Chronicles of On The Road Travel

Tour Guides - Can't Live With Them, Can't Live Without Them

This comment about 'travel specialists', or guides, by Mark Schatzker, the '80 Days or Bust' traveler from Condé Nast,  made me think about my own experience finding and dealing with guides.  I tend to agree with him that (even for independent travelers) a guide who can ease the hassles of negotiating in a new culture and language can enhance a particular experience.  Thorough research is advised if you're not going with a recommended guide, though.  Sometimes, unfortunately, we don't have the luxury of choice if we don't plan ahead.

Like the time I found myself stuck in the dreadful town of Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe with no prior plans on how to get to Botswana.  Considering ourselves expert travelers, Todd and I headed to Southern Africa for a month and decided to wing it as we had everywhere else we'd traveled to up to that point.  We were in for a surprise when we arrived in Victoria Falls from Cape Town to find out that most people traveling in this part of the continent booked tours ahead of time with foreign companies, as the infrastructure to get from point A to B (city to city, as much as country to country) was rudimentary at best.  Victoria Falls is a creepy town that felt abandoned and unwelcoming.  You were gawked at by seemingly unemployed young men everywhere you went and I did not feel safe, even when I was inside my hotel room. 

In this bleak environment we found ourselves staring at this man who was wearing a suit that was many sizes too large on him, sitting behind a desk in an unlit room inside a dingy strip mall, who claimed to be an expert tour guide of the area.  For the next 5 days he would take us through Botswana on a couple of safaris, then the Okavango Delta, and finally drop us off at the border crossing to Zambia, all meals, tent accomodation and transportation provided.  We just had to pay up front.  All our senses told us this was a bad idea.  After checking out the one other alternative in town, however, he was our only way out of that forsaken town the following day so we crossed our fingers and handed over our money.

As we probably could have predicted, the next few days were full of surprises.  Starting with being stranded in the rain at Chobe National Park with no guide, no tent and no food until 9 o'clock on the first night, to the meals of cold canned beans on plates that had been rinsed on dirty water out of the back of the trunk of our A/C-less car standing by the side of the road, to the unpleasant surprise that we had to purchase our own food to take to the Okavango Delta and yes, we were our own chefs.  Not to mention the fact that our guide casually told us he had been in jail and he carried a knife in the car in case we had any emergencies.  I honestly think the man did not mean to rip us off or give us an unpleasant experience; he truly thought he was giving us acceptable service, but there were many frustrated moments when we wished we had ditched the guide and struggled through the language and infrastructure barriers on our own. 

Looking back we had a great experience in spite of our guide and I remember the wonderful safaris, sceneries and people we met along the way.  I did walk into this one with my eyes open but I also had some key learnings from the experience: do my research (and potentially book tours) ahead of time when going to more remote, poor areas and set my expectations to the local custom when hiring a local guide in an untouristed country. 

If you're headed to Latin America, be sure to check out our recommended tours to avoid an unpleasant situation.  We stand by our recommendations, as we research all our providers before bringing them to you.

This article was posted by Veronica Montero

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A Great Alternative for a Mother's Day Gift

As Green As It Gets is an innovative organization in Antigua, Guatemala that supports small, independent coffee producers and local artisans. We feature them on the website for their unique coffee tours which allow you to pick, process and roast your own coffee. Just in time for Mother's Day, the folks at As Green As It Gets have come up with a brilliant idea - the  Mother Tree.  As part of their reforestation project, they have registered a number of trees in the Ixcan rainforest. These trees are old enough to bear healthy seeds if they are protected. Why not sponsor a Mother Tree in the name of your mom for the special occasion? A one-year sponsorship will ensure that the tree will not be cut down for lumber and will also go towards further reforestation efforts by the organization. Click here to choose your Mother Tree and find out more information about this environmentally-friendly gift! While you are on the website check out their other stuff - they have some neat items for sale and do a lot for the environment and small business owners in Guatemala.

What Every Visitor Should See in Buenos Aires

Any visitor hoping to experience the ‘essence’ of 21st century Buenos Aires can do so at MALBA, (Buenos Aires’ Museum of Latin American Art nestling in the city’s Palermo neighbourhood). Even standing on the steps outside there is something about the juxtaposed glass-panelling and concrete, design symmetry and asymmetry, of the museum’s construction that reflects the duality of a city looking hopefully to the future though haunted by a difficult past. MALBA’s founders seem to have set out specifically to capture this modern ‘essence’ since they chose three young and relatively unknown Argentine architects, (Gastón Atelman, Martín Fourcade and Alfredo Tapia) to design the building from four hundred and fifty international proposals.

HISTORY

This idea of MALBA as a mirror of Argentine consciousness is particularly poignant since it opened in 2001. This was the year Argentina was forced to emerge from former-President Carlos Menem’s capitalist dream to the reality that its economic infrastructure could not support this. In the throes of the ensuing economic crash, Eduardo F. Costantini, a private collector of twentieth century Latin American art since the 1970’s, opened the doors to the new house of his collection, the centerpiece of MALBA’s offering. This is testament to Costantini’s loyalty to birthplace, since he could justifiably have opted to place his collection in Brazil, Uruguay or Spain (less economically turbulent at the time), where parts of his collection had been showcased in previous years.

THE COLLECTION

With the two hundred and seventy piece Costantini patrimony MALBA houses one of the finest collections of twentieth century Latin American Art. It features Modernists (Guttero, Figari), Surrealists (Kahlo, Lazo), Constructivists (Le Parc, Palatnik) and Pop Artists (Uriburu, de la Vega) among others. MALBA also offers temporary collections that change by the season. Film festivals, authorial lectures and debates also take place regularly at MALBA. 

FOR THE VISITOR

The growing social awareness of porteños (Buenos Aires residents) is reflected at MALBA too. Special guided tours for children, the elderly, visually impaired and mentally handicapped now also feature alongside traditional tours. Free entry is available for the disabled, the retired, students and under 12 every day and for all on Wednesday. There is also a spacious restaurant, which extends onto the patio outside in summer, to cater for the ultimate unmissable porteño indulgence – food.

Find out more things to do in Buenos Aires from On The Road Travel.

This article was submitted by Muireann Prendergast. If you have an article you'd like to submit, please send it to [email protected].

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Insider Tips for a Visit to Paris

Some friends are headed to France this summer and I had started to pull together a list of recommendations - both from my own (although somewhat outdated) experiences and from friend who live there. I thought I may as well share them with you too... in case anyone else out there has planned a trip to Paris:

-  Have breakfast at Laduree on Rue Royale, drinks at the plaza athenee or Pershing Hall.
-  A Priori -- an amazing brunch spot in the Galleries Viviennes. If its nice out Les Tuileries is an amazing place to sit and read the paper.
-  Le Fumoir -- across from the Louvre is also good for brunch or drinks
-  Le Grand Colbert -- a little cheesy since it was the restaurant in the movie Somethings Gotta Give, but if you like seafood, especially shellfish, they have this AMAZING platter that you can share
-  Definitely go for falafel in the Marais -- its a great neighborhood to walk around in
-  Marriage Frere is a great tea house if your into that
-  Walking around St. Germain is, without a doubt, my favorite thing to do. Fun shops, great cafes and little bistros. Chez Fernand was a great little bistro on Rue Guisard. Also a great crepe place on princesse street...
-  Again, sounds a little cheesy, but these walking tours are actually a great way to see the city and hear the history. I did about 5 different ones while I was there.

Mostly, its a great city to not have an itinerary -- there's so much to do you can pick up anywhere.  Fontainebleau (where INSEAD was) is kinda cool and within 45 minutes of Paris. It has a beautiful castle with grounds. The town of Barbizon (near Fonty) is a little artists town and has great restaurants.

If you go to Burgundy, try to do a lunch tasting at La Table de Olivier Leflaive. It's a pretty cool experience.

Good blogs:
Bonjour Paris
Voice of Paris
Parisnormale: Indie Paris News

And a few recent travel articles:
Cheap and Chic Hotels in Paris
Best Boulangeries in Paris
Paris at a Price That's Right

Anyone else out there have good tips?

Travel Advice & Recommendations From Local Experts

Nightlife in Buenos Aires Still Stifled

The casual visitor to Buenos Aires may be impressed by the city’s abundance of free cultural offerings. This last summer the city sponsored 380 activities and 28 free public concerts featuring up-and-coming artists and big-name acts such as Gustavo Cerati and Juana Molina.

What many visitors may not realize is that despite the city’s offerings, many in the entertainment industry and concertgoers are unhappy about the lack of available venues to perform and see live music in Buenos Aires.

After the December 2004 fire in the nightclub República Cromagnón that killed 194 people, clubs and bars all over the Buenos Aires were shut down for security and code violations. The daily newspaper Clarín reports that before the Cromagnón fire there were 5000 venues for live music. Today there are less than 1000.

Musicians and club owners accuse the city of handing out heavy-handed fines to nightclubs, milongas and performance spaces over minor infractions and instituting code regulations that many smaller venues find impossible to complete. Groups such as the Syndicate of Argentine Musicians (known by its Spanish acronym, SAdeM) and the Union of Independent Musicians have held protests and presented formal complaints to the city government. They argue that the crackdown limits the income not only of musicians but everyone who works in the industry.

Some further accuse the city of generating positive publicity by monopolizing free cultural events and concentrating the music scene into the hands of a select few. Mayor Jorge Telerman, who replaced impeached mayor, Aníbal Ibarra, (and frequently appears in the newspaper pictured alongside musicians such as Bono and Tom Waits) co-owns one local club, La Trastienda.

The city, for its part, says it has cracked down on the sort of corruption that allowed Cromagnón to happen and adds that it is just complying with regulations that were always in place, but not necessarily enforced.

Article and photos by Ande Wanderer, our Editor in Buenos Aires. Also see our recommendations for 'Where to Go Out in Buenos Aires' as well as our calendar of events.   

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The Amazon: Coming Up For Air

The May issue of Vanity Fair Magazine is their 2nd Annual Green Issue. Inside is a wonderful article, with outstanding photos, about the effects of global warming on the Amazon. Unfortunately the online version of the magazine doesn't include this story, so I'll have to tell you about the article myself and if you are interested, you can pick up a copy and read the rest.

First of all, a few shocking facts that I found in the article and wasn't aware of:
1) The Amazon, which spans 9 countries including Brazil and Peru, generates 20% of the planet's oxygen and contains 15 - 20% of its life-forms
2) Peru's glaciers have lost almost a quarter of their ice since 1970 and a study by Peru's National Council for the Environment predicts that most of them could be gone in 20 years
3) 17 - 18% of the Amazon rain forest is gone, and some scientists predict that when 40% of it is cut it will hit the tipping point where it starts to die back spontaneously
4) A computer model at the Hadley Center in England predicts that the Amazon will start to turn into a savanna by 2050 and complete the tranformation by 2080... that is in our children's, and possible our, lifetime!
5) 25% of the worlds greenhouse gas emissions come from deforestation. 7% is from Brazil alone
6) The Quechua people who live at the base of the Qoyllur Rit'i glacier, in Peru, traditionally made an annual pilgrimmage to a symbolic rock below the glacier. The glacier has receded so far that it takes one hour to get there today and thus, the ritual has ceased. Most Quechua believe that the world will end when the glacier disappears.

The article follows the author's journey through the Amazon to find out whether the drought is part of a normal cycle or the beginning of a broader trend.  His quest takes him from Cusco through the Urubamba valley, deep into the Andes and over to Manaus, Brazil, the capital of the Brazilian Amazon where he explores the issue from a different perspective.

Along the way he visits indigenous villages and local experts to find spiritual and scientific evidence that help him to draw an unfortunate conclusion: the forest is gasping.

Here's a shot from the Peruvian Amazon. If you really want some entertainment, check out the video on the Vanity Fair website of Knut, the adorable polar bear cub that makes his debut on the May cover. Or... plan your trip to South America and see the beautiful landscapes before they disappear!

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Rent-A-Wife - Are They for Real?!

I realize this has nothing to do with travel but I couldn’t help myself.  This week I got a flyer in my mailbox from a home service based in Toronto and Ottawa called Rent-A-Wife.  You’ve gotta be kidding me!  (Note to self: remember to put that ‘No junk please’ sign on our mailbox).  I had to read the flyer over and again to figure out if this was a joke or not.  No joke.  They provide bodies (allegedly both male and female) that will help you organize your home around the following services: cleaning & organizing, property staging & home décor (i.e., decluttering, room makeovers), repairs & maintenance, and hospitality services (i.e., cooking).  And they use the traditional image of the wife as the homemaker to try to instill trust in their services.  Why not rent-a-hand or rent-a-friend?  Do they really get away with such an insulting and demeaning name by simply stating that "the whole point of the name is to legitimize work traditionally done by women in the home"?  This has to be one of the worst names ever to be given to a business.  Or maybe this simply proves that I’m not their target market.

Funny enough, there is a slightly racier European equivalent.  Rent-A-Wife.be in Belgium also offers home services but they go a step further by letting you specify what this person looks like (hair colour, eye colour, measurements, and even race!).  And their warranty – you can send them back whenever you’ve had enough of them.  They’ll send you a new one from their catalogue that matches your requirements within 24 hours.  I guess if you’re going to have someone inside your home doing your menial tasks for you, you may as well have someone you enjoy looking at?!  This ad says it all (it’s in French but no explanation is necessary for the non-French speakers). 

To go back to my original point about Rent-A-Wife being such a ridiculous name for a legitimate business, it turns out this cheeky ad is only an advertising spoof for an online DVD rental business, dvdpost.be, which uses an outrageous business idea to catch people’s attention!  I thought that was brilliant.

This article was posted by Veronica Montero

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More Violence Erupts in Rio de Janeiro

On the heels of yesterday's post about the recent festivities that have taken place in Rio, there has been yet another outbreak of violence in this beautiful city. One day after The Washington Post featured an article about gang violence involving youths in Rio, a major gun battle broke out in the city between police and gang members. Lee Weingast, OTR's Brazilian Editor reports from Rio de Janeiro:

Things are getting crazy violent around here again (still!). Yesterday (Tuesday) 20 people were killed in a big shootout near the Rebouças tunnel, which is the main connecting artery between the Zona Sul and the rest of the city. Two people were killed in a mugging downtown and another two killed on a street about 3 blks from my house.

The authorities in Rio insist that only members of drug gangs were killed in the shootouts. A New York Times article covering the tragedy points out that, while the murder rate in upscale districts of Rio de Janeiro is comparable to other big cities, the toll in shantytowns rises to around 250 per 100,000, a rate rivaling many war zones.

Like many large cities, Rio's favelas (shantytowns) are patchworked throughout the city and often built up in the hills overlooking upscale neighborhoods such as Ipanema and Copacabana. When the violence spills down into these areas it tends to get internationally recognized, whereas the press rarely picks up on it when it stays contained in the favelas. We continue to stress the importance of safety for those who travel to Brazil.

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Photo Album: Semana Santa in Rio de Janeiro

Veronica recently wrote about Semana Santa - one of the most important holidays, not only in Peru, but throughout Latin America. Lee Weingast, our editor in Rio de Janeiro, has posted these photos of Semana Santa Cultural, a week of street theater, capoeira, circus acts, processions, music, exhibits and installations in Santa Teresa. It's an annual event which takes place right before Easter. Most events are based, albeit loosely, on the religious symbols and story of Easter. Click on the photo below to watch her slideshow. To find out more about events taking place in Rio, check in with our Calendar of Events.

Semana Santa Cultural - Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

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Free Volunteer Opportunities in Latin America

It may seem like an oxymoron, but typically volunteer organizations require volunteers to pay for their experiences. In some cases these fees cover administration costs, in some cases they create a profit for the middleman, and in some cases it is merely the volunteer making a donation in return for the organization's time so that they can ease their conscience. It is difficult to find organizations that don't charge you an arm and a leg to help out.

Steve McElhinney has made this easier for everyone who would like to volunteer in Latin America, by posting the results of his own research for zero / low - cost volunteer positions. Thus was born Volunteer South America, where you can find three types of volunteer programs: programs where you pay a minimal fee for room and board (these allow for shorter term commitments);  day-center programs, where you organize your own room and board; and  full-commitment,  no-fee programs where you are offered free room and board and are expected to commit to a full time position.

Despite the name, the website offers options in both South and Central America, and is a great resource for any OTR traveler who is interested in getting involved with local communities.

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