ToDo: Invent Brilliant Title

I’ve always known that I don’t like to get bored.  I always thought it was a tiny personality quirk.  A little bit of seasoning to the Ilana-cake.  Something easily ignored.   I’m beginning to realise that it is something a bit more fundamental. A bit more scary.

 

I fly home to Australia at the end of the month for my friend Mayo’s wedding.  I’ve done the trip so many times that I’m amazingly zen about the whole thing.  Really, travelling is the only time when I can wait patiently.  I’m mentally prepared, I have a dozen different things with me to keep myself amused, it might be 35+ hours door-to-door but it’s just routine.

 

Except now.  Except now because of those stupid terrorists and their stupid plot.  How the fuck am I supposed to last for 35 hours without something to read?  Without my Gameboy?  Without my sleeping pills and my eyemask and my noise-cancelling headphones?

 

The TSA better be over their little tantrum by the time I need to fly.  Because, I kid you not, I’m actually starting to panic.

 

I discussed it with my mother and she had these calming words to say:

A molasses flood killed 21 people in Boston in 1919.  I did a couple of tours while I was in Bean Town and learned all about the American Revolution and other interesting hysterical facts, but I find myself stuck on the molasses.

 

We had a big conference, which was fun, as we were the Belles of the Ball.  Everyone was talking about our product.  Also, we sponsored a big party.  When Bill and I walked in, we saw drag queens and glow sticks, and these are not harbingers of great success for an IT party.  In fact, they’re grounds for abject terror.  I’m not sure how exactly it ended up being a great night.  I’m prepared to credit the booze.

 

Photos to the side.

Last year, Tropical Storm Arlene, the first of the season, foiled my plans to go diving in Florida.

 

This year, Tropical Storm Alberto, the first of the season, rained itself all over Havana.  The damn things are hunting me.  As it turned out, the rain wasn’t terrible – we bitched about it for a couple of days, then it stopped and we bitched instead about the heat and thought fondly of the rain.

 

Cuba has a pretty fascinating history, with the Spanish-American(-Cuban) War, the fight for indepence, slavery and  that revolution thingy that Fidel and Che got up to.  That history has stomped itself all over Havana.  Prior to the Revolution, Havana must have been so rich and so beautiful.  The bones of that beauty remain.  The old part of the city is an amazing combination of grandeur and decay.

 

For some reason, Havana has a lot of museums.  There’s one for playing cards and one for firemen.  There’s even a Napoleon museum.  I’m not sure why.  My favourite was the Museum of the Revolution.  It’s in what was the Presential Palace, and touches on Cuban history since Columbus first showed up, but it concentrates on the more recent upheavals.  My sister, the interpretive ranger, would have gone insane over the museum’s signage.  It was very good at telling you what an object was ("Silvio Ramirez’s glove"), but didn’t bother to tell you why it was significant in the grand scheme of things.  Who was the owner?  Why did he matter?  Was he somehow involved with something to do with the Revolution?  Which bit of the Revolution was he involved with?  Did the Revolution even have bits?

 

The best part was all the stuff that they managed to blame on the CIA.  Now, I know that they got up to some hinky assasination plans, but apparently, they also deliberately introduced every crop disease that Cuba has ever encountered.  Mother Nature is a spook, I guess.

 

We hit all the major Havana sights, found an internet cafe in the Capitol building (well, it’s not like they’re using it for anything else), and ate a lot of ham and cheese sandwiches.  We took our photos with the statue of Hemingway in El Floridita – the bar where they invented the daiquiri.  Needless to say, we also had a daiquiri.

 

We ventured outside of Havana to Veradero, Cuba’s big resort town.  Mark described it as similiar to "all the shitty Spanish sea-side towns my parents took me to when I was a kid".  We were hoping to be able to do some diving in the Bay of Pigs, but missed that trip by a day and instead dived on a couple of wrecks just off Veradero.  The first was quite deep at 31 meters and was a cargo ship that had blown up in 2000.  It is forbidden to import GPS units into Cuba, but our dive boat certainly could have used it.  Instead, they dragged around one of their staff until he found the site.  Most of the superstructure was still there, so we could do some swim-throughs.  I saw a Nassau Grouper.

 

The second wreck was only at 10m and was a German ship that had sunk in 1943.  The most concerning part about that site was that they used to feed the moray eels, so when divers arrive, guess what else does?  They have many teeth and were way too close for comfort.

 

There are some photos over at the side.  Mark has the full set on his photo site.  I hope at some point he’ll also post the photos he took with his fancy-schmancy camera.

Usually, renewing a visa just takes a few hours, but they say it can take "up to three days" so we didn’t have firm plans up-front around what day we’d head to Cuba.  In this day and age, it’s more than a little weird to rock up to the airline desk at the airport and ask to buy a ticket for that day’s flight.  It’s also a little stupid, as it turns out, because sometimes they’re sold out and you have to come back the next day.

 

So the next day, we merrily board our Cubana Airlines flight to Havana.

 

Let me just say: when your plane is of clanky old Russian make, there’s some weird smoke drifting down the aisle, and your travel companion delights in mentioning that Cubana has the worst maintained fleet in the world –  for the first time in about 15 years, you read the safety card.

 

We arrived in Havana late in the day.  Driving from the airport, I got so excited to see my first old American car.  And then my first Che billboard.  I never really seem to believe in iconic images until I can’t avoid it.

 

We stayed in a Casa Particular (a private home – sort of like a bed and breakfast) in Habana Vieja (Old Havana). Old Havana really is old…and run-down and kinda a bit..well, it looks like a slum.  Being thrown out of a cab (the road was blocked by rubble) at dusk in a fairly interesting part of town is an interesting experience.   There’s a photo of the street below – our place was the blue one on the right.

 

But the place we stayed at ended up being great, and so did Havana.  Two nights later, we’re trotting down at pitch-black street at midnight and feeling perfectly safe.  Havana may look delapidated and abandoned, but it’s incredibly vibrant.

 

The Bahamas was comfortable and nice.  Arriving in Cuba underlined to me that I’m not the kind happy to sit on a beach.  Cuba is more like full-contact travelling – it smelled, it looked scary, it was hard to do most things, but it was also fascinating and absorbing and amazing.  I felt alive.

 

On the night of my thirtieth birthday, I sat in Plaza Vieja with Mark, looking out at the uniquely Cuban buildings, drinking Cuban beer and listening to a great Cuban band.

I turned 30 earlier this month.  Big milestone.  A bit scary.  Felt like I had to live up to it.

 

Mark had been travelling all around South America and we’d talked about meeting up around the day of the birth somewhere cool.  The somewhere cool we decided on was Cuba.

 

I needed to renew my visa, so that required a stop in a "gateway country’.  Weirdly, the US doesn’t have any Consulates in Havana, so we spent a couple of days in the Bahamas.

 

Our trip didn’t get off to the most auspicious of starts.  The ground staff at Houston Airport conspired against Mark, and he didn’t make our flight.  We actually stood on either side of a closed plane door and bitched on our phones at volume about Continental staff.  Hey Google, CONTINENTAL SUCKS.

 

I was actually a little nervous about hitting an unknown country on my own.  Visions of Port Moresby, I suppose.  But Nassau was all very friendly and cool.  Apart from, well, not exactly "losing" my bag – more "choosing not to put it and many of its friends on my flight because they ran out of room".  My bag ended up arriving only a few hours before Mark, and he had to overnight in Newark.

 

Bahamian delicacies include conch chowder (similar to minestrone with added rubber bands), rice and peas (just what it sounds like) and macaroni and cheese.  It’s scary to think that the Bahamas was actually the culinary highpoint of the trip.

 

The Bahamas is lovely; the water is blue, the sand is yellow, the drinks have rum.  I think it has an affect on everyone – for the first time I’ve ever encountered, the US Consulate and Customs staff weren’t complete assholes.

 

We went to the Pirate Museum ’cause, you know, the Bahamas were totally their stomping ground.  Very cool and piratey.  Also went to the Atlantis Resort and Casino, which, if possible, may even be larger than anything in Vegas.  Mammoth, but also with fish.  It had a rather large aquarium thingy.