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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
By Vivienne Stanton
A word used again and again to describe the Jewish community in Mexico to me as I researched this story was cerrada—closed. “Wealthy” was another. “They live in Polanco,” one taxi driver told me knowingly, speaking of the swanky Mexico City neighborhood where Orthodox Jews in black hats share park space with manicured Mexican mommies and synagogues share blocks with high-rise hotels and Hummer dealerships. “They… Read more
(Published in The West Australian Weekend Magazine, 3 May 2008)
By Vivienne Stanton
It’s 8am on a cool, late-winter morning, and we’re in the middle of a wooded mountainside in the central Mexican highlands, hunting butterflies. They shouldn’t be too hard to find. Each year, up to 250 million of the bright orange insects—dubbed the Elvis of butterflies, for their flashy, patterned wings—arrive here en… Read more
By Vivienne Stanton
(Published in The West Australian Weekend Magazine, 29 March, 2008)
“The Bluuuuue Pannnnnnntheeeeeeeer,” yells the tenor-voiced announcer, “in dannnnnnger of extiiiiinnnnnnction!”
I’m in the Arena Mexico, drinking Corona from a paper cup and ducking, as potato chips fly over my head. Fans beat the rails and launch popcorn into the air. Lights flash. An 80s Rock Ballad blares from the sound system. The 16,500-seat stadium is jumping. … Read more
OVER a century ago, a few hundred disgruntled shearers, stockmen, poets and dreamers left Australia in search of Paradise in the small, green, landlocked South American nation of Paraguay. Their dream: to build a socialist Utopia based on the twin ideals of temperance and mateship—a “New Australia”—under the guidance of zealous labour leader, William Lane.
It failed spectacularly. Before they even set foot in their new home, the dreamers… Read more
By Vivienne Stanton and Temoris Grecko
(Published in National Geographic Traveler, Latin America, in April 2009.)
We’re driving down Cerrillos Road, a six-mile strip of hotels, motels and fast food restaurants, and we’re getting desperate. We’ve rejected two motels already (one smells like eggs, the other stale cigarettes), and many have rejected us, already full for the night. We bump into fellow travelers at each stop. We eye each… Read more
By Vivienne Stanton
(Published in National Geographic Traveler Latin America, June 2009)
In La Habana Vieja, a blind man sings songs in a beautiful voice outside the Bodegita del Medio, Hemingway’s old haunt, while tourists pose with Che Gueverra berets and fat cigars, and street hustlers shout offers of everything from cheap Cohibas to cheap women. Growth in tourism – now Cuba’s second-biggest foreign dollar earner – has had… Read more
By Vivienne Stanton
(Published in National Geographic Traveler, December 2008)
The bar was small and empty, the beer cool and delicious, the night air sweet and sticky with the scent of the tropics, and the Caribbean. The thief’s weapon was modern—not a knife, but a mobile phone. As he entered the bar, he pretended to drop it near our table. I bent to pick it up. He whisked the… Read more
By Vivienne Stanton
(Published in Life & Style, 2008)
HOPE Street, Perth, is a quiet lane in the back streets behind the Western Australian capital’s nightlife district: a compact, three-square-kilometre rectangle of Asian restaurants, Indian supermarkets, Italian cafes, kebab shops, sushi stalls, sex shops, Karaoke bars and backpacker hostels, doing their best to shake the city’s—my hometown—reputation as “Dullsville”. On any given Saturday, you’ll find backpackers stumbling out of… Read more
By Vivienne Stanton
(Published in Australian Gourmet Traveller, December 2009)
From the air, the world seems to fit within a single, sprawling eyeful. Patterns, unseen from the ground, reveal themselves. You are not an ant, crawling through dusty crevices, but an osprey, an eagle, a broad-winged sea bird, flying high in the sky.
Or so it seems, from the porthole of our Beechcraft King Air twin-engine turboprop jet: a… Read more
