The 100 Best Affordable Vacations (71 page)

Lodgingwise, your most convenient choices for the Art Car weekend are downtown, where there are chain hotels and motels. Some may offer discount rates for event attendees, but you’ll need to book early.

HOW TO GET IN TOUCH

Orange Show Center for Visionary Art,
2402 Munger St., 713-926-6368,
www.orangeshow.org
.

Greater Houston Convention & Visitors Bureau,
800-446-8786,
www.visithoustontexas.com
.

Houston Art Dealers Association
(713-520-7767,
www.arthouston.com
)

Houston Arts Alliance
(713-527-9330,
www.houstonartsalliance.com
)

PaperCity
magazine
(
www.papercitymag.com
).

foster self-sufficiency for those in need

PERRYVILLE, ARKANSAS

These children don’t need a cup, they need a cow.

—
DAN WEST (1893–1971), FOUNDER OF HEIFER INTERNATIONAL, WHO LADLED RATIONS OF MILK TO CHILDREN DURING THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR

89 |
Imagine living in a refugee camp. You have no food and water. Your home is a makeshift shelter offering minimal protection from heat or rain. No one speaks your language. It’s an abstraction that’s hard to appreciate until you live that way yourself.

The innovative charity Heifer International helps visitors understand the reality of poverty with its immersive Global Gateway program, at the group’s 1,200-acre farm in Perryville, Arkansas, about 50 miles northwest of Little Rock. In one of its most popular programs, guests are randomly assigned to spend the night in a mock-up of a poor community modeled on homes in Guatemala, Thailand, Zambia, Tibet, Appalachia, an urban slum, or a refugee camp. There’s enough food for everyone, but resources are unevenly distributed. The slum might have rice, Appalachia could have wood for cooking fires, and Guatemala might be blessed with water. True to life, the refugees have nothing. It’s only by cooperating through barter or trade—or not—that participants can eat and sleep in relative comfort.

It’s one of the most unique learning opportunities offered by the charity, best known for its original approach to philanthropy. Instead of trying to fight global poverty by giving away money, it donates animals—sheep, goats, water buffalo, camels, rabbits, guinea pigs, llamas, and, yes, heifers—to villagers around the world. The livestock can provide a livelihood for the poor, giving them a chance to feed their family and eventually provide animals to others.

The one-night Global Gateway experience is usually only open to school groups, but on select dates it is open to individual guests for $43. Heifer International’s philosophy is that the world has enough food—grain, vegetables, fruit, and meat—to supply everyone with a full diet, which the village experience tries to make clear to participants. The charity doesn’t preach redistribution as a solution. The goal is self-sufficiency, so everyone can feed themselves.

$PLURGE

SEEING PHILANTHROPY AT WORK OVERSEAS

Heifer International’s overseas study tours immerse visitors in the culture and lives of project beneficiaries. Tour participants, for example, might see how a generator powered by manure helps farmers in China or join with families harvesting honey in Poland.

For travelers, it can be an emotional experience watching Peruvian villagers accept a donation of alpacas that will help sustain their family, or to see how the charity helps Kenyan children orphaned by AIDS. Travelers will stay in hotels most evenings, although there may be an overnight in a village. While the focus is on Heifer programs, there often is a chance for some sightseeing. Fees run from $1,000 to $4,000, but do not include airfare.
Heifer International,
www.heifer.org/studytours
.

But as guests see, that’s much easier said than done.

As participants learn, their fate is really a matter of luck. And once they’re assigned to a “village” they simply have to make the most of it. Some participants are shocked when others won’t cooperate with them. Sometimes those with water will demand others wash their dishes before they’ll share their supply. It might sound like
Lord of the Flies,
but the experience delivers a profound and lasting lesson.

“We try to put people a little bit out of their comfort zone,” says Michelle Dusek Izaguirre, the charity’s senior director of Learning Centers. “But if everyone works together and shares, there’s plenty of food, and normally a good meal out of the deal.” The shelters are based on actual villages where Heifer International works. Thus the Zambian home resembles the roundhouses found in that African country. The Guatemalan shelter, though, does make a few concessions for visitors—it and the accompanying pit toilet are handicapped accessible.

Participants make breakfast the next morning, which requires more bartering and cooperation between the village inhabitants. Later that day, after they’ve done their dishes and cleaned their village, the program participants gather for a debriefing. “We talk a lot about being global citizens,” says Izaguirre. “How everyone’s not the same and we all have different realities.”

Heifer offers two other programs that individuals can sign up for:

 
Farm Program.
This service and education program costs $335 for a five-night visit, including food and accommodations, and focuses on either beekeeping or animal health care. Program participants arrive on Sunday night and check into an air-conditioned lodge. On Monday, they begin their farm chores, such as feeding animals, changing hay, and harvesting produce from a garden. The program’s experiences build on each other throughout the week. Participants may milk goats one day, learn to make cheese another, and then use the cheese to make a pizza. These aren’t just make-work activities. Heifer International maintains the farms to train workers and to demonstrate how its international programs work.

 
Women’s Lambing Program.
This spring program open to women only is scheduled around the lambing season. It runs $275 for a weekend and $600 for a week. The women work farm chores and learn how the charity uses sheep to help families. Participants get an in-depth education about the animal’s life cycle and gestation process, and often get to witness the inspiring moment when a lamb takes its first wobbly steps.

HOW TO GET IN TOUCH

Heifer International,
1 World Ave., Little Rock, AR 72202, 800-422-0474,
www.heifer.org
. Minimum age and other requirements vary by program.

relax at a spa

IXTAPAN DE LA SAL, MEXICO

Healing is a matter of time, but it is sometimes also a matter of opportunity.

—
PRECEPTS, PART OF THE HIPPOCRATIC CORPUS, ATTRIBUTED TO HIPPOCRATES (CA 460 B.C.–375 B.C.)

90 |
Spa visits aren’t usually on the affordable vacations list. But women from Oregon to New Jersey have discovered the secret of
Hotel Spa Ixtapan,
set near the town of Ixtapan de la Sal in the Mexican mountains, where a four-night package, including exercise and yoga classes, lodging, all meals, and many spa treatments, costs less than a single day at an upscale urban spa. If you share a room with a friend or spouse, the package costs $770; if you go solo, the cost rises to $870. Longer stays and sports packages are also offered.

Some visitors come for the health benefits, some simply to relax. Most of the 33,000 American women who come here each year are 50-plus, says owner Roberto San Roman, whose grandfather first developed the resort in the 1940s. (Men are welcome, too.)

Many guests are repeaters, like Rosemary Owens of Dallas, who has been visiting since the mid-1990s with a crowd of fellow airline employees. “It’s lovely. It’s affordable. They have beautiful service and food,” she says. “You get a whole lot of bang for the buck. And the treatments are really good; each year they’ve improved.”

Treatments run the gamut of what you’d expect to find at a destination spa, including firming facials, reflexology, deep massage, loofah, mani- and pedicures, scalp massage, Thai massage, and aromatherapy. Some treatments are included in packages; others may require an extra fee. Some massages take place in the main hotel building; others are offered in the newer Holistic Spa, a serene space of high light ceilings and trickling pools.

Hotel Spa Ixtapan isn’t a luxury resort, but the open-air lobby, twin swimming pools, and spacious, cheery rooms (sans AC, but in the mountains, cool enough even in summer) are more than comfortable. A constant refrain of tweets sounds from the treetops sheltering the 13-acre park of fountains and lawns. The tennis club, golf course, and a children’s play area make the resort popular with Mexican families during holidays, though the campus is large enough that you’re not likely to be distracted.

The resort has two restaurants; one features healthy fare, the other offers international and Mexican dishes. If you take all your meals at the health-conscious restaurant, you’ll consume less than 1,000 calories a day. Breakfast illustrates the differences: In the healthy restaurant, you dine on fresh fruit, cereals, and fresh juices—including an unappealing looking cactus diuretic that actually tastes pretty good—and eggs cooked to order. Looking for croissants or butter? Head for the other restaurant—but say goodbye to your weight-watching intentions.

For visitors coming from the United States, the only drawback is distance from the airport at Mexico City, a two-hour drive away. The hotel will provide transportation in its own vehicles for $360 round-trip for up to four people—a hefty fee if you’re on your own, but reasonable if you are traveling with friends. Alternatively, you can fly into the nearby airport at Toluca.

MORE BLISS FOR THE BUCK

At $250 or more for a half day of spa treatments at most U.S. resorts, you have to wonder whether a visit is worth the money. But some places do offer great value. You just have to know how to find them.

Look for spa deal weeks and months, usually held in the low season at resorts where business tends to be seasonal. For instance, during Miami’s Spa Month each July (www.miamispamonth.com), dozens of spas offer treatments and packages for $99. Hundreds of spas in other cities—including New York, Chicago, and Seattle—participate in a national spa week (www.spaweek.com), held in April and sometimes again in the fall, when some treatments are priced at $50.