Mara Vorhees first visited Belize as a student of international development, when she traveled the country on a backpacker's budget, researching the outcomes of US-sponsored foreign aid projects. She tell in love with the reef, the rasta guys, and the rice and beans (although she was not so enamored of US development policy). The pen-wielding traveler has since taken to seeing and saving the world by other means.
Besides this book, she has worked on Costa Rica, and a slew of other titles for Lonely Planet. Her articles and photographs of Central America have appeared in the Boston Globe and the Miami Herald, among other national newspapers. Born and raised in New York City, Joshua Samuel Brown has lived in Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, Singapore, Canada, Belize and America. He is the author of Vignettes of Taiwan (2005) and co-author of ten travel guides for Lonely Planet.
His work has appeared in numerous publications, including the South China Morning Post, The Standard (Hong Kong), Beijing Scene, the Asia Literary Review, Destination Belize and Cat Fancy. He has also contributed four stories to Lonely Planet's The World's Best Street Food guide (2012), is a regular contributor to the Lonely Planet website and has maintained the high-traffic travel blog Snarky Tofu since 2006.
When not on the road for Lonely Planet, Joshua writes comedy sketches, short stories and screenplays.