Cuba

Cuba hit me before I even landed — from the plane window I could see the coastline dissolving into that unreal turquoise-green water, islands scattered like dark shadows just beneath the surface. Nothing prepares you for the colour of this place from above.

Havana is a city that feels like it got stuck in a specific afternoon in 1958 and decided to stay there. The colonial facades are half crumbling, half gorgeous — cream and ochre peeling in long strips — and then a cherry-red convertible rolls past and the whole scene tips into something almost dreamlike. Riding in one of those open-top almendrones through the narrow streets of Old Havana, the buildings leaning in on both sides, the salt air mixing with exhaust, I kept thinking I'd imagined this city first somewhere and now I was actually inside it.

What got me most was the Plaza de la Revolución — the giant steel outlines of Che and Camilo on the ministry walls, the Jose Marti obelisk cutting straight up into the sky, all that open concrete baking in the midday sun. Quiet in a heavy kind of way. And then there are the little bars with cigar boxes nailed to the walls and hand-painted Coca-Cola murals that haven't changed since before my parents were born. Cuba doesn't try to be anything — it just is, completely, and that's what makes it so hard to leave.