Results tagged “Lodge” from Intelligent Travel Blog

Elizabeth Seward fulfills a childhood desire to visit Costa Rica.

I was in elementary school the first time I heard Costa Rica referenced as a destination people actually traveled to. A boy in my class answered his "what did you do this summer?" question with tales of this mystical place, which sounded a lot like Narnia to me. He was wearing a shirt covered in a colorful image of a parrot and the words "Costa Rica" scribbled underneath the bird in cursive. He made my summer's trip to Ocean City, Maryland sound like garbage and while I resented him for this, I still went home that evening parading the idea of Costa Rica vacation to my family. around the dinner table. When my mother told me how many birthday checks I'd have to save up before I could afford to fly the family to Costa Rica, I realized I would be 39--in which case I'd just fly myself. Fortunately, the prospect of vacationing in Costa Rica in my adult years didn't hinge on (only) birthday checks. 

I set out this past summer to embark on a trip to the land filled with monkeys and brightly colored poisonous frogs.  Flights to Costa Rica, as it turns out, are much less expensive than I'd once imagined.

Alaska's Kachemak Bay spans over 400,000 acres of glaciers, mountains and wilderness. And tucked along its coastline is the Kachemak Bay Wilderness Lodge, which travel writer David Hanson recently visited.

There's that old question: If you could have dinner with anyone in the world, who would it be? I don't like that question because it makes my head spin with all the possibilities. But recently the answer came to me in the form of a 66-year-old man sitting across the table. I was at the lodge he and his wife built almost forty years ago on the rugged southern shores of Alaska's Kachemak Bay. Michael and Diane McBride moved to this chunk of fir forest, basalt cliff and rocky beach in the mid '60s when no white person lived here permanently. Michael was a bush pilot and boat captain, and they both fished commercially until deciding to build a lodge and invite people to stay.

The problem with the "dinner with anyone in the world" question is that it leaves the parameters up to you, and that is limiting. Never would I have put together a person like Michael: bush pilot, sea captain, master hunting guide, fisherman, yoga instructor, carpenter, lodge owner, environmental warrior (his efforts defeated two resource extraction initiatives), father, grandfather, musician, and member of Explorer's Club, Royal Geographic Society, Smithsonian Board, and Nature Conservancy. Tonight, over dessert, he played an accordion he picked up in Austria decades ago.

Molly Feltner is traveling through Africa, and got the chance to experience a model sustainable hotel in Rwanda.

In my travels to various destinations in the developing world, I've often been disappointed by how some upscale resorts and hotels go out of their way to separate their businesses and guests from the local population. So I was pleasantly surprised when I discovered Sabyinyo Silverback Lodge, located in a farming community right outside Volcanoes National Park in Rwanda.

Set on the slopes of the volcano Sabyinyo, this luxury lodge caters to well-heeled tourists coming to track the park's mountain gorillas and it supports some of the neediest members of the surrounding community. It's managed by Governors' Camp, which operates several high-end lodges and safari camps in East Africa, but is owned by SACOLA, an association of about 18,000 local Rwandans that is sponsored by the International Gorilla Conservation Programme, African Wildlife Foundation, and USAID.

When guests stay at the lodge, $50 per person per night goes to SACOLA. Since the lodge opened in 2007, SACOLA has earned enough to build more than 1,200 houses for survivors of the Rwandan genocide and other needy families, and fund sustainable agriculture projects as well. Sabyinyo also employs locals--90 percent of the staff members are Rwandan--and most of the food and all of the flowers used on the property are grown by community members.