Good things do Happen!!

Click here for pictures from the Quebrada de Cafayate. Let me start off by saying that I´ve never really been to any real canyonlands. I´ve not been to the Grand Canyon, or Moab, Death Valley, etc. etc. So I have no way of knowing whether the magnificance that I experienced in the Quebrada de Cafayate is paralelled or not. However, you can rest assured that this humble narrator was duly impressed, and moved beyond words at several points of our canyon tour via bus with a coca-leaf loving local expert guide. Impressed to the point that I have even contemplated changing my plans for next year. Rather than spending 6 months in New Zealand, I strongly thought about instead returning to South America. For one, it would be much less expensive, not to mention there is no shortage of things to do, and would certainly be an enriching cultural experience. That being said, for now, I´ll stick with the plan. I have a (hopefully) long life ahead of me, and can certainly return another time. On with the tour.

Well, Happy New Year to one and all! Sorry for the recent lapse in communicating with the world. You see, Jody and I were off in Cuba enjoying a week of fun and sun over the holiday season. I’ll post a few more entries over the next few days about Cuba, but generally speaking, it was a fantastic week! Lots of pictures can be seen here. Every day was between 22 and 29 degrees, with mainly bright and sunny skies. Mind you, yours truly didn’t pick up much of a tan, but rest assured, I drank plenty of rum and spent much time in the water 🙂 The ironic exception to the weather of the week was on New Year’s Eve! We started our day off with plenty of sun and beach walking, followed by my attempts at sailing and windsurfing. From there, Jody and I took out a tandem kayak and went out snorkelling in the water near the hotel. Lots of fun fish. We had an underwater camera, so hopefully some of those shots will turn out. Later on, we had supper at one of the A La Carte restaurants, which we’d booked early in the week. It was very nice, a good way to have New Years Eve supper, away from the big chow hall. The meal was a feat of gastronomic indulgence, as we had a full 7 course meal lasting 3 hours! However, as you can see by this picture, sometime around 10pm, the skies unleashed monsoon-like rain! It was insane. In the span of 15 minutes, the normally dry walkways all over the resort were under ankle-deep water! The rain kept up for almost 2 hours. This made it rather unpleasant to attend the mainly outdoor festivities that the resort had planned out. I feel sorry for all the work they had put in only to be ‘dampened’. As a result, Jody and I ducked back to our cozy room to enjoy the evening in dry comfort. After all, we had a nice covered balcony from which to watch the world. I’ll say this much for the Cubans and New Year’s. They LOVE fireworks! They had shows that were almost the same calibre as the Canada Day fireworks in Ottawa! No joke! It was amazing. At midnight, they had a show of almost a half hour. It was a great way to enjoy the complimentary bottle of champagne that the staff had placed in every room (and complimentary quart of rum, which we took home).

As I alluded to in a previous post, Jody and I ran into a few snags on our way home from Cuba over the Christmas Holidays. Namely, we got stuck in Cuba an extra day due to mechanical problems with our Zoom Airlines plane. The picture you see here is at around midnight, when we were told to go back down through customs. Why is everyone standing there you ask? Well, the authorities had no idea why we were sent there, and we all had to go back up to where I was and around the airport another way to get to the baggage. Just one of the ‘little’ snags in this dismal experience. In any case, we’ve sort of waited for almost a month, hoping to receive some sort of explanation or apology for all the problems. However, there was no word from either Zoom or Go Travel Direct. As a result, we ended up writing a strongly worded letter outlining all the shortcomings, and sent it in to their customer relations departments. Now we just need to wait and see what they have to say. We’ll keep you posted. In the meantime, read on to see the full text of the letter we sent.