For quite a while we’ve featured the impressive La Mirage Garden Hotel near Otavalo in our luxury Ecuador hotel reviews. I got a chance to visit it in person recently when Metropolitan Touring took me on a tour outside the city and had the pleasure of dining there for the most memorable meal I had in the country.

Subtlety and conservative decorating have no place at La Mirage. Both the inn and the restaurant are meant to dazzle and impress. Antiques, gilded gold, and lace mix with columns, mirrors, and enough flowers to stock a floral shop. (This is prime rose-growing country, after all.) The view out the restaurant window is equally beguiling, with peacocks strolling around the fountain and manicured gardens.

In case the initial visual impression isn’t strong enough, the first taste at the table is another showpiece. An amuse-bouche arrives inside a music box. You open the lid and tinkling music plays while you give your taste buds their own introduction.

An exquisite local soup followed for me. Then I went all-in for the main course, selecting a typical local dish that would make Anthony Bourdain proud: pork and more pork with hominy, potatoes, and cheese corn cakes. (Note the wooden pig plate to complete the ensemble.)

I ordered the strawberry pyramid for dessert, expecting some nice little concoction with a few berries. Instead the layered structure you see here landed in front of me. It looked impossible to finish, but every bite was so good I managed to pull it off.

If you can fit in more than a day trip to Otavalo and Cotacachi, try to make time to spend a couple nights at La Mirage. If that’s not possible, at least make reservations for lunch or dinner while you are in the area. It’s a meal to remember and gives you a good feel for what is possible with the local cuisine in this bountiful region.

La Mirage Hotel review

Metropolitan Touring

I just got the story posted from my family adventure excursion in Belize this past summer. We avoided the cruise ship crowds and Ambergris vacationers to explore the wilder side of Belize.

After perusing a bunch of itineraries from upscale tour companies, I decided to use three of the best adventure lodges in the country as a base, in three different regions, and take excursions from there. We stayed at these fine hotels, all featured in Luxury Latin America: Blancaneaux Lodge, Turtle Inn, and Machaca Hill.

The weather wasn’t as cooperative as I would have liked in Placencia (that’s what happens when you go to Central America in the summer—their rainy season), but overall it went well.

See the full story here: Family-Friendly Adventure Excursions in Belize.

Fiddi Angermeyer, founder of Angermeyer Cruises, is a Galapagos original. Born and raised there, he acquired his boat-building skills firsthand from his father Fritz, who sailed with his three brothers from Germany in the 1930s. He is a pioneer of the Islands’ charter industry.

He’s one of the Galapagos tourism originals, so I felt fortunate to sit down with him this month at his Angermeyer Point Restaurant in Puerto Ayora to learn more about him and the operation.

How does your own history tie in with that of the Galapagos Islands tourism one?
My parents arrived here separately in the 1930s. Like most families on Santa Cruz Island they were into farming because they needed to be and later my father got into fishing and boat building. In the 1950s my uncle, Karl Angermeyer, started taking explorers and scientists out on trips. My parents joined in and started doing the same. It turned out that taking people out to explore the islands earned you more money than fishing and it was a whole lot easier. So the boats were adapted for people instead of fish. I went to the U.S. for school and then returned back here just as a real tourism industry was starting, first with scientists, then curious travelers.

How did you get your start after returning?
I have been at this in some form since the mid-1960s. I went to work on a boat affiliated with the Darwin Center for a while and learned a lot, then I started working on a boat my father had, the Dixie. It held four passengers and a crew of two. I learned by doing everything: fixing what went wrong, driving the boat, being a guide.

I used that as a stepping stone to get a more comfortable boat and then kept repeating the process. I’ve lost count of how many boats I’ve been through now. Sometimes I look around the harbor and I’ve worked on half the boats anchored here.

Did you find yourself adapting to changing tastes over the years as the visitors became more mainstream?
I was one of the first owners to have a boat that had private baths for each cabin. That was a big deal. When we first started, everyone just slept on a deck together. I mainly just went by what I liked and wanted though. I was one of the first to install air conditioning because I wanted it in my cabin. I was looking for more comfort myself!

Read the whole Angermeyer interview at LuxuryLatinAmerica.com

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I’ll get back to my current trip soon, but meanwhile we’ve posted a feature story from a destination that we have not covered otherwise: El Salvador.

Even the most savvy travelers know almost nothing about this country and apart from business travelers and a few curious Europeans, it doesn’t get much traffic from foreigners. Of course that’s just what makes it appealing for some—the chance to visit a place that hardly anyone else has spent any time in.

There’s not much of a luxury travel infrastructure in El Salvador, but there is some. In a sense this is a one-phone-call set-up: get in touch with Pascal Lebailly, who runs Los Almendros de San Lorenzo in the mountain town of Suchitoto. He’ll take care of the rest.

Read the whole story here: Luxury travel in El Salvador.