Greetings from Vinales, Cuba! I’m sitting on the patio of the casa particular I’m staying in here smoking a cigar I bought from a campesino in his tobacco field. Rough life. From Cancun I caught a flight to Havana, only about 45 minutes away, and had the pleasure of seeing my mom waiting for me when I cleared immigration. I’ve got no advice about getting into Cuba – my mom and I are both dual citizens so we used our French passports here. The Cuban adventure started with 4 days in Havana and I have to say that I was initially disappointed. I had very high expectations for Cuba – it was one of the places I was most excited to visit, seemed so different, special. I had heard about Cubans’ famed friendliness and been told that it would be nothing but beautiful music and dancing. Over the past 2.5 weeks Cuba has really grown on me but it was a rough start. Havana is a big, bustling city, and the main industry, as in most places in Cuba, is tourism. Tourism is big in a lot of places, obviously, but the discrepancy in earning potential here is pretty astounding. Teachers make around $25 per month, doctors maybe $30-35. A room in a casa particular (private houses that rent rooms – basically the entire hospitality industry in Cuba aside from very expensive hotels and all inclusive resorts), on the other hand, usually goes for between $20-30 per night, and some houses have multiple rooms that are filled every night. Even accounting for the taxes and registration fees they have to pay and the upkeep on the houses, the difference is gigantic. Similarly taxi drivers, tour guides (which are often required to enter national parks), and others involved with tourists get a much bigger slice of the pie. This results in lots of solicitation on the street and fake friendliness, though being approached on the street isn’t that common or obnoxious here and people are generally ok taking no for an answer. Walking around the old city of Havana was fun and the old cars and older buildings are as advertised. The food, unfortunately, started out bad – aggressively bland and overpriced. We quickly decided to stop eating at touristy restaurants and instead started going to the little windows that people run out of their living rooms, where you can get a cheese omelette or a ham and cheese sandwich for 10 national pesos, about 40 cents. Which brings me to one of the most perplexing aspects of Cuban life – their are two currencies. One is the CUC, the convertible money, which is worth about the same as a US dollar. The other is the national peso – it’s 25 national pesos per CUC if you’re buying CUC, 24 if you’re selling. Some places only take one currency or the other, some both. I think that in days gone by there was a fairly substantial separation between the two currencies and access to CUC was relatively restricted, but now with things opening up more domestically pretty much anyone can get, convert, and use either. Which really just means it makes it a lot more confusing for nothing.

Mom and I had a good time walking around Havana, checking out the gigantic Christopher Columbus cemetery, with its enormous marble mausoleums, and hunting orange carts by following orange peels in the gutter. 4 days were enough for us though, and we were glad to get to our next destination, a small town called Cienfuegos after the revolutionary general. It was very different from Havana – small, intimate, and lacking the habit of trying to rip off tourists. People gave us the same prices as Cubans and we enjoyed just strolling around and doing… not much. Which is a lot of what you do in Cuba. Waiting in line, for example, is practically a national pastime – whether you want to buy bread, put credit on your phone, change money, buy internet access, or almost anything else, you have to wait in line. With so much practice Cubans have developed a system which took some getting used to but which works well (if you have a Cuban memory – more on that later). Rather than having to actually stand in a single file line for what can be hours, Cubans come up and ask for “el ultimo”, “who’s last?”. You then remember the person in front of you and, once someone else comes, the person behind you, and you can stand around however you want. Before you know the system it’s perplexing – you come up to an establishment and there’s just a big disordered group of people standing around here and there, outside, because people have to wait outside and only 2-4 people get let inside by the ubiquitous doorman at a time. So picking up on that was something of an experience, but it feels pretty normal now.

After Cienfuegos we went to Trinidad, which is a prime tourist attraction and a UNESCO world heritage site for its architecture. My mom and I agreed we thought that was a little weird because the architecture, while beautiful, was pretty much the same as all the other places we’d been in Cuba. Lots of beautiful colonial buildings, some in shocking states of disrepair, others beautifully restored. We took a day and hiked to the Caburni waterfall in the nearby national park with a delightful French Canadian father-daughter pair and I got to take a dip in the pool at the bottom of the falls, which was completely brown from the storms the day before. The weather here changes incredibly fast – it’s sunny, then it starts to mist, 5 minutes later it is absolutely pouring down rain, then 10 minutes later it clears, and then the cycle starts all over again. Winter is normally the dry season here in Cuba but El Nino turns that on its head, and people tell me it’s rained more this winter than it did in the rainy season before. So it goes… From Trinidad we hopped on a bus for 12 hours to get to Santiago de Cuba, the second biggest city in the country, way on the east side of the island. I loved Santiago de Cuba. It’s huge and bustling just like Havana, but where in Havana I felt like a lot of things were set up specifically around attracting tourists with the mythical image of Cuba, Santiago really just has its own thing going on. There’s a giant pedestrian boulevard lined with shops in the center of town, but instead of being full of tourists buying knick knacks it’s just Cubans going about their lives. I had a great time strolling through there, up to the Parque Cespedes, down along the water, and running over to the Vista Alegre neighborhood to see the beautiful colonial houses. Santiago is surrounded by national parks and we had hoped to get out and check them out but day trips are expensive ($40-50 just to get out and walk around the park) and my mom got sick and had to lay low, so we skipped it. Somewhere around Trinidad or Santiago the food also got a lot better – the ham sandwiches came with a squirt of sauce, the chicken had a bit of seasoning, things generally started to taste like something. Most of the food here is simple – roast chicken or pork, seafood if you’re feeling a little spendier, with a small pile of lettuce or vegetables, and rice, always rice. One very common preparation of rice is arroz moros – rice cooked with black beans, which a couple times hardly tasted like anything but other times it was delicious, really stewed and flavorful. We had a good laugh when we eventually saw the full name of the dish on a menu – moros y cristianos. Moors and christians: white rice with black beans.

My mom was only here for two weeks and Santiago is about 16 hours away from Havana (where she flew out of) by bus, which is the only viable mode of transport if you don’t figure out a domestic flight in advance. We decided to break the trip up into two legs so as to minimize the suffering and picked Ciego de Avila as our stopover since it’s just about halfway in between. Ciego turned out to be adorable – a tiny town with, just like every other Cuban city, a nice main square surrounded by big pretty buildings. We took the overnight bus and got in around 8:30, so after an hour spent looking for a place to stay that night we had the day to just cruise around, get some ice cream, and relax. The next day was another 6 hours on the bus, finding a house in Havana, and then saying goodbye the day after that. My mom headed to the airport in the morning, which gave me time to stroll through the beautiful ivy-covered Parque Almendares before catching my bus here. Vinales is another of the most touristy destinations in Cuba, famous for its beautiful limestone mountains and tobacco plantations. I’ve been having a great time here. On my first day I went and walked around the national park, which is really just a series of fields of tobacco, yucca, pineapple, etc… and a couple of impressive caves. A guide is required and I was lucky to get hooked up with Gabriel, a 26 year old former English teacher who later became a tour guide. Gabriel was the first Cuban around my age that I had any prolonged interaction with and the 5 hours we spent meandering around plantations, checking out caves, and getting a lesson/demonstration in cigar making were a bonding experience. After the tour he lent me his bike to check out the other attractions around Vinales, and we agreed to meet up later. I’ve spent the past couple of days doing mostly nothing (it poured all day yesterday), hanging out with Gabriel and his friends at the knick knack table he runs in the market or drinking rum at one of the bars in town (you bring your own bottle of rum and leave it under the table, just ask for a couple of cups, and hang out). Saturday night he took me to the palenque, a cave a little ways outside of town where they’ve set up a nightclub, and yesterday he invited me to a delicious dinner of rice, beans, fried fish, and chicken in some kind of awesome gravy at his parents’ house. Hopefully whenever I have a home again I can invite him and return the favor.

So, yeah. Initial impressions here were really underwhelming but the place has grown on me tremendously. I’ve gotten used to waiting in line, to not being able to plan ahead, to just hanging out and soaking in what I can. Life here really is tremendously different, with internet as a prime example. Open internet access has apparently only been available for less than a year, and the process is… involved. You have to go to an ETECSA (the national telecommuncations company) office and wait in line to buy cards with internet access credentials, $2 an hour. Then you have to find a WiFi network – either in a fancy hotel or, interestingly enough, in the central square of pretty much every single town. This gives you the delightful contradiction of walking around a town looking at crumbling colonial houses, gigantic 50s Chevies and tiny Soviet Ladas rolling by, getting to the cute little square in the center of town by the side of a nice church or an imposing government building, and seeing everyone sitting around talking on Skype. It’s really a bit of an upside down experience. There are a couple of other Cuban particularities I’ve noticed and enjoyed. One is the common practice of calling people, even strangers, “mi amor” or “mi vida” (“my love” or “my life”, respectively). I did a bit of a double take the first time someone called me that in response to my polite order of a cheese omelet and a guava juice, but hey, it’s nice. The other thing I’ve noticed is Cubans’ memory. The story above about waiting in line is one example – more than once I’ve forgotten, in the melee, who was behind me in line, but I’ve never seen a Cuban forget. More impressive, though, are the people who run counters slinging sandwiches, coffee, juice, and omelets. You’ll have fifteen people at the window, not in any kind of line, and when someone new comes up they just head to the front and ask for what they want. The delay between ordering and getting your food can be 5-10 minutes if there are a lot of omelets being made, but the person running the show correctly matches food to person, without fail, and in the right order too. I just have no idea how they do it since when I ask someone for directions I start to forget where I’m going after the second turn. That’s life with limited access to technology I guess, the brain atrophy is delayed.

Today is going to be my last one in Vinales before I head off to what’s supposed to be a beautiful little town in the mountains called Las Terrazas. I’ll be spending two nights there and then heading to Havana on the 4th to spend the night and head out on the 5th. From Cuba I start an odyssey, 48 hours long in total, to Ushuaia, Argentina, the southernmost city on the planet, via Cancun, Lima, and Buenos Aires. The flights are all fairly short but the layovers are murder, and I’ll be sleeping in airports two nights in a row. So it goes… I’m really excited about Ushuaia – I’ve got a cruise of the Beagle channel lined up to see all kinds of sea birds, sea lions, and penguins. After that I’ll be working my way north overland through Patagonia, hoping to eat lots of beef and look at beautiful mountains, maybe even climb some. My friend Andy is coming down from Seattle to meet me in Santiago de Chile the third week of March and after that I was thinking of settling down, in Santiago or somewhere else, for a month or three to work, volunteer, program, or some combination of all three. That’s all a bit hazy at this point so we’ll see what happens, but I surely know that I’m excited. Hopefully the switch from tropical to arctic doesn’t kill me… I’ll be back with another update within a week! I swear.

When I decided to start a blog for this trip I told myself it was a good chance to practice what I was preaching about setting my mind to something and following through. I didn’t want to update it twice and then never touch it again so I told myself that I was going to have to update it at least weekly, no matter what, even with just a little blurb or photo. So that’s gone well so far… That’ll be the plan from here on out though – this post and the next to catch up on Colombia/Mexico and Cuba, respectively, and then weekly after that. Definitely. For sure.

So, Colombia and Mexico. I spent the first month of the trip traveling with Liv, with whom I traveled in Europe for a month and a half after graduating from college, and who graciously agreed to be my girlfriend about halfway through our month together in spite of my being a dirty vagrant. She’s busy finishing her Master’s in New York until May so we’ll be dating via carrier pigeon until then and planning to meet up again soon after. We started out the trip in Bogota, visiting our friend Silvana. Bogota is gigantic and lies right up against a beautiful mountain range. Silvana and her family gave us a warm welcome and showed us lots of famous Colombian hospitality, I felt part of the family the entire time we were there and even got checked up on a few times after we left. We visited their family house in Girardot for some oppressively hot sun and mosquitoes, drove around town with Camilo, her dad, and got drinks and advice from her brother Alejandro and her mom Pilar. One special experience was going to Camilo’s house for a novena. The novena is a Colombian Christmas tradition where, for each of the 9 nights before Christmas, people get together with different groups of friends and family to pray (depending…), eat, and generally be together. It’s a beautiful, joyous atmosphere and the typical food, tamales and hot chocolate, suits me just fine also. As great as the novena was the most beautiful moment of our ten days in Bogota was probably a last minute invitation to Camilo and Angie’s wedding. Camilo and Angie are good friends of Silvana’s whom I met when I spent a week in Bogota in June of last year. Then, by pure coincidence, Silvana and Camilo were separately visiting New York on the same weekend that I went to visit Liv there, so we all met up for a great day of Shake Shack and biking around Central Park. Camilo and Angie were getting married while we were in Bogota in a small, intimate ceremony at the beautiful Laguna de Cisga (sp?). A couple of friends of theirs ended up not being able to make it so when Silvana talked with Camilo before the wedding he told her to bring us along. The ceremony was perfect – right on the edge of a beautiful lake, administered by a close friend of theirs, Camilo and Angie trading touching vows with Marla the dog whimpering with excitement on the side. The reception was lots of fun (maybe even just a bit too much fun for me on the whiskey front…) and I’m overjoyed to have Camilo and Angie as friends. Next time it’ll be our turn to host.

After Bogota Liv and I went off to Cartagena. It’s a beautiful city right on the coast, baking in the Carribean sun. The old city is the main attraction, and with good reason. All beautiful colonial architecture and delicious restaurants surrounded by colonial fortifications, it’s delightful to just walk around and look. Ceviche is one of the most popular dishes in Cartagena and it’s easy to see why – the seafood is fresh and delicious, and having it raw and cold is perfect when you’ve been baking in the sun all day. We took a day for a boat tour around the Rosario Islands and to Baru, where we got our first taste of beach relaxation. The boat was a bit questionable and with choppy water on the way back there were serious tailbone concerns but luckily we made it without incident. From Cartagena we headed east a few hours, through Baranquilla, to a little town called Palomino which has good surfing beaches (too bad I can’t get up on a surfboard) and lies right next to beautiful forested mountains. One day we climbed up into the mountains and got a snapshot of beautiful, untouched jungle before spending a couple of hours lazily tubing down the river; another we just walked along the beach to see a different river; and a third we spent in Tayrona National Park, which was a real highlight. Once you get to the entrance the park is only accessible on foot or horseback so we chose the 3 hours walking through different forest scenes, giving on white sand beaches with beautiful rock formations and azure blue water (I know, I’ve been spending too much time reading tourist information leaflets). The pictures don’t do the place justice – it’s tremendous.

Some quick food highlights from Colombia: Ajiaco is a famous dish around Bogota, a soup made with 3 different types of potatoes and to which you can add chicken, avocado, cream, and other things. Piquete was incredible – it’s basically a giant grill where you choose what combination of things you want: all types of meat, potatoes, yucca, plantains, etc… They put everything in a giant basket for you and then you just eat with your hands. Liv and I had it in the mountains next to Bogota with Silvana’s dad Camilo, and, man. The pork rinds, chicken, pork, plantains, just… everything. It’s a good thing I don’t actually live in Colombia because Liv and I agreed we could eat that twice a week and I don’t think my heart would last very long. The ceviche in Cartagena was delicious, and we also took as much advantage as we could of fresh fruit juice.

From Colombia we went to Mexico city to meet up with Sofia, Liv’s current roommate in NY. We stayed with her at her parents’ beautiful new apartment (they still had boxes to unpack but gave us a fabulous welcome) and got extremely lucky with our timing – we were there the first week of January while everyone was away on vacation so the city was almost empty and we got to tour all around easily. First, though, we went and spent two nights in Valle de Bravo, about an hour and a half away from Mexico city, to do New Year’s with Pati, Sofia’s older sister. Pati is a professional paraglider (!!) and also works at a camp keeping a veritable menagerie (trained raven, boa constrictor, tarantula, scorpion, baby crocodile, among many others…) to teach kids about interacting with nature. She’s a complete badass. Valle is awesome – it’s a small, friendly town surrounded by mountains (hence paragliding) and has a big lake right in the center. We got to go up the mountain and watch a couple hundred hang- and paragliders take off (hang gliding is the big triangular sail where you’re horizontal and hold onto a bar, paragliding is with a parachute. These people are incredible – their flights can last 3-4 hours, spinning in circles in thermals to gain altitude before cruising off to a different spot and starting again), had a delicious late lunch on a rooftop terrace with a view of the lake, and met Brownie before ringing in the new year partying at his mezcaleria with the whole flying crew. The next day we went and saw the animals before heading back to Mexico city to explore. I loved Mexico city. It’s got a beautiful old center modeled after Paris, great museums, parks, everything. And obviously the food is stellar. We had delicious birria and pozole (different soups), quesadillas, alhambres, huaraches (I think that’s the name? or maybe that means flip flops…?), and of course tacos. Burritos turn out to be an American thing and aren’t really to be found in Mexico, but we didn’t miss them. After a week in Mexico city we caught a flight to Oaxaca, famous for its food and crafts, neither of which disappointed. We went and visited a famous alebrije (carved wooden figures with unbelievably intricate hand painted designs) workshop and stopped in San Bartolo to check out the famous black pottery. We also caught a bus up the mountains for some stunning views and to visit Monte Alban, a site with impressive ancient ruins (look, sorry, I’m not really a history buff). Food highlights were the mole (took a little getting used to but it grew on me), having breakfast at the cute little bakery next door, and corn on a stick with mayonnaise, cheese, chili powder, and lime in the square. So good. From Oaxaca we hopped a flight to Merida, the capital of the state of Yucatan. We didn’t find a ton to do in Merida but it was small and had a friendly feel. From there we rented a car and drove east, in the direction of Tulum. Renting the car turned out to be a great decision, we were thrilled with the freedom it gave us to explore instead of always being handcuffed to a tour group. We went to Chichen Itza (cool but again, I’m no history buff) and then stopped off at several cenotes before spending a night in Valladolid, halfway to Tulum. The cenotes were one of my favorite parts of the whole trip. They’re cave/well/underground pool things that you can swim in which generally have crystal clear water and some of which are astonishingly deep, 300 feet or more. They’re all similar but different – some are caves with a tiny opening at the top, some are open to the air, some have tree roots growing 50 feet down into the water, some are deep, some are wide, etc… We ended up going to 6 or so over two days and it didn’t get old for a second. After Valladolid we arrived in Tulum, on the east coast. Tulum has its own set of ancient ruins which are striking because they’re right up against the ocean. We visited those and also took a day to drive a few hours down to Bacalar, right next to the border with Belize, to check out the 7 color lake. The name comes from the fact that the water ends up being 7 different shades of blue in different parts of the lake because of depth, what’s on the bottom, etc… In the shallow parts it’s crystal clear and the whole thing was beautiful, a great day trip. We also stopped by a protected area for spider monkeys and got to see a group of them chowing down right where we parked. On our last day in Tulum we forked over the money to take a boat tour of the Sian Kaan nature reserve. After 30 bumpy minutes in a van we hopped on 6 person boats and cruised through 3 giant lakes with mangroves, islands, tons of birds, and apparently crocodiles and manatees, which we unfortunately didn’t see because the storm the day before had clouded up the water. After crossing the lagoons we grabbed a snack before heading out on the ocean to look for sea turtles and dolphins. Unfortunately the turtles didn’t cooperate but we were lucky with the dolphins, finding two big pods, one of which even included a playful little baby dolphin! Dawwwwwww. We also got to snorkel a bit at a coral reef before getting lunch and then heading home.

That pretty much wrapped it up for Mexico. The next day we just drove up to Cancun and relaxed, and then jetted off on our separate ways the day after that. This whole part of the trip was special since I was traveling with Liv, for a second time even! We’re lucky to form a great traveling duo – we both like to get out into nature, eat everything, meet people, and try new things. We’re different but I think we complement each other nicely, and we certainly keep each other entertained. I’m really grateful that we got to spend this month traveling together and I’m excited that we’re going to stay together intercontinentally, regardless of the challenges. It was an awfully hard goodbye in the airport in Cancun but I’m also excited for the rest of the trip, cruising around by myself, going with the flow, and seeing where I end up. I’m less sure now that I want to travel as long as possible, since a year or more of separation would be hard, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. We’ve been bandying around the idea of just picking somewhere abroad and moving there together, since we both want to live abroad, so that might end up being a perfect solution. We’ll see what happens…

Next up I’m meeting my mom in Cuba!