Wanderlust

There are two of us, and we run this blog and our website together. There have always been two of us, since childhood. First we studied in the same music school, then in the same school, then in different institutes, and then we hitchhiked around Cuba. We were then twenty years old. We were sick of Latin America, and we needed this trip like air, but, however, it became a compromise: at first a trip was planned from Argentina to Mexico, and from there on the Granma to Cuba, but it didn’t work out. We realized that we couldn’t earn that much money, so we left only the last point of the program (without Granma). So, having made a fortune from tutoring and asking our parents for the missing part, we bought tickets and set off for a month in the given direction. We had little money, a lot of enthusiasm, but there was no information at all that there was no hitchhiking in Cuba. The fact is that drivers there are forbidden to put foreigners in their cars; if you want to travel around Cuba, buy a bus ticket (there are different buses for foreigners and for the local population), but our budget could not stand this. The solution to the problem came from the truck drivers, it was with them that we drove most of the way, hiding behind a curtain in the cab during dangerous moments of checks on the roads, and we paid with conversations for life, brightening up the truck drivers’ kilometers of autopilots with stories about distant Russia. Our trip turned out to be completely different from what we expected, and the real Cuba was very different from the one we imagined. It turns out that Cubans don’t dance salsa right on the streets, we didn’t find a fruit paradise there either, and the local population does not at all welcome tourists with open arms.

Since then, we have never been to Latin America, but this trip is still paying dividends: how to surprise a potential employer at an interview? Casually mention that it was, supposedly, the case, I was hitchhiking around Cuba. How to let new acquaintances know who they are talking to? Listen to their story about their holiday in Varadero and tell them how things really are on the island of freedom. Can't get any ideas on what to post on your book blog? Well, I went to Cuba in vain, or what?

In general, traveling is for life.