Danger

On February 8th the US Department of State intensified its travel warning for Mexico to include 14 of the country’s 31 states. This is up from the April 2011 warning that only advised against traveling in two states and parts of eight others. This recent communique from the state department slaps advisories all over the [...]

In the aftermath of the Costa Concordia cruise tragedy, SodaHead.com – the web’s largest opinion-based community – ran a poll to determine if the general public was now “less likely to take a cruise given the incident.”  According to the SodaHead poll, the results demonstrate that this disaster may have a deep impact on the cruise industry, with 26% of the [...]

Often called the murder capital of the world, Juarez is best known to the world as a war zone, as a place where drug traffickers shoot it out with their rivals, a place where a stroll down the street possesses a very real risk of catching a stray bullet. Last year, over 3,000 people were murdered in Juarez alone.

SANTA MARTA, Colombia- “Who couldn’t like Santa Marta?” Wade Davis spoke in a film about the Kogi indigenous people of northeastern Colombia. My reply: “Me.” Against my own position that a traveler needs at least three days in any location to be warranted an opinion on it, my visit to Santa Marta lasted less than a half [...]

BOGOTA, Colombia- “Is traveling to Bogota safe?” This is a common question that I’ve heard asked by various people throughout my travels in Latin America and the world. But to anyone who has ever walked down the streets of this city, a quick laugh followed by an exasperated “Are you kidding me?” may be an [...]

REYKJAVIK, Iceland- 2:30 AM: “What is all of that black smoke!?!” A Danish girl asked me. I looked up to find a huge, billowing cloud of black smoke rising briskly into the atmosphere from a location very near to where we were standing. Video of black smoke and fire in Reykjavik “Something is on fire,” [...]

REYKJAVIK, Iceland- Either an excess of geo-thermal heat or a minor volcanic eruption under the Myrdals Glacier in the south of Iceland has caused major flooding in the region. The heat from the volcanic activity within melted parts of the glacier, and the excess water flow has caused rivers to flood their banks. A bridge was [...]

ZIPOLITE, Mexico- “I’ve heard that around 50 people a year drown in these waves, that is like a person a week,” a young tourist informed me on Zipolite beach one sunny day. We both looked off into the waves — they were rising around four feet up from the ocean surface before quickly crashing into [...]

The US government has recently issued warnings for its citizens to “be vigilant travelling in Europe, amid fears of an al-Qaeda commando-style attack.” Really? Oh yeah, and the newspapers say that Bin-Laden is in on this one, too. Who else? Sources have been dotting the travel news sphere that international intelligence has collected data that [...]