A–Z America Editors 
Across the Americas, Indigenous communities are opening their lands and cultures to visitors — on terms they set. Done well, these are the best travel experiences on the continent. Done badly, they’re a museum of other people’s lives. The difference is mostly in the choices you make before you arrive.
The Maya never had an empire, never vanished, and never stayed inside the borders drawn over their homeland. Following their cities through Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras and El Salvador is the finest historical journey in the Americas — and far easier than it looks.
The Inca built the largest empire in the pre-Columbian Americas, laced with 40,000 kilometres of stone road. One citadel gets the crowds. The rest of the system is sitting there, half-empty, wondering where everyone went.
The advertised rate says $18 a day. The counter says $61. The border says no. Renting a car in Latin America is straightforward once you understand the three places the industry makes its real money — and the one assumption that gets travellers stranded.
Five thousand kilometres from the Bolivian border to the edge of the Southern Ocean, past wine valleys, painted deserts, thirteen national parks and the emptiest horizon in the Americas. Ruta 40 is the road trip South America measures itself against.
The Mother Road turned one hundred this year. It was officially decommissioned four decades ago, and somewhere between those two facts lies the truth about what a Route 66 trip actually is in 2026 — and why this is the year to take it.
Prudhoe Bay to Ushuaia is roughly 30,000 kilometres, sixteen countries, one impossible jungle gap, and at least four months of your life. Here’s what the world’s longest road trip demands — before you sell the house.
Three departments, four small cities, a valley of sixty-metre wax palms, and some of the most welcoming farm stays in South America. The Eje Cafetero is Colombia’s easiest rural trip — once you understand how the pieces fit together.
Banff in July and Banff in October are two different destinations that happen to share a postcode. The right season depends on what you came for — and the wrong one can strand you at a closed road, a frozen lake, or a shuttle stop with no reservation.
Roughly four in five international visitors to Mexico never leave the coasts. Meanwhile, an hour or two inland from the airports they flew into sits one of the great collections of historic cities on Earth — and most of them are cheaper than the beach.
