WHOA THERE WAIT A SECOND! Phew. I thought you were about to click out of the page there for a minute, because I know from my recent reader survey that these roundups are pretty polarizing — some of you love ’em, some of you hate ’em. I tried to use your feedback to improve this roundup […]

 

Perhaps surprisingly, hostels are still somewhat of an exotic concept to me — prior to this trip, I’d probably stayed in less than fifteen. My travels have predominantly been in Southeast Asia, where hostels are still a rare choice compared to cheap guesthouses and bungalows — though they are gaining popularity. In Europe, where the hostel […]

 

Read Part I here. I woke up after the second night aboard The Aria so grateful that I was on a four night itinerary — there was no way I’d have been ready to leave the next day! The ship was already beginning to feel like home and I knew I’d soon miss waking up to […]

 

There are many seasoned travelers who seem to take pride in declaring themselves “sooo not cruise people.” I am not one of those travelers. My first cruise, a Silversea voyage from Athens to Istanbul, showed me all that is sunny about sailing the high seas. I loved the camaraderie onboard, the convenience of surveying a large […]

 

The views alone were worth the price of the flight — just $73. First, we soared over the Andes mountain range, and then dipped low over the snaking tributaries of the Amazon river. I snapped picture after picture and later captioned my first Instagram from Peru, bienvenidos a la selva; welcome to the jungle. When the plane […]

 

See Part I here. I must have been adjusting to the Amazon schedule, because on the second day of my Three Day Amazon Adventure at Heliconia Lodge I was awake at 6am. My excitement about the mornings’ excursions helped bolt me out of bed — we were going piranha fishin’ and pink dolphin spottin’! The river […]

 

I’m reporting live from Lima, where I’ve returned to the land of decent internet connections after eleven days in the jungle. My dear friend Zoe arrived yesterday, marking a new — and super fantastic — chapter in this journey. I’m shivering my buns off, but otherwise enjoying searching out hidden gems across Peru’s overlooked capital. This […]

 

Travel Porn is a feature in which I review books from my beloved travel literature genre. So far I’ve reviewed Bangkok Noir, a short story collection that brings the noir genre to the steamy streets of Thailand, Hotel Honolulu, a fictional account of a Waikiki hotel manager’s quirky life in a paradise lost, and Tiger Balm, […]

 

Less than twenty-four hours after arriving in Peru, I was being whisked fifty miles down the mighty Rio Amazonas by speedboat. My mission? To survive a Three Day Amazon Adventure at Heliconia Lodge, courtesy of Viator. Despite the tarantula holding, piranha fishing, and caiman spotting that was on the itinerary, I had a feeling that somehow […]

 

Reporting live from Peru! Well, just barely thanks to the expletive-inducingly slow internet connections in Iquitos. I arrived in the city after a cash-saving thirty-one hour, four flight journey, and then turned around and set off the next morning for the jungle. And deep in the Amazon, I found the perfect place to refresh and shake […]