Bob Schulman

If you haven't been to Puerto Vallarta for a while, you've got a big surprise waiting for you the next time you hop off a plane at western Mexico's booming resort there.

It's on the "Malecon," a mile-long walkway along the main beach of PV, as the locals call...

Durango is a little town nestled in a valley of southwest Colorado's San Juan Mountains. It's the kind of place where it's easy to imagine Butch and Sundance galloping off with a Pinkerton posse on their heels.

But this is no ordinary Old West town. For one thing, it's got...

You hear a certain kind of hip-swinging music everywhere in the Dominican Republic: In the airport terminals, in the lobby of your hotel, around the pool, on the powdery beaches, in the discos, even at weddings. It's that Caribbean country's peppy homegrown music, merengue (mah-ren-gay).

Some say the name was...

It's so rare you'd think it would be in a glass case or, at the very least, in a part of the church where tourists can't step on it. It's not. There's just a dinky little chain between you and a 1,400-year jump back in time.

The ancient Jordanian...

They're checking out Chichen Itza, packing Palenque and tooling around Tulum: A whopping 10.6 million tourists explored Mexico's 183 publicly open archaeological sites last year, according to the country's National Institute of Anthropology and History. And the visitor count is expected to soar through the roof in 2012.

Most of...

It's usually pretty quiet in the old colonial town of Higüey in the Dominican Republic. Not so when January 21 rolls around each year. On that day -- the national holiday of Nuestra Señora de la Altagracia (Our Lady of the Highest Grace, the Virgin Mary) -- it looks like...

Memo to travelers to Mexico: Make room in your closet for a bunch of new tee-shirts proclaiming your love for places like Teacapan, Esquinapa, Las Cabras and particularly for Playa Espiritu.

You may have to squint to find these spots on the map -- if they show up at all...

Did you have a good time on your vacation in Mexico? Are you a chatty, outgoing kind of person willing to share your experience with others? If so, you might get a free ride in a limo to your home or office back in the States. But there's a catch....

No one is really sure why he came to Mazatlan, but in the late 1820s a fellow from the Philippines showed up on the docks of this little Mexican town on the Pacific. His name was Juan Nepomuceno Machado, and he created something that has since been enjoyed by millions...

Christopher Columbus was cruising around the eastern Caribbean in 1493 when he spotted a bunch of islands so pristine he named the lovely dots in the blue-green waters "Las Virgenes," after the 11, 000 virgin handmaidens of the legendary St. Ursula. It's a tag they still have today: We know...

Where's my wall?

You'd think one of the Caribbean's best luxury resorts could afford all four walls. I've only got three. Oh, I get it, without the wall there's nothing between me and one of the most gorgeous sights in the world.

I'm in a hilltop room -- one...

Take the capital of a pre-Columbian empire - a city on an island in the middle of a lake - then, after it's destroyed by Spanish conquistadores, build another city on top of what's left. Then make the new city bigger and bigger as the lake dries up.

That is...

At first it seems a little odd, staying in Jewish-branded hotels, sampling kosher wines, checking out ancient synagogues and enjoying Israeli rock concerts, while visiting one of the most Catholic countries on the planet.

Such tours, popular among Jews and non-Jews alike, are...

Lol-be had just turned 12, and it was time for her "sacred journey" -- a ritual pilgrimage required of all Maya women at least once in their lifetime. It meant a long, arduous trip to the shrine of the fertility goddess Ixchel on the island of Cuzamil.

She began...

The early 1700s were busy times for the Jesuit missionaries bringing Christianity to western Mexico's Baja Peninsula (whether the natives wanted it or not). By 1721, the padres were saving souls at a dozen missions on the lower Baja including a big one at La Paz on the Sea of...

If you've come to Jordan to see the country's three main showstoppers -- Petra, the Dead Sea and the site of Jesus Christ's baptism -- there's a big surprise in store for you. Visitors quickly find the whole country is an outdoor history museum.

The other jaw-droppers start soon after...

In 1540, when Spanish troops captured the Mayan port of Kin Pech on the Gulf of Mexico, they found an unexpected treasure: a small, scrawny tree that grew all over the nearby forests -- and from which a gorgeous, red-orange dye could be made.

That was a big deal back...

The music swells, the pirates -- the good guys in the movie -- let out a great hurrah and Captain Blood (Errol Flynn) gives us a boyishly handsome grin as his guns blast an enemy galleon into toothpicks.

I've seen Michael Curtiz' old movie Captain Blood maybe a dozen times,...

They make you look classy, but did you know that precious gems like diamonds, jade, amethyst and amber have natural healing powers, too? So say the body-repair experts at the new Fiesta Americana Grand Coral Beach Gem Spa in Cancun, a $6 million project labeled "the first gem-inspired spa in...

It was good to be Augustus the Strong. For one thing, he had lots of jobs, like King of Poland, Grand Duke of Lithuania and Elector of the State of Saxony (which meant, besides running that central European state, he could vote for the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire)....