One of the interesting, little-discussed aspects of touring the Galapagos is that most companies are booking quite similar tours. This is mostly for a very good reason: the fragile ecosystem needs us humans to stay the hell off most of the area, so there are strict limits in place as to where our feet can step or not on any given island.

The differences come in what can be varied: the kind of ship, the guides, which islands you stop in, how fast and nimble your ship is, how eco-conscious it is.

Geographic Expeditions recently launched two new tours playing off these variables in different ways.

The first is a private charter option on what they are calling “the most luxurious yacht in the Galapagos Islands”—the Grand Odyssey. Here’s a taste of what is included on their 16-passenger vessel:

“Salon and entertainment area, dining room, spa and massage area, airy canopied sun deck, full bar, Jacuzzi, and exceptionally spacious en suite cabins…”

The other new tour is a land-based safari adventure, set up more like an African adventure, with a tented camp on Santa Cruz island and excursions by ship to nearby islands. Sure you won’t see it all this way, but there’s plenty of bounty nearby: sea lions, blue-footed boobies, land and sea iguanas, frigate birds, and more.

Both these new tours are set for December. For more info see the Geographic Expeditions site.

We always feel some obligation to revisit a luxury hotel we’ve reviewed when it adds a new wing or does a complete room overhaul. We felt especially obligated to revisit Mansion del Angel in Quito, Ecuador though: they moved across town!

Yes, they packed up a few moving vans and took their elegant furniture to a new address, from the modern Mariscal district to a more fitting mansion overlooking Parque Alameda. A grander building in a more elegant location.

The interiors are just as showy though, if not more so, with our reviewer equating the largest suite to a chamber that would suit King Louis the 14th.

Overall, this is a well-run, impressive Relais & Chateaux hotel filled with finery, with rates that are half that of the Plaza Grande on the square. And now there are more rooms to choose from than at the old location. See our full review of Mansion del Angel in Quito, Ecuador.

Congratulations to Peru’s Mario Vargas Llosa, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature last week. Here’s the sad part though: “He is the first Latin American writer to win the prize since Octavio Paz in 1990.” (No Spanish readers in Sweden perhaps?)

Big news for real estate investors looking at Ecuador: International Living reports that a new road and bridge has cut the drive time from Quito to the coast in half.

Here’s how I’ve been dealing with the health care crisis in the United States: moving to Mexico. A short jaunt will do it though for everything from root canals to operations. That’s why Mexico is expecting more than 50,000 medical tourists this year.

There’s a new 4th edition out of the indispensable guidebook to Nicaragua for travelers in any budget range: Moon Handbook Nicaragua. Joshua Berman, who has reviewed some of our luxury hotels in Nicaragua and Belize, is the co-author and he knows his stuff.

There’s not a lot of luxury travel in El Salvador, but our own Paige Penland has a new guide out for the country – El Salvador: a Great Destination.

Since I’m on a roll with contributor shout-outs here, check out Nicholas Gill’s rundown of Favorite Food Finds from Lima’s Mistura Food Festival.

As you pick up some roses for your sweetie this Valentine’s Day and pay twice the rate of the rest of the year, take solace in the fact that they went through a lot to get here. Those pretty flowers you are holding were probably growing in the soil of Ecuador or Colombia just a few days ago.

There’s a bit in the Quito and the High Valley story we published recently about a rose plantation I visited near Otavalo. There I saw the process in action, people working against the clock in the short window they have between cutting and shipping.

Basically the process works like this. The flowers grow until they are exactly the right shape, the workers moving through the rows each day cutting just those particular ones. They move on a cart to the cleaning area, where some of the excess leaves are stripped and they are cut to a uniform length. Then the flowers moved to a refrigerated packing room where like colors are sorted and packed together. They go into a colder refrigerated room and are packed into boxes. The packed roses go onto a refrigerated truck where they make the journey to Quito’s airport.

Each night thousands of boxes of roses leave the Quito airport and fly to the U.S., Russia, and Europe. On the other end they are loaded onto more refrigerated trucks to go to distribution centers. After that they get to your local florist then onto a dining room table or cubicle desk. All within a few days so they don’t start wilting.

So what are you paying for when you lay out the cash for those flowers? A little for the flowers themselves, but mostly for a lot of coordinated shipping.

Want some chocolates instead? Ecuador won’t mind. They ship out plenty of cocoa as well.

About a month ago I hand-delivered a postcard I had carried a very long way. From a dot of an island in the southern Pacific Ocean to a small city in Virginia. From Post Office Bay to a parent back home.

You see Post Office Bay, on Floreana Island in the Galapagos, was set up in the sailing ship days. Back then crews were away from home for years, with no way to contact loved ones at home except by mail. Getting that mail home relied on other ships, however, so sailors would pick up mail headed to where they were going and take it there themselves.

The tradition continues today, ironically now working better and faster than the real Ecuadorian postal service, which charges an amazing $2 and up to send a postcard or letter internationally. The cards we stuck in the mailbox at post office bay got to their recipients in a couple weeks.

I took longer delivering mine as I waited until I was driving through Virginia for the holiday break. I spent the night in Lynchburg (at the wonderful Craddock Terry Hotel) and hand-delivered my postcard to its surprised recipients—pictured here. Their son and his family had toured the Galapagos right before I was there and said, “This was an amazing trip. It’ll be even more amazing if this card makes it.”

It did, and I was almost as satisfied as a swashbuckling sailor.

If you’re heading out on a Galapagos cruise, don’t forget your address book!