A new airport just opened up a few months ago in Quito and so reliable transportation information on how to get to and from the airport is still scarce.  The old airport was located inside the city limits and taxi fares to most of the tourist areas were relatively cheap.  The new airport however is located 18 kilometers east of the city, through winding roads and high traffic areas.  Allow up to 2 hours (seriously) to get to the airport.

I'm currently in Quito, Ecuador.  I've spent the last two weeks exploring this city and wanted to share a few photos from my time here.  I'm staying in La Mariscal, which is a lively neighborhood filled with great restaurants and bars.  Upcoming posts will highlight some of my favorite restaurants and attractions in this city.  

I had a lot of fun shooting alongside Joel Duncan today.  Below are a few photos from the shoot with Tatiana.  The full album can also be seen here which includes some fun behind the scenes shots.

An executive from America was walking along the beach in a small coastal Mexican village, taking a much needed vacation.  It was his first in more than 10 years.  He noticed a small boat with just one fisherman pulling up to shore.  Inside the small boat were several large fish. The executive complimented the fisherman on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them.

International travel photographer Joel Duncan will be headlining the upcoming photo exhibition at the Hotel Charlee in Medellin, Colombia.   He has worked all over the world with recent assignments in India, Sri Lanka as well as Colombia.  I have had the privilege of collaborating with him on various projects throughout Central America and now here in Colombia.  

His work will be on display at the hotel from March until May.   I sat down with Joel for a quick interview on the eve of the big show.  Check out the video at the end of the post. 

In my previous post, The Best of Medellin, Colombia - Part 1, I shared some of the restaurants in Medellin that I enjoy.  Today I continue the list, revealing a few more of my favorites in beautiful Medellin.

Great cuisine oftentimes has the ability to bring you back to a certain time and place.  When I have excellent Spanish food, it transports me back to my days living in Barcelona when I was spoiled by the amazing tapas bars, the deceivingly potent sangria and the best seafood paella in the world.   Fortunately you won't need to fly all the way to Barcelona to sample the cuisine because there's a slice of Spain right in the middle of Poblado called Tapas 10.

If you're not paying close attention, you'll walk right past this tiny place like I did many times.  Although it's known as a tapas restaurant, I go there for one reason only...their seafood paella!  Not only is it delicious but very reasonably priced as well.  The paella lunch special pictured below only costs around $10,000 COP.  Wash it down with a glass of their house sangria.

After living for over a year in Medellin, I was often asked where my favorite places were in town.  Well, I have a pretty long list of recommendations so I've decided to break it up over several posts.  The first couple posts will cover my favorite restaurants.  After that I'll get into nightlife and some other fun categories.  For today's list I'll start off with the basic staples...burgers, ribs, pizza, wings, etc.

So without further adieu, here are some my favorite restaurants in Medellin.  Agree, disagree, or have anything to add? Let me know in the comments section!

This is by far my favorite burger in town.  They also have a great selection of beers as well.  The restaurant is located in Envigado so it's a bit of a hike from Poblado but well worth the effort.

Insider's Tip:  If you're looking for something sweet with your burger, they have superb milkshakes.  My favorite's the vanilla.

Barbocoa Burger & Beer
Address:  Carrera 44A #30 Sur 23 - Envigado
Price range:  10,000 - 20,000 COP

Pico Iyer wrote one of my favorite essays on travel.  In it he so eloquently explains what drives some of us to keep exploring.  The following is the full piece republished.

We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again—to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more. The beauty of this whole process was best described, perhaps, before people even took to frequent flying, by George Santayana in his lapidary essay, “The Philosophy of Travel.” We “need sometimes,” the Harvard philosopher wrote, “to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard, in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.”

After coming home from work each day, you probably clear out your mailbox, first throwing away all the annoying advertisements and junk mail, then flipping through the bills, and finally leaving a big pile on a table somewhere with the intentions of opening them as soon as you get some free time...which never comes.  

What if I told you for the last 2 years, I have not needed to throw away one piece of junk mail, have hardly handled any mail myself, and have not even had to go to a bank to deposit checks for that matter. 

How did I go about doing that you ask?  Keep reading and I will show you how to lead a virtually paperless existence using the services of Virtual Post Mail (VPM).