Whatever your passion, Central America is jam-packed with possibilities. Written by experts who travel on your budget, this guide lets you go further, stay longer, and pay less for the adventure of a lifetime. The countries covered in this guide are: Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Belize, and also part of Mexico—Quintana Roo, the Yucatan, and Chiapas states.Explore It All—in-depth coverage of all seven Central American nations, plus Mexico's Yucatan and Chiapas.Find Your Way—120 user-friendly maps plus detailed bus schedules and crucial border-crossing information.Rest Easy—lodging and restaurants that offer bang for your buck...plus the occasional splurge.Talk The Talk—comprehensive Language, Culture and Conduct sections keep you street-smart and clued-in. Who We Are At Lonely Planet, we see our job as inspiring and enabling travelers to connect with the world for their own benefit and for the benefit of the world at large. What We Do We offer travelers the world's richest travel advice, informed by the collective wisdom of over 350 Lonely Planet authors living in 37 countries and fluent in 70 languages. We are relentless in finding the special, the unique and the different for travellers wherever they are.When we update our guidebooks, we check every listing, in person, every time. We always offer the trusted filter for those who are curious, open minded and independent. We challenge our growing community of travelers; leading debate anddiscussion about travel and the world. We tell it like it is without fear or favor in service of the travelers; not clouded by any other motive. What We Believe We believe that travel leads to a deeper cultural understanding and compassion and therefore a better world.

    Most had never left home, never experienced a different culture. None had any guarantee of success. That they achieved so much for themselves and their country profoundly altered American history. As David McCullough writes, "Not all pioneers went west." Elizabeth Blackwell, the first female doctor in America, was one of this intrepid band. Another was Charles Sumner, who enrolled at the Sorbonne because of a burning desire to know more about everything. There he saw black students with the same ambition he had, and when he returned home, he would become the most powerful, unyielding voice for abolition in the U.S. Senate, almost at the cost of his life. Two staunch friends, James Fenimore Cooper and Samuel F. B. Morse, worked unrelentingly every day in Paris, Cooper writing and Morse painting what would be his masterpiece. From something he saw in France, Morse would also bring home his momentous idea for the telegraph. Pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk from New Orleans launched his spectacular career performing in Paris at age 15. George P. A. Healy, who had almost no money and little education, took the gamble of a lifetime and with no prospects whatsoever in Paris became one of the most celebrated portrait painters of the day. His subjects included Abraham Lincoln. Medical student Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote home of his toil and the exhilaration in "being at the center of things" in what was then the medical capital of the world. From all they learned in Paris, Holmes and his fellow "medicals" were to exert lasting influence on the profession of medicine in the United States. Writers Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, and Henry James were all "discovering" Paris, marveling at the treasures in the Louvre, or out with the Sunday throngs strolling the city's boulevards and gardens. "At last I have come into a dreamland," wrote Harriet Beecher Stowe, seeking escape from the notoriety Uncle Tom's Cabin had brought her. Almost forgotten today, the heroic American ambassador Elihu Washburne bravely remained at his post through the Franco-Prussian War, the long Siege of Paris and even more atrocious nightmare of the Commune. His vivid account in his diary of the starvation and suffering endured by the people of Paris (drawn on here for the first time) is one readers will never forget. The genius of sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the son of an immigrant shoemaker, and of painters Mary Cassatt and John Singer Sargent, three of the greatest American artists ever, would flourish in Paris, inspired by the examples of brilliant French masters, and by Paris itself. Nearly all of these Americans, whatever their troubles learning French, their spells of homesickness, and their suffering in the raw cold winters by the Seine, spent many of the happiest days and nights of their lives in Paris. McCullough tells this sweeping, fascinating story with power and intimacy, bringing us into the lives of remarkable men and women who, in Saint-Gaudens's phrase, longed "to soar into the blue." The Greater Journey is itself a masterpiece.

    Johnny Wray's gripping and often hilarious account of his adventures around the South Pacific has inspired readers and changed lives since its first publication 75 years ago. Fired from his day job during the Great Depression, Johnny begged, borrowed and stole the materials to build his famous yacht Ngataki. With some mates for company and a sextant to steer by, he set sail for the palm-fringed atolls and islands of his dreams - to discover they really did exist. But South Sea Vagabonds is much more than just a ripping yarn; it is a heartfelt hymn to the possibility of living a free life and truly being the master of one's own destiny.

    From its late-Victorian flowering in the mill towns of the northwest of England, football spread around the world with great speed. It was helped on its way by a series of missionaries who showed the rest of the planet the simple joys of the game. Even now, in many countries, the colloquial word for a football manager is not 'coach' or 'boss' but 'mister', as that is how the early teachers were known, because they had come from the home of the sport to help it develop in new territories.       In Rory Smith's stunning new book Mister, he looks at the stories of these pioneers of the game, men who left this country to take football across the globe. Sometimes, they had been spurned in their own land, as coaching was often frowned upon in England in those days, when players were starved of the ball during the week to make them hungry for it on matchday. So it was that the inspirations behind the 'Mighty Magyars' of the 1950s, the Dutch of the 1970s or top clubs such as Barcelona came from these shores.       England, without realising it, fired the very revolution that would remove its crown, changing football's history, thanks to a handful of men who sowed the seeds of the inversion of football's natural order. This is the story of the men who taught the world to play and shaped its destiny. This is the story of the Misters.

    This riveting book offers 20 harrowing, real-life tales of sea kayaking accidents that will not only keep readers on the edge of their seats, but also instruct them with potentially life-saving lessons.

    The Weary Blues announced the arrival of a rare voice in American poetry. A literary descendant of Walt Whitman ("I, too, sing America," Hughes wrote), he chanted the joys and sorrows of black America in unprecedented language. A gifted lyricist, he offered rhythms and cadences that epitomized the particularities of African American creativity, especially jazz and the blues. His second volume, steeped in the blues and controversial because of its frankness, confirmed Hughes as a poet of uncompromising integrity. Then in the 1930s came Dear Lovely Death (1931) and the radical A New Song (1938). Poems such as "Good Morning Revolution" and "Let America Be America Again" made his pen one of the most forceful in America during the Great Depression.

    But when he had a son, Marc became the father he had always wanted to have. When seven-year-old Cole asked him about beer, Marc Pittman put down his can and never drank again. He told his boys everything, and they were honest with him in return. They unburdened their fears; told him their dreams; and even admitted their sins. Despite the fact that his sons were star football players, they felt no shame in holding their father's hand in public. People told him he was lucky to have the relationship he did with his children, but Marc Pittman knew the truth-it wasn't luck, he worked at it every day. And then his eldest son, Cole, was killed in a traffic accident on the way to football practice at the University of Texas. This book is the story not just of how Marc Pittman dealt with this tragedy, but of the 21 years he lived with Cole and the lessons he learned about being a good father, a good friend, and a good man. "A must read...Marc Pittman crosses the boundary and stigma of the tough guy and shows that while being very tough, you can also be very compassionate. This book will make you appreciate not every hour, but every second you spend with someone you love."

    In Naked Airport, critic Alastair Gordon ranges from global geopolitics to action movies to the daily commute, showing how airports have changed our sense of time, distance, style, and even the way cities are built and business is done. Gordon introduces the people who shaped this place of sudden transition: pilots like Charles Lindberg, architects like Eero Saarinen, politicians like Fiorello La Guardia, and Hitler, who built Berlin’s Tempelhof as a showcase for Fascist power. He describes the airport’s futuristic contributions, such as credit cards, in the form of fly-now-pay-later schemes, and he charts its shift in popular perception, from glamorous to infuriating. Finally, he analyzes the airport’s function in war and peace—its gatekeeper role controlling immigration, its appeal to revolutionaries since the hijackings of the 1960s, and its new frontline position in the struggle against terror.Compelling and accessible, Naked Airport is an original history of a long-neglected yet central creation of modern reality and imagination.

    They have become renowned for their visual excellence, which includes unparalleled photography, 3-D mapping, and specially commissioned cutaway illustrations. DK "Eyewitness Travel Guides" are the only guides that work equally well for inspiration, as a planning tool, a practical resource while traveling, and a keepsake following any trip. Each guide is packed with the up-to-date, reliable destination information every traveler needs, including extensive hotel and restaurant listings, themed itineraries, lush photography, and numerous maps.

    Get paid to travel and write about it.Only no one told Jules that it would mean eating oily seabirds, repeatedly falling off a husky sled, getting stranded on a Mediterranean island, and crash-landing in Iran.The exotic destinations come thick and fast – Hong Kong, Hawaii, Huddersfield – as Jules navigates what it means to be a travel writer in a world with endless surprises up its sleeve.Add in a cast of larger-than-life characters – Elvis, Captain Cook, his own travel-mad Dad – and an eye for the ridiculous, and this journey with Jules is one you won’t want to miss.

    Perelman's companion is cartoonist Al Hirschfield, whose drawings capture the very essence of Perelmania.

    They give an incomparable view of French life before World War II.

    In “Plays With Cars,” the former Porsche manager covers some of his most ridiculous decisions, like buying an old Land Rover sight unseen, taking a Mercedes AMG station wagon to a rural Georgia dragstrip, and roadtripping across the United States in a Lotus Elise without air conditioning. He’s also reviewed his former cars, which range from a Mercedes G-wagen to a Nissan Cube. Most importantly, he wrote this entire description himself in the third person.

    In a prison camp, British POWs are forced into labor. The bridge they build will become a symbol of service and survival to one prisoner, Colonel Nicholson, a proud perfectionist. Pitted against the warden, Colonel Saito, Nicholson will nevertheless, out of a distorted sense of duty, aid his enemy. While on the outside, as the Allies race to destroy the bridge, Nicholson must decide which will be the first casualty: his patriotism or his pride.

    Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.