Journey Mexico Blog

If you love Beatnik literature, booking a Mexico City trip will transport you back in time to hear the sounds, smell the smells,

Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and others in Mexico City. Nov. 1956

and see the sights that inspired Beat heroes such as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and others.

Though names have changed and places have slightly evolved, many of the bars, apartments, and landmarks that inspired some of the most legendary Beat works still exist and are not marked with tourist-friendly signs or plaques – just as the anti-establishment authors would have wanted.

• Monterrey 122, on the corner of Chihuahua Street, is the anonymous building in which William Burroughs shot and killed his wife in an attempt to William-Tell a glass off of the top of her head. Burroughs later credited the incident as the catalyst of his writing career.
• Below the apartment where Burroughs killed his wife was the now legendary Bounty Bar, where ex-pats and Beatniks would drink until the sun came up. The bar still stands, but is now a cantina called Krika’s.
• You can also visit another then hang out for the Beats, Plaza Luis Cabrera, on Orizaba at Zacatecas Street. The plaza, filled with trees and a fountain, as well as the cafes that surround it were often the setting for Beats’ drug and alcohol induced conversations, which would later lead to some of literature’s most famous works.
• Chapultepec Park, which is Mexico City’s equivalent of New York’s Central Park, is where Jack Kerouac suggested the name for Burroughs’s novel Naked Lunch.
• Near Tacuba Metro station is the Panteon Americano cemetery. At the very back of the cemetery, lie the remains of Burroughs’s wife, marked with a little inscription that reads: “Joan Vollmer Burroughs, Loudonville, New York, 1923, Mexico D.F. Sept. 1951.”

Read more about the Beatnik authors in Mexico City at The San Francisco Chronicle

Two of our partner properties, The Banyan Tree Mayakoba and the Saint Regis Mexico City, both made Conde Nast Traveler’s “Hot List Hotels” for 2010.

The Banyan Tree is an incredible experience in exotic luxury with its Asian style villas, Thai trained masseuses, and Thai kitchen staff. Each villa offers its own private pool, and the staff members actually remove their shoes before entering your villa to wait on you. This award is an addition to the 300+ they’ve received since 2006.

The Saint Regis Mexico City, aside from being a stunning 189-room tower of class, was this year’s host for the Virtuoso Symposium, in which Journey Mexico was thrilled to be involved. The event was a huge success as is shown in the list of tweets to come out of Mexico City.

MACAY, The Museum of Contemporary Art of Yucatán, is definitely the place to go if you’d like to travel the Yucatan Peninsula and see contemporary art. Approximately 80,000 people have visited the MACAY museum, annually, over the past ten years.

by Leonardo Nierman

From now (April) until June of 2010, MACAY will be displaying their latest exhibit featuring works of the renowned Leonardo Nierman in salons 6 and 7 and in the Expoforo of the museum. Nierman’s exhibit, El Sonido del Color (The Sound of Color), consists of 96 pieces of sculpture, painting and tapestry.

Other featured artists are: Beatriz Simón, Ana Gómez, Leonel Coronado, Carlos Carbajo, Aurora Caro, Ángeles Maldonado, and Tania Cámara.

MACAY is open Sun, Mon, Wed, and Thu from 10 am to 6 pm as well as Sat and Sun from 10 am to 8 pm.

This seems like a pretty interesting book reflecting the social angst that came out of Oaxaca, Mexico in 2007. At the time, Mexican police officers opened fire on a group of protestors who were advocating for the right to an education. A strong social backlash was channeled through the art form of graffiti, and Protest Graffiti Mexico: Oaxaca is comprised of images of the graffiti photographed by, the now deceased, Elaine Sendyk.

You can purchase Protest Graffiti at Amazon for $21.24, and there are some really insightful comments about the book at BleedTheSoul.

Coco Nogales, a professional surfer and local of Puerto Escondido, is putting on a surf contest April 29^th and 30^th, 2010 in Oaxaca, Mexico. The event is called “The Coco Nogales Surf Challenge – For the Future Stars” and is being hosted in conjunction with Hurley and Red Bull.

The prizes for the event will total approximately 30,000 pesos (about 3,000 USD), and 20 to 30 surfboards will be given away to local groms who can’t afford to buy boards.

I don’t think the contest has an official website but for more information, you can email asociaciondesurfoaxaca@gmail.com or call in Mexico (954) 101-6452. Video of Coco and Puerto Escondido below:

Below is the trailer for a documentary film called Somewhere Near Tapachula about a mission in Tapachula, Chiapas for Mexican children with troubled pasts. In addition to shelter and schooling, the mission takes the children on weekly trips to the beach. Apparently, in 2004, someone left a surfboard at the mission for the children to use on these weekly trips to the ocean and since then, the process of learning to ride waves has given these kids a new outlook on life.

The blog I found the documentary on said the movie was to be released in October of 2009, and the film’s website shows tour dates from February to April (but no year). Oh wait, the film has its own blog, and… the tour is already over. If anyone has any info on where you can purchase/view the film in its entirety, please post in the comments section.

If you are interested in sailing to Mexico, next Friday, April 23^rd, marks the beginning of the 63^rd Newport to Ensenada Yacht Race, the word’s largest international yacht race. So far there are 210 yachts registered for this year’s event.

The race takes sailors 125 miles from Newport, California to Ensenada, Mexico on the Baja California peninsula. This year’s winner will be awarded a $6,000 watch from Lamborghini.

Non-racers can enjoy the event as well by taking the three day cruise with Carnival Cruise. Passengers pass the sailboats and end up with the ultimate view for the finish of the race. More information can be found at the race’s website, and below is a video about the race.

Typical RSS Symbol

If you’re not familiar with RSS Feeds, fear not. It’s actually a really simple and convenient feature that allows you to have updates from your favorite websites sent to you as soon as they are published, saving you the time of having to actually go to each site to check for updates.

Readers

To receive RSS feeds, you need a “reader.” A reader program is basically a customizable dashboard that receives and displays the RSS feeds to which you subscribe. Let’s say your three favorite websites are a sport’s blog, your friends website that publishes cooking recipes, and a news site. Once you sign up for their RSS feeds, you simply need to log into your reader account to view the newest content from all three sites. In your reader, you will see that the sports blog, the recipe site, and the news site each have their own little “section” on your dashboard, which you can move around. Now, you can choose which articles you’d like to read without having to actually navigate to each website.

If you have a Gmail account, iGoogle is the reader extension you should use. Once signed into Gmail, open a new tab in your web browser and go to http://www.google.com/ig. There you can customize your iGoogle page and move the different feeds around to your liking.

If you use Yahoo for email, your “MyYahoo” page is your reader. It’s very similar to iGoogle and is also customizable. There are several other reader programs, but these are the two I’d suggest.

Subscribing to an RSS feed

When you decide that you enjoy a website enough that you’d like their updates sent to your reader, look for their RSS icon. It’s usually orange with a sort of Wifi symbol on it (shown at top). If there is no icon, look for something that says “Follow our RSS Feed” or something similar. Once you find it, click on it and you should get something that looks like this:

Note, because I am signed into Google, it’s just showing me the Google options. If you use Yahoo, you will see several options – just click on the +Yahoo button. Because I use iGoogle, I would select “Add to Google Reader.” Once you click the button to add, you’re good to go. Sign into your reader account, and you will see the latest posts from the site you just added.

I just came across an interesting article that really opened my eyes about sunscreen. If you’ll be traveling to Mexico with us this year, or to anywhere else you’ll need protection from the sun, here are five things you need to know:

1. According to the Environmental Working Group’s 2009 study, only one in ten sunscreens offers superior protection from the sun and is made from healthy ingredients.
2. Sunscreens of 55-100 SPF only block 1-2% more sunburn rays than a sunscreen of 30 SPF.
3. The sun produces three bands of ultraviolet light: UVA, UVB, and UVC. UVB is the band that causes sunburn, and the US Food and Drug Administration only holds manufacturers to regulations in regards to UVB. Although UVB light will burn your skin with prolonged exposure, the body actually needs UVB light in order to make Vitamin D. According to Elsevier, the world’s leading publisher of Medical Information, 30-50% of Americans are deficient in Vitamin D.
4. UVB only makes up about 4% of the total ultraviolet light that enters our atmosphere. UVA is actually much more responsible for long-term negative effects cause by the sun including: skin cancer, premature skin aging, and other skin damage. Because the US government does not regulate UVA protection, most claims of UVA protection on sunscreen bottles are not credible.
5. Many brands claiming to block both UVA and UVB, Coppertone ultraGuard for example, use a compound that is absorbed into the skin called oxybenzone, which, although organic, is believed to be a photocarcinogen. When exposed to light, photocarcinogens damage human DNA.

Scary stuff right? The good news is there are websites out there that compare and rate brands of sunscreen. The Environmental Working Group has a great site that lists the top one hundred+ brands of sunscreen. They also have a great widget on the right hand side of the page, titled “Find Safe Sunscreen,” which allows you to search for specific brands and products and view their ratings. Don’t let the sun keep you from summer fun!

I just came across this video of Oaxaca that was made to celebrate Mexico’s 200th anniversary of Independence. The video does an incredible job of showing the diverse beauty that the state of Oaxaca has to offer.