A ‘Macondo Route’ has been launched in Colombia to tour the sites of the classic novel One Hundred Years of Solitude by 1982 Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez. While Macondo itself is a fictional town, the route will seek to promote tourism in the northern Colombian province of Magdalena, where Garcia Marquez was born in 1927.

This year’s ASEAN Tourism Forum (ATF) TRAVEX (Travel Exchange) 2011 registered an overwhelming response, with over 500 exhibition booths fully sold by the end of October 2010. All 10 member-nations will be represented at this annual leisure travel trade event which showcases the largest contingent of Association of Southeast Asian Nation’s (ASEAN) destination products and services.

State authorities in Melaka, Malaysia, plan to build the world’s longest sea bridge connecting Melaka to Sumatra, Indonesia. The plan is to construct a 27-mile bridge connecting Melaka to the island of Pulau Rupat, and a further five-mile bridge connecting Dumai in Riau province on the Sumatran mainland, according to reports in the Asian press.

The Costa Rica Tourism Board, together with the National Aquarium and Los Angeles Zoo, is excited to announce the Get Going Costa Rica Family Adventure Sweepstakes that will send two lucky families of four on an all inclusive family eco-adventure to Costa Rica for six nights and seven days, the summer of 2011. Winners will be accompanied by Los Angeles Zoo and National Aquarium conservation experts to learn more about the biodiversity of Costa Rica’s rich lands, fauna, and flora, as well as gain insight on existing research being done to preserve Costa Rica natural habitat.

According to the ITB World Travel Trends Report, compiled by IPK International and commissioned by ITB Berlin, the travel market in the Americas is a tale of two continents. Whereas North America is recovering only slowly from the aftermath of global recession, South America’s travel industry is taking advantage of a growth in arrivals.

This is a portal designed for travel professionals who really want to be in the know, though sometimes we have to go at great lengths on something more than the final reading text, which is the hotel offer as such and the fact that we had always wanted to go to Belize, especially to Dangriga –the Mecca of thousands of visitors who come looking for “life experiences” rather than mere vacations.