The reality can be confusing.

Things look, more or less, like what you’ve always seen in photographs. But there’s a lot of stuff you’ve never seen, too, and a wider landscape they fit into, one that you hadn’t (couldn’t have?) pictured. The reality is not better or worse than the fantasy. It’s just different. This is always true.

And I’ve been wanting to travel to Cuba forever. Finally, I made it. I took a million photos and had a number of interesting experiences here – still processing all of it – but one day in Havana, as told through my Instagram feed, shows something true about the place. And can serve as a rough plan for anyone else who’s making the trip.

One day in Havana, in pictures:

Have a Cuban breakfast

I read someplace that if you’re staying with a Cuban family and they offer to make you breakfast, the answer should be SI. That was good advice.

It’s particularly easy to arrange if you’re staying at an Airbnb whose owner lives next door. Exhibit A:

A post shared by Bridget Gleeson (@bridgetglee) on Mar 22, 2017 at 5:29am PDT

Call a cab

I did know there were classic cars in Havana. I didn’t expect every single car to be a classic.

This is what happens when you call a cab in Cuba. (Driver: smoking a cigar on the corner, waiting for us to come down.)

A post shared by Bridget Gleeson (@bridgetglee) on Mar 23, 2017 at 5:10am PDT

Sip coffee on the terrace at the Hotel Nacional

Essential. The hotel’s wide, elegant rear lawn, facing the sea, is also ideal for drinks at sunset.

Café cubano: served with milk in the morning, served with sugar in the afternoon #HavanaCuba

A post shared by Bridget Gleeson (@bridgetglee) on Mar 22, 2017 at 6:15pm PDT

Hotel-hop

You don’t have to actually stay in one of Havana’s beautiful old hotels to enjoy their grand architecture and glorious lobby bars.

This is at the Hotel Raquel (est. 1908), an Art Nouveau gem in the Jewish quarter.

A post shared by Bridget Gleeson (@bridgetglee) on Mar 22, 2017 at 5:28am PDT

Get out of town

For a little perspective, get out of Old Havana, preferably in a chauffeured 1957 Chevrolet convertible.

A post shared by Bridget Gleeson (@bridgetglee) on Mar 20, 2017 at 8:31am PDT

Drink mojitos

Obviously. Ask for yours the way Al Capone used to like them: with lots of mint and two kinds of rum.

A post shared by Bridget Gleeson (@bridgetglee) on Mar 20, 2017 at 4:50pm PDT

Return to a room with a view

There are a lot of nice (and affordable) places to stay, especially in the neighborhood of Vedado, where the friendliest Cuban family hosted us.

I couldn’t resist trying to capture the view in watercolor.

My apartment in Havana has a spectacular view of an Art Deco landmark: Edificio López Serrano (1932) #artdeco

A post shared by Bridget Gleeson (@bridgetglee) on Mar 21, 2017 at 5:31am PDT

Indulge in deep thoughts

Travel makes you think. Maybe you’ve heard.

This trip to Cuba made me wonder aloud: what’s the point of travel? “Pleasure,” my mom says, “the chance to break the daily routine.” In some cases, I think, that pleasure comes in the form of outdoor adventures, or lying on a beach, or having some kind of a particular cultural experience, or indulging in food and wine. In Havana, the pleasure is visual. It comes from just walking or driving around and seeing the beautiful old houses and abandoned palaces and vintage cars – and the people who inhabit them and drive them – as they appear before and around you.

A post shared by Bridget Gleeson (@bridgetglee) on Mar 23, 2017 at 4:42pm PDT

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2016 wasn’t exactly the best year ever, but I did manage to take my traveling watercolor set to Nicaragua, Paris, and Tierra del Fuego. So there’s that.

The year started out in Nicaragua, where I was on an assignment for Lonely Planet:

Next up was California.

Then it was back to Philadelphia.

And then to a flooded Paris.

Then back to Argentina, of course.

(Did you know that Tierra del Fuego is one of the most beautiful places in the world? It is. I love Uruguay, too. Also: I love this cheerful yellow table.)

I also experimented with other media this year.

And got the kids involved.

I made a map for my grandmother. And I painted in my notebook.

Sometimes I forgot my watercolors.

But I always had them with me in the most colorful places.

Farewell, 2016. You were a beast. But there were good times, too. Here’s to more adventures – more water, always, and more color – in the year ahead.

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I’ve recently completed a five-week assignment in Nicaragua. I had to visit a lot of places, some more desirable than others – and I decided to save the best for last. In my view, that’s the gorgeous southern Pacific coast, and nearby Isla de Ometepe, the volcanic island rising up in the middle of Lago de Nicaragua.

I’ve been to both of these places before. But the last time around, I was a backpacker traveling with friends. This time, I was alone.

There are pros and cons to going solo. But one good thing about traveling alone is that is frees you up to engage more with the people around you. And in this part of Nicaragua, it’s all surfers. Surfers – serious surfers – the kind that come from around the world to surf the famous breaks around Popoyo and San Juan del Sur. The kind that bring their own boards from New Zealand or Colombia or the United States or wherever they’re coming from.

I spent a lot of quality time with surfers and their surfboards in taxis, on crowded buses, on the backs of trucks, under the shade of a palm trees, sitting on the sand, watching the sun go down. They were all great to be with, no matter their age, sex, or nationality. Because they all had one thing in common: a true and deep enthusiasm for being outside.

I’m not a surfer myself, but what I observed is this. Surfers talk about the conditions, the breaks, the crowds, “dawn patrol,” swells, surf pangas. But the jargon is more like an ice-breaker, or a cover for the real conversation. Once you talk to a surfer for more than a few minutes, you realize this: they just want to be outside. They just want to be in the water all day. They want to be in the water at sunrise, and later in the morning when the sun is hot and beating down, nearly blinding everyone who’s floating on the surface. They want to feel the sky change as the afternoon rolls on. And, yes, they’d like to be in the water at sunset, too. Surfing is one way to do that.

The same could be said of skiing and snow, hiking and the mountains, wakeboarding and a lake. I think of when I learned to fly-fish in Argentinian Patagonia. I remember that I wasn’t that interested – I only did it because it was part of a story I was writing. The whole thing seemed like a lot of effort, and I had to wake up so early and put on all the equipment, and the water was freezing. It was only later, when I’d been standing waist-deep in a stream for hours, watching the condors circling high overhead, feeling the rhythm of the current, seeing the colors change in the mountains, that I suddenly got it. Fly-fishing is an excuse to stand in the water all day: to think about nothing and everything.

(Of course, shortly after this revelation, I felt a tug on the line. My guide, Martín, helped me pull in our big catch of the day, a silvery salmon. We threw him back, as you do in these protected waters. But the surprised look on Martín’s face, I thought, was priceless.)

Surfers and fly-fishermen appear to be practicing a sport, and they are. But they’re also reveling in a meditative pleasure that most of us don’t know about. You spend a couple of hours hiking or hanging out on the beach, checking your phone the whole time, and you feel like you’ve had some kind of an outdoor experience. But the surfer and the fisherman stay out all day. They see and hear and feel things that they can’t describe (and wouldn’t feel the need to, anyway, it’s not the point) – things that are subtler and more beautiful than anything that can be captured on Instagram or expressed in a text message.

(Not that I didn’t try).

But I find myself more interested in those moments in travel, and in life, that can’t be shared with anyone, that can’t be described. You can’t take a picture: it’s already gone.

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I tried to paint something everywhere I went. I’m not an artist – I know I’m not a very good painter – and that fact took the pressure off. I just needed a new hobby, a new way of looking at things. I needed an excuse to get off my iPhone and my MacBook. I wanted to actually look at things in real life instead of staring at them on a screen.

What I learned this year in trying to paint trees, castles, vegetable stands, houses, and beaches: you don’t have to be great at something to find fulfillment in it. (Did I mention I’m also a mediocre pianist and an average skiier?) Trying something new was refreshing. And other people noticed the effort. I walked into a party in Buenos Aires and someone I’d never met before said to me, “hey, are you the girl who paints trees and takes pictures of them?” Yes, I am, I thought. I was embarrassed for a second, and then I wasn’t.

Here, looking back at a dozen postcards – my twelve favorites out of the little paintings I made on the road this year – one for each month of the year.

Many of these are from Buenos Aires. That’s the other lesson I took from this: you can go all the way to Basque Country or Cozumel or the North Rim of the Grand Canyon to find beautiful views, or you can take a moment to really look at the streets you walk down every day. So: here’s to developing new interests. Happy New Year!

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I’m hardly the first person to point this out (hello, Socality Barbie, and a tip of the hat to ‘What I Instagrammed Vs. What Was Really Happening, Or My Entire Life Is A Lie.’)

But on my recent travels in Spain, I noticed a fairly wide gap between What I Instagrammed (left column) and What Was Actually Happening (right column, conveyed through text messages to one or both of my sisters.) A sampling, below. Spoiler alert: travel is only glamorous in retrospect.

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I’m back in Buenos Aires this week. And the beat goes on.

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My sister Elizabeth and I are always working on something together. Here’s a sneak peek at one of our latest projects: an illustrated cultural guide to the shapes and symbols of Morocco, based on a short but meaningful trip to the Mahgreb last September. The illustrations are based on photographs I took in Tangier, Fès and Marrakech, gorgeously rendered in watercolor by Liz — our family’s resident artist — and shown side-by-side with their real-life counterparts below.

In other words – the Riviera Maya, on the Caribbean coast of the Yucatán Peninsula, is a spectacularly beautiful landscape.

But the last time I came here, a few years ago, I didn’t like it much. All the resort people and the cruise ships and the loud beach clubs seemed to get in the way of my good time.

I was scheduled to stay in Playa del Carmen for several nights to review a pair of new boutique hotels. I remember that I did like the recycled pools on one of the hotel’s terraces. (But photos never tell the whole story, do they? The whole story is that we didn’t get any sleep – and not in a good way. It was hectic. I didn’t see some of the glorious underwater sights because I was distracted, I guess, by all of the bronzed and beautiful Italian people, and all of the Americans drinking ridiculously oversized margaritas.)

/// Fast-forward to 2015 ///

The shapely Italians, the Americans in sombreros, and the free tequila are still here. But this time around, I was determined to, well, get away from them.

It wasn’t easy. It involved doing my homework on Spanish-language blogs, talking to the cleaning lady at the hotel about where she goes on Saturdays, getting on several local ferry boats, and scanning the horizon for incoming watercraft with names like ‘Norwegian Princess’ and ‘Carnival Ecstasy.’

But the effort was well worth it. Here are a few of my loveliest discoveries.

On the left: climbing the tallest pyramid in the Mayan world at Cobá (a less touristy alternative to the much-hyped ruins at Chichen Itzá.)

On the right: a locals’-only beach on the island of Cozumel (a rarity, TRUST.)

 Underwater mysteries – courtesy of a waterproof camera. Around the coral reef off the western coast of Cozumel.

Isla Mujeres. Only a short ferry ride away from Cancun, but it sure doesn’t feel like it.

Even Playa del Carmen can be pretty charming if you get up early enough – and put your blanket down next to the Mexican families instead of at Mamita’s beach club.

The moral of the story? I can’t do anything about those cameras on sticks.

But this is the only kind of ‘party boat’ I’m really interested in. And I’m glad to report they still exist in this part of Mexico.

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I’m a writer – that’s what I know, it’s what I love, it’s what I do best. But writing well is so hard – and usually keeps you chained to your computer. Sometimes I get tired of it.

Luckily, I have friends and family who also work in creative fields. They noticed I’ve been feeling burned out, and they had suggestions.

‘What you should do is keep a travel sketchbook,’ said one friend. He’s a professor at the New School and he’s the kind of guy who jets off to Japan and brings back five futuristic artists’ books to show me. I can’t live up to that, I thought. But then my sister said ‘you should travel with some pencils or charcoals.’ (Easy for you to say, I thought, you’re a real artist.) ‘I don’t paint or draw,’ I said, ‘you know I’m not good at that.’ She said, ‘that’s not true, and it’s not the point, anyway.’ She put a watercolor set into my shopping basket.

I took their advice on a trip to Rio de Janeiro last week. First, before flying, I painted a map of Rio (left). Then I painted the view from my hotel room in Ipanema (right.)

Not exactly award-winning artistry, but they were right – it was refreshing to look at a place and think about how to describe it with paint and pencil instead of with words.

Next up: the input of a friend who’s a fellow travel journalist (and soon-to-be sommelier, and lately, a frequent contributor to Conde Nast Traveler.) The night before I left for Rio, she said ‘download Hyperlapse, and just play around with it in Brazil. I want to see what you come up with.’ This was my first experiment with the time-lapse video app.

Finally, once I was actually in Rio, another piece of advice kept coming back to me – the voice of my own mother, and of every boyfriend I’ve ever had, saying things like ‘I love your travel photos, Bridge, but it would be even better if you were in some of them…’ (Ridiculous, I thought.) But the truth is, I do like to have human figures in my photos.

And on this trip, I had no travel companion. So when I found myself alone on the rooftop terrace pool before breakfast (left) or alone with a caipirinha at sunset (right), I used a self-timer, and I pointed the camera at myself. I actually like how it turned out. It was authentic. I was alone, after all.

I feel inspired again. So, thanks, obrigada, dear friends, and mother, and ghosts of boyfriends past. This has been fun.

Don’t worry, I’ll start writing again now – but the watercolor set is going with me to Uruguay next week.

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