Cayo Coco
Carrie posted in What's happening on February 3rd, 2010
Last week we returned from a trip to Cayo Coco. Where is Cayo Coco? It’s technically part of Cuba, but not really. I mean, our passports would say we went to Cuba, but Cuba and Cayo Coco are two very different things.
Cayo Coco is more like a Canadian tropical island. The province of Cayo Coco. Ha! The Canadian version of Guantanamo Bay. Only instead of a dubious prison, Cayo Coco is an island of resorts. Just resorts. There are no towns on Cayo Coco, no Cubans actually live there. The white sand beaches are lined with resorts but 85% of the island is undeveloped. No building can be more than 3 stories high, so our 3rd story hotel room had an excellent view of the ocean even from 500 metres away from the beach across the lagoon. The flight leaves Toronto directly to Cayo Coco with the stewardesses getting everyone pumped saying “Is everybody ready for vacation!?” Because everyone on that flight was going to one of those resorts. And every resort was full of Canadians. French Canadians mostly. Ours was nearly empty as it was the off season, but other people we ran into said that their resorts were nearly 90% French Canadian. Every waiter, cook, bar tender, and activities programmer spoke French and English and Spanish and who knows how many other languages. I met a couple of Brits…one family from Argentina, the rest Canadian.
It was so strange for Canada to suddenly be the centre of the universe. The staff would all ask, “Where in Canada are you from? Toronto? Montreal? Vancouver?” We smiled and tried explain “Norte”. That brought questioning looks until we explained we lived near the Arctic Circle. If you think the Cubans were astounded you should have seen the reactions from the other Canadians. One woman from Quebec didn’t understand that I would actually live there. She thought I was just there for work, no one actually lives there. The Lifeguards had Canada hip bags; the housekeepers ankle socks with maple leaves on them. Gardeners had Habs t-shirts or Flames baseball caps and people don’t think twice about receiving a Twoonie or Loonies as a tip. The seats on the Bici-Taxis had maple leaves on them and MuchMusic was playing in Spanish on the TV. I thought, this is what it must be like for Americans to travel and have so many familiar things around them…
But we weren’t really travelling. The purpose of the trip was rest and relaxation and visit with Ryan and Linner’s parents. We made a serious dint in our book collections (and our livers), played cards with intensity, and enjoyed meals together catching up. We sat on the beach, went snorkeling, scuba diving, and sailing.  We did take one day to join a tour to the mainland and visit a couple of cities, a cigar factory, a sugarcane mill, a plantation, and a mangrove forest, but we didn’t really like it as we’re not very good “Follow the Flower” tourists. We kind of cringed as we realised that we were the Holland America tourists who sit on their coach buses who we make fun of all the time. Not to mention that the game was up when we quickly realised the driver and tour guide were in cahoots with certain tourist traps where they strategically dropped us off.
I would love to go back and travel around Cuba. I think it’s a fascinating country. Even from the very little we saw of it, so many myths were destroyed. It helped too that Ryan is a walking dictionary and his Spanish fluency allowed us to have some more in-depth conversations with the gardeners. They always had the best stories and loved to hear about where you were from and what your home was like. They could talk forever and we would trade beer we snuck from the bar for small animal figurines woven from palm fronds and flowers for our rooms. Even in Ciego de Avila Ryan struck up a nice conversation with an old woman sitting on the park bench next to him. I was highly motivated to take a Spanish class so that I could speak with people as well. I got by with a combination of French and “No hablo Espagnol” but it wasn’t the same.
But while I greatly enjoyed soaking up the much needed Vitamin D to get me through the rest of the winter (the Groundhog says there’s 6-weeks left of winter. HA! We should be so lucky…) one week of sitting on the beach was about all I could take. There’s only so much canned-entertainment and getting fleeced as a tourist that we could put up with.  The all-inclusive deal sucks you in then nails you with all the extras.
But I have a nice tan…
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