About this trip and this website

In January and February of 2012 we cycled for 40 days in Cuba. It was our fifth trip to Cuba but the first in over 10 years. This website offers information, photos, and a journal about this 2012 trip. After our time in Cuba, we spent over a month in southern Mexico, and there's a short section about that as well.

We first visited Cuba in 1999 for only two weeks. We were motivated mainly by curiosity about the revolutionary state. The experience was so rewarding that we returned three more times, cycling all over the country. We wrote a cycling guide, Bicycling Cuba, that was published in 2002 by Countryman Press, a division of W.W. Norton. It is still available through Amazon. One thing that made this cycling trip in 2012 much easier than our previous trips is that we had a great cycling guidebook to follow -- our own!

Barb cycling in Cuba, 2001 (left) and 2012. We get older, but our bikes stay weird.
 

For us, Cuba exerts a powerful attraction, something about the combination of its revolutionary history, the idealism that drove its revolutions, the humor and warmth and incredible diversity of its people, the beauty of the landscape. This year it was time to go cycling in Cuba once again. We're not getting younger, and it was uncertain how much longer we'll be able to do challenging bicycle tours in tropical heat! And we missed wonderful people whom we'd met in Cuba years before. So off we went.

Afternoon in the street, Trinidad
 

We imagine this website will be of interest especially to folks who are themselves thinking (or only fantasizing) about a trip to Cuba. The Cuba Journal is a day-by-day account of our travels with lots of photos. It's meant, at least in part, as a scrapbook for our own enjoyment, but it contains quite a lot of information.

The section More about Cuba briefly updates a few of the topics from our original guidebook, Bicycling Cuba — money, accommodation, and legalities. It also contains a short essay about changes in Cuba and a couple of other brief items.

Throughout our time in Cuba, we stayed most often in casas particulares, private homes renting rooms to tourists. This is by far the best type of accommodation in Cuba, we believe. You can click to see a page of information on Favorite Casas Particulares.

Finally, the Mexico section has merely a few notes and fresh photos from this year's trip. We have other, more detailed pages on travel in Mexico here on wallyandbarbara.com.