Sure, you could spend a week going back and forth from your resort’s bedroom to the beach chair, but how about a more interesting honeymoon? Or second honeymoon?

Wines of Chile and Enotour have just set up a Romantic Honeymoon Adventure tour in Chile. It takes in Santiago, Valparaiso, and lots of wine valleys in between, with plenty of insider access experiences. There are special touches like a blending session where you can prepare your own anniversary wine.

I was just in this area a few months ago with the people who organized it and the trip led to this article: Touring Chile’s Wine Districts Near Santiago. So go check that out to get a feel for what you would experience.

This tour is six days long and the great thing about Chile’s wine regions is that you can really hit a lot of them in that amount of time. Many are just a short drive from the capital city, so you can be staying in some of Chile’s best hotels at night. Naturally you’ll be eating well as you pop open all those bottles of wine.

The price is roughly three grand per person, but since this is a private tour there are options for customization that will bring the price up or down a bit. For more information, including an itinerary, see this Enotour page.

Our man on the scene in Chile, Jimmy Langman, got a chance to check out Patagonia Camp, an interesting resort we’re glad to add to our review collection of luxury hotels in Chile.

As with the luxury safari “camps” in Africa, this is no bare-bones facility where you’re going to be freezing at night and eating food around a smoky campfire. Instead you get to listen to the wind whip around outside your yurt while snuggled up in your comfy warm bed.

When you step outside, you have a view of a lake and the majestic Torres del Paine mountain range a few miles away. No camp grub for you: there’s an elegant restaurant that serves “some of the best food by far that I have dined on in a hotel in Chile” according to our reviewer. The parent company also owns Matetic Vineyards, so you can be assured you’ll have a good glass of wine with dinner as well. (See our related story, Touring Chile’s Wine Districts Near Santiago.)

This is one of the most beautiful regions in South America and with this unique lodging option you can get closer to it without making a lot of sacrifices. See our full review of Patagonia Camp in Chile.

Sure, ski season is just getting going in the U.S. and Canada, but if you’re planning a vacation for when it’s summer in the northern hemisphere, you can still do a ski trip—in Argentina or Chile.

When we go into shorts and flip-flops mode, they’re pulling out the skiwear to shush down the slopes in places like Catedral, Las Lenas, and Valle Navado. So if you’ll like to make a ski or snowboard vacation in July or August, check out our guide to the best resorts and slopeside hotels – Southern Hemisphere Skiing: Argentina and Chile.

It can be a little overwhelming trying to figure out which resorts to focus on in these countries, so as usual we’re trying to be a filter and save you some time separating the best options from the also-rans. So we’ll not only point you to the best places to ski, but also the best beds while you’re there. Click on the link above or the photo.

See more stories on luxury travel in Argentina or Luxury Travel in Chile.

How are Latin America’s coastal regions faring? I was one of the panelists trying to answer this question in National Geographic’s annual Geotourism survey. As usual, some places got failing grades (like Louisiana after the BP oil spill), while ironically oil-rich Norway scored the highest. In general cool climate places to better: fewer people are moving there and building vacation homes and resorts.

See the full report here, but the top rated destinations included spots in Chile and Argentina. These were places rated as “In excellent shape, relatively unspoiled, and likely to remain so.”
Chilean Fjords
Argentina: Valdés Peninsula

These were rated as “doing well, with a few surmountable problems.” (Scores out of 100)
Antarctic Peninsula 70
Costa Rica: Caribbean coast 70
Brazil: Bahia, northern coast 69
Brazil: Rio de Janeiro beaches 66
Colombia: Cartagena coastal region 65

Then “A mixed bag of successes and worries, with the future at risk.”
Mexico: Tulum to Sian Kaan 61
Chile: Viña del Mar 60
Belize: Coast and barrier reef 58
Honduras: Northern coast 57
Costa Rica: Pacific coast 55

Thankfully, only one Latin American destination showed up in either of the bottom two categories, that being Zihuatanejo in Mexico. It’s nice little town that is unfortunately a cruise ship stop, with the ships’ massive footprints overwhelming the fragile marine system and the thousands of visitors totally changing the character of the town itself.

Overall, the biggest problem on the coasts is over-development, with poorly planned and minimally supervised building projects quickly transforming coastal regions, not always for the better.

“From Costa Rica to Nova Scotia, native residents are getting priced out of their own oceanfronts. Some places cope with these changes. Others teeter at a tipping point,” says the intro.

There’s an inherent struggle that a publication like ours has to face. Sure, it’s great to buy your piece of paradise on the ocean, but at what cost to what was there before?

We do what we can to steer people to developments that preserve what made the place special instead of obliterating it in the process, but there are few locals anywhere who won’t take crazy gringo money in order to leave their fishing village shack with an unfathomable wad of cash in pocket. We can only hope that the positives—new jobs, better infrastructure, the sprouting of new outreach programs to help the poor—will make up for some of what has been lost along the way.

Please tread lightly when finding your place in the sun and ask that your builders and architects do the same. Do what you can to support the less fortunate in the community. If you can get to some place by some method other than on a cruise ship, that’s nice too. There’s only so much coastal land on this Earth and we need to take care of it.

While I was touring the many wine districts outside of Santiago, Chile, I was fortunate/unfortunate to spend a night in Valparaíso. The unfortunate part was I only had a night and a morning to explore the area. I definitely want to get back there another time to aimlessly wander the hillside neighborhoods and explore by funicular.

The fortunate part was I got to spend it at Casa Higueras Boutique Hotel, a lovely inn perched on a steep hillside, overlooking the bay. It’s got everything you would crave while staying in this UNESCO World Heritage City: a restaurant with great seafood, a great local wine selection, views of the bay from your room, a pool, and a hot tub for soaking those tired calf and thigh muscles after sightseeing.

This is a historic mansion with character, but there’s nothing creaky about the bi-lingual service or the room amenities. This is a special place to relax and take it all in while being right in the thick of what makes Valparaíso special. Stay here for a night while touring around, or take more time to explore and eat your way around the city.

See our full review of Casa Higueras.

See more on luxury travel in Chile.