India
Rajasthan
Varanasi
Kerala
DR For The Resort Phobic
By Vivienne Stanton
(Published in National Geographic Traveler Latin America, Feb 2011)
“Do you wonder where I’m taking you?”
I had to crane in to hear as the wind rushed through me, turning the hot night air cold, and my hair into matted dreadlocks. I was on the back of a motorbike, with a driver I hardly knew, heading through the countryside in search of a side of the… Read more
Popping the Tango Cherry
By Vivienne Stanton
It was a long time coming. But after three months’ resistance I finally succumbed to being led backwards in circles by a swarthy, sweaty-palmed Argentinian. And with that step (back-step, side-step, back and forth step) kissed my tango virginity goodbye forever. To tango class I came, I saw, and was conquered.
My conquistador was a diplomat named Edgar, or more elaborately, Edgar Javier Flores Tiravanti. Eddie… Read more
The Salsa Lesson
By Vivienne Stanton
(Published in National Geographic Traveler Latin America, December 2008)
When I was 25, I drove across Cuba with two friends, from Havana to Santiago de Cuba, via Trinidad and the Bay of Pigs. I remember crumbling buildings and creaking cars, un-marked roads and sugar cane fields, and kids in school uniforms playing baseball in empty lots where mansions once stood, using sticks for bats and bottle caps for… Read more
Children of the Revolution
By Vivienne Stanton
(Published in The West Magazine, December 2008)
As a bearded, 27-year-old law student from Santiago de Cuba in the country’s East, Roberto Gonzalez hid in the hills of the Sierra Maestra with his wife Maria and their baby daughter for ten months. They camped in shelters dug into the hillside, and learned how to shoot rifles. Without food or water, campesinos, local farm workers sympathetic to… Read more
Forgotten World
By Vivienne Stanton
(Published in National Geographic Traveler Latin America, April 2011)
From the outside it looked closed, but as we peered through the tinted windows of Jay-Jay’s International Travel in downtown Dili an Australian soldier in military fatigues stepped out, holding the door open. Inside a fluorescent-lit den of whirring fans and blasting air-con, Jay-Jay leaned back on his swivel chair, shiny in its plastic cover. There was… Read more
Quest for the American Dream
By Vivienne Stanton
(Published in Inside Mexico, December 2007)
Luis Osorio Castillo can’t remember which came first—was it the flash of metal, or the poke of steel against his ribs?
The tall, 21-year-old Nicaraguan with gentle eyes and a thin moustache had been in Guatemala City less than half an hour when the bandits held him up. Three pistol and machete-wielding men with scarves wrapped over their faces stole… Read more
The Forgotten Island
http://insidemex.com/people/lifestyle/the-forgotten-island
By Vivienne Stanton
I’m standing in the Casa del Poeta on Colonia Roma’s tree-lined Avenida Álvaro Obregón, imagining my feet subsumed in lake water. On the wall in front of me is an artist’s impression of Mexico City, then Tenochtitlan, in 1519. The image is bucolic: a neat, ordered city in the middle of a vast lake.
If a lake is like the Earth’s eye, reflecting its soul,… Read more
San Miguel
By Vivienne Stanton
(Published in Marie Claire, September 2010)
I’m sitting at a small, wooden table by an arched open window, overlooking the town of San Miguel de Allende. Flat top adobe houses spread out across the valley, painted yellow, white, burgundy and blue. Clutches of trees rise above rooftops. Bougainvillea sprouts over centuries-old colonial walls. Beyond the town, the pale green Mexican altiplano, the high plateau, rolls out… Read more