View the full set of Vinales photos here
Sarah has a rational fear of flying Cubana Air. They have an appalling safety record and have a fleet of Russian Yak planes, one of which was involved in the recent crash that killed Russia’s ice hockey team resulting in that type of plane being banned in Russia for civilian use. This does not inspire confidence in an already nervous flyer, so rather than keep heading east we decided to make a move back to the west to check out that side of the island in our last week in Cuba. So that is how we came to spend two and a half days straight on the Viazul bus to get to Vinales, a picturesque small town four hours east of Havana.
I was still a bit ill on arrival and after desultorily picking at my lunchtime beans and rice I decided to read the guidebook about the area. It mentions a shuttle bus that goes around all the main sites which sounded like a good option. “Great, is it running this afternoon?” Sarah asked. Bear in mind that we had just spend the previous 21 hours of the past three days on a bus. I thought she was joking, but no, Sarah’s first instinct is to attack sightseeing hard. Bless her natural curiosity which is a great quality, but this time even she came to her senses and we returned to our incredibly noisy casa.
Lonely planet describes Vinales as being a sleepy little town with the only noise being the creaking of a rocking chair. What we found was a cacophony of rumbling trucks, horns honking, crazy touts at the bus, roosters, people yelling, dogs barking, kids yelling, angle grinders. Peaceful and sleepy it was not but we were in a decent room above someone’s house with a view of the very attractive hills in the area which was as good a place as any for me to continue feeling ill. Sarah woke during the first night and said it sounded like there was a cock fight going on outside which it not beyond the realms of possibility.
The casa owner was lovely in her concern, giving me fresh guava juice and cooking plain plantain for me to eat. It took another few days and about a week all up before I finally felt hungry again. I was doing gold medal winning farts in the meantime. I got up in the middle of the night and did five in a row that could not be beaten for depth, timbre and vibrancy, and this is even with my earplugs in.
We found one good paladar. It was one of the few places in Cuba where the food seemed to have some decent flavour, probably helped by the presence of chilli which had been entirely absent from all other cooking on the island. Curiously coconut is also rare in cooking. Apparently they use it in Baracoa in the far east but it beats me why they don’t use it elsewhere. It’s as though everyone is just cooking the few dishes that they know. Either that or they’re just serving up the same thing to all the tousistas. Whatever the case the food is decent but unyieldingly monotonous. The monotony was also broken up at the paladar by the arrival of some Havana Cubans on holiday. Cubans abhor silence and these guys were soon playing Lady Gaga quite loudly on their phone. When they entered one of the guys said “Are you tourists? We are Cubans from Havana. I am gay. Do you mind?” It was as though he said he was going to smoke and whether it would bother us. I think when gay people come out in Cuba it tends to be in a very loud Cuban way, when they come out they come out all the way.
The Pinar del Rio province which contains the small town of Vinales is famous for its tobacco. We did a bike tour which stopped first at a tobacco farm where we saw the drying shed and then had the farmer roll us a cigar. It’s a very simple and natural process, just a few of the leaves bunched up and wrapped in another leaf. The tobacco farmer asked me how old I was and seemed surprised when I said 34. “You obviously don’t work outside”, he said. Nor do I roll and smoke a cigar for every tour group that comes through. He explained that the word for country folk in Cuba, guajiro, derives from ‘war hero’ (unverified). This dates from when the farmers took up machetes to fight in the US-Spanish-Cuban war of independence.
It’s really beautiful countryside around here once you get away from the bustle of the town. The mountains are an unusual shape caused by erosion and subsidance of land more than tectonic plates or volcanoes. The area is famous for its caves. We spent a couple of hours just riding through the tobacco farms on a red dirt road which made an exceedingly nice change from being stuck on the road behind truck fumes.
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