Media attention is on New Orleans this week for the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and the deluge that followed the storm. I’ll be in the Crescent City for the anniversary, among a group of people working on a Habitat for Humanity house—just one of many that are still needed.

I was in New Orleans only a couple of weeks ago, and am thrilled to be going back so soon. There’s something about the city that grabbed me the first time I visited, and I’ve never been able to get that place out of my mind. The feeling has only gotten stronger since Katrina.

In December 2005, Doug and I went to New Orleans to help by spending much-needed tourist dollars. We waited until we knew we wouldn’t be a burden on the city and its limited services, and we were well aware that most places remained closed.

After we walked into our favorite bar and ordered a drink, someone at the round table behind us asked: “Hey, y’all FEMA?”

No, we weren’t, we explained. We just wanted to spend some tourist money and see how things were three months after Katrina and the Federal Flood.

“Then your drinks are on me and you need to come on over here and join us,” responded the man.

That was just the beginning of getting to know what has become our group of New Orleans friends. More than 15 visits later, we’ve shared many hours at the round table in that bar (and others), crawfish boils, barbecues, Mardi Gras parades, Jazz Fest weekends, birthdays and a wedding. It’s been more than two years since we’ve stayed in a hotel, even though I always loved the sweet B&B where we were regulars. Instead, we bunk with friends in the Marigny.

I thought I was pretty familiar with the city before meeting them. And even though one friend will protest that I know more about New Orleans than he does (as a longtime resident), I’ve learned enough to know that as much as I’m familiar with New Orleans culture, I’ll never really know the city until I live there. And that’s often a question posed by our group of friends: “How is it that you don’t live here yet?”

The day I do have a home in New Orleans, I know that making an invitation list for my housewarming party will be easy.

In Honduras, often the best choice for happy hour is rum or beer. That doesn’t pose a problem for me, since I like both perfectly well. But cerveza drinkers on Guanaja have a few options, so let’s review them:

Salva Vida. Perhaps one of the best-named beers, salva vida means “lifesaver” in Spanish, and if you don’t remember that, you’ll be reminded by the lifesaver image on the brown bottle’s label. It’s a perfectly fine lager, perhaps nothing to write home about, but it’s one of my two favorite beers I find on the island.

Imperial. Another lager, this beer with the eagle label is more available on the mainland (especially in Tegucigalpa) than on Guanaja. But when I find it on the island, I’ll often have one.

Port Royal. For fans of pilsner beers, this is your go-to on Guanaja. It’s named after a town on Roatán that was once the site of Engligh pirate camps. Port Royal and Salva Vida are the most popular cervezas to choose here.

Barena. Akin to Corona, it’s in a clear bottle with a palm tree label and has a light flavor. On the hottest days, this is my first choice.

When a beer is served in the bottle in bars and restaurants, it will have a small napkin wrapped around the neck. If you’re in the islands, use the napkin to wipe off the mouth of the bottle before you take your first drink. Since most bottled beverages come over from the mainland on boats, there will often be a rusty residue on the mouth of the bottle from the bottle cap.

At our friends’ house on Guanaja, there are a few koozies to keep the beers cold. My favorite one, and the one I grab every time, has this printed on its side: “I thought I wanted a career. Turns out I just wanted the paychecks.” I couldn’t have said it better myself.

The first time I visited Guanaja, I’d read a guidebook before my trip. Guanaja’s main town, Bonacca, is on a cay just a short distance from the main island. The guidebook reference to the town (also known as “the Cay”) as the “Venice of the Caribbean” conjured an image in my mind, and I was eager to see it during my island travels.

It turns out that the nickname referred only to the canals through Bonacca, and not much else. At the time of that first trip, while I enjoyed meeting islanders in local bars and grocery stores on the Cay, I quickly learned to avoid looking in those canals. The seawater sloshed around, thick with garbage—from plastic bottles to Styrofoam. It made me wonder if the person who coined the nickname had done so well before the canals were choked with trash, or if he had come up with it after a long drinking jag.

A few years ago, the canals were cleaned up. Now, I don’t mind getting a glimpse of the water as I walk over the bridges and walkways on the Cay. Sure, there’s the occasional plastic bottle, but nothing like it was before. I can actually see through the water now, rather than a swirling mass of trash.

Nowadays, traveling to the Cay is on my list of necessities. While I can shop for some groceries in Mangrove Bight or Savannah Bight, Bonacca has a more thorough selection. Also, it’s the best place on the island for hardware and building materials. The bank? That’s on the Cay too. Any municipal tasks, like getting permits or paying taxes, have to be done there as well.

That said, I often enjoy walking up and down the main thoroughfare on the Cay. It’s only a pedestrian walkway, and just 7 feet wide. From there, I can tell who’s around, as I pass hardware stores, grocery stores, bars, small restaurants, the bank, the basketball court, an internet café and the bottle depository. There are neither street signs nor addresses. If I’m looking for something, I’ll be given directions based on what it’s next to.

Recently, while I was shopping in Casa Sikaffy, one of Guanaja’s largest grocery stores (that’s smaller than your average 7-Eleven), the lights suddenly went out. First thought: power outage. Nope. The owner’s sister walked up to me and explained, “There’s a funeral, and the body just passed in the street outside, so we turned the lights out for respect.” Yes, the street she was referring to was Main Street, Bonacca. Things are front and center here. Good luck keeping secrets.

I’ve spent a lot of time on Caribbean beaches these past few months, and it’s pretty difficult to get tired of them. What’s not to like? Warm, turquoise water that’s easy to float in is pretty high on my list.

When I took a trip to Big Sur a couple of weeks ago, it reminded me why I love where I live in California. Some of the beaches are sandy and others are rocky. Sometimes, there aren’t even beaches—but huge, craggy cliffs that drop down to the Pacific. The water’s nowhere as warm as the Caribbean, but sometimes it gets some of the same hues. And not many Caribbean beaches get awesome waves to surf.

Sure, life in California can be speedy and hectic, but it doesn’t have to be, especially in these little coastal communities. When I focus on the natural beauty and not the daily grind and the tailgating cars, I love this place as much as the Caribbean. So I’m going to borrow one of the best things about my life on the island and apply it to my life here on the mainland—Caribbean time. It won’t warm the water, but hey, even my amazing powers have limits.

Even the shortest trip can teach us lessons about differences in culture, valuable things to have on hand, or even the best way to live your life once you return. One of the more interesting lessons I’ve learned during the past few years of traveling to Honduras is how some of the side effects of the drug trade are rather nuanced. For example, what happens when drug traffickers suspect authorities are on their trail and they dump their bricks of cocaine overboard? Is that the end for that particular shipment?

First, I have to say that I’ve never seen a brick of cocaine, except on TV, so there are limits to what I know. But apparently, the high-tech era has come to this industry as well. GPS devices are wrapped in some of the waterproof packing, and once the bricks are dumped overboard, the drug runners can find where they eventually end up—often washed on shore anywhere between Colombia and the United States.

Folks I know in the Bay Islands call the washed-up bricks of cocaine square grouper, and it’s understood that if you find any, you can bring the grouper to certain people in the community, who will then pay you a finder’s fee of sorts. This gets their product back, and it encourages locals to participate in a way: Rather than turn the drugs in to the authorities and possibly getting fingered as a participant, play it quiet and get a reward you can spend.

Certainly, there are bigger issues with the illegal drug trade, but the islanders’ views aren’t solidly black or white—an issue I covered in my article in World Hum this week: Square Grouper on the Cocaine Coast. And while we may all have views on whether drugs should be legalized or the current “War on Drugs” should continue, learning about this particular side effect has given me an insight I likely wouldn’t have gotten by staying at home.

Once I became a property owner in Honduras, my vacations there took a turn from 100 percent relaxation to an ever-changing mix of hammock time and getting dirt under my nails.

One of the most rewarding projects, however, had only a little to do with my property and more to do with the island habitat. In 1998, Hurricane Mitch stalled over Guanaja for three days, killing people, destroying homes and devastating some of the great red mangrove forests that serve as buffers from the sea. Some of the mangroves have recovered, but in other areas, dead roots and branches stick up from the shallow water like bleached bones.

On my first trip to Guanaja, I kayaked through extensive mangrove tunnels right in front of the beach where I am now building my island home. Mitch completely destroyed those tunnels.

Some island friends, like Ray Powery, have planted mangrove seedlings (called propagules) in areas that were once great mangrove forests. Ray estimates that he’s planted 100,000 such seedlings in the past year. On one of our recent trips, Doug and I planted more than 3,000 red mangrove pods along the northeast coast of the island—including the area in front of our property. When I returned months later, I could see that many of them were sprouting.

Planting the propagules from our kayaks were incredibly easy, and we’ll certainly keep doing it until the area returns to its pre-Mitch beauty. More than pretty landscaping, mangroves are essential to island ecosystems, a topic I discussed in an article I wrote for Tonic (“DIY Paradise Preservation”) about our planting project. Now, every time I return, I take photos of the progress of those little seedlings.

On my recent trip to the northern coast of the Dominican Republic, one of my favorite adventures was a jungle trek on horseback to the Salto El Limón. The 170-foot cascade is right in the middle of the Samaná Peninsula, and the horseback voyage winds through the jungle, across the Río Limón, along a ridge and down to a rest stop near the waterfall.

At the stop, some men sat playing dominoes. I don’t know if Caribbean games differ from other regions, but the loud slap that rings through the air when a participant plays his domino by slamming it down on the table is one of my favorite sound memories of Caribbean countries.

Most visitors make the trip on horseback from local paradas (translated as “stops,” but in this case, the word refers to horseback tour outfitters) located along the road that cuts across the peninsula. I stopped at Parada Basilio y Ramona, and after the trek, Ramona had made a tipico Dominican lunch: chicken rice, beans, salad, tostones (smashed, fried plantains), yucca and cold Presidente beer.

I’m not the horse-crazy kid I used to be, and the last time I rode anywhere on the back of a horse was more than 10 years ago (in Copán, Honduras). But this trip, along with the refreshing plunge into the pool at the bottom of the waterfall, is easily something I would do again.

I was in the Dominican Republic as a guest of the Dominican Republic Ministry of Tourism, but the opinions in this article are my own.

When I first visited Guanaja, 13 years ago, one of the things that stood out to me was the major method of transportation: boat. The only road on Guanaja—dirt and full of holes—went from one town to another (Mangrove Bight to Savannah Bight), leaving only trails or the water for the rest of the island.

While it was new to me at first, it didn’t take that long to adapt. Since you’re traveling in a boat most of the time, that means things are going to get wet. Groceries are bagged or boxed; suitcases that aren’t water-resistant get sheathed in trash bags; and there’s always a rain jacket stashed in case a passenger is shy about getting hit with saltwater spray. I usually just dress knowing that I may get splashed. If I need to be dry on the other end of my trip, I’ll bring a towel and/or a change of clothes.

But a couple of years ago, the dirt road was paved. Then, cars and scooters started showing up on Guanaja. Now, folks in Mangrove Bight save a lot of time and money by getting many necessities in Savannah Bight, rather than taking a boat all the way around the island to Bonacca—the cay that’s the municipal hub of the island. Similarly, Savannah Bight residents don’t have to make boat trips to Bonacca as often for groceries, because some are delivered directly to their town.

It still seems strange when scooters blaze past me while I’m walking on the road (no sidewalks), or when I look over my shoulder to see a truck right behind me, waiting for me to move. But eventually, it’ll be as old hat as traveling by sea. Besides, the road doesn’t go near my property, and I don’t imagine a road ever will, so I won’t be giving up the boat anytime soon.

World Cup games are winding down, with only four teams left. It’s always at this point in the World Cup when I become concerned about the lack of decent soccer footage on TV once the big competition is over. Sure, I could watch the occasional U.S. game, or the highlights of the European league, but I really crave Latin American fútbol.

As much as I wish that the Honduras team made it past the first round this year, I’m extremely proud that the team made it to the World Cup at all—for the first time in 28 years. And with three players from the same family on the team, Honduras has made a mark in World Cup history.

Away from the tiny TV screen, I’d certainly love to attend a match in a huge stadium with blaring vuvuzelas. But island-style soccer on Guanaja is significantly more laid-back.

The Mangrove Bight team plays on the soccer field in Mitch, a town that got its start after Hurricane Mitch in 1998, when many people rebuilt after losing their homes. There’s no fancy seating, or vendors to bring you food and drink. On the other hand, nobody frisks you and takes away the snacks and beverages you bring. So, there’s that.

Our local team doesn’t have shiny matching uniforms like some others do. See the bright yellow outfits in the photo? That’s the visiting team.

Ultimately, the distractions of pretty jerseys and grand stadiums don’t really matter. What does matter is the game and the fun for both players and spectators. Old-school soccer suits Guanaja. And if some day, one person shows up with a vuvuzela, I won’t mind at all.

Gorgeous turquoise water, soft sand, high-rise hotels, kiteboarding and umbrella drinks. Yes, Aruba’s got it all. But the “one happy island” also has a wild side, and even though I like my lounging time, I tend to prefer the wild side of things.

On my recent trip to Aruba, I went on the Natural Pool Jeep Adventure with De Palm Tours. It’s a good thing, too, because I spied plenty of people with rental cars trying to drive the rugged route along the northeast side of the island. Let’s just say they were a tad frustrated. On my Jeep tour, which was in a Land Rover, we stopped at the California Lighthouse, the ruins of a gold mill and along the road to stack rocks—the tourist’s idea of wishing stones. No, I won’t tell you what I wished for.

We also stopped to swim and snorkel in a natural pool at the edge of the island. The craggy rocks encircled the pool full of reef fish, and the occasional crash of a large wave made the otherwise calm pool fill with fizzy water. This sweet spot isn’t unknown to tourists. If you find the pool full of splashing people, it’s just not the same thing as getting it to yourself. It’s worth it to hang out until you get some quiet time.

While the splashing coast, stacked rocks and dusty terrain made for great memories, one of my favorite scenes was a small, colorful beer stand outside the gold mill ruins. Just a painted trailer and the pretty Aruban flag—as simple and refreshing as that part of the island.

I was in Aruba as a guest of the Aruba Marriott Resort & Stellaris Casino, but the opinions in this article are my own.