Cuba

The Audaz, small and sleek, hung on the edge of an 8ft wave then plummeted. From the top of the bridge the movement was so revoltingly vertiginous that I worried about whimpering, but at least I could see it coming, cling to the nearest handhold and watch the bow bury itself in the hollow below. From the back, beside the fighting chair, they could see nothing and there were cries.

It was the first day of the 57th Ernest Hemingway International Billfishing Competition and I was trying to keep down the previous evening's dinner. The Havana skyline lay hot, weary and distant across the angry sea. Hemingway would not have approved if I had thrown up. No, he would have written: 'Nicoll was a Jock. Nicoll puked. Some Jock.' A few pages later, I would have been killed.

He offers a hard path, old Papa, even if you plan to veer away before that moment with the shotgun. By the end of two weeks, I would have scarred hands, molten sunburn and enough mosquito bites to frighten those beside the pool into thinking I had the pox. Of course, it doesn't have to be like that. In Cuba, there is also Hemingworld, the genteel, literary trail, and many follow it. You can't escape the writer in Havana.

Take the Ambos Mundos, a corner hotel in the old town. Havana life spills across its tiled ground floor. Hemingway lived here from 1932 to 1939, finishing For Whom the Bell Tolls. His room, 511, is now a shrine, the thin bed unslept in, windows theatrically thrown open to reveal the view across the fingered bay to the statue of Christ on the opposite shore.

Or there is El Floridita, with Hemingway's signature under the signs that read, 'Mi daiquiri en el Floridita'. Or La Bodeguita del Medio, where the barman claims the writer invented the mojito, Cuba's infamous mix of white rum, sugar and mint. Or the house in San Francisco de Paula, the Finca Vigia, or the sunworn town of Cojimar, where he kept his fighting boat, the Pilar.

That's the easy way to follow the writer's Cuban journey. People enjoy this, and why not? It should be reassuring when a writer creates destinations. I love the glade dedicated to Robert Louis Stevenson in my home town of Edinburgh; I even have a fondness for the gothic spike put up for Sir Walter Scott. Yet there's not much of Cuba in the dining room of Cojimar's La Terraza, only the happy chat of the Saga crowd.

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