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’s no shortage of beautiful landscapes in the Coffee Triangle of Colombia, but few of them get as many oooh and aaahs as the gorgeous Cocora Valley, near the attractive town of Salento.

The secret seems to be getting out on Salento. There were far more tourists wandering around the shops and cafes when I was there in February than there were when I visited a few years back. Colombia’s tourism numbers keep rising as more and more tourists return from the country raving about how great it was. The safety situation is dramatically better than it was in the dark past and the infrastructure is good overall.

When we got to the Cocora Valley 11 kms away, we practically had the place to ourselves though.

The trip up there is half the fun. You get into an old Jeep Willy with benches in the back and barrel out of hilly Salento into the land of the wax palm trees. The best way to do is standing up and holding on to the roof bar so you get a full panoramic view. First you see the misty mountains from afar as the Jeep winds around the turns. As you get closer you see the super-high palm trees studding the green mountains like toothpicks with palm leaves on top.

This is a stunning landscape to admire at more then 2,000 meters and you can see it by walking further in the hills from the parking area or booking a horseback riding trip with a guide from the stables on site.

Most visitors who come up here visit one of the restaurants though. The thing to order is locally farmed fresh-water trout fried up with or without breading and garlic. It comes with fried plantains and different sauces. Order a beer or get the mulled juice, sugar, and spices drink caneloza with or without rum.

There’s no need to make reservations or book a tour for this experience. Just show up in the Salento town square, hire a jeep, and head into the hills.

See more on this Cocora Valley trip in either of these feature stories: Exploring the Coffee Triangle of Colombia and Touring the Best of Colombia.

We’ve long had a review of Chilean tour company Explora’s Salto Chico Lodge in the Torres del Paine national park, also listed sometimes as Explora Patagonia. It’s got one of the most fantastic mountain views in the world and is on the doorstep of one of the planet’s greatest hiking destinations.

You can cover a lot more ground on horseback than by foot, however, and Explora has formally launched a new equestrian tour program. One of our contributors was fortunate enough to be one of the first to experience it. Here’s one half day in a four-day program:

Before lunch my fate is an 11-mile ride. We begin by crossing the deep Chinas River, climbing up and down hillsides and passing the Laguna Jara Cruce.

Our destination is the remote Estancia 2 de Enero, a farm belonging to the owner of Explora. We stop here for mate (a typical herbal tea favored by gauchos on both the Argentinian and Chilean sides of the border) before cantering back along the high ridges following the scent of lunch. Guanacos (Patagonian llamas) disperse as we pass, some jumping over a fence in perfect line.

The rides cross pampas to icebergs and glaciers, alpine lakes and rivers, with expert guides customizing the itinerary depending on the skill and experience of the riders. As with the equestrian excursions the company runs in the Atacama desert, guests are assured of getting the best equipment and healthy horses used to carrying strangers.

See our full feature story (with gorgeous photos) on touring Patagonia by horseback with Explora.

There’s a lot of exotic mystery packed into the title of this post, but it refers to a luxury adventure tour story we just posted on an Explora Travesia tour from Bolivia to Chile. It goes across the Uyuni Salt Flat, through the desert visiting lagoons, and ends up in San Pedro de Atacama in Chile. (You can do it in a reverse direction as well.)

For a jaded traveler like me who is hard to surprise, this adventure tour was a pure delight from when the driver picked me up in Potosi until I reluctantly checked out of Explora Atacama hotel after three days at the end. All the details were done right, the food was terrific, and Explora’s series of “shelters” along the way provided middle-of-nowhere seclusion with hot showers and wine. This was “glamping” defined: in a sleeping bag on a cot, but with feather pillows, nice toiletries, and a million stars with no light pollution.

It’s getting harder to get away from it all, to get off the grid and leave the constant nagging of communication requests behind, but this Travesia tour takes you into raw nature where there’s no ringing cell phone and no status updates. Just the beauty of sky, earth, water, and animals. You see every star in the sky, not just the ones bright enough to poke through the light pollution. The prominent noises are the wind and your own heartbeat.

Then when you get back to civilization at Explora Atacama, you spend your days on more adventures, biking to a salt lagoon, hiking through desert canyons, soaking in hot springs, riding horses, or climbing mountains. Sitting around watching TV it is not.

Call it “soft adventure” or “luxury adventure,” but I managed to eat well and also lose a couple pounds on this trip. Nice.

See our full tour story on Crossing the Salt Flat and Deserts into Chile.