Well, the hype will hopefully die down now that the contest is over to name the new Seven Wonders of the World. Three of them are in Latin America:

Chichen Itza in Mexico

Machu Picchu in Peru

Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio, Brazil

I detect a bit of ballot-stuffing on the last one, but any contest like this is bound to be hotly contested no matter how the votes come in. I like Wendy Perrin’s post on the subject, noting that you’d have to be living under a rock to not know these places are worth a stop. Many would argue that they are already getting way too many visitors as it is, putting a major strain on what made them great to start with.

Frankly though, I’m glad that Chichen Itza made the cut instead of Tikal. We don’t need more tour buses heading to the latter, filled with obese people who can’t make the 20-minute trek through the jungle to get to the start of the pyramids. Difficulty can be a good thing when it comes to preservation.

We’ll soon be posting reviews for top hotels in Guatemala, but I have to say it won’t be a real long list. There are plenty of interesting, enticing, evocative inns that are great values, but still not a lot of upscale hotels that cater to picky travelers willing to pay for superlative service. Guatemala will get there in a few years I’m sure, but it wasn’t that long ago that a major civil war ended (1996) and the crowds are just now starting to stream back in. For now anyway, the predictable glossy travel mags have ignored the place, so the “hot crowd” doesn’t have this destination on its radar.

There’s really only one big hotel that shows up with regularity on any “best of” lists, the Casa Santo Domingo in Antigua. It’s nice, and worth visiting for a drink or meal if nothing else, but I was more entranced with the two best small inns in the city, Panza Verde (pictured here) and Posada de los Leones. Stay tuned and we’ll have reviews up soon.

I’m currently checking out the luxury hotel scene in Guatemala, which is not all that extensive, but when it comes to great service and excellent views, it’s hard to beat La Lancha. This lakefront hotel, owned by movie director Francis Ford Coppola, is an impressive gem among a range of rather overpriced basic offerings near the Maya ruins of Tikal.

There are good reasons to stay out at one of the three hotels right by the entrance to the Tikal ruins, but being pampered certainly isn’t one of them. None of them have to try all that hard to fill up and it’s hard to hold onto a well-trained staff in the middle of a Guatemalan national park, so you can’t expect a whole lot.

At La Lancha, it’s a different story. It’s a good 30-45 minute ride from the ruins to La Lancha’s spot above the lake, but it’s a world away in terms of facilities, food, and personal attention. This opened in 2006 as Coppola’s third hotel in the region, joining Turtle Inn and Blancaneaux Lodge in Belize. It shares the same attentive sense of design and has the same conch “shellphone” in each room as Turtle Inn, but the theme here is a mix of the nautical and the Guatemalan.

Finding some wildlife is not difficult here. I took this photo from the restaurant while having lunch and at 5 in the morning heard at least a dozen howler monkeys going nuts.