How to use Airbnb to live with a local in another country (+ get a $40 coupon!)

Here’s a link that will give you $40 in travel credit!

Back when we were singles travelling alone or with friends, we would rent a bed in a hostel dormitory for $6-$35 per night. You know the scene: There would be a couple having sex a few bunks down, someone defiling the bathroom after a night of too much drinking, people wandering in and out at all hours.

Thank God Airbnb was invented.

For a little bit more money, you can now get an inexpensive, private room, pretty much anywhere in the world. We still go for the absolute most basic accommodations and that keeps it relatively inexpensive, but now we have a place to safely leave our backpacks if we’re going out for a few hours, a locking door that allows us to sleep more peacefully, and a quiet sanctuary to rest away our jet lag and process our travels 24 hours a day.

But the biggest advantage of Airbnb is your host. Your host is your key to knowing where to find the best food in the neighborhood on your first night in town, what precautions you need to take to stay safe, where to find that odd item you accidentally lost or forgot, which sights are overly touristy, and which sites are often overlooked. Our hosts have been gems. Without Ana in Havana, I never would have gotten to buy bread from our balcony like a local. David, in Mexico City, took the time to plan our entire last day for us, suggesting that we get off the metro a few stops early and walk back through a beautiful park and historic streets, stringing together a few sights in a gorgeous part of town. David’s friend also suggested the best tacos I’ve ever had in my life and this churro shop.

Local knowledge about a neighborhood can be your key to packing in a big adventure in a single weekend and we can’t recommend it highly enough.

If you would like to sign up for and try Airbnb, here’s a link that will give you $40 in travel credit to get started. (We also get $20 back when you sign up using this link. You get $40, we get $20, that seems pretty win-win to me!)

Happy travels!

Our Airbnb in Mexico City. Glamorous? Nope. But for $12/night, we’ll take it!

How to pack for any adventure in under an hour and never forget anything

We are notorious last-minute packers. Fortunately, I made up a system for that, and it works brilliantly. (I’m not even humble bragging, I know.) I never worry about whether or not I have everything and always have some idea of what our standard load out will be for every trip. The key to doing this simply is having a bomber packing list (Get our master packing list on google docs here).

Meet my packing list:

The packing list has a variety of categories across the top: All Outdoor, Climbing, Backpacking, Travel, Photography, etc. And under that category heading, I’ve created a list of things we usually bring that are associated with that type of travel.

When I want to pack for a new trip, let’s say next month’s adventure to London, I make a new tab on the google doc and copy and paste the relevant columns into the tab I have created. For London, I chose All Outdoor, First Aid Kit, Toiletries, Travel, Photography, Documents, Navigation, and Clothing System.

I then delete out everything I don’t think we need and then condense all of the columns.

As we pack, we usually put everything on the bed first, (and take a photo or two for you lovely folks), and as things are loaded into the backpacks, I turn each item green. I highlight things in yellow that we need to remember the day of the trip, or that I’m unable to pack right away.

The morning of, I check the list. When everything on your list is green, It’s time to get in the car and go!

Using this system, we almost never forget the things we intend to bring and can usually pack for any adventure in under an hour, which is necessary when you travel as much as we do. You can see our packing list and save your own version here.

 

(Video) Old Cars in Cuba

Just a bunch of old cars in Cuba for the grandparents and gear heads.

 

Regla: A Well-Kept Secret

 

Just across the bay from Havana sits Regla, a fascinating town with a rich cultural history. The locals reach it by hopping on a ferry boat that runs back and forth all day long. The Cuban fare is 10 centavos in pesos nacionales, or about a 1/2 cent USD. The first time we crossed we didn’t know the price and payed $1 CUC/USD each, which would have paid for 500 people. I did notice that the man collecting the fair pocketed it instead of putting it in his collection bag… Oh well. We learned our lesson and knew better the second time around.

 

After we crossed the bay, we didn’t see a single tourist all day. People would stop to ask us how we were doing, if we were okay, if they could help us with anything, and so on. A pack of little girls came up to us to stare and one got up the courage to ask us to buy her a peso pizza. We obliged.

Regla has a fascinating museum of Afro-Cuban religion where Santeria featured prominently and we were fortunate to get an impromptu private tour.
Santeria worships dual-identity orishas, which are both Catholic saints and west-African deities. It is a religion deep with rituals, parties, symbolism, and blood sacrifices.

http://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/cuba-santeria-pp

 

This guy is a little devil who dances in processions on Saint days, according to the woman who gave us our tour. She was a believer and her Orisha was Yemoja.

All over Cuba there are people dressed all in white, who had been to see a Babalawo (Father of the Secrets) in the past year. The Babalawo throw snail shells or goat’s bones to tell the future and choose a saint/orisha for a believer to bring into their home and dedicate themselves to. The religion is complex, and varies geographically, and I couldn’t do it justice here. But I do intend to learn more about it!

 

Below are shrines from the Regla Conga or Palo Monte. Not exactly Santeria, this is another West-African religion that was brought to Cuba with slaves.

The divination priest in this tradition will tell a believer what they needed to gather to put in their shrine, be it a branch of a certain wood of a certain length (Harry Potter, anyone?), or, as in the case of these shrines, human bones.

I asked where the bones come from. The woman said the cemetery, usually. They try to only dig up believers in the religion who wouldn’t mind… but no guarantees. If your priest tells you to get human bones you have no choice. You best go buy yourself a shovel.

 

 

 

 

Traipsing Through the Jungle in Río San Juan

Like everywhere we went in Cuba, transportation to Rio San Juan was a challenge. We flagged down an off-duty driver, who had a friend, who had a family member, who was able to give us a ride in the back of a tractor taxi past farms and jungle to the river. Our plan was to catch a ride there and hike back.

We went to the rain forest and it rained. Go figure. The rain had the effect of clearing out the locals for the most part and the river was still beautiful so we waited it out.

The bamboo forest surrounding the swimming holes was out of this world. It completely dwarfed Josh in this photo:

After some time spent enjoying the river and forest, it was time to start our hike back to the casa.

The trail back was gentle and well-traveled from locals heading between towns on horseback.

 

First, it brought us through a small village. About 13 people lived here, mostly children, and it didn’t appear to have electricity or running water. They were wary of us and I waited until we got respectfully far away to snap a photo.

 

Then, we headed deeper into the jungle again. Nicole was fortunate to catch an anole (lizard) and realize a decade old dream.

 

We managed to find the ruins of a French-Haitian coffee plantation from the 1800s.

 

These were the craziest vines I (Nicole) have ever seen. And that’s saying a lot from someone who has been to rain forests all over Latin America, including the Amazon.

 

This suspension bridge felt less than safe, but we had to check it out.

 

The trail eventually spit us out on the road that would take us home. Fun fact about these horses: we would later observe them being herded on down the road by a man on a moped.

 

Home sweet casa!

Raising Chickens in Cuba

 

Sometimes we feel like tourists, and other times we feel like travelers. In Maida’s house in Las Terrazas, we were comfortably in the traveler category. We spent a lot of time with the abuelo (grandfather) of the household watching TV, learning about his fruit trees, watching birds and, most importantly, learning about chickens. Like most older adults anywhere in the world, he seemed glad to have found an audience who would listen to him talk and sit next to him on the couch as the Cuban ballet program played in the background.

 

Abuelo digs out some eggs from the nest of a free-roosting chicken.

 

Abuelo passed me warm, heavy eggs. I felt kind of bad for keeping them away from their mother. He insisted that they were absolutely fine, and he’s been doing this for enough years that I believe him.

 

He has around 65 birds: 1 rooster, 15 adult hens, 3 turkeys that he duped a chicken into raising, and the rest mixed sex juveniles and chicks.

Over decades of breeding chickens, he’s learned to select for two things: good mothers and good layers. If he has plenty of fertilized eggs from good mothers, he will eat or sell all of the fertilized eggs from the good layers. But if he is short on eggs and has a hen who is a bad mother but a prolific layer, he will occasionally give her eggs to a better mother to raise, in hopes he will have an excellent layer in the next generation. He also said as soon as the juvenile males start fighting with one another, it’s time to eat them.

 

We didn’t get to eat any of the juvenile males, but we did get to eat some of the eggs in an omelette!

 

One night, abuelo talked about how he was concerned because he couldn’t find the youngest turkey chick. The next morning I wandered out of the bedroom and he excitedly thrust a peeping bucket into my hands. I spent probably a half hour just sitting with that turkey, keeping him warm, petting him and admiring his fluffy yellow feathers. The mother hen was nearby and unhappily squawking about the fact that we had stolen her young, but abuelo didn’t pay her any mind. It was worth it.

Pardon the bed head. I really did wake up this way.

 

If anyone has the opportunity to go to Cuba and be one of the lucky few to stay overnight in this small community, we highly recommend staying with Maida and spending some time with her family as travelers, not tourists.