In light of a rollercoaster year, involving a flurry of (almost) willing men, save the teacher who balked at my apparently high profile office job, I made a decision. Christmas has never been big in my family, and the thought of scouring the South African coastline for new meat seemed to border on the ridiculeux.

Just this time last year I'd found myself a man half my age, a guy so willing to be tamed and taunted by an older woman, I'm certain he screamed out 'Zoology 101' mid-orgasm.

No. I'm tired of the concurrent melting pots of holiday makers all flocking to the Ballito's, Plett's and Kenton's of our country, and doing pretty much what they did last year, except now their conversations may be laced with talk of the global economic crunch, and not what horsepower their holiday speedboat is — only because this year, they can't afford to buy an extra motor.

The good old days…

The other snitch with Christmas holidaying, is that my married friends and their golden retrievers tend to go and shack up with their in-laws at their beach cottages, and pull up the handbrake only too readily when I reminisce the good old days of sitting semi-naked on a beach, with a bonfire and bottle of JC le Roux's finest, with a bunch of men in tow that we'd met a few hours before at the local pub. These activities, sadly, are becoming fewer and far between.

I wanted to go somewhere that didn't involve newly-engaged couplings, taking somewhat contrived-looking pictures of each other frolicking with dolphins on a Mauritian beach.

Nor did I want to breakfast in a hotel the next morning adjacent to couples-taking-package-holidays-together. You know the types — they'll moan and roll their eyes amongst their close-knit brethren when talking about the local food, or exclaim loudly: "This would never happen in Cape Town, next year we're going back there."

Couples who buy package deals together, because they spotted a special on the back of the Sunday Times, and although Mauritius or even Lech in Austria, for instance, offers a romantic setting of snow-capped peaks, skiing, log fires and schnapps, I have to ask when the last time was when these people actually copulated.

They tend to spend much of their holidays either disagreeing with each other, or complaining about that 'weird indescribable meat' they had to eat on their free breakfast.

Make hay while the sun shines

Perhaps I have just been subjected to some of the more indecently-vocal couples. They ought to drink in their surroundings, find themselves again, get randy, and make hay while the sun shines. On that note, I deliberately and emphatically decided to forego Mauritius, the Seychelles, Zanzibar, you know, those sort of island Mecca's that seem to germinate such smug married couples, and head instead, for Latin America — Cuba to be precise.

This very-difficult-and-expensive-to-get-to destination seems to offer me a personal menu of enterprises, directly correlated to my heart, it so turns out. Latino males.

Once in Argentina, an (incredibly loin-stirring) stranger walked up to me in a park, planted a sultry kiss directly onto my lips and exclaimed, "Welcome to Argentina!"

He didn't care from whence I had come, he didn't care if I worked in a bank, whether I ate with my mouth open; he didn't care if I was an axe murderer, come to think of it. And to top it off, I've never experienced a Latin-American man in my hotel room, drinking my coffee, and wrapped up in my crispy white sheet before. And what with the golden skin, and the shuttered balconies overlooking Havana, it does paint a pretty picture indeed.

Not to mention, of course, the frenetic energy the place seem to exude — the samba, where smoking hot men named Juan gaze into your soul as they shimmy up against you after too many mojitos.

Stuff Mauritius, I am heading to Cuba.

Perhaps I'll even hear wolf whistles from the streets when I ride around in a vintage 1950's car with the top down, in anticipation of taking my top down.