LiveYourAdventure.com

April 5, 2005

In this AdventureAlert:

Dear Friends,

I've been very busy! Contrary to what's been printed on the website, my book, Driving to the End of the World isn't quite ready yet. But I'm getting very close. I should have details on a special pre-publication offer in the next AdventureAlert.

Part of what I've been busy with, in addition to writing, is re-vamping the website to help you live YOUR adventure. That's why you see the "Under Construction" sign up there, and that's also why you haven't seen an AdventureAlert for awhile. The updated site is gonna be cool, and I can't wait to launch it. Soon...

I'm also starting a driving tour of the United States this summer! Told you I was busy. Look for more details in upcoming AdventureAlerts.

You'll really enjoy this AdventureView with Christopher Baker. He's a prolific author who has become a personal friend. His book Mi Moto Fidel: Motorcycling Through Castro's Cuba was a big inspiration for me to write Driving to the End of the World. On April 20th, Chris and I will be conducting a tele-class called, "The Secrets to Successful Travel Writing". Chris has written countless guidebooks and teaches a travel writing course, so he knows his stuff. Don't miss it! For more details on this exciting event, click here.

Enjoy the AdventureView! I'll keep you posted,

Mark

AdventureView: Chris Baker
Motorcycles Around Cuba

With a fire engine-red motorcycle and a burning desire for adventure, Chris Baker set his sights on Cuba. In three months he covered over 7,000 miles – a journey that would forever change his views of this tiny, politically charged island. He has written four very popular books on Cuba – two guidebooks, a coffee-table book, and an award-winning literary book, Mi Moto Fidel: Motorcycling Through Castro’s Cuba. In this AdventureView Chris talks with Mark about his adventures there, what inspired him to travel and write, getting into (and out of) trouble, and he shares some opinions on current U.S. policies.

LiveYourAdventure: Tell me how you came up with the idea to take a motorcycle trip around Cuba.
Chris Baker: It was simple. When I was asked by Moon Publications to author a guidebook about Cuba, I instantly knew I wanted to do a literary book. And I knew Cuba was going to be the place. I also knew I wanted to motorcycle around, not just because it was going to be a tremendous adventure that way, but also because two books about Cuba had been published recently, and in both the authors had been traveling primarily by car. I felt that cycling around Cuba added a kind of sexy panache, and it was a small play on the motorcycle diaries of Che Guevara. I was well aware that Guevara motorcycled around South America, and with his connections with Cuba…

LYA: Has that been your grandest adventure?
CB: Yes, in that it was a long journey of 11,000 km or 7,000 miles on a motorcycle. It was an adventure just getting the motorcycle there considering the problems that exist in trading with Cuba. But most importantly it was the adventure that was closest to my heart, the one that was just so tremendously rewarding. It was a fantastic adventure, not just in the spirit of true adventure travel, but in terms of what I got back from it emotionally in connecting with the island. The great thing about motorcycle travel is that you're not enclosed like you would be in a car, plane, or rail. You’re out in the open and you really do connect with the place.

LYA: How and when did you first get the traveling bug?
CB: All through high school geography was my favorite subject, and I studied geography at the University. I’m from North England. I don’t know if you had the same thing in the States, but in the 1950s and 60s in England, birthday cards used to fold out. If you folded out a birthday card you'd get this big sheet of white paper. I used my old cards to draw maps. This was well before I was ten years old. I used to draw maps of America all the time! So I went to the University, studied geography and did a Masters’ in Latin American studies. I got the travel bug from my love and knowledge of geography, and a desire to explore the world from that curiosity. Also at University in London I was meeting a lot of people who were well-traveled, some who were doing the overland London-to-Australia route, which had become popular in the early 70's. So I started my travel days when I was a student with expeditions to the Sahara. Then I did a brief University exchange in Poland to Krakow University. That gave me my bug. I would spend my spring and summer holidays hitchhiking to Greece and sleeping on the beaches. Once that’s in you at an early age, you’re not getting it out of you.

LYA: I would agree. So tell me about your latest, your photography book.
CB: I’ve always had a passion for photography, and always had a camera with me on my travels. As a magazine and newspaper writer I was able to sell my photography in association with my feature stories. I have quite a number of guidebooks, my literary travel book, Mi Moto Fidel, and I wanted to put out a quality coffee-table book so I could establish myself as a photographer and push myself a little more to produce. One thing that really struck me was that the old 1950s American cars are as important to Cuban culture and the experience of traveling through Cuba as the gondolas are to Venice, the red double-deckers to London, or the cable cars of San Francisco. They're a defining element. I didn’t feel these old American cars had been given the graphic treatment they deserved. I realized there was a tremendous enthusiasm out there, not only for Cuba but for American cars, so to combine the two and produce a coffee-table book... I knew it was something I would be proud of.

LYA: Did you take pictures for your coffee table book while you were traveling on your motorcycle, or did you go back and them later?
CB: The motorcycle journey happened in 1996 and was the first long journey I made through Cuba. I was photographing the whole while and taking photos of American cars, but at that time I hadn’t conceived of a coffee table book. That came later when I realized I had a lot of photos of American cars, but also because the more I traveled through the country the more it became obvious that the number of old American cars was quite profound, about one in six. I was coming across cars I'd never seen. I’m English and I didn’t know the history of Chevrolet and Oldsmobile etcetera, but I did know I was seeing vehicles that were extremely rare, such as Hudsons and Model T Fords—almost every day you see a Model T in the countryside as a daily run-around vehicle.

LYA: You teach travel writing to people, tell me about that.
CB: I gave a course two nights ago. More or less monthly I teach a full learning annex and I’ve been on faculty for about five years. It’s basically Travel Writing 101; a three-hour class where I give all the basics, the tools a would-be travel writer needs to set out and get enthused, and tips on how to avoid common pitfalls neophyte travel writers make.

LYA: Have you had any success stories from your students?
CB: Absolutely. There was an English guy who was a waiter in the Bay area and he took my class. He sold to Conde Nast Traveler in about six months or so. That was six to eight weeks after graduating from my class, and he’d never been published. He called and said, “I just got my first story published!” He sent it to me with photos. He’s actually a good photographer as well as a good writer. He’s now launched a full-time career.

LYA: Let’s go back to your adventure in Cuba. Did you ever feel your life was at risk?
CB: That’s a really excellent question because a lot of people have great fears about traveling to Cuba. My first visit was in 1993, and I made several more short visits before I began my motorcycle trip, but nonetheless when I took the motorcycle in, I had a lot of fears. Not about the physical danger of muggings and whatnot — my experiences in Cuba told me that it's a very safe destination from that perspective. But I had certain other fears, even though I couldn’t put my finger on it.

I think one fear was that I would run afoul of Cuban officials, because it's a Communist state, and the government keeps a very close eye on folks, especially foreign journalists. It was also during this journey I had some tremendously important political epiphanies that had a profound impact on my political perspective of Cuba. At the same time I had become aware that Cuba is very much a police state. I had my encounters with Secret Police when I expressed myself politically for the first time incautiously on the telephone to the States. Within 24 hours I was taken in and interrogated. Cuban intelligence made its final appearance seconds before I left Cuba, also. One of my fears was losing my motorcycle to Cuban officials, but my biggest fear of all was losing my notebooks.

I was not only taking notes for my guidebook – critically important notes about accommodations and bus routes and other essential information – I was taking other notes as well. Those notebooks included some damaging conversations with individual Cubans, and also my own perspectives and feelings, many of which were very positive towards Cuba and the government, and many which were negative. In the last moments, when I was preparing the motorcycle to exit, I had actually hidden my notebooks. It was only once onboard the boat that I felt I was being paranoid for no reason. Because the motorcycle was going to be on the deck and I knew it was going to be washed by sea spray and waves, once we were ready to sail I took the notebooks from under the saddle where I’d taped them for hiding. I thought I was safe, so I tucked them in my baggage in the hold of the boat. It was only at this stage the Secret Police came specifically to read my notebooks. They had quite clearly been keeping tabs on me, unbeknownst to me, and they came and said, “Your notebooks Mr. Baker."

LYA: And they looked at them.
CB: They read them! And what was really fascinating was… I don’t like to give it all away because this is an important part of Mi Moto Fidel… but I went through an epiphany. In earlier trips I had been viewing the Cuban Revolution very sympathetically. And whilst I still have tremendous sympathies and respect for the accomplishments of the Revolution, it was during the motorcycle journey that I changed my perspective.

So what happened was the tone in the notebooks, which were ordered chronologically, began to shift. By notebook #4 the shift was happening. At that stage more Cubans (who will only make critical comments if they believe you can be trusted) were beginning to open up to me and I was finding a different Cuba —a different perspective coming from the people themselves. And that was reflected in the notebooks.

So the Secret Police began reading them. As I said I had had an interrogation, and that’s absolutely the right word for it, in the eastern provinces of Holguien six weeks prior. I’d been through the questioning and knew the process. It was almost an identical thematic interrogation as he was reading my notebooks. He wanted to know if I was a journalist, and since I wasn’t traveling on a journalist’s visa, I tried to pass myself off as an ordinary teacher and consultant on tourism. He asked why I needed all these notes if I wasn’t a journalist. But more importantly they were looking for negative commentary. They weren’t going to let these notebooks out of the country if there were negatives.

His questioning got stronger and stronger as he went through notebooks #2 and #3, and obviously he was reading piecemeal. Then he got to notebook #4 where this great change happened, and he’d already reached the critical point of the questioning, “What do you think about the Revolution, what have you written about it, what have you written about Cuba, and is there anything negative?” I was panicking because they had an agent whose job was to stand over me and intimidate me, to gauge my reaction as the other agent was questioning me. At the moment I was about to buckle under, my knees were going, I was going to lose all my notebooks, he handed them back to me and said, “You can write a good book with that.”

LYA: What did you learn from your adventure you could share, especially for someone who might be a little fearful?
CB: Well, I learned an important lesson during the attempt to get to Cuba. If you’re determined to make something happen, however difficult it seems, if it's a true dream it will happen. You'll make it happen. That was really reflected for me when I arrived in Florida to pick up the pre-arranged sailboat that was going to take me to Cuba. I hadn’t seen it before, I don’t think I’d seen pictures even, but I had a commitment from the skipper who used to take his own motorcycle into Cuba. So I’ve got everything ready, and I took one look at his boat and simply turned around. I said, “I’m not putting my motorcycle on that piece of crap.” The sea was very rough, there was a storm at the time...

I didn’t even say hello to the skipper, I just said, “I'm not going on that boat. What do I do now?” I was so full of belief that this day I was going to Cuba. I think it was only because I believed my dream was going to happen that I actually got another boat arranged within two hours. And it wasn’t as if I arranged it, I just serendipitously found another boat that was ready to leave for Cuba and had been cleared by customs. I’m atheistic, so I don’t believe in the Gods, but if there are gods, they were certainly working on my behalf at that moment.

LYA: One last question. From your British perspective, tell me your take on Bush’s attitude towards Cuba.
CB: I am also a U.S. citizen, a 25-year resident of the Bay area. I think that in itself tells you where I might be politically. I live in the Bay area because I thoroughly enjoy its liberal take on the world and the local’s belief that we need to be contributory in society. I was very very dismayed by the election results because I think that in the last four years America has been on a dangerous path internationally and domestically. So while the feeling in my local community, and perhaps even the whole of costal California, was of great hope that we could turn America around to a much saner, respectful course in the world that would pay attention to resolving issues, I feel the majority of America is caught in some incorrect perspective and time warp and has got its priorities mixed up.

LYA: I agree. I heard one of Bush’s campaign speeches in Florida catering to the Miami mafia and saying, “Freedom is on the march.” So next stop, Cuba.
CB: Yes Mark, it’s really sad to think what the next step might be. A lot of Cubans are very fearful there's an agenda for Cuba, that it’s next. Thoughts that there may have been secret plans to put troops in Cuba on any pretext, and we know pretexts were used to get into Iraq. Had Iraq not become the mess it is, I think Cubans would have a good rationale to be fearful that America would come stomping in with troops. But the Bush administration seems to have pandered to a small clique of extreme Cuban-Americans in Miami for electoral reasons. It’s important to remember Cubans are disproportionately powerful politically in relationship to their numbers down there. It’s pleasing to know there’s a growing moderate voice amongst that community that provides more balance, but it’s not getting heard by Washington.

LYA: Thank you very much for your time, Chris.
CB: Thank you, Mark.

To contact Mark, click here.

To contact Chris Baker, click here.

Join Chris and Mark for special tele-class: The Secrets to Successful Travel Writing. Click here for more details.

Lost a friend from the road.

While traveling through Boliva a year or two ago I crossed paths with Simon Milward, another adventurer on a 'round-the-world trip supporting democracy, health care, and motorcyclist's rights. We became email pals, and had plans for him to be featured in an upcoming AdventureView. Sadly, he passed away in March. To read a tribute to Simon, click here. To read a little about my encounter with him in Boliva, read my Adventure Alert, Bye Bye Bolivia.