Warning: given that this is a website about gardening, I feel it is my responsibility to provide a trigger warning. This story started out simply but took a hard turn once I started to let go of the blocks around honestly expressing some of the brutal things I witnessed on this trip: mainly sex tourism.

Since the cold weather started I have been plaintively reliving various past trips through old photos. Every few days I find myself fantasizing about going back to Oaxaca, Mexico, the Mojave desert, Joshua Tree, and now Cuba. Wanderlust is kicking in hard. My camera wants to go on a trip, preferably somewhere warm.

This morning I fell down another old trip worm hole remembering our 2008 and 2009 trips to Cuba. After the second time I emphatically stated that we would go back when we were able to do a driving trip that could take us over a longer distance. But now that winter has set in hard and I have looked back at the photos, I just want to go back, period.

Nostalgia has a funny way of blurring the difficult parts of an experience, and in a twisted way I find that I may even be longing to go back to the same place and to relive the same trip. Of course, it doesn’t work that way. We may go off on trips seeking an escape from work, day-to-day routine, and the cold, but no trip I have ever taken has been that simple. Some of this is due to the fact that I am incapable of laying out on a beach without a care in the world. Five minutes of that and I’m ready to go. I did not bleed the limited resources at my disposal to lay around. I can do that at home on the couch. For free. I often travel to poorer destinations because frankly, that’s what I can afford. There’s a kind of exploitation built into this sort of travel that I’m not comfortable with. As a result, my attitude is that the least I can do is keep my eyes open and take in as much as I can and then do something with it, regardless of how painful it may be, no matter how much discomfort comes my way as a result. I’m still trying to work my head around all of this. What price do other people pay for my wanderlust? I try to keep my footprint small and my intentions good, but someone always pays.

I travelled to Cuba the second time just as Polaroid was going under. I took with me boxes of SX-70 film. As we travelled, I asked people if I could take their photo with the SX-70 and then took a digital photo of them holding the photo before handing them the photo to keep. I’m painfully shy at times and this provided me a way to meet people and talk to them as best I could in my terrible Spanish. In many cases people were so excited about the photo that they ran off to show people before I could record the image! In this particular case we had gone on a hotel-organized scooter trip to a nearby farm. I asked this little boy if I could take his photo with his goat. I then took this specific image with a second camera. He was very shy, but lit up when I gave him the photo to keep.

To be fair, I also travel to get out of my comfort zone and see something different. Travel may offer an escape, but there is something in the unexpected discomforts that arise that challenge me in a specific way, allowing me to see myself more closely should I be able to accept that I may not always like what I see. This has been especially true in Cuba where I can not predict or plan for how I would like things to go. Cuba decides for me. Cuba says, So sorry, but this is the trip you are getting. I have the choice to either give myself over to it and go with what comes or go down hard fighting.

I befriended this sweet little pig named Puerco, whom I am certain has since been eaten. Pork is a pretty big deal in Cuba.

On our first trip to Cuba we flew to Santiago de Cuba to stay in a crummy little all-inclusive in the UNESCO biosphere outside the city. I researched the area heavily, knowing there would be no internet service once we left home. We travelled twice into the city armed with the most extensive list of places to eat and see I have ever compiled for a trip, before or since. I was proud of that list. I was arrogant and puffed up and full of myself about the mastery of that list. I imagined myself with a big ribbon, The award goes to Gayla Trail, World Class, Kick Ass Travel List Maker 2008! Cheers from the crowd. It turned out to be utter garbage. Nothing was as I’d been told and we abandoned it completely.

The second trip was planned based on what we’d learned the year before. This time we’d stay in the same general area, but close to a few of the places I wanted to explore further: an abandoned amusement park, a humble, but inspiring cactus garden that I could walk to every single day, a calmer ocean in which to snorkel. I had big plans. We landed at the small airport in Santiago buzzing with excitement and eager to dive in and further explore some of the places we did not have time for the first time around. The drive from the airport was not far, about 30 minutes to an hour tops. We could get to the city from our hotel in roughly 20 minutes or so and even had plans to stay overnight in a Casa Paricular (a government-supported homestay of sorts). We made our way through customs and out to the hotel van. As the vehicle started to pull out of the airport we were notified that water was not running at the hotel and we would be taken to a “bigger and better resort.” That’s all we were given. No hotel name or location and without internet service it’s not as if we’d have the chance to look it up anyway. I quickly asked the other passengers (mostly Canadian) if they had a clue about our destination, but they didn’t know or care. Most were just happy to hear the words “free upgrade.” As I watched the landscape move through the window, I decided that if I did not want to have a tension-filled trip I would have to just sit back and let it be.

An hour and a half later we arrived at my vacation nightmare, an all-inclusive sprawling resort of the sort where Canadians go to get their winter party on and play something that resembled Bingo, but in a pool. With a loudspeaker. It was 3 hours away from our original destination. No cactus garden. No abandoned amusement park. A lot of fall down drunk Caucasians with cornrows and beads in their hair and an elevator that permanently smelled like farts.

We checked in and ate lunch in the giant cafeteria. The food reminded us of a game of phone tag. Salads, cappuccinos, and sweets were reminiscent of their intended North American counterpart, but it was as if they were being prepared based on an idea passed down through several people. I enjoyed that aspect of it and found myself indulging in things I would never eat otherwise just to know what they would be like. There was a lot of food presented here, too much for a country that suffers so greatly from rationing and poverty. The hotel was located right next door to a small village where several homes were made “weatherproof” by dried banana leaves and people were desperate for shoes. The excess, entitlement, and unappreciated extravagance made me feel gross.

We ate lunch on top of paper maps that vaguely outlined the expanse of the hotel grounds. There were a few gardens and Davin noted something that looked like a food garden, although it was suspiciously unmarked. We finished our food and made a b-line straight for this mysterious garden and it did in fact turn out to be a small organic farm. I sought out the farmer and with our sad spanish and a lot of pantomiming were able to ascertain that the farm was supplying vegetables, fruit, and eggs for the resort. We offered him some of the really good chocolate we had brought and for the rest of the trip we were supplied daily with the tastiest green coconuts. Guinea fowl roamed freely, but apparently vacationers had complained that the free range birds that occasionally wandered over to the beach area were “dirty” and “gross.” Funny how the sunburned tourists that wandered into the village seeking cheap sex with impoverished women and underage girls were not.

These are the disturbing contrasts I sometimes forget in my nostalgic pursuit of warm memories.

Later that evening in the village, in the magic hour before the sun goes down and the sky is on fire with the most divine orange cast, a woman called me aside and offered her daughter to me. The little girl was probably about 11. The exact terms of this offer were not exactly clear to me, but I knew what she was saying almost instantly. I turned pale. I wanted to run away, to get away from her as quickly as possible. To dissolve right out of this nightmare in front of me. I am not naive. I know about sex tourism. I suppose though that as a woman, I assumed that I would never be confronted with it in quite this way. I had caught glimpses of it, but always from a distance. Never would I have ever imagined myself to be seen as a possible patron. Thinking back on it I should not have been surprised. We often chatted with our fellow tourists during meals at the resort. I was shocked by how few left the grounds. Some stayed two weeks and even a month and never went beyond the guarded boundaries of the beach or the road. While in the village I occasionally saw a few that had wandered in seeking sex tourism or to drop off a bag of cast-off t-shirts and lousy dollar store pens in order to help placate the iffy morality we trade on when we travel to impoverished places. I may have brought better quality t-shirts and pens, but I’m complicit too.

I ran into this woman on a few more occasions over the course of the week. Each time I felt repulsed and disgusted. I did not like this woman one bit. I struggled with these feelings. Who am I to cast aspersions on her? I can’t begin to understand the desperation that brought her to that moment, most likely before and since. I can’t understand it, but I also can’t accept it. I hated the look in her eyes when she made her grotesque pitch. I hated what she was doing to her child, to herself. I hated myself too in that moment for being there at all, in a position to be witness to it.

The woman in this photo was living in one of the banana leaf-lined houses I mentioned. She and her husband were trying to build a more solid house next to it using bricks they acquired as they could afford them. The wall was only a few bricks high when we were there and we gave her some money to buy more. In return she offered me some coffee beans that she had collected in the mountains and I was very touched by her generous spirit.

At the government run farmers market. The lack of options was startling. Onions, tomatoes, and that was pretty much it.

There are many more stories that I can tell you about this trip to Cuba as well as the previous one, all of which are full of contradictions and stark, sometimes painful contrasts. Cuba taught me how to let go of control and lean into what comes. And that I can handle it. It made me think hard about what it means to travel and if there is any way to do so that is not complicit in exploitation even in some small, but significant way. It taught me that even when I think I know what it means to be desperate that I had better check myself in a hurry because I have barely begun to experience the meaning of the word. It taught me to be grateful for the shoes on my feet and the diversity of foodstuffs we have available here; whatever we want, whenever we want it. It also clarified in a new way that having such availability is maybe not such a good thing.

Finally, Cuba made me realize with a new urgency that I needed to prioritize a trip to the Caribbean to finally see where my family comes from. And so I did. We scrimped and saved and by the end of the year I was sobbing and shaking on a plane as we flew into Barbados. But that’s another story.