Zapata Swamp Cuba: The first time most people see a zunzuncito, they don’t see a bird. They see an insect that’s behaving strangely — hanging in the air beside a flower, too fast to focus on, gone before anyone can point at it. Then…
Great Pyramid of Cholula: Stand in the middle of Cholula, in the Mexican state of Puebla, and look east. There’s a hill. Grass, scrubby trees, a path winding up the side, and at the top a small yellow church with two white towers, the…
Sometime in late October, monarch butterflies that hatched in a field in Ontario or Michigan start flying south. It weighs about half a gram. It has never been more than a few kilometers from where it was born. Somewhere around the second week of…
There’s a sound in Santiago de Cuba that doesn’t exist anywhere else, and once a year the whole city is built around it. It comes from a Chinese cornet — a thin, nasal, almost painful horn that cuts over a wall of drums, brake…
La Paz Mexico Sea of Cortez: Most people fly into Los Cabos, get in a taxi, and never look north. The airport spits you out toward the resort strip — the pools, the swim-up bars, the golf, the tequila glasses the size of a…
The first thing you notice in Cienfuegos, Cuba is the straight lines. You come in off the road expecting the usual tangle of a Cuban town — narrow lanes, colonial walls leaning on each other, a plaza that grew where the streets happened to…
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…
