Gary Chandler grew up in a small ski town south of Lake Tahoe, California. He earned his bachelor's degree at UC Berkeley, and also studied abroad in Mexico City and Oaxaca. After graduation, Gary backpacked through much of Mexico and Central America, and later Southeast Asia, Europe, and the Caribbean. His first guidebook assignment was covering the highlands of Guatemala, which was followed by assignments in El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, and elsewhere. Gary has contributed to almost 30 guidebooks, many coauthored with wife and fellow travel writer/photographer Liza Prado. Between assignments, Gary earned a master's degree in journalism at Columbia University, worked as a news reporter and criminal investigator, and published numerous articles and blogs about travel in Latin America. He and Liza have two children and live in Colorado.Liza Prado was working as a corporate attorney in San Francisco when she took a leap of faith and decided to try travel writing and photography instead. Twelve years later, she has coauthored twenty-two guidebooks and written dozens of feature articles about destinations in the Americas. Her photographs have been published in several travel books, apps, and websites like Gogobot.com and Away.com. Since her first visit to the region in 2002, the Yucatan Peninsula has remained one of Liza's favourite places to travel. For this assignment, she went diving on coral reefs and snorkeled in cenotes, listened to howler monkeys and watched flamingos in flight, climbed Maya ruins and explored colonial cities, ate countless fish tacos and even learned to make a decent salbute. A graduate of Brown University and Stanford Law School, Liza has traveled extensively throughout the Americas and Europe. She currently lives in Denver, Colorado with her frequent coauthor Gary Chandler and their children, Eva and Leo.
