Bikepacking Cuba

This is a great 5-minute short on a 860-mile bikepacking trip across Cuba. You can read a full write up on the trip and see the full route here. I especially like how the film got it’s name “La Ruta Mala” which translates to “the bad way”:

The name of this route – ‘La Ruta Mala’, or ‘the bad way’ – came pretty easily, but its meaning is also multifaceted. Joe Cruz and I designed it by poring over satellite imagery, a couple of paper maps, and blogs and trip reports by other bike tourists. The majority of the reports floating around made it seem like tarmac roads were going to keep us from our dream of putting together a mostly dirt route across the country. But after starting the route, we quickly realized that was not going to be the case. In fact, many of the tracks we found in our research turned out to be even more rugged and challenging that we expected, and some of the rougher horse tracks likely haven’t even seen bicycles, much less cars. There were many incidents where locals flagged us down shouting that we were going the wrong way, or the bad way, and they insisted on giving us directions to a main road. We smiled and told them that we prefer the bad way.