The Sound Café, Bywater district, New Orleans

New Orleans is really the United States' only truly Caribbean city, and I felt going there with Walking to Guantánamo was a must. My good friend Martin Krusche, originally of Munich and Red Hook, Brooklyn, permanently resettled there shortly before hurricane Katrina, and then stuck it out despite having to evacuate just after his arrival. When I called him, he suggested a reading at Beth's books, in the Bywater.

Shortly after I met Martin, at the beginning of this millenium, he went to Cuba himself, taking his own bicycle and riding it the length of the country. In fact, I lent him the saddlebags I had originally had made in Trinidad, so those made a return journey. Martin was smart enough to take advantage of the prevailing winds, riding from Santiago to Havana, rather than the other way around, and said my advice, to take kevlar inner tubes for the bike, prevented him from having even a single flat tire. (I had dozens, recounted in the book in excruciating and, I hope, hilarious detail).

Hart McNee, doing his thing on the bass flute

One man doing the work of three: Michael Skinkus playing an entire set of batá on his own

To my surprise and joy Martin had put together a gang of musicians to introduce me and the book reading, and even cooked up a massive pot of Cuban black beans. The band launched the evening with a collection of orisha songs, invocations to the saints played on the trio of ceremonial drums called batá. Then I read from a chapter in which I had an encounter with the vodou lwa Gran Bwa.

Martin's friend Christine P. Horn was kind enough to host us in her home sight unseen, and when dropping off our bags there earlier in the afternoon I had seen a painting of Gran Bwa on the kitchen cabinet. It turned out that the painter and musician Hart McNee had painted it, and named one of his albums after that same spirit, a coincidence which seemed too great to ignore when choosing which chapter to read from.

Don't let Mr. Krusche's Bavarian regalia fool you; these were authentic Cuban black beans

The visit to New Orleans was full of coincidences; Tristan Thompson, who runs Beth's books and had done a fabulous job of promoting the event, turned out to have spent a winter at McMurdo station, Antarctica, about a decade ago...