Your News Intake While Traveling

One of the wonderful things about traveling is you can remove yourself from the incessant silly faux-news chatter going on in your home country. OK, Michael Jackson died and it might have been drug-related. Do we really need to know any more than that? Wake me up when it’s settled.

It does pay to keep an eye on the headlines though. Pick an English language paper up once in a while (if you can’t read the local one) or pull up a news page when you’re logging on somewhere to check e-mail. The BBC site is always a good stop because it’s easy to navigate by continent or country and they tend to focus on what matters instead of what will titillate the masses.

Sometimes there are things going on that can cause big trouble if ignored. Trying to bus into a town when there’s a civil war erupting is never a good idea.

For instance, if you were headed to mainland Honduras this week, you may want to reroute that trip. A major coup just took place. The president sacked the head of the military. Then the military forcibly put the elected president on a plane and sent him to Costa Rica. They then proceeded, with the help of the Supreme Court, to install the speaker of the legislature as head of the government.

There are two sides to this mess of course and both have some validity, but it’s upheaval no matter what. Keep an eye on the website of Honduras This Week . If you’re flying in and out of Roatan you’re probably fine. It hasn’t really gotten all that ugly elsewhere either, but you may want to wait until things work themselves out. After all, many of those Hondurans are descended from pirates . They don’t take well to rules and authority figures.

That’s one problem with The World’s Cheapest Destinations : they tend to be a bit less predictable than the developed countries with a longer history of stable government. As we’ve seen in Thailand lately and plenty of other cheap countries in the past, local political disruption can quickly turn into major travel disruption, even if safety isn’t an issue. Being willfully ignorant about celebrity gossip and political punditry is good; being willfully ignorant about what’s going on at your next destination is not so good.

One last note on this Honduras coup though: when’s the last time you heard Hugo Chavez and the U.S. Secretary of State agree on something ?