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Apocalypse now
For a longtime resident, Seattle's last few tumultuous days seem to have come straight from the Book of Revelation.
By Jim Molnar
[12/03/99]

Wanderlust
The genie of desire
When I finally kissed a man in Africa, he ran away.
By Tanya Shaffer
[12/03/99]

Travel Advisor
Well trained
Our travel expert offers advice on rolling through some European hot spots, plus information on cruising Alaska and Germany's Passion Play 2000.
By Donald D. Groff
[12/02/99]

"Would God forgive Lenin?"
In a lonely tower above the mean streets of Krasnoyarsk, a wanderer encounters the fervent heart of Russia's abiding faith.
By Jeffrey Tayler
[12/01/99]

Feasting on the island everyone loves to hate
Don't criticize Singapore until you've tried the kaya at the Chin Mee Chin.
By Jamie James
[11/30/99]

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Traditional tourist haunts have long been showing the resulting wear and tear. Bali's beaches are packed with inebriated Australians. Yosemite National Park is a human stampede. Trekking in Nepal increased 255 percent from 1980-91. "There isn't a rock between Bangkok and the beaches of Hispaniola that does not recoil from suntan oil, and the gurgle of Coca-Cola," Noel Coward was lamenting even 30 years ago.

But in the late 1980s, the advent of "ecotourism" promised a conscientious enjoyment of the earth's last wild, clean corners. Environmentalists championed it; even international bankers extolled its potential for drawing hard currency to developing countries, the traditional supplier of raw materials to industrialized yuppies.

Still, the concept has been liberally interpreted. Having lived in Mexico and Brazil for the past 12 years, I've watched the wave of hype, as ECOTURISMO! signs have beckoned travelers to anything from a simple nature walk to an air-conditioned stay in a 200-room hotel. Off the coast of Florianopolis, an island in southern Brazil, I once, by awful accident, took an "ecotourist" trip on a boat full of dancing young women in penguin-print bikinis; our tour involved chasing dolphins while blasting loud AM-radio hits.

This made me all the more grateful when, in 1996, I got a chance to visit explora's first hotel, in the middle of Chile's Torres del Paine park.

My husband and I had always wanted to see Patagonia, the southern, windswept region famously described by Bruce Chatwin as the "last place on earth." And when we heard of the comforts of the new hotel, we figured we might as well bring along our 14-month-old son, Joe. Given the reception we'd been promised -- with hot baths, three generous meals and a crib -- this certainly wouldn't amount to child abuse, we told ourselves. Joe simply had to endure the three-hour flight from Santiago to Punta Arenas and a six-hour van ride to the park.

We had some second thoughts, of course, after watching our little bundle of love throw up four times on the windy, storm-swept roads, to the endless tune of the "Sesame Street" theme song on his miniature, Bert-and-Ernie tape player. But by then it was too late. When we pulled up at the strange wooden 30-room inn, perched on a wild and empty cliff, we were bedraggled and worn out and guilty and smelly as only new parents can be, and were wondering if we had made a terrible mistake.

Inside the hotel, a huge fire was burning in the grate and white-jacketed waiters were scurrying back and forth with plates of lamb, salmon and ceviche and carafes of fine Chilean red wine. One paused to place a gleaming champagne bucket under a small leak in the roof. The huge picture windows in the dining room looked out on Lake Pehoe and the snowcapped, 6,300-foot "horns," or Cuernos del Paine, above it. Not a single other man-made structure -- or man, for that matter -- was in view. Later that evening, bilingual guides assembled to describe the hikes and horseback rides we might take the next day, to visit spectacular glacier fields and valleys full of wildflowers. Joe napped, and we all began to feel better.

Other guests must be feeling pretty good as well. Recently, I heard that the Patagonia explora is almost completely booked into 2001.

The setting for the larger explora hotel, which opened just last year, is equally striking. It sits on an 8,000-foot-high plane in the Atacama desert, the driest place on earth, surrounded by active volcanoes. The resort is within easy traveling distance of a Diane Arbus gallery of freaks of nature, including the Crying Grandpa geysers, the Valley of the Moon's craggy lunar rock formations, and a warm, dead lake with a freezing cold surface, surrounded by squawking flamingos and so full of minerals that you float. Yet it's also just an hour's drive from the nearest airport, which was good news for Joe.

Next page | The man behind the explora style