Mean time in heaven
INTERVIEW | A ‘Rotten’ guy from Mundelein in an unspoiled tropical paradise
Some 15 million visitors last year traveled to the Caribbean, a vacation paradise where people come to relax on the beach and work on their tan to the tune of steel drums.
Unless you're Gary Buslik of Mundelein. He doesn't like the sun. He's afraid of sand. And he finds steel drum music to be "vaguely satanic."
(Richard A. Chapman/Sun-Times)
"I was not alive when they built the Panama Canal, but in hearing 'Yellow Bird' for the millionth time, my eardrums can imagine what the isthmus must have felt like when that huge, hardened-steel, saw-toothed gnawing wheel ground its way from one ocean to the other," he said.
Buslik's love-hate relationship with this part of the world is the subject of his new book, A Rotten Person Travels the Caribbean (Travelers' Tales, $14.95). For 254 seriously funny pages, this University of Illinois at Chicago literature and creative writing teacher recounts the highlights of a couple of decades' worth of travel around the islands. He reminisces about watching cockfighting in Grenada, stalking Hemingway's ghost in Cuba and those "Midnight Express" moments while trying to smuggle Cuban stogies out of St. Martin.
I asked this self-proclaimed rotten person what he likes about the Caribbean isles.
"They remind me nothing of my own suburb of Mundelein," he said. "They are not flat. They do not have a SuperTarget. And seagulls fly over actual water instead of the Mundelein Commons parking lot."
Here's what else Buslik had to say in a recent Q & A:
Q. Why did you write this?
A. Each essay-chapter recounts a funny (I hope) and sometimes-poignant incident that happened while I was traveling throughout the Caribbean, either on vacation or writing assignment. It's unified in that it is not only set in the Caribbean but it dramatizes the tension between me, a generally miserable person, and my wife, who in many respects symbolizes the Caribbean: she's colorful, cheerful, enormously expensive, and she smells like a banana.
Q. What annoys you the most about the Caribbean?
A. Golf. To accommodate Americans, I suppose, the sport -- if you want to call it a sport, which I don't because I think sport should involve actual sweating -- has arrived on a few islands now, and I think it's an abomination. On one island, they watered the greens with chemicals and the mist carried into the hills and killed hundreds of palm trees. I rank golf with cockfighting. Worse, in fact, because at least with cockfighting you can eat the loser.
Q. If you could spend a week on any Caribbean island, which one would you go to?
A. It depends on my mood. If you feel like gambling, wandering souvenir shops for rubber alligators and T-shirts that say "I'm with Stupid" and careening around town slurping frozen margaritas and deliberately stepping on the flip-flops of the tourist walking in front of you, you can't beat St. Maarten. The Dutch know how to have fun -- mainly to make up for the fact that you have to dig up tulip bulbs every fall and replant them in the spring.
On the other hand, whenever I get good and sick of Mundelein strip centers and Petcos and Great Clips and Starbucks and Blockbusters, I head to Nevis, an impossibly green gumdrop island in the eastern Caribbean. My wife and I like staying at the Hermitage Plantation, an inn nestled into the edge of a lush rainforest at the hem of an ancient volcano. Among the flowery grounds sit a 250-year-old restored great house and 15 traditional West Indian gingerbread cottages.
During the day you sit on your private veranda measuring the hues of the sea and plucking mangoes off trees. ... Americans like staying near beaches, but the smart money stays up high, away from the hubbub and heat.
Q. Which is the most underrated island?
A. It's not the "rating" -- whatever that means -- that counts but how difficult some islands are to get to. The most popular islands are the ones that offer nonstop flights. But for my money, puddle-jumping is the way to go. Find those places with goats grazing the runways and pilots who might not show up if their wives are having babies, and you'll experience the real Caribbean. Nevis, St. Vincent, Mustique, Statia, Saba, Dominica, Bonaire. Now you're talking.
Q. Most Americans will never get the chance to visit Cuba. You did. Tell us what we're all missing.
A. Visiting Cuba is like gazing through amber at a delicate fossil. It was lovely and sad. While it was terrific seeing all those 1950s cars sputtering around, on the other hand, gorgeous colonial buildings collapse from neglect on average of one per day. So one man's quaint is another man's poor. But the Cubans are cheery despite their lack of everything, genuinely warm and hospitable, and I look forward to the day we can all just be pals. But if you ever want to see Cuba the way it used to be, go now, any legal way you can, because once the embargo is lifted that country will become a powerhouse of modernity overnight, and it will be about as quaint and colonial as my hometown of Mundelein.
Q. What can you tell someone trying to smuggle Cuban cigars through customs?
A. Do not separate them. At the Miami airport, security agents are trained to spot individual cigars on an X-ray screen. If you are caught, they will waterboard you until you confess to having understated the total value of cocktail stirrers you brought back into the country, and they will cavity-search your wife for illicit seashells. They will also confiscate your Big & Buxom Biker Chicks magazine. But if you tie your Cuban cigars together, they will show up on the screen as a bundle of dynamite, and you'll zip through customs like a VIP.
Q. Where's the best windsurfing?
A. It depends on your skill level. For me, an upper-intermediate, it's not so much the wind and surf I seek as it is the scenery. I like the lee side of Antigua along Seven Mile Beach because it's not rough water, and I can start out in the late morning, sail leisurely along the shoreline, and haul up at one of the beach restaurants for lunch.
Q. Which islands are best if you want to be lazy?
A. I suppose you can be lazy anywhere. Me, I like variety. If you're in St. Martin, you might spend a day on the beach and then head to a casino after dinner. If you don't gamble, fine. Take a walk. If you simply want to be alone, I suggest a place like Petit St. Vincent, a private island with only one small resort. There are no shops, no restaurants, nothing but solitude. These places aren't cheap, but here's a trade secret: Tell them you're a travel writer and promise to write something nice about them in national publications. You'll be amazed at the kind of money you'll save just by being a lying lowlife.