Tag Archives: Guatemala

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State Dept. warning on Mexico

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Americans are being told to avoid non-essential travel to one northern Mexican state after arrests of alleged Mexican drug cartel leaders in the United States prompt fears of retaliation against US tourists.

The US State Department has issued an emergency warning to US citizens following the arrest in Oklahoma of high-ranking members of the infamous Mexican drug cartel known as los Zetas.

The warning was issued by State’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security the day after a raid by federal agents Tuesday on a horse ranch in Ruidoso, OK. Those arrested are suspected of using horse breeding and quarterhorse racing as part of a scheme to launder millions of dollars in Zetas drug money.

For more details on backstory behind this raid and the alleged money-laundering scheme, read this Washington Post story here.

This latest warning from State doesn’t mention los Zetas by name, saying only that:

“The U.S. Embassy alerts U.S. citizens traveling and residing in Mexico to the enhanced potential for violence related to today’s arrests of Transnational Criminal Organization (TCO) associates and family members residing in the United States.”

Once you know about the Ruidoso raid, as well as the background of los Zetas, it’s not too hard to figure out which “Transnational Criminal Organization” they’re talking about.

Los Zetas may control as many as 11 of Mexico’s 31 states, but their power base is believed to be in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, across the border from Laredo, TX. Even before Tuesday’s arrests, the State Department war advising Americans to avoid non-essential travel to or in Tamaulipas.

They renewed that warning yesterday.

The State Department has issued plenty of travel warnings about Mexico through most of this decade, but I can’t recall another time when State came this close to saying that American tourists and expats in Mexico could be specific targets of retaliation.

Arguably the most feared of all those cartels, los Zetas was formed back in 1999 by deserters from an elite Mexican army paratroop unit. Originally hired as highly paid bodyguards for an existing Mexican cartel, they soon went into the drug business for themselves, using their military skills to train gunmen, stage jailbreaks, even set up their own sophisticated communications network.

They are known above all for their willingness to massacre rivals and civilians alike. Their victims may well number in the thousands.

And if you’re wondering if they’ve ever sent gunmen across the border to conduct drug-related “hits” in the United States, the answer is yes.

As their original members have been depleted by government arrests and assassinations from rival cartels, they are believed to have reached across their southern border to recruit new members from los Kaibiles, a Guatemalan army special forces unit with a reputation for human rights violations.

There is no mention in the State Department warning of any specific, credible threat. I suspects it’s based more than anything on the reputation of los Zetas and their new Guatemalan partners for ultra-violence. Frankly, however, that might well be reason enough to issue it — and for Americans living or traveling south of the border to take it seriously.

To Splurge or to Scrimp, that is the question

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Travel expert Pauline Frommer was in Long Beach for the recent Los Angeles Travel & Adventure Show. What follows is from her public presentation at the show.

If the name Pauline Frommer rings a bell with you, it might be because she’s the daughter of the man I call the Godfather of Travel, Arthur Frommer. However, she’s an accomplished travel writer herself with her own published guidebook series.

In her presentation at the Los Angeles Travel & Adventure Show in Long Beach, she focused on cost-conscious travel, specifically on knowing when to splurge and when to scrimp.

LODGING
If, like most of us, you’re not blessed with unlimited discretionary funds, you’ll be heartened to hear that she mostly leaned toward scrimping, and she recommended a few Web sites to help you do that.

One of them was Hotels Combined.

“Hotel Combined looks at (other hotel) sites and picks out the best deals,” she said. “They do not sell anything.”

Indeed, that seems to be developing into a theme in the travel industry. Hotels, like airlines, are increasingly looking for ways to get around the Expedias and Travelocitys and Orbitzes to market themselves directly to their online customers.

(Just today, in fact, The Economist magazine reported that six major hotel chains — Choice, Hilton, Hyatt, InterContinental, Marriott and Wyndham — have joined forces to create Roomkey.com to sell their rooms.)

“(Hotel) chains no longer want to pay fees to third-party sites,” Ms. Frommer said.

(Nor is it just fees. If you find a lower room rate at, say, a Sheraton on Expedia than you can get from Sheraton’s own Web site, you’ll learn that Sheraton can’t match it, even if you call the hotel yourself. Why? As it was explained to me by the Sheraton reservations clerk, Expedia has bought up and controls its own block of rooms within the hotel. Crazy, huh?)

Another site she recommended for tracking down hotel bargains was Hipmunk, which lets you tailor your hotel search not only by price, but by location and any number of other specific factors you have in mind.

Say you want to track down the best room rates in the section of town closest to the theater district. Hipmunk will map them out for you.

Conversely, if you want to see which hotels are located in the parts of the city you want to avoid, it’ll show you that, too. That feature literally could save your life.

Other hotel sites she recommended included:

She also is a big fan of vacation rentals as an alternative to hotels, along with home stays and home exchanges. Good for saving money, she said, and also for getting a true feel for a place.

“When you rent a home, you get into the parts of the city you want to see,” she said. “You meet the locals. It’s a real cultural experience.”

Her recommended sites include:

When it comes to home exchanges, “go with the companies with lots and lots of members,” she said. “The more members it has, the more opportunities you have to go places.”

AIRLINES
She didn’t have much good news when it came to airfares (no one does), but she did point out that the quest for airfare bargains has moved into the realm of social media.

“Airlines are putting limited sales on Facebook and Twitter,” she said. “Sales may last a day, maybe two or three hours. You have to ‘like’ the airline’s page on Facebook.”

No matter where or how you decide to shop for airfares, timing is everything. And the weekend is the worst possible time. You’re better off booking Tuesday or Wednesday.

“Airlines know most people search (for airfares) on the weekends,” Ms. Frommer said. “Prices will be higher then.”

Other airfare tips:

  • Book early, but not TOO early. No more than three or more months ahead. Any earlier and you’ll be paying the highest rates possible.
  • Sometimes, booking a pair of one-way flights may be cheaper than a single round-trip ticket.
  • Likewise, flights with one or more stops are often cheaper than direct or non-stop flights.

CAR RENTALS
The news on car rentals was even worse than airfares. Rates have jumped 30 percent in the last two years.

Your best bet here, she said, is to make use of local car rental companies that offer lower rates than the big boys, even so-called “rent-a-wreck” outfits that rent older cars that have more than a few miles — and maybe a few dents — on them.

Here, too, she had a Web site to recommend. Autoslash finds coupons from car rental firms that you can apply to your rental, even if you’ve already booked your vehicle. Find a coupon that applies, then rebook at the lower price. Sweet.

DESTINATIONS
Like many other travel experts these days, she’s touting Eastern Europe. For 2012, Ms. Frommer is especially fond of Poland, which she described as an “extraordinary destination.”

“Krakow has the largest public square in the world. Warsaw was 93 percent destroyed by the Nazis during World War II; it’s been completely rebuilt. The country has churches and cathedrals as beautiful as anything in Western Europe. The food is delicious, fresh fruits, fresh fish. You an buy a good meal for a couple of dollars.

“It’s Western Europe at half the cost.”

Travelers also will benefit from the fact that one of the world’s major annual soccer tournaments, the UEFA Euro2012, is split this year between Poland and Ukraine, she said. The European Union is pouring money into Poland to bring the country’s infrastructure up to western standards ahead of the tourney.

Another destination she liked was Guatemala. Let’s face it, there aren’t that many places in the world where you can toast marshmallows over an active volcano. She’s been there and done that.

“Great poverty, but great, great beauty,” she said of the country.

FOOD
This was one of the few areas in which she came down on the side of splurging, if only on occasion.

“If you don’t try the great restaurants in the world’s great cities, you’re missing out,” she said. “If you’re going to splurge on anything, splurge on the experience.”

She expanded on that idea — and so will IBIT in a subsequent post.

Edited by P.A.Rice

IBIT TRAVEL DIGEST

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A roundup of the good, the bad and the bizarre from the world’s best travel media.​

THE TRAVEL HORIZON
This is the time of year when travel experts and industry observers offer up their forecasts for the new year.

The folks over at Travel+Leisure are expecting a lot of new cruise vacationers this year — and with all the ships coming out or already sailing, they’ll find no shortage of waiting cabins.
More on that later this week.

Over at Fox News, they expect more travelers to opt for vacation rentals over hotel stays, something IBIT has been advocating since we started up three years ago.

Meanwhile, the budget travel specialists over at About.com look for more travelers to opt for less popular destinations and less travel spending, especially in the face of what they anticipate as an upsurge in travel-related taxes and fees. Lovely.

They also see travelers zeroing in on countries whose currencies are more stable, which makes sense. It’s no fun waking up on the other side of the world to find out that the value of the local funds in your wallet has bottomed out overnight.

As for destinations, South America is hot, and not just for the climate. A lot of travelers are discovering they can find almost everything they look for in Europe by heading south instead of east, be it an urban experience or adventure travel.

Meanwhile, a lot of black American travelers are increasingly connecting with black Latino cultures in South America and the Caribbean as they realize how much of our history is also theirs. You’ll be seeing more about that here, too, in the coming days and weeks.

Another hot travel ticket for 2012: Asia. Between Asia-based airlines scrambling for more passengers and tour companies offering package almost too cheap to be legal, travel to Asian and Pacific destinations should be a strong draw in 2012.

DEPARTMENT STORE DINING
One of the things that was lost with the “malling” of America was the concept of the department store food court.

That’s not the case elsewhere in the world, which explains why multi-story mega-stores like Harrods in London and the KaDeWe in Berlin are as famous for their food courts as they are for their clothing, jewelry and fine furnishings.

Department store food courts are mini-arcades, featuring fresh and canned goods from around the world, along with counters where the hungry shopper can sit down to some incredible cuisine. It’s the best of everything, carefully prepared and lovingly presented, or it’s not there.

They’re seldom cheap, but what you get for the money is usually well worth it.

The Frommers Web site offers a slideshow of some of its favorite food courts around the world. If you find yourself salivating by the time you finish it, that’s quite all right.

SHAKING THINGS UP
Lastly, 2012 in Japan came in not with a bang, but a tremor — a magnitude 7.0 earthquake off the coast, deep under the Pacific Ocean. Tokyo apparently got a good rattling, but no reports of damage or injuries early on.

And just as well, since the country is still recovering from last year’s devastating quake disaster. But when your nation makes its home on the Ring of Fire, you can’t expect any breaks from Mother Nature.

Japan’s New Year’s Day shaker is one more reminder that when you travel, you might actually want to figure out your own plan for getting out of the hotel in an emergency.



And now, here’s this week’s Digest:

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AIR
from USA Today
2011 was the safest year yet for air travel. That sound you hear is me, knocking on wood.

from the Wall Street Journal
the Christmas holidays may be over, but winter air travel may still give you lots of close encounters with cold and flu bugs. How to get through winter travel in good health.

from fastcodesign.com
Would to take a nap in a box in the airport? There’s a Russian outfit that’s betting you would, and you may one day start seeing their Sleepboxes in departure lounges.

from the National Geographic
NatGeo’s list of its favorite airports and why.

​

LAND
from the MSNBC
Is Southwest Airlines slipping? How do you let a 9-year-old girl fly unaccompanied by an adult, then basically lose the child for five hours? Not good.

from YouTube
Chris McGinnis explains about “dead weeks” and what makes them the best time to find travel bargains.

from the Age (Australia)
There’s a new Ferrari on Italy’s roads — its railroads. And like its four-wheeled namesake, it’s red, and it’s fast. Very fast.

from Bike Radar
Bike garages…in Los Angeles? Is Southern California finally beginning to cool on its love affair with the automobile?

SEA

from USA Today
There’s a lady in Indiana suing Carnival Cruise Lines. Reason: she said the ship was going too fast. You can’t make this stuff up.

from the Travel Weekly
San Francisco is going all in on an $86 million spruce-up on its waterfront, and a new cruise ship terminal is part of the package. If sailing under the Golden Gate Bridge isn’t on your bucket list, it should be.

from the Luxury Daily ​
Celebrity Cruises plans to offer more cruises this year with themes designed around food and wine. They’re called “Excite the Senses” cruises.

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AFRICA
from allAfrica.com
Two hotels in Rwanda earn five-star ratings.

from allAfrica.com
Could medical tourism work for Africa the way it has for Asia? Some folks in Kenya are starting to look at it.

from ​This Day (Nigeria)
Want to know why African regional air travel suffers such a bad reputation? This is one example.

from​ This Day (Nigeria)
The Calabar Festival, Africa’s largest street party.

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AMERICAS/CARIBBEAN
from the New York Times
How to spend a hip weekend in Trinidad.

from ​the Guardian (London UK)
Are you one of those folks who believes the world is going to end this year? Would you like to meet the folks whose ancient culture produced that prediction? If so, head for Guatemala.

from the San Francisco Chronicle
Moderately priced hotels in Hawaii. That’s right, I said it!

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ASIA/PACIFIC
from Nomadic Matt
Get your grub on like — and where — the locals do in Bangkok.

​from the BBC Travel
The 2010 World Expo may only be a memory now, but Shanghai isn’t slowing down one bit — not in its growth, not in its swag and not in its rivalry with Beijing.

from the San Francisco Chronicle​
There’s more to French Polynesia than Tahiti and Bora Bora.

from Globetrooper
Train travel is one of the best ways to experience India, but you need to choose your berth with care. These guys will tell you how.

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EUROPE
from the Guardian (London UK)
Each year, the European Union selects a city as the EU’s Capital of Culture. The bet here says you’ve never heard of it, and in some ways, that’s a good thing. Hint: it’s in Slovenia.

from the Girls Guide Paris
I can’t imagine wanting to ever get out of Paris, but if you need a quick getaway from the City of Light, the Burgundy region is a good candidate — and not just for the wine that bears its name.

from the Los Angeles Times
In any other city, an ATM machine will give you money. In Paris, the bread you get from an ATM may be warm and crusty and good with a little olive oil.

from the Huffington Post
​Do London like a Londoner.

the SUNDAY TRAVEL DIGEST

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A roundup of the good, bad and bizarre from the world of travel

Canal houseboat, Amsterdam

Canal houseboat, Amsterdam | © Greg Gross

THE WORLD ON YOUR SHOULDERS
Every year, travelers in the know save tons of money by ignoring the major holidays and doing their traveling during the so-called “shoulder seasons.” Maybe you could be one of them.

The upcoming Labor Day weekend marks the official end of the summer vacation season and the start of what the travel industry people call the “shoulder season,” those months just before and after a major holiday, when business falls like a bungee jumper for airlines, hotels, resorts, cruise ships.

To compensate, they all start offering deals, sometimes outrageously good deals, in the hope of drawing business. An airline seat or a hotel room sold at a loss, they figure, is still better than letting it go empty.

Want to see some destinations where going off-season can save you some bucks this fall? The folks at Smarter Travel offer up a set of five.

Some locales have their own shoulder seasons, dictated by climate. Take New Orleans. Summer is actually a time when tourism falls off in the NOLA. A daily regimen of searing heat and thick humidity will do that to a place.

Which explains how you can find four-star New Orleans hotels offering room rates in the dead of summer for less than $100 a night. Heat, humidity? That’s what snowballs, beer and frozen daiquiris are for.

Or what about Buenos Aires, Argentina or New Zealand, both well below the Equator. Their winter is our summer, their spring our fall. A little careful shopping could yield some great trips.

Spring and fall also are when cruise lines move their ships to and from warmer waters on one-way sails called “repositioning cruises.” They can last from a week to a month, like the traditional transoceanic liners, but at a fraction of the cost.

Work and school schedules are the biggest obstacles to shoulder-season travel, but if you can manage it, you can nail down some serious travel bargains.

And when your friends ask how you did it, you can just smile — and shrug your shoulders.

And now, here’s this week’s Digest:

from the New York Times
People are starting to travel again, but they’re doing it cheaper.

from the New York Times
Our old-fashioned credit and debit cards, with their magnetic stripes, are running into problems overseas, where many countries are shifting to cards embedded with digital chips and require a PIN to use.

from Smarter Travel
The attack on vacation rentals continues. It’s spreading now to San Francisco. More and more, you can expect to see cities cracking down on private renters and trying to force travelers into pricier hotels.

from Smarter Travel
You paid for those frequent flier miles you haven’t used yet. Don’t let them expire.

AFRICA
from The Standard (Nairobi, Kenya)
Freretown is a Kenyan community with a unique and bittersweet legacy. The usual African tribal rivalries don’t exist here. Why? Because its inhabitants are all the descendants of freed slaves.

AMERICAS
from the Los Angeles Times
Are you a fiend for chocolate? Do you love great cities? Leave your heart — and your diet — in San Francisco next month.

from the Guardian (London, UK)
Easy rider in Central America: Simon Gandolfi takes you around Guatemala by motorcycle.

ASIA
from the Guardian (London UK)
Looking to do a little shopping for electronics, or just see what happens when geeks take over an entire neighborhood? Bargain + bizarre = the Akihabara district of Tokyo. They call it Electric Town for more than one reason.

EUROPE
from the Daily Mail (London, UK)
Did you hear the one about the Mile High Pickpocket? No joke. Wonder why all those little padlocks are dangling on my carry-on backpack? Now you know!

from the Guardian (London, UK)
Ever play in a treehouse when you were a kid? In Sweden, they have treehouses from grown-ups — and they are nothing like your childhood.