Puerto Vallarta has one foot firmly planted in the colonial pastA mustachioed man in a traditional Mexican serape rides a donkey along a cobblestone street in Old Town. Elderly women stop at midday to kneel in prayer at the city’s landmark Cathedral of Our Lady of Guadalupe as laundry flaps in the breeze from a nearby stucco balcony. At dusk, Puerto Vallartans gather in the town square to waltz under the palm trees.
Posteado el Febrero 6, 2008 - Categorizado en Puerto Vallarta Mexico Mexico reports record tourist revenuesThe Mexican tourism sector reported record revenues of 12.97 billion dollars in 2007, accounting for a 6.6-percent increase compared to the previous year. Local tourism authorities pointed out that the country received 21.5 million foreign vacationers, who spent an average of 487 dollars each. If that tendency continues, tourist arrivals will increase 1.8 percent, to 21.7 million foreign vacationers. The tourist balance was also favorable, reporting a surplus of 4.74 billion dollars, that is, 16.6 percent more than in 2006. Posteado el Febrero 6, 2008 - Categorizado en Mexico Tourism Beach road between Navarre Beach and Pensacola Beach should be done sometime this summerOne of the most commonly asked questions at the Santa Rosa County Tourist Development Council is whether the road between Navarre Beach and Pensacola Beach is open. “They love to be able to go down that road,” said executive director Kate Wilkes. “Even the snowbirds, ‘Is the road open? Is the road open?’ It’s such a pleasant drive.” Officials with the Gulf Islands National Seashore say that a portion of the seven-mile stretch, which was damaged in 2004 by Hurricane Ivan, will reopen by the end of April. The entire road is expected to be navigable sometime this summer. “We may have to lower some speed limits and some weight limits,” said Jerry Eubanks, superintendent for the Gulf Islands National Seashore. Posteado el Febrero 6, 2008 - Categorizado en Mexico Tourism Monarch butterflies are worth the hikeIf you’d rather see butterflies on a mountaintop than slather yourself with sunblock on a tourist-packed beach in Cancun, Mexico is an ideal winter destination. Acording to suntimes.com, ecotourism is drawing fans in the central states of Michoacan and Mexico, thanks to the spectacular yearly migration of millions of orange-and-black-winged monarch butterflies. In delicate swarms, the butterflies head south from the United States and Canada to Mexico, where they drip from pine trees and coat mountainsides from November to late March. They gather in such astonishing numbers that cars passing the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve sometimes have to slow to speeds of a couple of miles an hour to avoid splattering the delicate creatures on the windshield as they fly across the road. ”I have on many occasions seen Spaniards, Italians, Americans, Canadians, Mexicans come into the butterfly colonies and literally weep,” said Lincoln Brower, a monarch expert at the University of Florida and Sweet Briar College in Sweet Briar, Va. ”It’s such an overwhelming emotional experience to realize that you’re actually looking at these tens of millions of monarch butterflies that have come into this tiny, little area of Mexico.” Posteado el Febrero 6, 2008 - Categorizado en Cancun Mexico An inside view of Oaxaca’s culinary treasuresOf all of Mexico’s attractions - white sand beaches, majestic ruins, the afternoon margarita - one of my favorite must be the mercado. Humble, ubiquitous, and utterly intriguing, it resembles an American supermarket about as much as a tamale does a hamburger. Even the conquistadors were charmed. Writing home about the New World, they filled their accounts with what they had seen and tasted in the great Tenoch-titlan mercado: fried crickets, avocados, gopher, frog, and bee tamales, not to mention the cacao bean.
She would know. For the past 15 years, Trilling has been teaching the secrets of Mexican cuisine to novices and seasoned chefs alike. An American born in Philadelphia to a Mexican mother and Russian father, she owns Seasons of My Heart, a cooking school housed in a bougainvillea-shrouded ranch outside Oaxaca, and also stars in a PBS television series of the same name. Posteado el Febrero 6, 2008 - Categorizado en Mexico Oaxaca Tourism |
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Today the market remains a spot where the ancient and modern coexist side by side, a place where a wizened Aztec grandmother may hawk homemade tortillas next to a teenager selling a bootleg DVD of The Fast and the Furious. It is, as Susana Trilling says, “the heart of Mexico.”
