Sosúa in the Dominican Republic

10 July 2026 | Author/Destination: | Category: General Reading Time:  6 minutes

Sosúa Beach © flickr.com - stupiddingo/cc-by-2.0

Sosúa Beach © flickr.com – stupiddingo/cc-by-2.0

Sosúa is a beach town and municipality in the Puerto Plata Province of the Dominican Republic. The Gregorio Luperón International Airport is located in the western part of the municipality. The town is divided into three sectors: El Batey, which is the main tourist section and on the east side of the main beach (Playa Sosúa); Los Charamicos, on the west end of the beach; north of them, toward the airport, is Sosúa Abajo. Sosua is accessed primarily by Camino Cinco, or Highway 5, which runs the country’s northern coastline.   read more…

The Vision of the Seas

1 February 2026 | Author/Destination: | Category: Cruise Ships, Yacht of the Month Reading Time:  5 minutes

Port of Amsterdam, Netherlands © AlfvanBeem

Port of Amsterdam, Netherlands © AlfvanBeem

Vision of the Seas is a Vision-class cruise ship operated by Royal Caribbean International, the last of her class. She is also the namesake of her class. Her maiden voyage began on May 2, 1998, following which she sailed for a year in Europe before being moved to other routes.   read more…

Port of Spain on the Gulf of Paria

5 December 2025 | Author/Destination: | Category: General Reading Time:  8 minutes

© Itrydisrespxtsmtsep

© Itrydisrespxtsmtsep

Port of Spain (Trinidadian English: Port ah Spain) is the capital and chief port of Trinidad and Tobago. With a municipal population of 49,867 (2017), an urban population of 81,142 and a transient daily population of 250,000, it is Trinidad and Tobago’s third largest municipality, after Chaguanas and San Fernando.   read more…

Playa in Havana

30 July 2025 | Author/Destination: | Category: General Reading Time:  3 minutes

© panoramio.com - Xiaotong Gao/cc-by-sa-3.0

© panoramio.com – Xiaotong Gao/cc-by-sa-3.0

Playa (Spanish for beach) is a municipal district in the Cuban province and capital of Havana. The Playa district also includes the well-known district of Miramar.   read more…

Hotel Oloffson in Port-au-Prince

24 July 2025 | Author/Destination: | Category: General, Hotels Reading Time:  8 minutes

© flickr.com - lucianf/cc-by-2.0

© flickr.com – lucianf/cc-by-2.0

The Hotel Oloffson was a hotel in central Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Originally a private mansion in the late 19th century, it was later made into a hotel; during its heyday it was known as the “Greenwich Village of the Tropics”, hosting celebrity actors, writers, and artists, including Ernest Hemingway and Mick Jagger. The architecture was late-19th century tropical gingerbread house, a French-origin tropical mansion design. The hotel was the real-life inspiration for the hotel in Graham Greene‘s 1966 novel The Comedians. On July 6, 2025, during a prolonged period of intense lawlessness and gang violence in Haiti, the hotel was incinerated by unknown assailants in an arson attack.   read more…

Boca Chica in the Dominican Republic

12 June 2025 | Author/Destination: | Category: General Reading Time:  7 minutes

© Mario Roberto Durán Ortiz/cc-by-sa-4.0

© Mario Roberto Durán Ortiz/cc-by-sa-4.0

Boca Chica is a municipality (municipio) of the Santo Domingo province in the Dominican Republic. Within the municipality there is one municipal district (distritos municipal): La Caleta. As of the 2022 census it had 167,040 inhabitants, 104,951 living in the city itself and 62,089 in its rural districts (Secciones). Boca Chica has a popular beach with the same name, located about 30 kilometers east of Santo Domingo de Guzmán in the south-east region of the country.   read more…

Hotel Tryp Habana Libre in Cuba

11 February 2025 | Author/Destination: | Category: General, Hotels Reading Time:  14 minutes

© Happypepe/cc-by-sa-4.0

© Happypepe/cc-by-sa-4.0

Hotel Tryp Habana Libre is one of the larger hotels in Cuba, situated in Vedado, Havana. The hotel has 572 rooms in a 25-floor tower at Calle 23 (“La Rampa”) and Calle L. Opened in 1958 as the Habana Hilton, the hotel famously served as the residence of Fidel Castro and other revolutionaries throughout 1959, after their capture of Havana.   read more…

Saint Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands

13 December 2024 | Author/Destination: | Category: General Reading Time:  12 minutes

Downtown Christiansted © flickr.com - Prayitno/cc-by-2.0

Downtown Christiansted © flickr.com – Prayitno/cc-by-2.0

Saint Croix (Spanish: Santa Cruz; Dutch: Sint-Kruis; French: Sainte-Croix; Danish; Norwegian: Sankt Croix; Taino: Ay Ay) is an island in the Caribbean Sea, and a county and constituent district of the United States Virgin Islands (USVI), an unincorporated territory of the United States.   read more…

Theme Week Dominican Republic – Santiago de los Caballeros

30 November 2024 | Author/Destination: | Category: General Reading Time:  10 minutes

Monument to the Heroes of the Restoration © panoramio.com - Luis A. González Hde…/cc-by-sa-3.0

Monument to the Heroes of the Restoration © panoramio.com – Luis A. González Hde…/cc-by-sa-3.0

Santiago de los Caballeros (English: Saint James of the Knights), often shortened to Santiago, is the second-largest city in the Dominican Republic and the fourth-largest city in the Caribbean by population. It is the capital of Santiago Province and the largest major metropolis in the Cibao region of the country. Santiago is the largest Caribbean city that is not a capital city, and it is also the largest non-coastal metropolis in the Caribbean islands. The city has a total population of 771,748 inhabitants (2022). Santiago is located approximately 155 km (96 mi) northwest of the capital Santo Domingo with an average altitude of 178 m (584 ft).   read more…

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