“We will ride 31 miles today of undulating hills,” our guide says. We are cycling & sweating our way through the costal hills between Cienfuegos & Playa Larga & Trinidad. These towns have many exquisite colonial buildings in various states of repair. We ride on bumpy patched and non-patched roads beside many horse-drawn wagons, scooters, and classic US cars from the 1950s. My favorite was the double-seated bikers balancing a freshly frosted cake in one hand. We pass neighbors working together on engines, playing marbles in the street, and listening to salsa music.

It is Christmas Day and there is 62 percent humidity. We enjoyed a lunch with our group of 13 travelers, consisting of pork, cabbage salad, and congris (rice & black bean mix), with an appetizer of guava and pineapple and dessert of rice pudding. The non-traditionalness of it is charming, and delicious.

After a hot day of biking, we awoke to no water when we turned on the faucet at the “casa particular,” Cuba’s version of a B & B. Worthy of complaint, as we were paying for a certain level of comfort. The first in our group to comment was a 6-foot-tall Russian-American New York doctor/tango dancer. “No water, no problem. I brought wipes we can use this morning instead of showering.”

To my delight, we were travelling with easy going people who understood that adventure comes in all forms. My kind of people. We travel with hidden wads of cash, as the country cannot accept American credit cards and the ATMs are unreliable. Since then, we’ve had power outages and most toilets we visit don’t have toilet paper.  And it’s all part of it.

We stop at a family’s compound replete with papaya trees and a few lethargic dogs laying in the shade. We are ushered through a narrow corridor between buildings, continuing up some oversized stairs to a rooftop.  Here, we find an understated honey sanctuary replete with a clothesline of drying underwear above our heads.

40 stacked bee boxes housed “abejas de la tierra,” a special kind of non-stinging bee that, in the wild, builds its hives in the ground. The apiarist, also an understated man, opens a bee box and reveals what looks like fat cave-dwelling honey-filled stalagmite pods attached to the wood. He hands out straws. The next step is for us to stick the straw, and our faces, into one of the pods and drink runny honey directly from the pods without sucking up any bees in the process. He demonstrated no dramatics and lead with an air of normalcy; I follow suit and play it cool. Exciting, bizarre, and totally delicious.