ColumnTravel lessons: Good food, from good places, with good people.

Only one day into a trip to Baja, Mexico, and my friend Megan and I had come up with our official “Taco Challenge.” (Because when you travel, you should always have a challenge.) This one involved eating at least one taco every day. Three days into the trip, and not only did we have another fellow traveler on board with the Taco Challenge, we were developing a full-blown taco ranking system. Based on a scale from 1 to 5, the taco eater was required to rate both the taco and the ambiance of where it was consumed. Such are the challenges when eating while traveling.

Travel and food go hand in hand. Why do you think there are so many destination specific foods topping the trend lists for 2012? Because food in itself is a form of travel, letting us explore no matter if we’re in the country of the food’s origin or thousands of miles away.

So let’s get back to Mexico.

The best tacos, as most anyone will tell you, are to be found at the simplest taquerias. Concrete floors, open walls, maybe even a grapefruit tree planted in the middle. There may be a TV in the background with a Spanish speaking sports announcer. Near the kitchen a man in an apron may be cutting charred pieces of pastor from the large vertical spit. There will be a centerpiece of freshly sliced cucumber and several bowls of salsa, and if you’re really lucky, you’ll even have a full toppings bar to choose from; Pickled onions, guacamole, cilantro, four kinds of salsa and fresh cabbage are standard. At this point, it’s impossible not to eat well.

When you travel, food can be best when it’s at its simplest form. Take away the stars, the fancy menus, and fancy décor and what are you left with? Food. Food that represents a local community and culture. So you forget about words like “organic” and “local” and “artisan,” because when it comes down to it, what’s on the plate in front of you represents something beyond that.

Later, we drive along the Pacific, and in between a taqueria and the beach, there is a basil farm. In an otherwise arid landscape with prickly cacti and desert rocks, there are also pockets of lush, verdant, farmland. The smell of basil seeps through the open car windows. There is an instant feel of being better connected to the land where food comes from. At home, the smell of basil is reserved for studio apartment windows and farmers markets. Here it’s simply part of the air.

But even Baja has an organic market. A glorious spread of food, art and music, tucked into a corner of San Jose del Cabo every single Saturday Market. There’s even artisan cheese at Mercado Organico, along with homemade bread and fresh vegetables in wooden crates.

And the organic portabello tacos, covered with a layer of herbs and cheese and grilled right in front of us? They get a 5.

There is an ongoing debate about the value of organic. Where does your organic come from? Because a farm doesn’t have the resources to get organic certification, does that mean their produce isn’t as good as the larger scale farm that’s mass producing organic lettuce? When we focus on simply one element of food we forget about all the rest: who grew it, how it was grown, where it was grown. Blindly choosing certified organic is a sign of not truly thinking about what we eat. It’s just as bad as choosing a restaurant simply because they serve up figs wrapped in bacon and pour their bourbon drinks into a mason jar.

Choosing food because you know where it comes from, and that it was made with intention, and not because the latest hip food blog told you to eat it is a different story. A quesadilla grilled on the beach, made with fresh tortillas and cheese beats an organic wheatgrass smoothie from the trustafarian owned juice shop any day. And a restaurant doesn’t have to be fancy, it just needs to serve up fresh food with a community feel. That’s the reminder we get when we travel, and the ideal that we should all embrace when it comes to food we make and eat at home.

Good food, from good places, with good people – if we can make that a 2012 food trend, we’ll be doing well. With or without tacos.

Editor’s note: This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’s weekly column at EcoSalon, Foodie Underground, discovering what’s new and different in the underground food movement, from supper clubs to mini markets to the culinary avant garde.

Images: Anna Brones

The Tubohotel in Mexico features salvaged concrete tubes as sleeping spaces.

If a cast-off, concrete tube measuring six by nine feet sounds like a cozy space rather than a claustrophobic one, then the Tubohotel is for you. Located in the artistic Pueblo Magico of Tepoztlan (it’s also one of the safest towns south of the border), in the mountains near Mexico City, this camp offers the chance to sleep in a two-story tube community set in an organic orchard. It was founded by bubbly celebrity chef Ana Garcia (the Mexican Rachael Ray), who offers culinary courses in her hacienda nearby.

Shaded by organic lime, avocado and guava trees, each of the 20 units are shielded from peeping tubists by curtains over its circular glass window/door. The tubes don’t come equipped with TVs, chairs, or “facilities,” but the trade off is you get to stay somewhere totally far-out and original.

Thanks to the thermic qualities of the concrete, tubes maintain their temperatures day and night.

Rates from $37, including tax and a fully rounded experience.

Photos: Tubohotel

North America’s beauty spreads from sea to shining sea.

When wanderlust strikes, there’s the tendency to picture oneself overseas. My personal fantasies bring me to deserts in Morocco, beaches in Goa, hole-in-the-wall salsa clubs in Havana. I tend to forget the bounty of natural beauty that exists right here in North America. These pictures showcase the stunning vistas, cultural relics, and breathtaking natural phenomena that exist right at our front doors, or at least within a few hours drive.

(above) Capitol Reef National Park, Utah, USA

San Jose del Cabo, Baja California, Mexico

White Sands, New Mexico, USA

Washington, D.C., USA

Venice Beach, California, USA

Crater Lake, Oregon, USA

Grand Canyon, Arizona, USA

San Gorgonio Pass Wind Farm, White Water, California, USA

Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming, USA

Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada

Las Vegas, Nevada, USA

Banff National Park, Canada

Coyote Butte North, Arizona, USA

Henkel, Colorado, USA

Quebec City, Quebec, Canada

Kent, Washington, USA 

Pagosa Valley, Colorado, USA

Lackawanna State Forest, Pennsylvania, USA

San Francisco, California, USA

Chicago, Illinois, USA

Santa Cruz, California, USA

Galveston, Texas, USA

Cape Elizabeth, Maine, USA

Bitterroot Mountains, Montana, USA

Cimarron National Grassland, Kansas, USA

Fenway Park, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

Yosemite National Park, California, USA

U.S. Route 66, Arizona, USA

Mule Canyon, Colorado, USA

New Orleans, Louisiana, USA

Everglades, Florida, USA

Sequoia National Park, California, USA

Anne’s Beach, Florida Keys, USA

South Dakota, USA

Quechee, Vermont, USA

Riverwood Park, Mississauga, Canada

St. Louis, Missouri, USA

Bountiful, Utah, USA

Big Moose Lake, New York, USA

New York, New York, USA

Eielson Air Force Base, Alaska, USA

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“A week without your computer, are you going to be okay?”

I raised my eyebrows and shook my head; sometimes people just don’t get it. Yes, I was about to take off and leave my computer sitting right where it deserved to sit: on my desk. No, I was not going to live-tweet about my trip or post pictures on Facebook. I was going to take six whole days off from the technical world, not even my cell phone was going to get turned on, and I was going to be just fine.

A New York Times article that I read almost a year ago has stuck with me, and I’ve cited it in several conversations regarding our inability to truly disconnect. Titled “On Vacation and Looking For WiFi,” the central topic hits a little too close to home, but raises an important point: we have created a society where we are so connected that we have practically made it impossible to ever truly pull ourselves away.

Five years ago, in Barbados, none of us consulted a computer. Three years ago, in Costa Rica, a few family members walked to an Internet cafe and checked our e-mail one afternoon just for the novelty of being online in a faraway place.

This year I stood in a long line in the lobby of this resort in the Dominican Republic, to wait my turn to sign up for 25 hours of Internet service for $25. Several family members brought laptops and we checked our work email daily.

It’s not about keeping in touch with what’s going on; no matter where you are in the world you probably have access to a newspaper, even if it’s a few days old. The fear of disconnecting stems from our need to be in control. What if an important email comes in while we’re out and we don’t get to it? What if the person needs an immediate response?

Well, what if? We’ve somehow traded our ability to trust that other people can handle themselves, answer their own questions, and even learn to wait if they can’t get an immediate response for the false sense of security that comes from thinking that we can always be in control.

Two days into a week-long stay in Mexico and those questions seemed very far away. Insignificant even.

Little did I know that while I was contemplating how unimportant all the stuff I had left really was, the document I had diligently prepared for my business partner and emailed to her at 1 a.m. – a document which included all that needed to be done while I was out – was in fact the wrong one. An attempt at making myself feel in control, yet slightly failing in the process. But, like any sound, intelligent human being, she called my neighbor, got let into my apartment and sent the document to herself from my computer. Smart woman.

Meanwhile – my everyday virtual duties switched for overlooking the ocean – I wrote in my journal:

Disconnecting. A whole week of it. And what does it remind me? That most of what we do isn’t that important. The constant updates, the information overload. In the end, we can turn it all off. In fact, it’s easier than we lead ourselves to believe.

So what can’t we turn off? Feelings, emotions, creativity… those the the things that are always there, often impended by our everyday routine that we deem necessary.

It’s easy to overlook the things that make us feel alive, to quickly get out of balance. But in taking time to slow down, we remember how to find that balance.

We can’t give up our jobs and we can’t give up email. To be an active citizen, we have to be educated, so we can’t give up consuming information. I would never argue for any of the above. But we can take time to assess how much of all of these things is healthy.

We can take time to focus on the slower activities that cultivate our friendships, our emotions and our creativity. Drawing, writing, traveling, walking, cooking, talking, sitting, thinking – all those good things that we often put into the “quality of life” category.

And as for that creative inspiration that only comes when I myself truly disconnect? Here are some Mexico photos.

Images: Anna Brones

I’m nomadic by nature but strive to travel for a purpose. Writing and taking pictures as a job blurs the line between work and play, but still, I tend to stay busy in far away places. By contrast, this last week in Mexico was down time. Me time. As it turns out, learning time.

I was there for a very small wedding of two good friends, in a tiny town of old homes and a few fancy houses built by California surfers.

It felt a bit ironic, as a decade-long relationship of mine recently came to a close. What I did not anticipate about this trip was how much time I’d spend in my head meditating on life and work and how love might function within it. When the water was clean, I surfed, forgetting my thoughts. But when I wasn’t surfing, I had a lot of time to think, mostly in a hammock staring at the ocean. It was hard; tearful at times. Not because I was watching new love pledge togetherness, but more because I was thinking about a past love. Far away, even with such vast space and peace, you still can’t always find the answers. Sometimes there simply aren’t any.

Love makes you think about dying alone. Silent breakfasts on Sunday morning. What you’re going to give in this life and what this life is going to give, in return, to you.

It’s complex for a wanderer like me; I’d need someone who shares my lust for adventure, my love for empirical experiences that challenge the very foundation of what we think we know about human nature. My mother tells me that I have to drop ‘I am what I do’, but I can’t. When the dust settles, all you really are is the sum total of your deeds in life. I believe nature really is that simple.

At the crux of this, for me, is a lifelong goal to sail around the world and document the cultures and people I meet. It’s something I’m currently doing. I’d love to share it with someone, a friend who shares my endless love of and fascination for the ocean. Isn’t that what we all want? These kinds of connections are rare, but sometimes you find them when you choose to take the offbeat path of your heart. You find others like yourself, who have committed to a life less ordinary. This is my tribe.

And we learn, too, that it is possible to love someone thoroughly yet realize that togetherness simply isn’t going to work. Paths cross, and lives connect, but our tribes pull.

Mexico, your hammocks and salty breezes brought me back to my true self. And sometimes losing love is a necessary step towards the path to personal discovery. And that’s a brutal fact.

I’ve been to Mexico many times, always typically as a dirty surfing traveler. I’ve gotten sick. Whether it’s the water, the food, the fruit in the market, I don’t know, but Mexico isn’t a country that typically agrees with me. It’s a land of contradictions and uncanny juxtapositions. Just on the outskirts of four star hotels in Zihuantenejo is an old Mexico where life is slow, poor and dirty. The town where I am, Saladita, is far away from the glass bottom boat rides and fancy resorts, but it’s been marked by old surfers looking to retire in a surfer’s paradise. But just back off the beach, a few miles inland is the land of serious drug violence. Tourists, even dirty ones with surfboards, are largely shielded from this reality. Drug fighting is bad for beach tourism, especially when it produces a surfeit of bodies being dumped into the ocean. Just a year ago, there were an inordinate amount of shark attacks on swimmers and it was surmised by marine biologists that these attacks may be happening because sharks have gotten used to the taste of human flesh because so many bodies end up in the ocean from different sides of warring factions. No joke.

But where I am, it’s a different world. Saladita is known for a perfect wave that breaks consistently. It’s the kind of wave that surfers dream about – long, peely, and easy to catch. I’ve surfed my guts when we first got here but I haven’t been in the ocean for two days. Why? The rain came. Everywhere, the smell of burning plastic on the beach carries on the wind, and the deluge of trash that comes out of the river makes the ocean off limits for many hours after wards, especially for someone like me. Everywhere I go in the world, I look at places through an environmental, water quality lens. I look at behavior. I look at systems. I see many people unaware that they are poisoning themselves. I wish I didn’t, but you can’t un-know reality once you engage in perceiving it.

Just yesterday, walking around, documenting the human stain on this divine land, I asked a guy spraying chemicals on weeds by the river bank what he was spraying. Paraquat. Paraquat is a non-selective herbicide (meaning it kills everything) and it’s extremely toxic to humans. He filled it from an even bigger tank on the back of a truck, over and over again. Never mind the septic tank leaks, never mind the straight dumping of feces into the river in very poor areas, never mind the animals crapping on the river bank, and never mind all the garbage sent out to sea. Chemicals freak me out. Even taking a small swig of Paraquat and spitting it out can cause death. Sure, it’s diluted a bit, but no matter what, it’s getting into my body. Because everything runs down hill.

But what do you do? And is it a gringo’s place to do anything? That’s the rub. By all standards other than environmental, surfers spending cash and building houses is a good thing for the local people. They make money. And good money.

Right in front of the wave, there is a surf camp called Lourdes’s. Lourdes is a woman about 35, a regal Mexican goddess who makes it her job to know everything that happens in Saladita. Her surf lodge is basic, includes clean sheets and ceiling fans, but otherwise no luxury. I see the money she makes – all cash. I see the car she drives. Surfers are good for her quality of life. But don’t piss off Lourdes. You want to build a vacation Palapa with an infinity pool? Or you just want to buy a cheap bag of ditch weed? You must first pass the ‘pinche gringo’ test with Lourdes. She owns the place and she will bring a hammer down on anyone not in her good graces.

To wit, just up the road sits a half finished Hacienda that was being built by a guy from California. He pissed Lourdes off, and the next day the workers building his place quit coming and stole all the building materials. The guy can’t get anyone to finish it and he’s persona non-grata around these parts. As a traveling surfer, it’s something I like to see: Mexican ownership of Mexican resources.

But how long will it be before people quit coming here to surf because the water is so dirty? With all this gringo infusion of cash, why is there so little infrastructure to manage the waste humans create? It’s all about margins and people in power that control those margins. It’s overwhelming, indeed. Constantly, the environmental movement is chastised for being too ‘doom and gloom’ and enviro non-profits all that want to remain solvent try to balance bad news with hope. But sometimes, looking at the challenges that face a place even as beautiful as this one, you realize quickly that hope is not an effective strategy. Oh Mexico, my heart is still hopeful for you, but I fear for you.

Image: ripkas

My Hawaii honeymoon was telling in terms of my husband’s shunning of the sun. Fair skinned and sensitized by a father who had been treated several times for melanoma, my better half sought out the biggest umbrellas and thatched huts available for taking shelter on the beach. I would have preferred he sported tropical jams instead of those baggy Brooks Brothers khaki pants and huaraches, rather than sensible saddle shoes, but he’s eccentric and not one to cave to convention.

Even so, 16 years later, I follow his lead in guarding my skin on our travels. Repenting for my baby oil-swathed summer tanning marathons in Malibu, and wary of sun cancer and wrinkling too fast, I can appreciate a resort environment without sacrificing my health and beauty. Here are some cool summer spots for a sun-screened getaway.

Indian Springs

This historic and ultra hip spa resort in Calistoga is a favorite weekend getaway among many of my friends in San Francisco. That’s because the lushly planted 16-acre property is both scenically soothing in a vintage Hollywood fashion and its famous Olympic-sized mineral pool is hugely restorative.

We were there on a rainy Easter weekend. It was sunny and clear when we arrived on Friday, and pouring like nobody’s business on Sunday. Either way, the setting offers diverse respite opps out of the sun, from the covered poolside veranda to a romantic indoor poolside lounge with a stone fireplace. There’s also shaded herb gardens for repose and an understated spa for receiving a mudbath with pure volcanish ash – a long practiced ritual to complement the mineral plunge. The Wapoo Indians settled in the site 8,000 years ago, followed by the Spanish who named the treasured plot Agua Caliente. Sure, the water is hot, but you can still keep your cool in the heat of the summer here. Just substitute the tan for a fan (which you will need in your room).  Soak up the mineral water with proper protection, then hide in the shade with a good read. You’ll  feel more relaxed than you have in months.

Four Seasons Punte Mita, Mexico

This stunning resort with a coral lined beach and extraordinary guacamole is just 25 minutes from the Puerto Vallarta International Airport and offers breaks on rooms during the heat of the summer (August is best) when being in the direct sun can fry your bass. But why not take advantage of the rates and simply enjoy the spectacular setting, spa treatments, covered patio areas, excellent snorkeling and scuba, gym workouts and amazingly healthy cuisine for a steal. The summer promotion includes a resort credit of $400-$1200 daily towards room rate or other activities. This can get you a usually high priced Four Seasons room for two for $250-$350. There are also third and fourth night free offers, which many resorts are doing during the summer.

One of my favorite water activities here where I won’t feel the burn: floating down the well-shaded Lazy River – a narrow pool with a current which encircles the Oasis complex. Kids ride it with an inner tube, but I like wading through it for the resistance exercise. And better yet, there is well stocked bar nearby. Cowabunga!

This is the second installment in a travel series by EcoSalon’s Senior Editor, Luanne Bradley.

Images: downing.amanda, Four seasons, Popofaddicus

Have you ever really thought about what chewing gum is made of? Maybe you don’t really want to know. Modern gum is mostly made up of petro-based polymers. Essentially, you’re chewing plastic. But the original chewing gum came from chicle, the latex of a tropical Central American tree. And the Consorcio Chicleros of south-eastern Mexico are taking chewing gum back to its original Mayan roots.

So gum-lovers, I’d like to present you with a better option: Chicza, an organic, biodegradable, agave-sweetened gum made completely from chicle tree latex, the old-fashioned way. The chicle latex is sustainably harvested right in the tropical forest. These trees can’t produce the latex in any other environment than their natural one, so the chicleros have great incentive to protect their trees and their livelihood.

And you, as the gum chewing consumer, can rest assured that you’re chewing a botanical product (and not the product of the petrol business) and helping these people protect their land from deforestation and cattle grazing. So chew up! And toss your gum in the compost when you’re done.