What We Did on Our Spring Vacation (Extended Version)

OK, I'll warn you right now, I'm putting A LOT of words and pictures on here. So if you're not in the mood for a vacation slide show you might as well go peruse this monstrosity for a few hours instead. As a reward for your patience, should you choose to stick around, here's some pleasant Cuban music to enjoy while I take you on a magical journey...




Your magical journey host, dog-tired after finally arriving at the resort

Our first day in Cuba was actually just part of one night, as we got in quite late. We'd rushed around like crazy back in Halifax, trying to get everything done before we left and becoming generally stressed out. A guy who looked exactly like Paul Shaffer, including the sunglasses, drove the minibus to the airport blasting Guns 'n Roses, the words to which I was surprised to find out Ali knew. He also kept turning the volume up and down while he drove, for some reason, as if it was one of the many knobs he had to keep checking and adjusting. In fact, he was very frantic in general and we were convinced he was on speed.

Then the ladies at the airport who were in charge of giving us our tickets told us we were late and almost didn't make it, even though there was still a full hour before the flight left. Weird. We didn't get seats together, so Ali watched the back of my head as I read my whole Believer magazine and got a good start on Infinite Jest. I put a pretty decent sized dent in that one over the course of the week, and am now maybe a twentieth of the way through it. The seats were uncomfortable and the meal was a roast beef sandwich (who eats roast beef anymore?) but otherwise the flight was pretty bearable for being four hours long.

The air when we got off the plane was unimaginably hot, moist, and oxygenated. It had an interesting smell, too, that I never did figure out what it was. Kind of like some kind of smoky spice or perfume. Of course there was no air conditioning in the little airport and the luggage carousel was excruciatingly slow, but we were entertained by the drug-sniffing dog, who was really cute. He wasn't a German shepherd or anything, and wasn't even being led around. There was a guy in charge of him, but he was just left to wander around, happily sniffing everything. I have to say, he was very thorough too, even though he didn't seem to have any kind of system, which made me think about all the energy that can get expended trying to create systems that ensure thoroughness.

The bus to the resort included a bit of a tour from a friendly Cuban woman named Madeleine, who told us about places we could see, tipping, a donkey that drinks beer, and other useful tidbits. We found almost all the people we dealt with friendly and helpful. We couldn't really see much in the darkness outside the bus, but an hour later we arrived at the resort and checked in. It seemed like a really nice place, mostly open to the outside and brightly painted with lots of plants and birds chirping everywhere, and a breeze blowing through the trees. The room itself was spare but clean, with a huge bed and a couple of beers in the minibar/fridge. Unfortunately there was also a pretty unpleasant smell like wet cardboard or a dead rat coming from the ventillation, so we turned the air conditioning off.

We were starving from not eating the roast beef sandwiches, so we went down to the inside/outside dining area, where we'd heard there was some food left over out of which one could make sandwiches, even though it was very late. A couple of cheese buns and some really tough ends of citrus fruit later, we were ready to call it, which is when Ali took the above picture of me. A slightly older (than us) couple had sat down at the table beside us and the woman seemed itchy to chat. Unfortunately, our eyes were glazing over at this point, and all we could manage in the way of conversation was a vaguely neanderthal "Huh. Huh." We crashed hard at probably around 2 or 2:30 and I dreamed about rats trying to eat our food.

The next morning we woke up to this:

The view from our balcony

It still smelled great outside and the birds were making all sorts of cute noises, plus you could hear the ocean beyond the trees. Unfortunately, it still smelled like a pulp mill in the room and plus now it was boiling hot since we'd turned off the a/c. We had breakfast at the buffet, which was pretty good except for these bullet-shaped breaded things that I was assuming were some kind of home fry or tater tot but were actually stuffed with what looked and tasted like flour and water. We later found out they were supposedly chicken, so I didn't have to eat any more of them.

We spent a lot of the second day wandering around, checking the place out and getting the lay of the land.

The resort, seen from a third-story walkway

The pool, seen from behind the bushes because this is where most of the yahoos hung out

Ali taking some pictures which we haven't gotten developed yet

Ali taking some more pictures that aren't developed, on the beach

Being sufficiently impressed with the layout and free everything including incredible cappuccinos, we went to the beach in the afternoon for a swim and some tanning. The beach was just a short sidewalk from the main resort, and actually had some resort-related small buildings right on it. We were sensibly cautious with the tanning lotion, having heard plenty of horror stories about three-minute sunburns. But we didn't end up being on the beach long anyway, because hunger soon struck and we had to check out the snack bar which becomes the disco after 11:00 pm. Having nothing but leisure time is strangely tricky to schedule. It definitely took us a few days to get the hang of it. The food at the snack bar, unlike almost all the food we had at the resort, was not very good. I had a plate of grilled seafood, which turned out to be covered in this tomato sauce that tasted sort of like a wet rag. The shrimps all had the shells still on them, and even their heads. Eyeballs too. There were legs and feelers everywhere. We couldn't figure out a good way to get that crap off them without making a huge mess. It wasn't so bad for me because I only had three shrimps on my combo plate. Ali fared a little worse, having ordered the grilled shrimp.

Later on, we ran into the woman at whom we'd grunted the night before, whose name was Jane, we learned. She turned out to be in the room next to ours with her husband, Bill. Their room also turned out to have had a bad smell. I asked her if it was like wet cardboard and she replied that it was more like a dead rat. But she said she complained to someone about it and now it seemed all right. Miraculously, ours was fine after that too. I don't even want to know how they fixed the problem.

Dinner was again at the same buffet, where we ate almost all our meals. It's called "La Arcada," which, according to Ali's Spanish/English dictionary has a double meaning of arcade and also retching.

That night we checked out the crazy old piano player I already told you about. He smokes a big cigar while he plays, and has a list of 104 songs that he knows. They are all rendered in this maniacal style where every bar has to have some new and surprising trick thrown in. It's entertaining, but really you start to wonder after awhile if there's any shred of sanity in his musical head. We also saw the tres guitar quintet I also told you about. They sounded kind of like the music you may or may not still be listening to. We watched them with Jane and Bill, but left when they were replaced onstage by a loud obnoxious emcee announcing loud obnoxious high-school-style skits.

Next morning we took some bikes out and explored the area a little. It's very rural and very poor. The houses all look like falling apart shacks, but I guess they are nicer on the inside than on the outside. Most of the people we passed smiled and waved, which made me feel a little less like an obnoxious North American thinking he's at the zoo or something.

Ali's favourite shack

We ended up getting kind of lost, and there were vultures flying around everywhere. Especially around the train tracks where a dog was eating some unidentifiable carcass. We later noticed that these vultures were always around wherever you went, but at the time it seemed kind of ominous.




A road that we turned down, hoping to find a way back to the resort, ended up leading down a hill to a "marina," at which point it stopped. We had just passed a lot of trucks at the side of the road whose drivers had all looked curiously at us as we pretended to know where we were going, and we now had to immediately turn around and ride past them again, looking like we didn't care that it was now as obvious to us as it had already been to them that we didn't know where we were going. At the top of the hill, an older guy with a flattened nose stopped us and asked us in Spanish if we had any food or clothes we could give him. I handed him a convertible peso, which he took as inconspicuously as he could. I guess begging is illegal.

Back at the resort, we grabbed some lunch and headed to the beach for a swim to cool off. Masks and snorkels were available, so we tried that out only a little fearfully. What we'd thought was a big rock in the still pretty shallow water turned out to be a large school of human-hand-sized tropical fish. They were mostly these flat roundish grey ones and cute yellow-and-black-striped ones. It was kind of creepy seeing all that life going on right around us, but also pretty cool. They're very good at not letting you touch them, even when they're all around you. I wish I had some photos to put on here, because we took a few rolls over the week with this underwater camera Alison borrowed from work, but those pictures are not developed yet either. Just watch Finding Nemo and you'll get the picture.

That night, the big show had been recommended to us by the staff every time we brought up how great the band the night before had been. They all said, "Yeah, those guys are good, but tonight we'll have the full band." But the full band turned out to be a guy playing electric guitar through either a chorus pedal or some kind of hair metal distortion, alternately, a keyboardist with a full arsenal of equally horrific sounds, and an "American Idol"-type guy singing numbers like "What's Goin' On?" (the 4 Non Blondes song, not the Marvin Gaye one) and "O-Bla-Di, O-Bla-Da".

The next day was mostly taken up with tennis, ping pong, and more snorkelling/lolling around on the beach. We did go for a couple of walks. One was to the next resort down the beach, which was "four stars plus" to see whether they had any sunglasses at their gift shop. I had stupidly forgotten to bring mine. It seems like when I forget to pack something, it's usually the most important thing. I once went somewhere for two weeks with no socks or underwear. Anyway, sunglasses were inexplicably impossible to come by the entire time we were in Cuba. The other resort turned out to be much like ours, but with everything bumped up to the next level. The people staying there looked a little fancier too — fewer student-yahoos and more suburban success stories. Interesting that the class divide is not just between the tourists and the Cubans, but also intratouristical.

The other walk was along a trail that led off the beach, along the shore behind the trees that were between our balcony and the ocean. It was paved for quite awhile, and then turned into just a cut path through the forest. We were in sandals and so thought we might have to turn back, but the path was covered in naturally formed rock. It was really weird-looking — like concrete Swiss cheese. Sometimes you'd come across a pretty big hole and there would actually be a tree growing out of it, which gave the impression of a city sidewalk. I thought at first that it was volcanic in nature, but we figured out later that it was all fossilized coral that had been smoothed out somewhat by the water. You could tell because sometimes it would be broken open to reveal these mazelike patterns.

The five-piece band we'd liked so much two nights before played that night in the dining area, because it was "Noche Cubana". That meant that all the food they served was traditional Cuban fare, and the servers all wore traditional Cuban costumes. We enjoyed the band over one too many glasses of red wine while we ate. It felt like a special night.

The band and some guy eating his dinner

I went for a bike ride by myself early the next morning, as the sun coming up had woken me and it looked like there'd be some nice light for photos.

A bus brings some early arrivals from the airport

A field off the road protected by a cactus fence

The beach before the sun-worshippers invade it

At 9:00 we went on a bicycle tour with five other people, two of whom were Jane and Bill. Jane hadn't been on a bike in awhile and fell over onto the pavement before she even started moving. It looked really painful, but she said she was all right. In fact, when I asked her a couple of days later about it, she said she'd escaped unscathed. I said I was sure she would have gotten a bad bruise, and she said she might have one on her bum but hadn't checked yet, which I thought was a little weird.

A guy who looked like Chris Murphy with long curly black hair and a Spanish accent led us down the highway about two miles to a tiny subdivision of apartment buildings. He explained a lot about Cuban life along the way, and showed us the market where the local people spend their government pesos. These are the non-convertible ones that are worth about one twentieth of the convertible ones. This market is in fact the only place where they are worth anything, and you use them to buy your month's allotment of staples like rice and beans, provided by the government. All other transactions are in convertible pesos, which go for $1.30 CDN. Our guide, Anger (pronounced ahn-ZHER) makes 25 pesos a month working at the resort. He said that people who work at such places are considered lucky because they make more than a lot of people and get fed and make tips. His mother is a school teacher and only makes 15 pesos a month. The village of kind of gross-looking apartments, he told us, is for people who are exceptional at their jobs and have been doing them for a long time. As a reward for this, the government allows you the privilege of buying one of these apartments, but you are never allowed to sell it. So you are, in effect, forced to live there for the rest of your life.

The bike tour

The rest of that day was more wandering, ping pong, and snorkelling. We ate dinner that night in one of the "a la carte" restaurants, the Cuban one. The food was really good, but we found it kind of weird that this restaurant which was pretending to be fancier than it actually was was decorated to look like a gentrified version of the impoverished houses we'd seen lots of on our bike trip — the kind most of the people working in the restaurant probably worked in. After dinner we felt kind of romantic from the wine and being dressed up, so we went for a night-time stroll on the beach. On returning, we were stopped by a beach security guard so that he might give Alison a present of this leaf-origami grasshopper he'd made.



It was intricate and beautiful, and we thanked him very much and he smiled widely. Ali asked me if I thought he'd expected us to give him something and I said probably and she started to cry, which made me feel like kind of a jerk but which I also found really nice after all the thinking and talking we'd done all day about injustice and given the fact that it was so delicate and sweetly given and that we probably would have to leave it behind when we returned to Canada. I said he probably was just bored, thought he'd make something clever he knew how to make, and gave it to someone at random as an act of kindness, and if he happened to make some money out of it that would just be icing on the cake. That made Ali feel better.

The rest of our time there was pretty much more of the same. We did go for a disappointing trip to Guardalavaca one day, where we'd thought we'd do some sightseeing. It turned out not to be a town, but just another resort with a market outside it where people were selling the same crap they sold at our slightly better resort. We also went for another long bike ride on which we again weren't sure where we were going. But this time we ended up at the other end of the path behind the trees we'd walked along before. A ping pong match with Jane and Bill was threatened all week long but never materialized. An old Italian guy on the beach with an iPod wouldn't stop singing at the top of his voice. We caught two lizards "doing it".

The perpetrators — kind of hard to see, I admit

On our last day there, we flushed all our previous cautiousness down the toilet by lying out in the sun for a couple of hours without any sunscreen on. Stupid, I know. We thought that since we were pretty tanned already it wouldn't hurt us. I got the worse dosage and am still regretting it today. My entire front got a bad burn, and my shoulders even blistered. I'm peeling like crazy now, and I have to wear long sleeves everywhere because my arms look like a rotting corpse. The one positive aspect of that episode was that the cold Halifax air was kind of refreshing when we got off the plane.

Now we've been back for a week, the old routine is in full gear again, and we're getting ready to move into our new place over the month of June. I can't really say I like moving, but getting rid of a large percentage of our crap is fairly exciting. Tomorrow we ruthlessly go through the books and magazines. If anyone actually made it this far, sorry to be such a bore. Thanks for listening.

- Andrew