We recently posted a new feature story on touring the Amazon Rainforest region of Ecuador. You read a lot more about jungle tours in Peru and Brazil—partly because they are marketed more heavily—but there is more to Ecuador than the high Andes and the Galapagos.

Our writer explored the area through the unique Sacha Lodge. Read the feature to get the full story, but this is one of those examples of someone with money buying up land to keep it pristine rather than using it for raw materials or farming. Like Pumalin Park in Chile, the 5,000 acres that make up the lodge’s playground are an investment in nature and preservation.

We’ll also have a full review of the lodge itself posted in a couple weeks, along with other additions to our reviews of luxury hotels in Ecuador.

Now and then we’ll get e-mails from readers asking why we don’t review rental villas in Latin America since we cover hotels. Their point being, for groups or families, renting a villa or a condo makes a lot more sense than staying in a hotel since there’s more space, a kitchen, and maybe a private cook.

They’re right of course, but for us it’s a matter of that being more than we can manage. If we just covered Los Cabos or the west coast of Costa Rica, it might be doable. We’re Luxury Latin America though, bringing you the best of the best from the Rio Grande down to the tip of Patagonia. Getting a handle on the constantly shifting villa rental scene on two continents would be impossible to do in a thorough way.

That doesn’t mean we’ll ignore rental homes completely though. Our new luxury tour feature this week is on a villa vacation in Costa Rica, on the Pacific Coast near Jaco.

Our correspondent set up a short villa stay with activities through Mead Brown, an agency that specializes in high-end rental property in Costa Rica. You simply tell the agency what you’re looking to do and they’ll take care of all the arrangements. In this case, it was golf, ziplining, horseback riding, and getting up close and personal with huge crocodiles.

Finding worthwhile, well-researched travel destination information on the web can be a frustrating and time-sucking endeavor. In most cases you’ll spend half the time and learn twice as much by just buying a good guidebook. There are exceptions now and then, however, which brings me to this great series of posts on Mendoza from the Global Nomad blog at Planeteye: Dining at the wineries of Mendoza.

If you’ve landed on my post here after September ‘08, just go to the September archives of that blog and scroll back from September 17. There are great roundups of the restaurant scene and meals you can have at local wineries. At someone who has dined at a few of them myself, I’d say it’s an accurate and comprehensive view of the Mendoza, Argentina wine and dine scene. Our own article, Touring the best of Mendoza wine country hits a few of the same highlights, including an impressive meal at the Club Tapiz restaurant and a tasting at Nieto Senetiner.

If you’d like to do more than just pass through the region, check out our interview with David English, who helps clients make good choices when searching for Mendoza real estate and Argentina vineyards.

If you’d like to daydream about mud baths and massages in the tropics, check out our new luxury spa roundup: Costa Rica’s Eco-luxe Spas.

This was written by new contributor Insiya Rasiwala, who leads yoga trips and writes often about yoga, ecotourism, and health for various magazines.

As with Argentina and Mexico, Costa Rica is rightly becoming well-known for its spas. The resorts in Costa Rica have a lot to work with including views of lush jungle, tropical fruit and coffee ingredients, and the twittering of birds as you get your rubdown.

This article highlights five of the most notable spas, one at a hotel we will be reviewing shortly and some at hotels we have already reviewed: the Four Seasons Papagayo, Gaia Hotel and Reserve, and Flor Blanca.

We recently posted a story I wrote after a tour of Honduras, called Honduras Above the Water.

For a variety of good reasons, I’ve never gotten certified as a scuba diver. I’m usually pretty content to go snorkeling anyway and haven’t had some “must do before I die” driving force to get me under the water. As I traveled around Honduras I discovered that I was not alone. While Roatan remains the big draw for the country, mostly attracting divers, there’s a lot more to the area than fish and coral below the surface.

So I spent a few days on Roatan with the other non-divers, then set out for Pico Bonito National Park and then the archeological ruins of Copan. From a tourism standpoint it’s still a place in flux, still finding its feet, but it’s one of the best values on the planet if you don’t need marble palaces and a steady flow of hip fusion food piled in a tower. Go check out our wrap-up, or go read the reviews of the best hotels in Honduras.