I made my first visit to Bogota earlier this week on a tour through Colombia. Some aspects of the city are definitely holding it back (it may have the trashiest Plaza Principal in South America), but it is home to two great museums worth visiting.

Bogota Gold Museum

The Gold Museum (Museo de Oro) is an educational look at Pre-Colombian history and shows how the precious metal was used by various indigenous groups in different areas. Much of what the Spanish found they melted down, but a lot of great pieces survived. Some are delicate and intricate, others meant to dazzle subjects with their sheer glow on the head and body.

The presentation is well-designed and the pieces great and small are enhanced by great lighting. Many of the interesting pieces are mounted in glass boxes that can be viewed from all sides. Some of the chieftain adornments are shown on a head and body shadow to give a sense of placement on a person.

Admission is less than $2 but is free on Sunday, so assume there will be a big crowd that day. There are four sections on multiple floors, so plan on staying for a while if you want to take it all in.

Botero Museum of Bogota

The other must-see is the museum of Fernando Botero. Even if you don’t know his name, you certainly have seen the work of this Colombian painter and sculptor. (And if you stay at Sofitel Santa Clara in Cartagena, there’s a sculpture in the main courtyard and a painting in the best suite.) He’s the man behind the fleshy, whimsical works like the one shown here.

This free museum is not huge, but it has an excellent collection of Botero paintings. Try to see it with a guide or someone who knows how to interpret the symbolism in the works to fully appreciate the levels.

The Botero Museum is in a collection offered free each day, in the Bank of the Republic’s museum complex in Bogota’s historical Candelaria district. If you’re interested in money and its history, next door is the Casa de Moneda (Money Museum).

The official site is in Spanish only. See the official Colombia Travel site for more information in English on Bogota.

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.

The reason we run luxury real estate round-up articles on this travel site is that many people end up buying where they’ve traveled. Or at least come back and rent long-term. How many times have you heard someone say, “We went there on vacation and just fell in love with the place.”

For me, it was my sometimes home of Guanajuato, Mexico. Down the road are about 10,000 foreigners who felt the same about San Miguel de Allende. We’ve run articles on places in Latin America many couldn’t stand to leave: Ambergris Caye, Mendoza, Zihuatanejo, Punta de Mita, Cuenca, Bocas del Toro…

They all sound more romantic and exotic than Naples or Scottsdale, right?

Moving to a foreign country or spending part of the year there isn’t as simple as just packing up a suitcase though, so it’s worthwhile to do your homework. Moon Handbooks has a lot of good guides out, written by authors who know them well. Living Abroad in Mexico, for example, or Living Abroad in Belize. These will answer all the questions you have and a lot that you didn’t know you should have. They cover visas, cultural issues, costs, real estate, and the most important question: why there? Follow either of those links and you can search for ones on Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and more.

You can find lots of free information on the web for specific locations and if you can dig up a good message board the expats use, that’s a great place to get nitty-gritty details. For authoritative information that is current and vetted, however, you can’t beat a paid subscription to International Living Magazine. They’re often running deals for $59 a year or $89 for two years, which is a small price to pay for expert advice on a major life change. They’ll save you a lot of headaches.

They spend a good bit of each issue focusing on Latin America since it’s close to the U.S. and Canada, most of the countries are welcoming to foreigners who aren’t broke, and it’s easy to buy real estate. Apart from a few outliers here and there, you’ll almost always get more for your money than you would where you live now—with far lower monthly expenses. Click here for more.

We’ve got a story going up soon on my Travesia trip with explora that ended up in the Atacama Desert of Chile. If you haven’t been to San Pedro de Atacama, it’s hard to believe how crazy popular this area is with adventure travelers. Despite the high cost to get there and stay there, the tourists seem to outnumber the locals in this little oasis.

I’ve updated our article on adventure excursions in Atacama, posting a few new photos and adding some information about some of the most popular tours.

The updates included taking out the “driest place on Earth” description you so often see in the media because after floods and mudslides ripped through the area last year and swept away a lot of homes, it seems stupid to keep calling it that. The floods swept away the infrastructure at the Puritama Hot Springs, but they had just opened back up all fresh and new the week I visited this past November.

At any of the luxury Atacama Chile hotels we’ve profiled, you’ll have your pick from a menu of excursions going out each day. At a small place like Awasi, that may be a handful. At a larger place like Explora Atacama, it may be a blackboard with two dozen options on it. We’ve listed some of the most common tours you’ll find.

One other change that came about from the rains is that a lot of salt came to the surface in Moon Valley, giving the place a whole different look with white crystals on top the ground. The photo to the right is  from a hike through the area after walking through a sandy desert area that was totally brown. No, my companions are not walking on snow—it’s salt.

See the full story here: Adventure Excursions in the Atacama Desert.

Looking to visit the region soon? Check flight prices on LAN.

One of the first batches of hotel reviews we posted on Luxury Latin America when we launched half a decade ago was for Ambergris Caye, Belize. This included what many consider the top resort on the island, Victoria House.

Hotels evolve, expand, and upgrade over the years and it was time to get a new set of eyes (and a new camera lens) trained on Victoria House. So when one of our contributors was researching the Ambergris Caye Luxury Real Estate story we posted recently, he checked into both their ownership options and what it was like for hotel guests.

We’re happy to say little has changed on the service side, with the staffers—many of them here since before we posted the first review—still delivering personalized, friendly service with a smile. While the resort evokes the time of “British Honduras” when Belize was a colony of the queen, we’re facing the Caribbean after all, so stuffiness can only go so far.

What has changed on the physical side is the addition of several new villas, so if you’ve got a big family or a group wanting some space and a kitchen, you’ll be set here. This was partly driven by destination wedding demand: there are a lot of weddings in this tropical paradise. Dive on the reef, then dive into marriage.

For more information, see our updated review of Victoria House in Belize.