Baracoa Cuba: The road that finally connected Baracoa to the rest of Cuba is called La Farola, and it does not let you arrive gently. It climbs out of Guantánamo, hairpins up into the Sierra del Purial, and for a while there’s nothing on…
Chiapas Mexico: Most people who fly to Mexico for the first time land in Cancún, spend a week somewhere with a pool and a view of the Caribbean, and go home convinced they’ve seen the country. They’ve seen a sliver of it — a…
Cuban Paladares: There’s a moment a lot of first-time visitors to Cuba have on about the second night. They’ve checked into a resort or a state hotel, they’ve been to the buffet twice, and they’re standing over a tray of pale rice, boiled vegetables…
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…
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….
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…
