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Travel Advisor
Scholar ship
Our travel expert digs up information on cheap flights for students, plus international phone cards and livening up that Florida-New York drive.
By Donald D. Groff
[12/09/99]

Making bombs in Zanzibar
An enigmatic encounter with a would-be African terrorist leaves an expatriate wondering about truth and faith.
By Frank Bures
[12/08/99]

Out of the Blue
Coping with the EgyptAir mystery
When you work at 30,000 feet, you don't want to doubt the pilot.
By Elliott Neal Hester
[12/07/99]

The agony and the ecotourism
Two progressive resorts in Chile exemplify the baby-boomer shift from bare-bones backpacking to pampered adventure.
By Katherine Ellison
[12/04/99]

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]

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I have taken the ground floor garden suite at the Hotel Grano de Oro, a lovely, converted turn-of-the-century mansion in San José. The room is furnished with a nod to the property's past: beautiful handcrafted hardwood furniture, a four-post wrought-iron bed, antique furnishings, prints and other accents.

My bathroom is a huge, painted-tile affair with a soothing jacuzzi. A French door, in a small sitting room off the bedroom, opens onto a tropical garden, where I can relax with a cigarette and a cool drink. Breezes billow the gauzy curtains that pirouette inside slatted windows opening onto more fragrant gardens. It is intoxicating. I am transported to a Latin America of another time, or into the pages of a García Márquez novel, a poem by Neruda. What a place to get laid.

I need to reacquaint myself with the heart of the city, an easy walk from the hotel. It is a journey of run-on sentences, a stream of scenes in a Whitman poem. Sidewalk vendors are selling lottery tickets, boots, belts, baseball caps, knock-off watches, fruits and vegetables, Latin magazines, used books; the air is heavy with the smell of fried fish, of bad fish; ugly, blanched slabs of meat are piled high in a butcher shop; crusty tubers in odd shapes overflow boxes in a grocery store; there is the glorious smell of ground coffee; store after store displays cheap shirts, cheap shoes; the occasional store displays expensive-looking jewelry. Old couples hobble along, hand in hand; young girls hold schoolbooks to their breasts; little boys tote knapsacks, horse around; on a ledge outside an office building, a man with no legs is begging coins; children in school uniforms stand in line at a Pizza Hut; everywhere there are clots of animated conversation.

Within a few blocks of each other are a half-dozen pickup bars in an area nicknamed "Gringo Gulch." The most famous of these places is Key Largo on Calle 7, just south of Avenida 3, across from Parque Morazan. Like Grano de Oro, Key Largo is also a converted in-town mansion, but there the comparison ends. Here prostitutes, part- and full-time, enact an unscripted floor show. As a display of the human mating dance, Key Largo never disappoints.

I pass Key Largo. In the bright sunlight of late morning there is no visible activity. Shutters in the window facing the avenue are open and I can hear the faint sounds of workmen banging away inside.

At the Blue Marlin Bar in the Hotel Del Rey sit three fat Americans. Their guts sag over their belts, presenting patches of sweaty black hair pasted against white skin, peeking beneath buttons stretched to the limit. All have goatees. All suck on bottles of weak and watery American beer, forgoing the smooth, lovely taste of the local brew: Imperial. It's five until 11 in the morning. The two men on the ends are hanging on the words of the loud one in the middle and supporting his every inane comment. I have an urge to punch the loud one in the mouth. What is it with me and being left out of conversations?

Hookers are already working the bar and the adjacent tables. They are a hard-looking lot, heavily made up, overdressed in evening wear, inappropriate to the late-morning sun. They seem a good match for the patrons at the bar, however, who nonetheless are riveted by a meaningless mid-season basketball game.

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