The beach at Infinity Bay, Honduras

A couple times a year I like to highlight which pages of Luxury Latin America travelers are clicking on the most. It changes a lot from one quarter to the next depending on where our readers are headed and who’s in the news (good or bad), and usually it’s a bit surprising who makes it up to the top.

The most popular pages are the portal ones, like the main luxury tours page or luxury travel in Costa Rica, but here are the individual ones people planning a vacation landed on the most so far this year.

Luxury hotel and resort reviews:

5) Infinity Bay in Roatan, Honduras
4) Cayo Espanto near Ambergris Caye, Belize
3) Jicaro Island Ecolodge near Granada, Nicaragua
2) Azul in Ambergris Caye, Belize
1) Hotel Garzon in Uruguay

Mendoza wine country, Argentina

Luxury tours in Latin America:

5) Getting Pampered in the Spas of Argentina
4) Touring the Wine Districts of Chile Near Santiago
3) Touring the Best of Mendoza Wine Country, Argentina
2) Trekking From Lodge to Lodge to Machu Picchu, Peru
1) The Coffee Triangle of Colombia

So from all this I’ll conclude you want to head to a beach, get pampered, or drink some wine. Except for that hardy bunch going trekking through the Andes Mountains…

We’ve been spending a good bit of time in fast-growing Colombia recently and for good reasons. The country’s tourism numbers are increasing rapidly as people update their expectations and new hotels are going up at a frenetic pace.

Our latest tour story, from writer Judith Fein, is about a return to Colombia with Adventure Associates, going beyond the usual first-timer’s route to dive deeper into the culture and the people.

She landed in Bogota, as most visitors do who aren’t flying direct to Cartagena, but her trip took her to interesting villages far away, including Villa de Leyva. Well, after taking part in a cooking course in the capital.

The city of Medellin gets a bad rap, like many cities where the reputation of 10 or 20 years ago is a very hard perception to change. Really this is an attractive, vibrant city with low crime and a favorite for expatriates choosing Colombia. Nevertheless, our correspondent did go on a Pablo Escobar tour after returning from the Antioquia region.

See the full story here: Cooking, Culture, and Cobblestones in Colombia

There are plenty of luxurious boutique hotels in Cartagena de Indias of Colombia as this is clearly the top destination in the country for upscale travelers. There’s a new kid on the historic blocks of the center now that’s a clear contender: Casa San Agustin Boutique Hotel.

Located in a prime spot in the UNESCO World Heritage walled old city of Cartagena, this 24-room hotel is easy walking distance to all the plazas, bars, shops, and restaurants, as well as the stone walls facing the beach and water.

It’s a conversion of three houses into a hotel, with a cohesive design that pulls them all together in lots of cremes, whites, and earth tones blended with plenty of Colombian touches. It’s all aesthetically spot-on and chic, design-savvy without being ostentatious or uncomfortable. Original walls are blended into the design—one supporting the arches from a centuries-0ld aqueduct—and some exposed frescoes in the library room.

Meal times are a delight here and even if you stay elsewhere, get the hotel’s restaurant on your itinerary sometime.

“The beautifully designed Alma Restaurant lives up to its custom hardwood furniture and Colombian handicrafts with a menu that features local seafood, beef aged on the premises, and delightful desserts using the wealthy of fruits and cacao grown in the country. Presented with international flair and confidence, yet drawing on the homeland for inspiration, the menu here is getting a reputation as one of the best in the city. A fine wine list and inventive cocktails round out the experience here or at the equally attractive bar with tapas menu.”

In a city with stiff competition already, this is nevertheless a great addition to the Cartagena boutique hotel scene. See our full review of Casa San Agustin.

A few weeks ago I visited the Coffee Triangle region of Colombia for the second time and drank lots of coffee of course. Colombia is one of the world’s largest producers of coffee and the best beans from here are praised as some of the best available anywhere.

Many travelers come back underwhelmed by what they drink there though, which is a shame. Despite the importance of coffee to Colombia’s economy and tourism, a lot of cheap, bad coffee is served there—the kind of stuff you get from a fast food place or gas station at home, not what you get from a good independent cafe. Which brings us to this list:

1) Most of the good Colombian coffee doesn’t stay in Colombia.

There are several grades of coffee beans, based on the farm they come from, the size of the beans, and whether the beans have defects. I saw one demo with several screens the beans go through, each with smaller and smaller holes. Someone goes through the biggest ones, picks out the defectives, and those are tagged for high-grade export. The next batch is lower-grade export. The rest stay in Colombia. To get something good in Colombia itself, you need to go to a hotel buying export-quality beans (surprisingly few of those, so see our luxury hotels in Colombia listings) or a good coffee shop.

2) Fresh coffee is better coffee

If you buy ground coffee in a store, it’s only going to be but so good, no matter where it comes from. To get all the essences and flavors the beans are capable of, you need to grind them yourself. Or buy at a shop that does that right before they make your cup. If you live in the San Francisco Bay area, you can get farm-fresh coffee from Azahar, a company drastically shortening the time between farm and cup.

3) Colombian coffee is best roasted light or medium

Beans from different countries have a different flavor profile and the ones from here are not known for being dark, earthy, or robust. So if you’re getting dark French Roast coffee, it’s better from a place like Sumatra or Chiapas. The best cappuccino I’ve ever had was from Jesus Martin cafe in Salento on this trip, roasted medium, not dark.

4) Fair trade matters a lot right now

Due to lots of oversupply from Vietnam and other players, the price of coffee on the world market has dropped to a record low. It’s to the point where farmers are selling raw beans for less than what it costs to produce them. So a lot of them have gone on strike and are waging protests. With fair trade arrangements, farmers are paid a set price regardless of the ups and downs with commodity prices. It has its own flaws, of course, and it’s not a sure guarantee of quality, but it’s at least an indication that the wholesaler middleman is not getting all the profit.

5) Prepare good coffee with care

There’s a good reason most coffee nuts you know use a French press to prepare their coffee. It tastes a whole lot better than it will in your typical automatic drip maker. The same beans can taste drastically different in those two methods. The next best is any kind of filter system where you’re pouring hot (not quite boiling) water over the coffee yourself. Do it right and you’ll be rewarded.

See more on travel in Colombia on Luxury Latin America or the official Colombia Tourism site.

Explora Atacama hotel, also known as Hotel de Larache, opened in the early 1990s and was a pioneer in northern Chile. They were the first ones to really put the area on the tourism map and their all-inclusive adventure lodge concept has become the norm others in the area have had to adopt when they arrived on the scene.

Tourism exploded in the region over the past decade and we’ve reviewed several excellent competitors: Awasi, Tierra Atacama, and Alto Atacama. Explora has kept up with the challenges though, renovating here, adding new excursions there, and making major upgrades to what’s offered in the restaurant. So while it’s not the fanciest in town, especially when it comes to the rooms, the 50-room lodge still draws more upscale adventure travelers than anyone else.

I’ve just updated our review of Explora Atacama after spending three nights there toward the end of 2012. The original reviewer described the public areas as “REI meets Ikea” and I still like that description. Well-traveled people donning apparel from Patagonia, Columbia, and ExOfficio are often perched on the sleek furniture sipping a Chilean Carmenere or a pisco cocktail. It is kind of like a luxury summer camp for adults, days spent hiking or biking, nights spent conversing and eating well. For each excursion, whether it’s soaking at the recently reopened Puritama Hot Springs or visiting the Tatio Geyser, the guide will have good food and drinks at the ready set out on a tablecloth.

Explora Atacama also has a few attributes few other lodges can equal. Despite its sizable acreage, it’s only a 10-minute walk from the town square. The bevy of horses in the in-house stables has no match elsewhere and the menu of excursions here is more extensive every day than at any of the other lodges. (Depending on occupancy, there are typically 12-18 guides on site, some doing two excursions per day.)

And the last attribute is, you can stay here before or after a Travesia overland tour through the Bolivian desert and salt flat (Salar de Uyuni). I did just that in November and will have a feature story up on it soon.

See our updated review of Explora Atacama Hotel de Larache.