

Yoani Sánchez, 32, and her husband, Reinaldo Escobar, 60, established Consenso desde Cuba , a Web site based in Germany. Sánchez has attracted a considerable following with her blog, Generación Y, in which she has artfully written gentle critiques of the government by describing her daily life in Cuba…

Because Sánchez, like most Cubans, can get online for only a few minutes at a time, she writes almost all her essays beforehand, then goes to the one Internet café, signs on, updates her Web site, copies some key pages that interest her and walks out with everything on a memory stick. Friends copy the information, and it passes from hand to hand.

I came across an interesting recent blog entry on Blog Critics Magazine in which Terence Clarke reminisced about a two-decade-old journey to Nicaragua and what he learned about that country and its love affair with baseball.

“Baseball is a poem,” my companion said. I looked out the bus window….My companion’s sentiment was similar to one that both John and I had noticed among the Nicaraguans in general. Whenever we asked one of them what he did for a living, the answer was almost universally, “I am a poet.”

Putting aside for the moment that at the time it was almost impossible to make a living in Nicaragua…it still seemed unusual to us that so many Nicaraguans claimed to be poets. It’s well known in the United States that writing poetry will make you no money at all. So John and I figured that maybe the Nicaraguans were simply acknowledging that fact, and that, since there was no money anywhere in Nicaragua, maybe poetry was as good a profession as any.

But that was an insouciant observation on our part, because baseball and poetry in Nicaragua have in common one very important element. The heart itself is best expressed by baseball and by verse. The two make the soul sing in that country, equally so, and they do not alternate. Both express the same emotional infusion of earth, water and light. Both bring forth the same artistic flower.

Our group played a game of baseball against an all-star team of farmhands in the town of Boaco…Afterwards we were honored at a fiesta on a ranch outside town. The farmhands had all been invited, and there was a smattering of dignitaries as well, including the nurse at the local clinic, who was holding a baseball in her hands when we met.  She explained that she had loved the game all her life, and was overjoyed that we had come all this way to play against her neighbors here in Boaco.

At first John and I didn’t know that she was the local nurse, because when I asked her what she did, she replied, “Well, I’m a poet.” Only a few minutes later did we discover her medical leanings.

But I took the opportunity to tell her that many, many Nicaraguans had told me that they were poets. Did she know, I asked, why there were so many poets in her country?

“Of course, señor,” she replied. Her eyes fluttered. Her hands caressed the baseball. Smiling, she took in a hurried, excited breath. “It is because Nicaragua is a poem.”

When Brigid Schulte’s sister suggested a family beach vacation that involved 12 people, ranging in age from a five-year-old child to their seventy-something parents, she wasn’t very enamored with the idea. But a week in Zihuatanejo, Mexico, cured her skepticism. She wrote about the family’s experiences for the Washington Post.

Zihuatanejo is an old fishing village on Mexico’s Pacific coast, about 150 miles north of glitzy, touristy Acapulco and just south of lower-key but still touristy Ixtapa…I’d never heard of Zihuatanejo. Claire assured me that it was the place that the inmates of “The Shawshank Redemption” dreamed of going once they broke out of jail. Once we landed, I could quickly see why…

The first thing we noticed when we walked into the tile- and thatch-roofed villa was the breeze. Zihuatanejo is hot, no matter what time of year. But local architect Enrique Zozaya, who carefully studies the direction of the wind and the way the tropical light plays on a piece of land, had designed the villa to take maximum advantage of the ocean breezes. The living room upstairs was completely open to the winds, and three of the four bedrooms had open terraces…

By the time the rest of the family arrived later that afternoon, the staff had squeezed the juice from the limes, made a gigantic pitcher of margaritas and put out platters of fresh guacamole, salsa and chips. The kids played in the pool while the adults caught up. Gama grilled the guachinango (red snapper) that had been caught earlier that day. And we ate by moonlight at the teak table out on the patio before turning in. We would end up eating all of our meals this way…

Over the next few days, we both explored as a group and split into smaller parties. We sisters began every morning by climbing down the steep stairs to a rocky platform near the water’s edge to do yoga. The kids started in the pool. My husband figured out where he could walk every morning to buy an English-language newspaper. And my parents quickly learned how to say huevos revueltos (scrambled eggs) when Gama asked what they wanted for breakfast.

I have to say, I was attracted to this article because Lisa and I had a similarly amazing experience in Zihuatanejo a year ago. It was a quickly-planned, spontaneous vacation and we chose the destination simply because it was relatively inexpensive, we wouldn’t need rental cars to get around, and we could get there at the last minute with frequent flyer miles. We also didn’t know much about Zihuatanejo before we arrived, but it was beautiful, laid-back and friendly. What more did we need?

Here is a photo of the beach at sunset;

And here is the view from the balcony of the condo we rented:

Margaritas, chips and salsa, and an ocean breeze. Hard to beat.

If you like chocolate, you might want to check out this recent feature in Smithsonian Magazine called “A Brief History of Chocolate.” There are quite a few delectable facts about the history of this incredibly popular treat. A sample:

When most of us hear the word chocolate, we picture a bar, a box of bonbons, or a bunny. The verb that comes to mind is probably “eat,” not “drink,” and the most apt adjective would seem to be “sweet.” But for about 90 percent of chocolate’s long history, it was strictly a beverage, and sugar didn’t have anything to do with it…

Etymologists trace the origin of the word “chocolate” to the Aztec word “xocoatl,” which referred to a bitter drink brewed from cacao beans…In the book The True History of Chocolate, authors Sophie and Michael Coe make a case that the earliest linguistic evidence of chocolate consumption stretches back three or even four millennia, to pre-Columbian cultures of Mesoamerica such as the Olmec…

Sweetened chocolate didn’t appear until Europeans discovered the Americas and sampled the native cuisine. Legend has it that the Aztec king Montezuma welcomed the Spanish explorer Hernando Cortes with a banquet that included drinking chocolate, having tragically mistaken him for a reincarnated deity instead of a conquering invader. Chocolate didn’t suit the foreigners’ tastebuds at first –one described it in his writings as “a bitter drink for pigs” – but once mixed with honey or cane sugar, it quickly became popular throughout Spain.

By the 17th century, chocolate was a fashionable drink throughout Europe, believed to have nutritious, medicinal and even aphrodisiac properties (it’s rumored that Casanova was especially fond of the stuff).  But it remained largely a privilege of the rich until the invention of the steam engine made mass production possible in the late 1700s.

From Oregon to Argentina, to be exact. At least that’s the goal of Jonathan Dunham, who has already trekked down the West coast of the United States, through Mexico and Central America, and is now in Venezuela. The donkey (named Judas) has been with him since Mexico, when it was given to him by a family with whom he lived for several months. The NY Times recently profiled Dunham:

His quest began more than two years ago in Portland, Ore., where he was working as a substitute teacher in the public schools. One day, he decided to start walking south, down through the western United States. From Texas he crossed the border into the northern Mexican state of Tamaulipas, where he stopped for a while. He said he hoped to walk for two more years across the rest of South America until reaching Patagonia…

The precise motivation for Mr. Dunham’s travels is not entirely clear, even to him; perhaps it never will be, though at a minimum it is a journey of self-discovery and endurance. In the meantime, newspapers along his route have reported that he was walking for world peace or to set a world record or to spread the word of God.

“They always find something to say,” Mr. Dunham said of the reporters who beat a path to meet him and Judas.

Mr. Dunham has relied on the kindness of strangers along his way through Mexico, Central America and, now, Venezuela. He keeps away from big cities, aware that they are no place for a donkey like Judas. He often seeks out a church upon arriving in a new town or village in search of a safe place to sleep.

Do you love to watch the tango? If, like writer Joe Ray, you’re obsessed by the sultry movements of the dancers and want to learn to tango yourself, you might want to do what he did and head to Buenos Aires for some lessons. He wrote about his experiences for the Boston Globe:

It’s every male wallflower’s dream: walk into a hall of beautiful people, choose the woman you would like as a partner, nod confidently in her direction, and watch as she meets you on the dance floor. One caveat: In this country, when you take her hand you had better know how to tango…

My obsession with the dance began in Paris where, weather permitting, a tango group meets a few times a week in an amphitheater on the banks of the Seine. The music caught me first: somehow light, sultry, and full of longing, with the accordion-like bandoneón grabbing my heartstrings as I rode by on my bicycle. I watched, entranced, trying to understand it all, but it seemed beyond me - everyone was doing different steps, forcing me to watch one couple at a time, and even then, I couldn’t figure it out. No matter. Simply watching and listening was a beautiful way to spend an evening.

In Buenos Aires, tango fanatic and area native Silvia Guzmán agrees to be my guide and immediately puts a finger on what fascinates me most about the dance.

“It’s three minutes of connection,” she says as we watch dancers go ’round in counterclockwise circles at the Salon Canning “milonga,” or tango hall. “You’re always right in front of your partner, never next to each other.”

The sensuality is delicious. We watch instructors call out a few steps - “uno, dos, tres” “apart, together, apart” - as his feet scissor in and out between hers, which flare in circles. When the class ends and the floor fills, people aren’t just connecting, they’re smoldering. I zero in on one couple and while their feet flit about, cat-and-mouse style, their heads touch, and their chests are pressed together. I might as well be staring through a bedroom window.

This year, February is Carnival month in Rio de Janeiro and Mardi Gras month in New Orleans. These are the most famous pre-Lenten celebrations in the world but they are far from the only ones. As this article points out, many countries and cities celebrate Carnival with a diverse array of local traditions.

The hedonistic bacchanalia of Carnival lets loose across the globe every spring, yet most people tend to think only of the plastic beads and floats at New Orleans’ Mardi Gras or samba and elaborately costumed (or barely covered) dancers at Rio de Janeiro’s Carnaval…There is, however, more to this age-old party—and ways to celebrate it…

Some of the most far-flung cities are now home to the festival’s most vibrant incarnations, incorporating many African and indigenous South American traditions, foods and rhythms.

For example…

Carnival in Trinidad and Tobago has its roots as much in West African festivals as it does in European masquerade balls. When slave owners banned the use of African religious practices, dance and drums in colonial Trinidad, the African slaves were only able to openly demonstrate their cultural traditions in those permissive few days leading up to Ash Wednesday. The end result is a concentrated burst of expression that is one of the planet’s most colorful and energetic Carnival celebrations…

In Colombia—one of the world’s largest exporters of flowers—the northern city of Barranquilla hosts a Carnival that’s known for La Batalla de Flores (the Battle of Flowers), a parade where floats try to outdo each other in terms of decorative floral excess. The music is cumbia—not Brazilian samba—and the elaborate costumes draw from both African and indigenous folklore…

Despite the variety, Carnival’s attraction remains the same around the world. It’s not just a chance to show off local culture and music, but an opportunity to melt into the crowd and purge the stresses of daily life. Call it catharsis. Call it a cultural encounter. Anyway you slice it, it’s party time.

As they’re fond of saying in New Orleans, “Let the Good Times Roll”!

Most everyone knows about the Mayan temples at Chichén Itzá, Mexico, which aren’t far from the tourist playgrounds of Cancun. But the Mayans left an even more impressive complex at Tikal in Guatemala, which is lesser known only because it is more remote and less touristed. Ethan Todras-Whitehill, however, went to Tikal recently and reported on his experience for the NY Times.

Now, in the dim light of early morning, a green sea of leaves stretches out before us, fog banks float about like dinghies, and only the resident leviathans, Temples I and III, dare to lift their stony heads above the horizon. Slowly, the city below the canopy begins to take shape, the hidden concert hall of moss-covered stone that has echoed this same jungle symphony every morning for more than a thousand years.

The very word “ruin” suggests a fallen city or temple, a one-time New York or Jerusalem whose inhabitants died out, taking the life of the place with them. But Tikal, surrounded by ever-creeping vegetation and screeching wildlife, and since 1996 once again used for rituals by the Mayan people, feels organic and strangely vivid. It is as if when the inhabitants of the city left, the jungle moved in, keeping it alive until the Mayans could return. Tikal has the feel of a living ruin, closer to its original vitality than perhaps any other deserted city of the past.

Among Mayan sites, Tikal has long been second banana to Chichén Itzá in Mexico…But that popularity seems based on factors other than the ruins themselves. The great advantage of Chichén Itzá is accessibility, in particular, its proximity to the resort towns of the Yucatán Peninsula. It is less lively than Tikal and smaller — its centerpiece a step pyramid that is half the height of some Tikal structures…But for my park entry fee, no ruins can match Tikal’s. Some ancient sites — the Pyramids, the Colosseum — feel monumental. Others — Ephesus, Petra — feel like cities. Stand in the center of Tikal’s Great Plaza, and you will have a feeling of both.