Nearly twenty million international travelers fly into Cancún every year, and most of them see the same forty kilometers of it. The plane lands, a transfer van picks them up, and within an hour they are checked into a property on the Hotel Zone…
Ask someone in Havana when they last went to Camagüey, and there’s a fair chance the answer is “never.” It isn’t that they don’t know it. Camagüey is Cuba’s third-largest city, a provincial capital of more than 300,000 people sitting almost exactly in the…
Cuba reforms: On June 19, standing before the National Assembly, the Cuban government laid out a package it had been trailing for a week: 176 measures, grouped into 23 “strategic axes,” presented as the deepest reordering of the island’s economy since the Special Period…
There’s a particular sound you start to notice a few days into any trip across Cuba, and it has nothing to do with a concert ticket. It’s the scrape of a chair being dragged onto a sidewalk in the late afternoon. Somebody’s cousin shows…
Copper Canyon Mexico- Most people who land in Chihuahua have never said the word barranca out loud. They came for the train, or for a photo they saw once: a green gorge falling away beneath a glass-floored cable car, somebody’s arms thrown wide at…
The town that sugar built (and sugar abandoned) Trinidad Cuba: There is a particular hour in Trinidad, just after the sun clears the red-tiled rooftops, when the light hits the cobblestones and you understand why people keep calling this place a museum without walls….
A VP of sales told me last year that she’d stopped fighting her CFO about where to take the annual incentive trip. For three years running she’d built a case for somewhere “fresh” — Portugal one year, Thailand another — and every time the…
There’s a specific moment on the road from Havana to Viñales — about 180 kilometers west, somewhere past Pinar del Río — when the flat Cuban lowlands stop and the valley opens up below you. Most people pull over without planning to. The mogotes…
Most people who visit Oaxaca for the first time arrive with a list. A tlayuda from a market stall. Mole negro, slow-cooked and dark as charcoal. Mezcal from a producer nobody back home has heard of. The list is good — genuinely, it’s one…
Most people who visit Havana spend their entire trip in one square kilometer. They walk the Malecón at sunset, photograph a 1955 Chevrolet on Obispo Street, eat at a paladar someone recommended online, and leave thinking they’ve seen the city. They haven’t. Knowing Havana’s…
