¡Arrrrriba Mexico!

End of August, 2006

After the somewhat materially spartan surroundings of Cuba, it was nice to return to Mexico and the relatively comfy high-life of the Yucatan Peninsula. It comes as no surprise that this part of the world should be rich in creature comforts, as the area is the playground of American tourists on their annual 7-day vacation, or college students on a beach 'n' booze break. Unfortunately these facts push the price of everything up to inflated levels by Mexican standards, as those types of visitor tend to have lots of money and little time rather than the other way around.

The worst place for that kind of thing is Cancun, so after landing there I moved on straight away to Isla Mujeres, a small island not far off the coast. Isla Mujeres is still expensive and totally "Gringo", but is much more laid-back than many other places in the area. It has a very cool hostel which is right next to a great beach, where the crystal-clear Pacific was actually too warm to stay in for very long! Having grown up taking holidays at beaches around the UK, I never thought I'd hear myself say that.

The hostel was a very sociable place, and I enjoyed a few games of beach volleyball with an international crowd made up chiefly of ridiculously over-competitive Israelis blokes split across both teams. Imagine a John McEnroe style argument in Hebrew every time there was the slightest doubt as to whether the ball was in or out, while everyone else sat down and rested until they were quite done...

At the hostel I met Swiss Christian and Christina, and the next day we all set off southwards for Tulum further down the coast. Mr. Dasje had definitely made another friend in Christina, so he got lots of outings for photo opportunities over the time that we travelled with them. Tulum was a nice place to spend a few days. We took an overpriced beachfront chalet and spent a few days chilling, eating, drinking, diving and sitting on the beach.

The diving was different to everything I had done before, as we dived in cenotes rather than the ocean. Cenotes are underground systems of caves and caverns which are filled, usually floor to ceiling, with fresh water. So unlike ocean diving, there was usually no natural light (except for the occasional shaft from a vent), and we used torches. It was a great couple of dives; the underground volcanic terrain was pretty stunning.

Then Christian and Christine left Tulum on a tortuous bus journey going the long way to Guatemala. Apparently if you are Swiss you can't go the easy way through Belize, unless you have a very expensive visa. I wonder what the Swiss ever did to Belize.... Anyway, I visited the ruins on my own and was not particularly overwhelmed. They are nice enough, just on the global scale of things no great shakes, although they do go right down to a great beach! Maybe those Mayan town planners were up for a little surfing, who knows.

From Tulum I moved inland to a place with some proper Mayan ruins; Chichen Itza. Now they were more like it. I got to the area the night before in order to be at the site at 8 am, hopefully beating the tour bus crowds. It was worth the effort. I enjoyed a site virtually empty of other people for the first couple of hours, (other than the ubiquitous sellers of crafty souvenirs who apparently aren't supposed to be there, but most certainly are). The ruins are in various states of conservation or decay, but are all very impressive. Especially grand were the main pyramid and the big court where the Mayans played their "life or death" ball game, (the captain of the winning team would lose his head to attain the great honour of meeting the gods!). The only bummer was that you could no longer climb the main pyramid; I suppose they have to balance access with conservation. Also in the area, and right across the road from my hotel, was a deep cenote which was open to the sky and very popular with locals for swimming.

I then moved back to the coast, and visited the island of Cozumel where I did a couple of dives. The island has an excellent reputation and the dives were good; it was a shame the boat we dived off wasn't very comfortable, being nothing more than a little motor launch. That's not what you pay your US$70 for! Where were my snacks and the on-board toilet?!? The island of Cozumel itself is a little weird. It is one of the stops on the itinerary of some of the unfeasibly gargantuan cruise ships that sail the Caribbean, and the whole place seemed to revolve around them. They would dock in the morning, belch their load of loaded passengers onto the island to bumble around for a couple of hours, eating in over-priced waterfront restaurants and souvenir shopping, before being sucked back into the belly of the boat again. This meant that the rest of the time the island seemed strangely deserted, with way too many shops and restaurants for the number of people normally there.

It also meant that local expectations of the visitors were altered. For example, instead of the custom for restaurant tipping prevalent in the rest of Mexico (10% or spare change), in Cozumel waiting staff would expect the American custom of tipping, (15-20%), to prevail, and often this would just be added on to the bill. This was because the ship loads of visitors would tend to just blindly import their own culture rather than abide by local customs.

I left Cozumel and headed for Playa del Carmen, further back up the coast and on the way back towards Cancun, where I eventually had to catch my next flight. Several people had described "Playa" to me as kind of like Cancun, just not so bad. The town was clearly constructed around raking in the Gringo Dollar, but I did actually quite like it and had a few fun days there, getting a couple more dives in (from a much more professional boat!). There was another cool hostel there where I met Danish Helle, who had been getting some dives in too before returning to Copenhagen to her medical studies. Helle is a big fan of the BBC Big Band, which I suspect makes her unique amongst the under 40's...

So on my last day in Mexico, I boarded the bus in Playa del Carmen to head back up to the airport and on to Costa Rica. Yet another early morning bus departure had me snoozing in my seat when there was a huge bang, the windscreen shattered and the bus swerved violently to the left. When we had stopped safely at the side of the highway, it became apparent that a car had struck the bus on a front corner, and had then itself ended up off the road on the other side of the carriageway. It seems that the car was joining the highway when it hit the bus. The occupants were out and walking around, but were clearly in shock and the bus crew were over getting them to sit down and stay still, soon after which ambulances and police arrived. No one on the bus was hurt, and eventually another bus arrived and took us all on to the airport.

So my time in Mexico had been good, although I left very aware of the fact that in many ways the Yucatan peninsula is not typical of Mexico. Or perhaps the region is just a particular face of Mexico.... the face it likes to show its big neighbour to the north in holiday brochures!

¡Cuba, quiero bailar la salsa!

First few weeks of August, 2006

(Apologies for the slightly weird indenting on this entry. Blogger has gone haywire with it. I have no idea why, and I don't know how to put it right. But anyway, here goes...)

"You dance to the music like nobody does.
The first time I saw you, I knew it was love..."
(Cuba, The Gibson Brothers)

The fun started when I got to the airport in Cancun, and saw the aircraft on which Aviacion de Cubana proposed to fly myself and another hundred or so people from Mexico to Havana. It was an old Soviet Yakovlev YAK-42, and as soon as you boarded it was obvious that the aircraft had seen better days. However, I had only myself to blame. I had deliberately booked the flight with Cuba's national airline for the experience of flying with them, when there was a perfectly acceptable identical flight with Mexicana for only US$20 more.

Sure enough, as soon as we had boarded and settled in, we were informed of unspecified "problemas tecnicas" and had to get off again. The wait in the departure lounge stretched into hours, with little information forthcoming from the airline. A few of the more belligerent members of the passenger body regularly attempted to wring information out of the nonchalant airline employees, and passed any info on to other passengers. It was during this wait that I got to know Ana Paula and Ana Claudia, two Brazilian students of architecture who were going to Havana for a few days. Speaking Portuguese, the Anas were in a better position than I to understand any information that crept out in Spanish, so it was good to have them around!

Eventually we were all bused back to Cancun town centre, and put up in a hotel by the airline. Then, obscenely early the next morning, we were all bused back to the airport for a whole lot more of "hurry up and wait". The only problem at this point seemed to be that the airline couldn't provide a hot snack en route, but otherwise we could fly. A vote was taken, and the passenger body overwhelmingly decided to forgo their warm soggy sandwich in order to get off the ground.

The scene inside the aircraft was bizarre. The seating was unassigned, but the cabin crew made people move around in order to balance the weight in the aircraft as apparently the plane could not take off unless this balance was achieved. Then the normal rules regarding tray tables, seat belts, seats being upright and hand baggage being stowed for take-off and landing didn't seem to matter. There was hand luggage lying around everywhere during take-off, with people reclining in their seats for a snooze with no seat belt on! So either Aviacion de Cubana are a bunch of slackers, or the rest of the airline industry is applying unnecessary rules to us all every time we fly....

The best part, however, was the " rock 'n' roll dry-ice show" in the cabin during take off. Now it is normal to see a little water vapour enter the cabin along with the cold air from the air conditioning when a plane takes off in a humid location. However, when the captain announced that there would be "a little water vapour" entering the cabin during take off, and that it was "perfectly normal and would disappear soon after we were airborne", he did nothing to prepare passengers for what ensued. Clouds of chilled water vapour filled the entire cabin from floor level up to about half a metre off the floor, making it impossible to see below your knees for several minutes!

So eventually we arrived in Havana and I found myself a casa particular right across from the steps of La Universidad de Habana, where I was to take Spanish lessons. A casa particular is a private home that has been officially authorised to accept paying guests, with the owners passing on a large part of what they receive to the government in the form of a heavy tax. This keeps accommodation prices pretty high compared to the rest of Latin America, and this seemed to be the theme for most things in Cuba. Whether or not these high prices can be blamed in part on the American trade emargo is a matter for debate, but I am sure that it doesn't help. I have to say that it is quite odd to see that a small, poor, politically-introspective country like Cuba is still such a worry to their mighty Yankee neighbour. I wonder what moves Washington will try to make when Fidel pops his army boots...

Governmental control of retail is administered partly through the dual currency system. Cuba has both convertible pesos,(CUC), and local pesos or monedad nacional, (MN). Most working Cubans are paid in MN, although a few who deal with visitors have direct access to CUC. Visitors exchanging money will receive mostly CUC, but can also purchase MN. American dollars, only two years ago the hard currency used freely within Cuba, are no longer legal tender and I didn't touch one the entire time I was there.

Items are priced in one currency or the other, depending on what the item is and who the likely consumer is. Most things that a visitor is likely to buy are sold for CUC, things produced for consumption by locals are sold in MN. So as a visitor you mostly use CUCs, but you can also use MN for certain items, such as ice cream, pizza, sandwiches or fruit bought on the street. For example you can purchase the equivalent of a nice "Walls" type ice cream in a shop or restaurant, aimed at visitors, for about 2 pesos CUC which is roughly equivalent to US$2. Or, you could buy a locally-produced ice cream cone from a little hole-in-the-wall outlet aimed at locals for 1 peso MN, about equivalent to $0.04.

Anyway, I intended to spend a couple of weeks in Havana, getting to know the city and culture whilst taking Spanish lessons to add to the start I had made with the audio course on my ipod. But first I spent a couple of days hanging out with the Anas before they went back to Mexico, and one night found myself in Havana's Casa De La Musica, a big nightclub which also has live music. So there was whitey, not a sala/merengue/latin-moves-of-any-kind bone in his body, in a dance club with two Brazilian girls and surrounded by gyrating Cubans. It was very much a case of ¨Cuba, quiero bailer la salsa, (pero descraciamante no puedo...!)¨. Hey, I tried! It was a fun night though, despite my white-boy handicap.

When I started the course at the university, it was obvious to me that the course was not what I was looking for. The class contained about ten people, and consisted mostly of us writing passages and then reading them out in class. Since I really needed to work on my comprehension of spoken Spanish, I decided that one-on-one tuition would be better for me. Fortunately I had not yet paid for the course(!), and so was able to drop out and find a private tutor. At the university I had met German Lisa, and so started hanging out with her. She stayed on in the course, and what she subsequently told me about the classes confirmed for me that I had been right in leaving...

The private tutor I found was an interesting case. She was called Ania, and taught several foreign students in her home, most of whom also lodged with her. Lessons at her place, conducted entirely in Spanish, were always an interesting experience. Her family, her neighbours, and other students would constantly wander in and out, with Ania constantly nagging her husband, talking on the phone and making me rocket-fuel coffee. I guess I learned stuff, although I continually had to ask her to slow down when she spoke, (verbal comprehension has always been the most difficult part of learning a foreign language for me, written and spoken grammar is relatively easy). Ania was very excitable, and apparently found it hard to remember to comply with my request...

So with my Spanish slowly improving, I set about getting to know Havana. It is a fascinating pace, with beautiful crumbling architecture, more museums than you could shake a mojito mixer at, friendly genuine people, friendly ungenuine people, dirt, smells, unusual sights and music oozing out of every pore. I liked it a lot, and in the second week moved from the university area to a more central location to be closer to where things were happening. My new hosts were Señora Cary and her family, who were really lovely and very keen to converse with me to help my Spanish along. Of course it was very interesting to live with a Cuban family, and to see how daily life is for them.

I spent half a day at Havana's aquarium, looking at all sorts of sad aquatic specimens in even sadder circumstances. There were many marine creatures in enclosures clearly too small for them, and the place was not sufficiently supervised. At one point I had to use my rudimentary Spanish to stop some small children throwing big stones at the poor turtles, (meaning that I have officially become the kind of grumpy middle-aged man who would have stopped me throwing stones at the same turtles when I was that age). There were no aquarium staff or, it seemed, responsible parents to do the job. The place confirmed for me that I will always prefer to go to where the animals are to see them, rather than have them brought to me. The visit was lifted, however, by the dolphin show! Now whether we humans just think dolphins are always happy because they seem to smile, or in fact performing dolphins are happy because they keep getting fed fish for just larking about, I don't know. But they were excellent!

It was really easy to fall into conversation with strangers in the street. People would just come up and start talking, in Spanish or English, and be full of interest about where I was from, how long I had been there, etc. Sometime the encounter would end with them asking me for money for a drink or something, but usually it just ended with a handshake and the Cuban taking off about their business. You couldn't shut out one without shutting out the other, so I just accepted the whole thing. At one point when I was having lunch in a restaurant, two dodgy-looking muchachas joined me uninvited at my table and asked me to buy them coffee. I ended up doing that; it was easier than trying to fend off their hustle. They said that that they were nurses, but I suspect that they were members of the oldest profession. I made my excuses and left...

For Latin America, Cuba seems to be a very safe place if you are a tourist. The police presence is very marked, and they seem literally to be on every other street corner, 24 hours a day. This is great when you are walking home at night, especially as the feel of the area I was staying in would have set alarm bells ringing in any other country. However, it might be argued that the police presence is not so reassuring if you disagree with the Cuban government, and perhaps would like to indulge in a little political fly-posting or graffiti. The
only graffiti is pro-Fidel, and since I was there over his 80th birthday and during his illness, much of the graffiti seemed to reflect people's desire for him to live for a further 80 years.

Given the Cult Of Fidel that the regime has fostered, it will be interesting to see how the authorities deal with breaking the news of his eventual death and the period immediately following. I thought that I might be there to see that, but they tell us that he is still alive. The subject of Fidel's real condition is one thing that most Cubans are not too keen to discuss. When, during one class, I suggested to the normally garrulous Ania that Fidel might already be dead, she simply answered "Esta enfermo" and clearly didn't want to discuss the matter further. It can be risky to contradict the official line.

While staying in Señora Cary's casa I met Jade, a Kiwi who had taken the other guest room. She was also travelling in various places around the world for a year, but unlike me she was going south to north through the American continent. We spent a few days hanging out, visiting the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes and bars such as La Bodeguita del Medio where, (as they are keen to remind you), Hemmingway quaffed
mojitos. Consequently the mojitos there were expensive at 4 CUC, (about US$4), but they were very good. Jade was half Maori and so was very good at sticking her tongue out, haka-style...

So after a couple of weeks in the capital I took off for a few days in Trinidad, a very picturesque town on the other side of the island from Havana. Trinidad´s popularity as a tourist destination has led to an irritating level of street hawking of everything from restaurants to cigars, and the number of times I heard ¨psst, amigo¨ as I walked along really became irritating. However, Trinidad really came into it's own at night, with a huge outdoor dance in the square with live music and DJs, marred only by some pretty frequent power outages.

It was in Trinidad, whilst I was strolling around the rooftop of a museum in the town, that one of my molars shattered on a particularly tough Cuban mint. It didn't hurt, but it was going to require some professional attention. Whilst considering using the reputedly excellent Cuban health service, I found out that it is available to Cubans only, and that foreigners must go to private clinics. As I was going to be in Miami shortly anyway, I decided to use the US dental system as it was more of a known quantity...

So I left Cuba bound for Mexico again, this time incident-free on a very nice new plane that Aviacion de Cubana had apparently borrowed from some South American airline! I can't say that I was too upset about that fact....

Northwest Passage - Seattle & British Columbia

Last couple of weeks in July, 2006

So after six months travelling in Asia, I flew from Hong Kong to Vancouver. I was looking forward to visiting friends in Canada and the US, but also to having a little time in an English-speaking country with a familiar culture, and temperatures less than 30 degrees Celsius!

Vancouver is an attractive, manageable city with some nice tourist attractions, such as the markets on Granville Island which I visited very early in the morning the day after I arrived, (courtesy of an attack of insomnia). It was great to just get some freshly-baked sourdough bread and sit by the moored boats, watching the bay slowly come to life. The market also enabled me to indulge a craving that I had tried to ignore for the previous six months - my need for good European-style cheeses! Before I left, I never would have thought that something as mundane as fromage would leave such as big hole in my life by its absence but, (with the exception of that served up in sandwiches in Vientiane's wonderful Scandinavian Bakery), anything and everything that had rejoiced in the name of cheese throughout Asia had been, well, a bit "different". For example, any mention of cheese in Vietnam almost always meant a triangle of "La Vache Qui Rit" processed gunk. So a good block of provolone piquante it was, to go nicely with the sourdough loaf! Yum...

Later that day a Greyhound bus took me down across the border to see my friend Pete in Seattle. I have known Pete since my teen years growing up in Northampton, but he has lived in Seattle for about the last ten years or so. This was my first time visiting him there, (although my second time in the city as I had been there in the summer of 1990).

Much of my time in Seattle was spent just relaxing, and indulging in those pleasures that American culture always delivers on..... shopping and over-eating! I was taking advantage of the former to replace a lot of stuff that had become worn out on the first half of my trip, particularly clothes. So after some time spent wandering around the various retail outlets of the city, (including, of course, Urban Outfitters for their excellent t-shirts!), a big bag of tired old traveller clothes went to the Goodwill store. The above-mentioned over-eating went some way towards offsetting the 8 kg that I had lost travelling in Asia, and did start to make me concerned that my newly-acquired t-shirts might be a bit too snug by the time I left...

Pete and I did a couple of very cool touristy things. One was to go to the top of the Bank of America building, the tallest construction in Seattle, standing at 285m. The observation floor we visited isn't actually open to the public, but it houses the studios of a syndicated radio travel news service. The idea is that instead of going to the expense of using a helicopter, they can just look out of the window too see what the traffic is like! Pete does some work for them so we were able to hang out up there, taking in the views of the bay, the city and the mountains behind. It was a hot and sunny day, and the visibility was excellent.

The other touristy thing was that we went to the Experience Music Project Museum, which is next to the Seattle Space Needle. The museum, brainchild of Seattle-based Microsoft's Paul Allen, is a huge, highly-impressive, interactive complex focusing on modern music. It contains an amazing range of music-related paraphernalia, including a history of the guitar with a display of some remarkable old models and historically important instruments. The museum also has several little rehearsal studios that you could just walk into, pick up instruments and jam, so the place had more than enough to keep a couple of music musos amused for several hours! It also has a permanent exhibit highlighting the musical history the Northwest, and is rightly proud of local heritage figures such as Hendrix, The Wipers, The Kingsmen and, (of course), Nirvana et al. The fact that they also managed to portray in a positive light the region having spawned the likes of Heart and Queensrÿche, is a credit to the curators' enthusiasm...

After a few days in Seattle, another Greyhound then took me back across the border, up into Canada's beautiful British Columbia to the town of Whistler. There I stayed with Stacey, who I had travelled with in Thailand and Laos, and had since returned home.

Whistler earns its keep as one of Canada's premier ski resorts, but is still lively out-of-season as the mountains are beautiful whether or not they are covered in snow. The town itself is very pretty, and was constructed from scratch a couple of decades ago purely as a tourist destination. There is is something about that fact which gives the place a slightly surreal "Santa's Groto" feel; in fact, some residents refer to Whistler as "The Bubble", a hint that living there isn't quite like living in a "normal" town!

Whistler is very definitely a lovely place to spend some time. I took ski lifts to the top of Whistler Mountain, where there were still patches of snow, and walked a trail or two. The views of the valley and the surrounding mountains were just beautiful. Other days we spent time cycling around the area, borrowing Stacey's friends' dogs Misha and Ruby for long walks in the woods and to the Narin and Checkamous River waterfalls. There are lots of bears in that part of the world, and it was very important to me to see one during my visit. Much looking during the daytime brought no results, but one night we just happened across one. He was sat on his big fat bear ass, sorting through some trash near the bins he had retrieved it from, like an over-sized child ripping open presents on Christmas morning! I was delighted, but the locals are much more circumspect about meeting bears in the woods. When out for a walk once we met a family coming the other way who told us that they had just seen a bear cub, and Stacey almost had to drag me back the other way! Where there is a baby bear, a very protective mama bear is not far behind...

So after a wonderful few days in Whistler, I returned to Vancouver in order to catch a flight to Cancun and on to Cuba. A got in a bit of last-minute North American shopping to equip myself for Cuba, and left the comfort of Canada for the heat of Mexico.