south

You’re probably already more familiar with this small town on the coast of Georgia than you think. Savannah, Georgia, has been featured in popular films like Forrest Gump and The Last Song, but there is much more to this vacation hot spot than just pretty scenery. Savannah has something for every type of traveler looking for a weekend away.

For the past century, southern writers have significantly shaped the literary world. Their writing has closely reflected the challenges of our nation, making their work essential American reads. Today, visiting many of their homes is as easy as driving through the neighboring states of Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. Mississippi is the ideal starting place for your southern literature road trip. Jackson, the heart of southern literary tradition, is home to Nobel Prize award-winners William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Alice Walker, Richard Wright, and Eudora Welty. Oxford, just outside of Jackson, is suspected to be the model for Faulkner’s fictional universe, Yoknapatawpha. In Oxford you can visit Faulkner’s mansion, Rowan Oak, that now doubles as a museum. A nearby home, known as The Sound and the Fury House, is the supposed setting for this critically-acclaimed work. Faulkner fans can also visit his nearby grave. Close by in Jackson, Mississippi, bibliophiles can visit the Eudora Welty Home and Garden. The home and museum contain the largest collection of Eudora Welty materials. Exhibits are hosted in honor of Welty, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Optimist’s Daughter.

Cateura, one of the poorest cities in Paraguay, is ruled by its enormous landfill. Nearly everyone who calls this small town home works at the landfill and lives in a shack made from corrugated metal and scrap wood that were found among the garbage. Over the years, ton after ton of solid waste flowed down from the capital city, Asunción, to the landfill here in Cateura. Because the people had no place to dispose of their own garbage, the trash piled high in the city and filled the lagoon, leaving the land and the water polluted and unsanitary.

The scaled head of a predator drifts through the water like the tip of an iceberg. He wanders closer toward the boat and blinks his beady, black eyes at the passengers. For a moment he lies motionless, and you could mistake him for a brown, misshapen rock. Yet when the tour guide throws a morsel of food toward the water, the alligator rapidly raises his monstrous body and snatches the food out of the air. Then the giant reptile smoothly sinks back down into the murky water and glides away, his tail shifting back and forth behind him like a snake.