We caught the red-eye from JFK to Reykjavik, Iceland. It’s around a five and a half hour flight that leaves at 8pm local time. You do the math. We arrived at 6am local time to a rough landing in driving wind and rain, a filthy dog of a day. We got out of the plane and on to a cold shuttle bus to the terminal, not really what your body wants to be doing when it thinks it’s the middle of the night. We then caught another shuttle bus into the city which dropped everyone at their hotel door in typical Scandanavian efficiency. Unfortunately we were last to be dropped off and eventually got to our hostel at 8am with barely a glimmer of light showing on the horizon.
Happily the pain ended there. The rest of our travels in Iceland were unbelievably smoothly run and organised. Iceland has been dominated by Denmark and Norway in its history and Scandanavian design has rubbed off on everything here, from the toilet flush to the alcove to place your bags, everything is simple and functional. It’s much like living in an Ikea catalogue without having to assemble anything. The only weird thing was the complete absence of double beds, everywhere had two singles pushed together, but after soaking for two hours in a hot tub (or hot pot as the Icelandic call them) these sort of details take on an insignificant air.
One of the pools in Reykjavik actually recommends a good soak in a hot pot as a remedy for jetlag and we can confirm that it is indeed a very pleasant way to overcome the grey fatigue associated with air travel. On our first day, after a brief sleep, we went to a nearby cafe which we chose mainly because the driving rain made wandering around looking for other choices an unattractive proposition. Happily, Cafe Haiti served an amazing creamy fish soup with a bit of spice as well as beautiful smoked salmon on toast with a creamy horseradish sauce on the side. It truly hit the spot, probably the best meal during our time in Iceland. We then walked through the cold grey streets, buffeted by a murderous wind and light drizzle, to a suburban pool about 15 minutes from our hostel. $4 each to get in and access outdoor hot pots of four different temperatures ranging from 36 to 42 degrees. All the locals were out as well enjoying a break from the beginning winter. It was truly blissful to lie in warm water as our hair was ruffled by the wind and dampened by drizzle. The sun, which barely made the effort of getting out of bed, was gone by this time and just the soft lights of the outdoor pool remained.
Kids practiced their swimming in the nearby 25m pool. The instructor/lifeguard yelling at them from outside the pool was dressed in a heavy duty hooded parka and boots with the pant cuffs taped shut. This was not a balmy summers day scene but bizarrely the pool was still packed. After a reasonable two hour soaking and a few laps we dragged our water logged limbs off to the supermarket for some food. Iceland has a reputation for some bizarre food, the most horrible sounding being purifying shark, which we didn’t see. They also eat puffins but numbers are on the decline so this particular avenue of gastronomy might be in trouble. The only weird thing we saw at the supermarket was a cooked sheep’s head, packaged much like a roast chook. They also sell ready-to-eat packets of dried fish which taste truly horrible but obviously do something better for the locals.
We conservatively chose to get some skyr which is a delicious yoghurt-type drink. Most of the food is imported. Iceland catches a lot of fish and has a lot of sheep roaming the hills with fleece that looks like a huge mop has been draped over their back, but apart from a few greenhouses not much of the land is arable. It probably doesn’t help when volcanoes deposit masses of ash all over the place. It’s probably partly because of all the food importing that eating out in Iceland is insanely expensive. It’s not unusual to see mains at $40-$70. The average price is around $30 for a typical restaurant. In fact, everything is pretty damn expensive in Iceland which explains why we only had six days to drive around the country.
The following day our rental car was delivered to the hostel and we paid on a portable credit card reader. They picked the car up at the end of the trip as well. And with that we hit the road for our Icelandic road trip.
New York, a sophisticated and interesting city, seemed even more modern and organised after a month in Cuba. No more crumbling buildings and monotonous cuisine in the city where you can get great tasting food almost anywhere, anytime.
That said, our accommodation was way worse in New York. After a while in Cuba you get used to paying $25 for a high-ceilinged room in a expansive house with a palm-filled courtyard. In New York we literally had a room you could not swing a cat in (not that I tried). Just one small double bed with no other furniture other than a mirror which turned up on the wall halfway through our stay, heating that didn’t work too well, classic grungy hostel bathrooms and noisy kids who yelled at each other all night. For all that, we just jammed the ear plugs in and collapsed on to our bed after walking the city each day and most of the night, so it did the job.
New York has to be the best city for walking in the world. There is something happening on every corner, food to replenish you on every block and before you know it you’ve walked from one end of Manhattan to the other and your lower back is screaming for mercy. We were staying right next to Central Park so on our first morning we took a lovely stroll through the Autumn leaves on a beautiful sunny day. The previous day had been the New York marathon so there were lots of people there with finishing medals taking a post-race stroll. We also came across a woman who was still running the race with the aid of a walking frame and some burly guardian angels. In true NYC fashion they had motivational music playing for her as she slowly made her way along the course.
The park also had a harp busker, melodic singers and ice skating which all set the mood perfectly for the Museum of Modern Art. MOMA is like a best of for contemporary art with probably the best example from each artist and period that you could think of. It is appropriately busy as well, almost jam packed on a Monday afternoon. There was also a very cool design exhibit which had a lot of technology design (think infographics) which I was unaware had crossed from blogs to the gallery world.
We next tracked down a lunch place. I had an awesome sandwich. God they do good sandwiches. It was not hot pastrami, instead a flame grilled steak (none of your fast food type steak here, a beautiful piece of meat) which was then thinly sliced and served in a bun with hot jus on the side. Sarah had a big salad, and we we say big we really mean enormous. Americans can’t seem to abide lettuce unless it’s in huge quantities with a nice dressing.
Then the walking continued, on to the elevated park downtown. This is a fantastic initiative where an old elevated train track that was going to be pulled down was instead converted to a park. The design is fantastic. You stroll along above the traffic and catch scenic glimpses of the New York skyline. It’s a very peaceful place amongst a busy city. You can sit perched above the street watching the traffic flow by from specially designed viewing platforms. It was a great way to spend twilight in the city.
Next we wandered on down through the meat packers district, which is now full of boutique shops, and tried to track down the 9/11 memorial. When we finally got there it turns out that you need to book ahead because demand is so great. When we finally got in the next day and showed our tickets to four different sets of security guards the memorials themselves were very fitting. They have left the huge holes in the ground and turned them into waterfalls. The noise of the water competes with the chaos of the city and anchors you in the place. The water is cleansing and continuous.
Sarah fell in love in New York with hot buttered cider. Strictly speaking this was my drink but I can see how you could be tempted. Hot cider on a cool Autumn morning alone would be worth it, but when they but some butter in and sprinkle the hot butter froth with cinnamon you have a totally different and delicious beast on your hands. Let’s face it, butter makes everything taste good. We also had our mandatory slice of pizza which is about as tasty as fast food pizza gets. Our biggest scam (they do happen in western cities as well) was a $9 slice of cheesecake in a Times Square cafe which we only went in to use the toilet. Admittedly it was the size of my head but it didn’t go down so well about an hour after breakfast. One night we went a bit upmarket and had a nice dinner in the west village which felt extraordinarily decadent. We were going to a play nearby with a series of vignettes about gay marriage which was as entertaining as it sounds and featured among others the guy from Sex and the City who played the jazz double bass player Carrie dates briefly (Sarah Race can picture him I’m sure – he’s filled out a lot since then).
Occupy Wallstreet was interesting to wander through. It seemed like a fairly random collection of people who just wanted to complain about something. I’m sure there is a valid movement at the core but the rabble collected in the city was not coming across coherently at all. Complaints we read varied from the ban on smoking to the use of recruitment agencies.
On our last morning we went to the public library to look at an amazing free exhibition featuring some of their treasures including the original Winnie the Pooh toys, a Gutenberg bible, notes from Malcolm X’s diary, a draft of the US constitution, notes from Virginia Woolfe’s diary, a draft of Borges’ writing. It was interesting to see the draft process from a lot of famous writers.
And with that we winged our way on the red eye to Iceland after an (as usual) thoroughly enjoyable stay in the Big Apple.
I have sympathy for people who get lost in Mexico City. It’s the kind of place where every street seems to look familiar, there is sketchy sign posting and confusing street layout. The procedure when arriving at the airport is to go to an official taxi counter, tell them where you’re going and pay in advance. At least by doing this you know that your driver isn’t going to drive around in circles running up the meter and in theory you have less chance of being robbed. Mexico City taxi drivers are renowned for robbery which must be like taking candy from altitude sickness affected babies.
To be fair to our taxi driver we were going to an address on the outskirts of the city, a fair way out, but it’s not a good sign when you get in the taxi, tell the taxi driver where you’re going, and he gets out to ask the other taxi drivers where the hell it is. Despite getting directions our young driver got lost fairly early in our journey before getting himself back on track, but gut instinct will only get you so far in a city as gargantuan as this one. He must have asked for directions about half a dozen times, most memorably from a ghost. A large part of our reason for going back to Mexico from Cuba was for the Day of the Dead celebrations which coincide with Halloween so it wasn’t a surprise to see a lot of people dressed up, but when your taxi driver is asking directions from a ghost, and the ghost is gesticulating wildly in a manner that suggests you’re not very close to where you’re trying to get to, it’s discouraging to say the least. Eventually we stopped at a payphone and rang Isaac at the Gonzalez family home where we were staying and got him to talk to the taxi driver. Even so he had to stop and ask directions once more as well as reverse the wrong way up a freeway. We must have been in the car for well over two hours before we finally arrived. We couldn’t help but feel a bit sorry for the driver who was probably going to get into a heap of trouble for taking so long delivering us when he could have been picking up other customers. His boss rang from time to time and the driver had to admit to being very lost.
Altitude sickness is a strange beast. No-one can predict who will be afflicted. It doesn’t matter how fit you are, what gender or what age. We took it easy the day after we got into Mexico City and had a much needed internet chore day which was very productive but by the time night rolled around Sarah was feeling very unwell. She was cold (which is not highly unusual) but also had aching bones and started to feel nauseous. We didn’t even think of it flying in but Mexico City is higher than the highest mountain in Australia. Admittedly Australia is not famous for high mountains but even so, this is a really high city. Altitude sickness is much like getting a really bad flu. In the time Sarah was struck down her symptoms included nausea, vomiting, lethargy, sleeplessness, aches, sneezing, runny nose, diarrhoea, fever, throbbing headache, loss of appetite and a cough. Individually these symptoms are annoying but add them altogether and it’s pretty miserable.
Sarah threw up for a lot of that night and then gamely got in the taxi we had booked the following morning to take us to the bus station. This was not going to be a pleasant 20 minute taxi ride but a journey through Mexico City, which in our experience is never simple. Sarah got in the passenger seat, put the seat all the way back with a coat over her and a scarf over her eyes. We then went over a million speed bumps. Mexico is addicted to the speed bump and I tend to think it’s a very necessary traffic control device. Without them the traffic would be even more insane. But when you’re not feeling well the last thing you need is constant accelerating and braking over a million of them. The taxi driver also had a compulsion for changing lanes as though he would find the magical path through all this traffic. Instead he just found a bus pulling out or some other slowdown. Undaunted by the way the traffic crept forward, every time there was five metres of space he zoomed into second gear before finding to his shock that he had to slam his brakes on again when the traffic inevitably slowed down again. This was annoying for me and I didn’t feel to bad. Sarah just lay quietly being jiggled around in her seat, I’m sure wishing she was anywhere else in the world.
When we finally arrived after about 90 minutes of this Sarah dragged herself to a bench outside the station and lay down with her head on a bad and coat covering her while I went off to sort out the tickets. We were off to Patzcuaro, a small town to the west of Mexico City famed for its day of the dead celebrations. It is a little lower in altitude which we hoped in vain would help with Sarah’s altitude sickness. In the end Sarah spent virtually all of our week in Mexico lying in bed. Fortunately the hotel room in Patzcuaro had a spectacular view and an open fireplace, so if you had to be sick this was a great place to do it.
We had a pretty quiet time but did drag ourselves out of bed at 11pm on the night of the Day of the Dead to go to a couple of cemeteries. Day of the Dead has echoes of Halloween but has different roots. Day of the Dead dates back to before the arrival of Spaniards in the Americas. The Indian belief is that on this one day of the year their relatives come back from the dead to visit and have a bit of a yarn. People set up shrines for their dead relatives with something to drink (spirits are thirsty after the long journey from the underworld) and all their favourite foods. The graves are also elaborately decorated with orange marygold flowers and candles. Everyone gathers down at the cemetery and spends the night by the grave with a fire going and some warm drinks. The atmosphere is fantastic. There are lots of kids running around and at the entrance to one of the cemeteries we visited there were food stalls and trampolines set up for the kids. To me it felt like mystical camping. I think it would be a great tradition to have in Australia. It’s very peaceful and warm-spirited.
In the coming days we went to Uruapan simply because it was 500 metres lower and descending is the only sure-fire cure for altitude sickness. It was a more industrial and lived in city than Patzcuaro and had a lovely huge park near the centre of town with a river running through it and sculpted waterfalls. On the way there in a taxi we were stopped by the Federales. These guys don’t mess around. This guy was standing in the middle of the road packing heat as he waved us down. As soon as we stopped he questioned the driver, hand on gun the whole time. Where are you coming from, where are you going, and where are you going after that. There is a big police presence in Mexico for obvious reasons. The drug cartels cause a lot of violence. Luckily we didn’t even see a hint of it but it’s was a sad reminder of the violence plaguing this otherwise wonderful country.
As I took an orientating walk in Uruapan on the first night, in other words, got lost, I noticed lots of political posters for an upcoming election. Not only were there cars driving by blaring music and voting encouragement, a light plane flew overhead with loudspeakers blaring. I wonder why they never thought of that in the Blues Brothers.
We got the bus back to Mexico City without incident and are now waiting for our flight to Newark where we will gratefully suck in the oxygen rich atmosphere of a sea level city.
We didn’t get a really good look at Havana the first time around. Sure, we walked along the Malecon (a sea wall that stretches along the harbour front), we got scammed, had a nice dinner overlooking the fort and got an afternoon of Afro Cuban drumming across the street from our casa, but we didn’t fully explore the old quarter and boy are we glad we came back and gave it a thorough going over. Old Havana is being lovingly restored by a passionate local architect and the results are amazing, especially in contrast to the crumbling decay in the rest of the city. It feels more like an old European city with soft lights and a genteel feeling. It helps that cars are not allowed in. Being able to stroll along the street without noisy belching traffic is a rare luxury in Cuba.
I had been feeling more recovered from my food poisoning when I contracted another dose on my first night in Havana. We went to a restaurant recommended by the casa owner. I had half of my fried fish which didn’t taste too fresh and palmed most of the remainder off to the waiting street cats who exuded a tough, rather than cute, attitude. One of the cats sneezed on my leg under the table but as I didn’t lick my leg I’m pretty sure that didn’t give me the food poisoning. This bout caused me to throw up a lot which made a nice change. It didn’t really kick in until the following night by which time we had managed a good stroll around the city with a couple of museums and the camera obscura. I don’t know how Havana came to have a camera obscura installed but it is surprisingly cool. The camera obscura has a surprisingly long history. It is a device which reflects light through a pinhole to reproduce reality in a darkened room. The one in Havana had an operator who spun the camera around for a 360 degree view of the city and could change the focus. She took great delight in showing us where her husband’s car was parked, telling us that he didn’t know that she could spy on it. The image has a paint-like quality to it which makes moving objects, like laundry flapping on the line, appear all the more surreal.
Despite being a bit ill I had made a commitment to go out salsa dancing to practice what we had learned. First we had a few forts to look at in the blistering morning heat. Havana has a long history being founded in 1592. It was used as a gathering point of the Spanish flotilla before they sailed back to Spain after they had plundered all the gold from the Americas. Pirates of the Caribbean is not a whimsical film title, they really did exist and sacked towns mercilessly. In the end Havana had three forts and a gate which they pulled over the mouth of the harbour every night. This didn’t save them from the British who set up camp on a ridge opposite the harbour in 1762 and shelled the crap out of the city. The Brits held Havana for a year before peace broke out and they traded Havana for Florida. The forts are in impressive shape and work is still going on to restore them.
For dinner that night we craved anything but the standard Cuban meal so we went to a Middle Eastern restaurant. The food was fine but had been put the the usual Cuban blandifier. The most unusual part of the night was the animal begging at our table. It’s usual to get some dogs and cats hanging around but at this place there was a white rabbit which hopped up on its hind paws, front paws crossed, to beg for food. It gulped down the cabbage Sarah gave it, as well as some onion. We have no idea whether this is good for a rabbit or not but it sure enjoyed it. Four other rabbits were kept in a large bell-shaped cage at the back of the restaurant’s courtyard so I guess this is some kind of gimmick. Either that or they have a rabbit special on the menu every now and then.
Sarah got us tickets to see some Cuban contemporary dance in a grand old theatre much like the state theatre in Sydney. The dancing was much like you would see in Sydney as well, which is to say very good but abstract at times. We’re not really sure how this Cuban choreographer managed to be so on the world pulse in terms of current contemporary dance ideas.
Then it was our turn. We took a stab in the dark and went to a nearby music house that has a variety of different music on different nights. Our energy levels were low so by the time we lined up, paid, got in and realised that tonight was latina video DJ night we couldn’t be bothered tracking down any live music. We were probably too early for the real action to start but once there was a big enough crowd on the dancefloor to cover us we shuffled out and did our very basic salsa moves. No-one laughed at me so I escaped unscathed and Sarah kindly said I did very well. We decided not to do the dirty dancing lift in the end, not wanting to show off. There were a few western sugar daddies doing the white man upper bite as their much younger dates cavorted around them. We then got our final bicicletta through the potholed and darkened streets to our casa.
Our taxi to the airport had the blessing of air-conditioning as well as an interesting taxi driver who had been in the Cuban military when they were sent to Ethiopia to fight Somalia. He drove big trucks over there so he seemed capable of getting through Havana traffic without incident.
We weren’t really sorry to be leaving Cuba, a month felt like more than enough. The country is so full of contrasts for us. A lot of people are genuinely warm and friendly but a lot of them were simply trying to get money out of us. The political system provides free healthcare and education (to an extent) but there is no public transport. It’s very easy as a tourist to travel around but Cubans are not allowed to leave their own country. Music is everywhere but often the same refrains are belted out every time. There is a lot of potential for tropical food but the cooking is monotonous and uninspired.
It’s impossible to separate the strands of communism, the embargo and the poor Cuban economy. If this is an experiment is socialism it was never given a proper chance to succeed. Cuba has done amazingly well to get this far with little international support. It is a small country and by no means down and out. The people have pride and a lot of joy but they definitely want change and to open the country up more.
We felt claustrophobic just visiting for a month so I can’t imagine how it feels to live there all the time. It probably helps if you like salsa and don’t mind the heat.
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.
We arrived at the Bayamo bus station after a 90 minute taxi ride from the Sierra Maestra over typically rough Cuban roads with an hour before the Viazul bus arrived. Viazul is the tourist bus service, priced a little too high for the locals to use much. For some reason everyone advises you to get to the bus station an hour before the bus arrives to buy a ticket, but whenever we did that (which was every time) they refused to sell us a ticket until the bus actually arrived so they could see how many spare seats there were. It’s lucky we were travelling in low season or we would have had to be much more organised which is difficult in a country with telecommunications and customer service as bad as Cuba (just for the record, the Viazul lady in Camaguey is a complete bi-atch).
When we got out of the taxi at the bus station there were the usual guys crowding around asking us where we were going. We ignored them and got into the station to settle into the hard plastic seats they make specially for such locations when it occurred to Sarah to go and check exactly how much it would cost to get a taxi from here to Santiago. She came back with a quote for CUC$40 which was a fair bit more expensive than the bus so we settled in for the hours wait. A tout then came to find us offering to take us for $25 which was about $5 more expensive than the bus all up. Why not, we thought. The taxi driver was a nice bald old guy without all his teeth and a ready laugh. He wasn’t entirely sure where the casa was located in Santiago but was sure that it was in the centre of town and that we could just ask when we got there, which is often how it works in Cuba.
The drive was unremarkable apart from the incredibly bad diesel fumes. I don’t think air-conditioning works in any Cuban taxi, even though this one was relatively modern, so we barrelled down the highway with all the windows open. This is fun until you get stuck behind a huge old truck belching out a massive cloud of thick black diesel fumes. As diesel is cheaper over here a lot of the vehicles have been converted to run on it but not in a modern super eco-friendly sense. By the time we arrived in Santiago, the hottest place we had been in Cuba yet, we just wanted to get out of the car.
While Santiago has the advantage to those trying to navigate its streets of not being purposefully designed as a maze it has a few tricks up its sleeves. Like many towns in Cuba the streets have new and old names which changed after the revolution. Many people don’t seem to know both which can lead to issues. The streets in the old town are incredibly narrow which makes the going slow. The biggest disadvantage is that most of the streets aren’t signposted so you have no idea what they’re called even if you do find the right street. Some have old metal plaques attached to the wall with the name faded but often these have fallen off. The old town of Santiago is all one way streets so if you don’t know where you’re going there is lots of looping around. Our taxi driver admitted right at the start of the journey that he didn’t know where he was going but fear not, we would just ask people, and to be fair he did that very well. We must have asked about a dozen people, all of whom were dead certain they knew the way, but either they were wrong, were bad at giving directions, or our taxi driver was incredibly bad at following directions. He kept saying to Sarah in Spanish, “I really do know Santiago, just not this street”. We circled our casa about a dozen times until eventually a kind-hearted mechanic jumped in the car with us (maybe he had seen us go around a few times) and guided us in personally. The taxi driver was jumping out of his skin with happiness that we had arrived. We were relieved to get into our very nice and quiet casa for a lie down.
Lonely Planet warns that Santiago is the worst place in Cuba for touts but the writing in that tome is highly hyperbolic so we took that with a grain of salt. We weren’t ripped off too badly. There was the tour of museums we did with a private car where they dutifully drove us around to all the museums, all of which were closed *because* it was raining. It’s some kind of bizarre Cuban thing that cultural activities taking place indoors close as soon as they see the first raindrops spattering down. It seems unlikely that the guys driving us around wouldn’t know this, but they were at least informative.
Now we were being scammed for smaller amounts. We went to the casa de tradicionnes, a music house famous for eclectic musical offerings. On the way a cheerful youth accosted us with “Hey, where you from?”. We had a brief chat and he tagged along as we went into the music house so Sarah paid his $2 entry and bought him a $1 beer. There was then a disjointed Spanish conversation until our new friend excused himself, in retrospect to grab his friend who spoke better English than him. His friend was super skinny with crooked teeth and a scar on his cheek. He leaned against the table as he chatted with Sarah. All creatures seem to be able to tell that Sarah is a soft touch. Her kind heart shines out through her face so as a consequence she gets the majority of tout attention. It helps that she speaks a smattering of Spanish as well. So the skinny scarred guy is chatting to Sarah and then asks her “Are you open?”. This got my ears pricked up but Sarah didn’t hear what he said over the music and asked him to repeat himself. The skinny guy looked nervously at me and asked Sarah if we were married. I could see Sarah about to launch into the whole “we’re not married but…” story so I said “Just tell him we’re married”. This obviously confused the skinny guy because he started on his chat up lines:
“Your eyes are as blue as pimming swools.” – sorry, this is an obscure Degrassi Junior High reference. I’ll buy a special present for anyone who can tell me the context without resorting to an internet search, and I work on the internet so I’ll know if you cheat.
“Your eyes are as blue as….”
We couldn’t hear what he said so Sarah yelled at him to repeat it.
“Your eyes are as blue as…”, this time he also made a hand gesture upward.
“My eyes are as blue as the sky?” Sarah yelled back.
“Your eyes are as blue as the sky”, nervous smile from skinny guy.
“Thanks”.
Never mind that Sarah doesn’t have blue eyes. Obviously all western girls have them, as anyone who has done the English for Touts course would know. By this stage the band had broken into playing Guantanamera, that common refrain popularised by the Buena Vista Social Club which you hear everywhere in Cuba.
“You have a beautiful smile.”
“What?”
“You have a beautiful smile.”
By this stage I just wanted Sarah to give the guy some small change so we could leave, but he had to launch into his story about a sick wife in the hospital. We heard him out and Sarah gave him a $3 note. He looked decidedly unimpressed. I patted his friend on the shoulder as we left. When you consider the average worker makes $10 a month they did ok for ten minutes of small talk.
This situation worked out a lot better than the story a fellow traveller Carsten told us. He went out drinking with two German girls and they were joined by a Cuban guy for whom they bought a drink. They ordered another round for themselves and magically a drink turned up for the Cuban guy as well. Carsten went to the bar to pay for the drinks he and the German girls had ordered. When the barman came to get the money for the drink from the Cuban guy he asked Carsten to pay which he reluctantly did but got pissed off and refused to buy him any more drinks. By this stage another Cuban guy had joined them and was hitting on one of the German girls. She wasn’t interested but he kept pestering her. One of the Cuban guys said to Carsten that all foreign women come to Cuba to have sex with Cuban guys and that they should consider themselves lucky that Cuban guys look at them because Cuban men are the best in the world. Eventually Carsten left but heard the next day that these guys had followed the girls back to their casa. The girls were banging on the door to their casa but the owner had gone to bed. The guys started pawing them and trying to kiss them, calling themselves lesbians when they didn’t respond. Eventually the girls just yelled at them “yes, we are lesbians, now leave us alone.” I have not been sexually harassed yet but surely it’s only a matter of time.
We had a salsa lesson in Santiago. We found our teacher during a music performance in the afternoon where he asked Sarah to dance and guided her around a few simple steps. The next morning it was my turn as well. We took up a small corner of the bar, cleared a few chairs out of the way, and launched into the first step. This involves stepping to the side, back to the middle, then stepping to the other side, in time with the other person and preferably in time to the music. We had this mastered pretty fast so we moved on to step two, which is similar but consists of stepping back while the other person steps forward, returning to the middle neutral position, then doing the opposite with the other leg. Step three is where it started getting complicated. It is step two but moving Sarah around in a circle. I could generally manage this until Sarah started talking which made me lose count and completely forget which leg was supposed to be doing what. We seemed to be providing entertainment for the bar at least and any passing pedestrians watching what must be for them like teaching an adult to crawl. By this stage I was pouring sweat again as I took a break and watched our teacher, a cool older Afro-Cuban man in white shoes, show Sarah how to do a turn. We did a couple of successful turns ourselves and that was pretty much an hour done. I’m not sure at what point it becomes fun but we’ll try it out live before we leave Cuba.
After the salsa class we met a fellow traveller, a German guy called Carsten who spoke fluent English and Spanish. He had done an exchange in Canada when younger and taught in Adelaide briefly. It turns out that he was caught in the exact same scam as us in Havana, although they told him there was a free salsa festival, not a free concert by the Buena Vista Social Group. He had spoken to seven other couples who had also been caught out, so it’s doing quite well for the Cubanos in Havana. I’m not sure the Santiago guys have heard of that one yet. Funnily enough in Santiago that night a free concert was being planned by an apparently famous group called Los Van Van (who have won a Latin grammys). So despite this sounding like exactly the kind of thing a scammer would say we heard about the concert from lots of different sources and saw that one of the big plazas had been setup for a concert. We still weren’t sure by 9pm as it had been raining most of the day but we thought we would give it a try. The taxi driver got us halfway to the venue before he told is that the concert had been moved and asked for an extra dollar to take us there. This made us immediately suspicious but we agreed. It turns out the concert had been moved from the square to the concert hall next door, so I’m not sure what the extra dollar was for. Carsten snagged a few tickets for about $1 each and we headed in, or at least tried to.
Event management in Cuba is not as smoothly done as other parts of the world I’ve seen. The crowd became jammed trying to get into the one open door and everyone started yelling at each other. We just stood back and waited for the passage to become unblocked which took a strangely long time given that once we got in there where plenty of spare seats on the mezzanine level where we found ourselves. The venue was not dissimilar in layout to the Opera House but was a very different vibe to most gigs I’ve been to there. There was booty shaking everywhere. The crowd went nuts during the songs. The atmosphere was electric and the band were off the hook. They had three trombones, two electric organs, four singers, two guys on percussion and two electric violins. They incessantly pumped out salsa tunes that sounded similar to my ears but kept me moving for close to three hours. One of the singers was doing hip shakes like Elvis. The best part of the gig was all the random people invited up on stage to dance, little girls, older women humping the floor, fat ladies shaking their booty. Towards the end of the gig security guards came on stage to try and clear people off. They kept dancing as they were escorted to the edge of the stage. The most manic dancer, a woman in white, kept running away from the security guard and he eventually just gave up. We had only one tourist moment when an incredibly drunk man came up to us and offered us a swig of rum. We all declined. He stood in front of me then told Sarah it was his birthday. She wished him a happy birthday. He then asked for a dollar as a present. Sarah laughed and said no. When Sarah moved aside he told Carsten that Sarah has asked Carsten to give him a dollar. Having no luck he stumbled off. We saw him later attempting to stumble on stage for a dance but he was an easy stop for the security guard.
While in Santiago we broke a golden rule of travelling by going to a restaurant recommended by a tout. He was a very helpful tout who gave us directions and accompanied us down to the water to look at the mountains over the harbour. The next night, all things being equal among food in Cuba, we decided that this paladar was probably as good as any other restaurant in the city, and it was in a decent location. So we arrived at the empty restaurant to his delight and I bought a bottle of black market 15 year old rum. We ate chicken. I woke up in the middle of the night feeling unwell.
To be fair, my illness could have been caused by the street ice-cream we had, another bad idea, or the local cake with thick egg white icing, or the street pizza. It’s not really important once it happens why it happened. All you know is that you feel crook. So I spent the next two and half days lying in bed with no appetite and frequent trips to the toilet. Sarah was a very patient nurse. It was nowhere near as bad as my worst food poisoning incident. Those of you who followed my travels through Europe might recall the dodgy sausage I ate from the street vendor in Milan that caused me to get off the train to Venice early in order to lie as weak as a kitten in a Verona hostel where I threw up every little sip of water I drank.
This was just boring old travellers’ diarrhoea which we made the mistake of treating with gastro-stop, not realising that this is really emergency medication for if you need to sit on a bus for eight hours and is not the best treatment for curing the illness. We’re bombarding it with antibiotics now with some improvement which you would hope for by day six.
If you’re going to start a revolution in a very hot climate it makes sense to me to set up your base in the mountains. That’s sure as hell what I would do. No slogging it out on the hot plains for me, I would be sitting up in the cloud forest with a jungle garden and a group of female fighters while my enemies slogged around in the forest looking for me. Fidel Castro and I are of the same mind on this, in fact this was exactly the blueprint Castro followed in his guerilla campaign of 1958 and ’59. I might be glossing over the difficulties of his situation slightly but from what we saw of his jungle hideout he had a pretty sweet six months up there.
We got to the hideout by a less arduous method than the revolutionaries although there was still a muddy jungle trek to content with. From Camaguey we went south to the small and sleepy town of Bayamo where we discovered that not all casas are created equally (although they all charge a very similar price). As in Camaguey when we arrived at the casa we had booked we were given the palm off to a nearby casa, not that there was much difference in our minds as we arranged the original casa through the unofficial casa owners network and had no idea what the place was like. As a result of the palm off we ended up in a basic room with lumpy beds above a blaring TV, but in had air-con so I’ll quit my whinging now. To be fair they did serve up one of the nicest breakfasts in one of the worst settings. We were jammed into a dining room with barely enough room for the small table, jammed in between the kitchen and the living room. A random assortment of people watched a soap opera (which was quite entertaining) while omelette was cooked for us with half decent cheese and ham. Add some fresh rolls, the option of peanut butter and plenty of fresh fruit and we were in breakfast heaven. It always pays to have fat hosts.
We shifted after that to the old hotel on the main square which was not much more expensive and a whole lot quieter. They had clocks in the lobby showing the time in London, Spain, Berlin and Cuba, but the Cuban clock had stopped running. Time has stopped for Cuban food as well. We ate in the hotel restaurant one night just from lack of choice. We ordered two ‘salade naturelles’ which it turns out is sliced cucumber on a plate (one for each of us) with an unidentified white creamy substance on the skin of the cucumber which I hoped was cheese that had been left on the knife while the cucumber was being sliced. We were the only people in the 50-seater restaurant and were scratching the depths of conversation for an hour. Given that we are doing almost everything together and lack no opportunity for talking, extra talking time over dinner can be a bit redundant. Finally our very tasty traditional rice dish arrived, much like a risotto, served in typical surly government-run restaurant fashion by our waitress.
There is no greater example of the differences between the capitalist free market system and the communist system than the way it affects customer service. I don’t wish to trivialise communist revolutions but it is the most striking difference for a tourist. The capitalist free market is represented by the touts who bend over backwards to sell you something, anything that you want they can find. They are pushy and obnoxious but incredibly useful in getting things done. The workers in government-run restaurants and hotels represent the communist system. They have no incentive for you to enjoy your stay as their job is secure and funded. As a result most of the time when you enter they look as though you’ve just inconvenienced them by disturbing their spare time as they sit bored in the empty restaurant. Dining in a government-run restaurant in Cuba is the closest I have come to an authentic Fawlty Towers experience.
Bayamo is a quiet town. One of our most exciting nights was when we had a beer overlooking the trickle of a creek. A couple of flies were walking across the table, which was pretty exciting in itself, but then our new best friend, Mr Green Lizard, wandered onto the table and proceded to pounce on and catch six flies in a row. We were just entranced watching him sneak up and catch these flies with a lightning fast lunge. We started to will more flies to land on the table so that we could watch him catch more. Eventually his belly must have been so full of fly that he jumped off the table to sit in the sun and digest.
From Bayamo we took a taxi to Santo Domingo in the heart of the Sierra Maestra range. Santo Domingo is one dirt street but what a setting! Nestled in a verdant valley peppered with pigs and goats, banana trees, sugar cane and coffee plantations you couldn’t ask for a more peaceful or picturesque setting. We stayed in the government hotel and got the expected government service at lunch but for dinner that night we went to a local paladar, which is the restaurant equivalent to casa particulares, home run enterprises that have been licensed by the government to serve the public. Here we had stewed goat and crispy banana chips, the best in Cuba so far. We also had a guava milkshake, the first and only example of this delicious treat that we had while in the country. If you’re ever in the area, we don’t know the ladies name but just ask for the paladar next door to the library, it’s well worth it.
We had an appetite that night because we had earned it with a walk through the jungle to one of Castro’s bases in his guerilla fight against Batista. In a very brief summary, Castro first attacked the Batista government in a bungled raid on the barracks in Santiago de Cuba, the second biggest city in Cuba at the other end of the island. This happened in 1953 but when he was caught Castro was jailed and then exiled. From Mexico he gathered forces and with 82 men returned to Cuba in 1956 on a ship called the Granma. In another bungle they landed in the wrong spot and were quickly routed by the army. The scattered force headed to the nearby mountains to regroup and start a guerilla movement. The camp we visited was Castro’s base for six months and was one of many that he moved between. No-one knew the location of all the camps but Castro.
There is a five kilometre uphill stretch to the start of the walk which we got a lift up in a 4WD. The road is insanely steep. I’ve often wondered what it would look like on some hills if rather than snaking around in hairpin turns the road just went straight up. Look no further for the answer, you get gradients of 45% which can only be attempted in a 4WD despite in being paved.
Once at the top of that hill it’s a mere six kilometre return hike on a muddy rock strewn path. Beats my why he couldn’t locate his rebel base somewhere a bit more accessible. This walk was actually a lot easier than the hike to the waterfall near Trinidad, partly because it was cooler up in the mountains and a little less steep for this particular walk, although I imagine the nearby three day trek up Cuba’s highest mountain has some challenging moments.
We were being guided on this walk by Alexi (the name is part of a trend of Cuban childrens names from that era with Russian overtones) the mandatory walk guide. Luckily he was very informative with understandable English. He is yet another Cuban teacher who has moved into the tourist business, I’m sure not coincidentally right around the time he had his first child, though he didn’t explicitly make that link for us.
The headquarters you trek to see are a re-creation. The original buildings were reclaimed by the jungle. Castro kept the location of these headquarters secret for ten years after he came to power just in case everything went pear-shaped and he needed somewhere to escape and start again. The political situation when Castro came to power was far from certain as in any power vacuum. It didn’t help that a lot of the people who financed his revolution were not expecting him to be quite as communist as he turned out to be. No refunds. Once he felt secure enough he opened the location up in the 1970s. It was then used for a few ceremonies with ministers flown in by helicopter to see where it all started. It was only in the 90s that they decided to turn it into a tourist attraction and built the huts in what looks like a pretty authentic recreation. Castro’s hut has multiple exit points so that he could jump out the window if enemy forces managed to sneak past the sentry or creep up the steep gully next to his hut. Castro had a spring mattress and kerosene-powered fridge. It’s actually a very pleasant spot. The rebels even had a radio transmitter for spreading soft propaganda with the dulcet tones of the afore-mentioned female contingent of revolutionaries on for an hour a day (between seven and eight pm).
The best part of the walk was the coffee plantation halfway along the track where you can pull up a pew next to the coffee beans drying in the sun and, if you’re non-caffeine drinkers like us, have a refreshing drink of bottled water and some bananas. It’s the one place recently I wished I still drank that vile black liquid as the peacocks (seriously) and chickens wandered around and the clouds draped themselves over the green mountains. The peacocks actually wandered through the drying coffee beans – maybe that’s their signature taste, a bit like the coffee from Vietnam that is picked out of the poo of civets.
I wound down the day with a Cuban cigar and a bottle of seven year old rum which was surprisingly smooth, but didn’t kick on as we were in the country and getting up early in the morning to drive back to Bayamo and then get the bus onwards to Santiago de Cuba. It was while driving between Bayamo and Santo Domingo that I first noticed the human-powered machete lawnmower. You take one machete per person and then hack at the grass repeatedly until it has been shorn. The guys with these machetes do an incredible job. Whereas you or I would give at best a dozen strokes resulting in a lawn that looks like a bad haircut. These guys leave a perfectly manicured looking lawn all along the verges of the roads. I’m not sure whether the lack of lawnmowers is due to expensive fuel or whether they simply can’t afford them, but it’s this human-powered approach which keeps Cuba a low emissions economy (trying to overlook the fact that the diesel emissions they do have are really dirty).
The latest men’s fashion tip from Cuba, especially for those blessed with a beer belly, is to pull your shirt above the beer belly and wander around with your fat proudly displayed. In a hot climate this is imminently sensible but be sure to have a lot of fat around your mid-riff or it just looks silly. The official uniform for female workers in Cuba is saucy, white shirts that are generally a size too small, fishnet stockings and skirts that gravitate towards mini. Casual wear is generally tight jeans shorts.
Our next stop after Trinidad was Camaguey which is further to the east, away from Havana. It’s in cattle country and famous for two things: having a lot of churches and its streets being deliberately designed as a maze. It’s not often you come across a city that is less confusing to navigate than Canberra but then we didn’t face looting from pirates in the planning stages of the city. Camaguey was purposefully designed with maze-like streets in an attempt to confuse marauding pirates which has to be the coolest reason for street layout and yet the most impractical. In the end it didn’t help them as the pirates got hold of a map of the city and ransacked it anyway. I’m not sure what the pirates were doing so far inland but I guess they worked hard for their loot in those days.
Today Camaguey is a much sleepier place known for being home to the Cuban cowboy. It has a sleepy feel in the day largely because if the heat. At night when it cools down it’s much more pleasant to wander the squares. We were in town on the night Cuba celebrates its independence from the Spanish and in celebration the town put on a musical dance performance which was a thousand times cooler than the equivalent ‘Australian government sponsored town square concert in a small country town celebration’ would be. Loose hips rule. I’m not sure the Aussie pub fallback of standing with arms crossed, schooner in one hand, and tapping your foot would really cut it over here.
Camaguey also stands out in my mind for pissweak park world. They have one of the largest parks in Cuba but have filled it with such a random collection of junk that it beggars belief. I submit for evidence the zoo which has a feature attraction near the front gate of a cage of pigeons. Never mind that pigeons infest every city in the world, for some reason Camaguey sees them as a drawcard to pull in the crowds. Slightly more interesting is the huge tree, not associated with the zoo, upon which were perched dozens of vultures. As a centrepiece for a park it’s creepy but not entirely uncompelling. Maybe people bring in dead animals as offering. The piece de resistance of pissweak park is the artificial cave filled with stagnant water and rubbish. This must have seemed like a good idea to someone at the time but it’s not entirely clear why. The frogs in the park sound like crystal baubles clinking together.
Luckily for Camaguey the attraction of the place is in the many fine squares, although this being the city of confusion many of the squares are different shapes, rhombus or rectangle. Having a quiet drink and watching the world go by is about as hectic as it gets. It was while having a drink in a plaza that we met some middle-aged Israeli men who had been taking salsa lessons for a decade and were here on holiday to learn more from the masters. We went out with the briefly that night. Outside the casa de la trova (music house) a couple of young girls attached themselves to a couple of the Israeli guys, which we found strange because we were sure the Israeli guys were gay. Once inside the girls refused to dance until they had finished their free drink. One of the Israeli guys said that often they will end up going home with the Cuban girls and offering them money or gifts, but it’s not prostitution. I’m not sure how they define it in Israel but that sure as hell sounds like prostitution to me. It was hard not to feel a little sorry for these girls hanging out with foreigners for whatever handouts they could get.
As a tourist the feeling of being money on legs in the eyes of the local Cubanismos is easier to understand when you look at the figures. A doctor in Cuba makes around CUC$25-30 per month which is what a tourist will spend on the cheapest accommodation in one night. A taxi driver we talked to who has finished his medical degree said that he can earn CUC$500 per month driving tourists around so why would he earn less than a tenth of that by practising medicine. Letting tourists into the country was a desperate revenue raising attempt once the Soviet Union crumbled and stopped handing Cuba loads of money. There is not a lot going for the Cuban economy and letting people have tourists pay to stay in their home is a very quick way to inject money into the economy. This quick win comes at a longer term cost when doctors and professors jump on the tourist gravy train as the only realistic way to earn decent money in Cuba. Seeing all these tourists with money to burn must be demoralising for most Cubans who not only can’t afford to travel but are not allowed to leave the country by the Government unless under special circumstances. We try to bear this in mind when touts winkle a few more pesos out of us. A few dollars to us means a lot more to them. I swear they are going to an ‘English for Touts’ course. I can see the late night TV ad now with flashing peso bills: ‘Earn money now by learning such useful phrases as “Hey Lady!”, “Where you from?” or “Want a taxi?”.’ Cubans also do a hissing sound to get people’s attention, sort of like pssst but starting with an h. Instead of a wolf whistle they make a loud kissing sound.
It’s not all doom and gloom though. Cubans are well educated, have decent (though under-supplied) medical care, can dance like the devil and enjoy themselves wherever possible. One bitter taxi driver we talked to compared keeping the population healthy with looking after your chickens so that they lay lots of eggs (ie. healthy people will work harder). There is definitely a mood for change in the country from the people we have talked to here but no clear indication of what should change or how the country would look. It feels like Cuba will slowly modernize but they are not an economic heavy-weight like China so it might take some time. It remains to be seen whether people have the patience to wait.
Part of the interest in travelling are the fellow travellers you meet. At our Camaguey casa we met Max, a 27 year old Russian who was taking photos of Cuba for his blog with a readership of 12,000. The angle of the blog is how crap socialist systems are and why Russia should not go back to communism. Max looked more like he was 17, a classic skinny computer nerd (the casa owner said he was ‘flacco’, Spanish for skinny but slightly insulting sounding). Max was avoiding the tourist areas but didn’t speak Spanish which must have been a drawback in discovering the real Cuba. He admitted that he didn’t really care about Cuba anyway, just what it reflected about Russia. He ran an interesting poker business which bankrolls players to enter tournaments who they select by statistically analysing online poker sites for the top players.
At the end of the dinner with Max he mentioned that he was going out to meet girls. Sarah translated this for the casa owner who in very matronly fashion told him that if he brought a girl home she would have to sign in to the casa (casa owners are required to register all guests for government records). I imagine this would be a romance killer.
We arrived in Cuba desperately needing a break, which sounds odd after having a six week holiday through North America, but even just being a tourist can be tiring and those long days in the Californian National Parks took their toll. So rather than head straight for the dance floor in Havana we decided to take the bus to the beach instead. Trinidad is on the south coast of Cuba about five and a half hours by bus from Havana. That is five and a half hours on a Cuban road which very quickly changes from the six lane freeway that the Soviets built (even though half the lanes are too rough to use) into a single lane each way highway of lesser quality than most Australian country roads. Add to that a million guys on bikes giving lifts to their girlfriends or kids, tractors and numerous horses with cart attached, not to mention big old Soviet trucks that are now used as buses for the locals making them look like cattle being taken to slaughter. Fuel is so expensive for locals that no-one drives much unless on business. It’s hard not to feel guilty as you whiz by all this in half full air-conditioned coaches that the locals can’t afford to buy a ticket on. The menagerie on the highway slows progress slightly but given there are barely any other fast moving vehicles there is simply a lot of overtaking. Cuba also has a very efficient road kill cleanup system. There are dozens of vultures circling wherever you go in the country ready to pounce on whatever carrion is lying lifeless on the road. This could be a good idea for Australia – we have such a good history with imported species that one more can’t hurt.
We arrived in Trinidad and were immediately caught up in the maelstrom of touts asking whether we had a casa reservation. It’s not hard to find somewhere to stay in Cuba as everyone knows someone, but in this case we did do some research and had decided to stay in Casilda a little out of town. Although the backyard pool didn’t quite live up to the photos, being more like a large waist deep wading pool located in a dog poo infested (but lush) backyard, we still had a separate bungalow room above the dining area so we quickly started getting acclimatised to Cuban time.
Cuban time is due largely to the heat. It beats me how anyone had a revolution in this climate. It’s much more suited for lounging around drinking rum and maybe some strolling around when the heat has gone out of the day. Casilda was a tiny fishing town, just a street really, leading down to an inaccessible dock. In other parts of the world this would be a grim part of town but in Cuba there is still green grass everywhere and horses grazing, kids playing football and people just gathered on their porch having a chat.
We shifted after a couple of nights to the slightly bigger tiny fishing town called La Boca which is on the water south of Trinidad. La Boca is where the locals come on holiday, drinking rum and playing loud music near the rocky shore. We stayed at a lovely casa called El Capitan which has a porch out the back with an uninterrupted view down to the sea. The sunsets were amazing and we had one day just sitting on the porch and looking at the fishing boats and spear gun snorkellers go about their work, which we ate for dinner later that night. At dusk the crabs emerged from their holes in the sandy soil next to the house and we watched them without moving, then waved a hand to see them all freeze before scurrying back to their holes. I’m sure they got sick of us interrupting the start of their day.
We were served meals at the casa by Jesus, a wizened middle-aged man who chuckled softly as he brought each item out. He was effectively teaching Sarah the Spanish words for all the items which he seemed to find very amusing. Either that or he just found serving food a humorous activity. Sarah is fantastic at talking with the locals but her Spanish is more functional and it’s hard to have in depth conversations. Some of her clangers have been: “We need to touch the taxi tomorrow”; on hearing someone’s age: “I thought you were more Thursday”; and “It’s name is Sarah”.
The other bonus in this area is Playa Ancon, the best beach on the south coast. It is truly like stepping into a brochure for the Caribbean with blinding white sand and matching turquoise water, deck chairs and palm thatched umbrellas. Very kind gentlemen drop by every now and then to sell beer, mojitos and pizza. One guy came around selling coconuts and bananas. We found out his name was Elbis, which is the Spanish pronunciation of Elvis (Havana is known locally as La Habana). Elvis looked like an Australian beach bum with dreads partly dyed golden by the sun. It felt incredibly indulgent but was just the thing to recharge. We had a good couple of days reading and having dips in the sea. On our first day there a storm rolled in and while all the (all-inclusive) resort people dashed back to their rooms we stayed out swimming while the rain fell into the ocean. We literally got caught in the rain after having pina coladas. It was incredibly peaceful. It’s one of those moments which I’m sure will float back to us even after we rejoin the rat race.
A few kilometres further north of La Boca is the more famous town of Trinidad. Trinidad is famous for its architecture and cobbled streets which truly are gorgeous. We took a break from the midday heat on the roof top of a museum and had a beautiful view of the green jungled hills surrounding the town, the brightly coloured houses and the sparkling Caribbean in the distance. Trinidad had a nice sleepy feel. Even the touts just had one go and respected your right to say no gracias.
Though we complain about the touts it is incredibly useful for getting around. As soon as you need to go somewhere you just hail a passing bicicletta and away you go. The biciclettas are like a modern day rickshaw. They are homemade vehicles, a bike with two seats attached and a tarpaulin over the top. They generally have really thick tires and low gears for pulling fat tourists up hills. In a hot country they are a refreshing way to travel, for us. On the journey from Casilda to La Boca, about 8 kilometres, I found myself mentally complaining about they way my sunglasses were pinching my nose, then looked up at the guy pedalling us in the hot morning sun and had one of those western guilt moments, but truth be told if I was stuck in Cuba I would probably be in the bicicletta driver business. A lot of the drivers we’ve talked to, both biciclettas and taxis, are ex-teachers and much prefer driving tourists around. It’s less stressful and the pay is better by an order of magnitude. We also had a couple of trips in the famous old American cars the Cubans somehow manage to keep running with adapted parts sent from relatives in Miami. For a long time there was a ban on buying new cars, and now people just can’t afford them, so the old cars are all over the place, some in better condition than others, but still rolling. It’s a reminder of either how good modern suspension has become, or how bad suspension can get when it’s old. These cars just barrel along at a leisurely place, errant springs poking your back, but they are definitely the coolest way to travel.
We do need to work on our bargaining though. We needed to get a taxi from La Boca to Playa Ancon one day, so we wandered from our casa into town looking for transport. One guy with an old-style car offered us CUC$7 one way or CUC$12 return. That’s a bit steep, we thought, so we said no thanks and wandered back a bit to ask if anyone else had a taxi. They pointed back to the guy we had just come from then yelled out “Hey, these guys need a taxi!”. We returned to the only taxi in town at that moment and funnily enough he had not shifted his price.
I read once that the people most likely to sweat the most, contrary to popular opinion, are skinny, fit and male. Tick, tick, tick. Sweating is a wonderfully efficient cooling system, a lot better than panting in my opinion, but it does show its weakness when you’re hiking in the jungle. 100% humidity totally jams the system. Instead of the sweat evaporating to air-cool my over-heating body it pools in my eyebrows. My fingers act like windscreen wipers to clear my eyebrows of build-up but there’s no help for the rest of my body. Ironically we had hiked down to a beautiful waterfall and had a refreshing swim in the pool underneath it. The waterfall is 70 metres high and cascades down the smoothed out rock in a graceful arc. It’s just a pity that the pool is not located at the top of the insanely steep hill as the refreshing effects of the swim were lost by the time we got back to the carpark for a free juice at the rooster bar. The rooster bar was very cool, more of an open-air shack located at the start of the trail. There really were chickens and a rooster hanging around which the bar man shooed away every so often. Rather than bar stools there were swings attached to the roof.
After the waterfall we took in a tour of the old sugar plantations in a place called ‘Valley of the Engineers’. This 30 square kilometre valley used to produce one third of Cuba’s sugar and you can still see why today. The land is incredibly lush and fertile. They don’t grow sugar here anymore as it moved further west in the country and this area is now very poor, relying mainly on tourism to survive. One of the tourist attractions is a 45 metre high tour which you can climb via very rickety wooden stairs. The tower has survived a fair few hurricanes so it seemed unlikely we would bring it tumbling down but it didn’t feel as solid as the CN Tower in Toronto.
After another amazing dinner and sunset at the casa it was time to hit to road again and head off to Camaguey further east.
Cuba immediately lived up to stereotypes. After being waved through immigration by incredibly glamorous customs officials we changed some money, bought a map and jumped in a taxi. The taxi got about ten metres from the airport before breaking down. We were not in some cool 50s Cadillac but a small modern car of some description. The driver turned it over a few time but every time it sputtered to life it died again as soon as he tried to put it in gear. He got out, opened the hood, tweaked a few things, tried to start the engine, and repeated this process a good few times, assuring us this wouldn’t take long. This his mates come over to offer some advice on what might be wrong. All the while we’re sitting in a lane of the arrivals terminal. What in many airports of the world would be a catastrophically inconvenient obstacle to outgoing traffic is just part of the scenery in Cuba where people cram into whatever car is available and get around by bicycle or horse and cart.
By this stage we had removed ourselves from the back seat of the taxi and the driver took this opportunity to lift the back seat up and bang underneath it on what I can only assume was the location of the gas tank. After a good ten minutes of reassuring noises he finally admitted defeat and rolled his taxi off the road while the next one in line came to pick us up and drive us through the crumbling Havana streets to our casa particular.
Under Raul Castro the country was opened up to tourism in the early 90s after the ‘special period’. The is a propaganda euphemism for when the economy went to crap. After the collapse of the Soviet Union Cuba lost its major backer and there wasn’t anything left for the economy to fall back on. People ran out of food and were having sugar and water for breakfast while raising pigs in their bathroom as a means of survival. Tourism is one of the new winners in the Cuban economy. The casa owners pay the government CUC$200/month to operate regardless of whether they have guests. Although a lot of people fly in to the resorts for all-inclusive holiday packages the cheaper option is to stay in casa particulars which are private homes where people have been authorised to devote a room or two to hosting paying tourists. At $25 – $30 a night they are not only a bargain but give you some interaction with the locals and provide the best meals in Cuba.
The most confusing part of travel in Cuba is the monetary system. Tourists are given Cuban Convertible Pesos (CUC) to use, while locals generally use Cuban Pesos (CUP). The CUC is worth about 20 times the CUP, so you obviously don’t want to pay for something valued in CUP with your CUCs, but it’s not always clear which is which. I guess this monetary segregation is another way to stop Cubans being able to leave, as most of the population only has access to a currency of lesser value, not that Cubans can leave easily anyway, needing a letter from a foreigner guaranteeing them. The two currencies also end up segregating tourists and locals to a large degree, as what may be cheap for a tourist could be prohibitively expensive for a local. For instance, the rental on two beach chairs from the tourist resort at Playa Ancor is CUC$4 (roughly AUS$4) but this would be beyond contemplation for most locals just to lounge on the beach. As a tourist this makes you very valuable as you have rare and valuable CUCs. It’s a confusing system for everyone.
Our Cuban stereotype overload reached boiling point the next day when we were caught in a very enjoyable scam, the closest to a win-win scam I can imagine. Sarah and I do not look Cuban. We blended into Canadian society like a ninja but when we wander around downtown Cuba there is absolutely no escaping the fact that we stick out like a sore thumb and her index finger. We might as well be flashing in neon it’s so obvious, and that flashing light draws all sorts of moths -the taxi bicicletta drivers asking if we want a ride, the taxi drivers asking if we want a ride, touts advising us to go to restaurants, beggers after some change. This time as we wandered through the streets of Old Havana looking for a bank from which to extract some money we were warmly accosted by a lady with her aunt and son in tow.
“Hello, where are you from? Austria? I have friends in Vienna. Oh, kangaroos, yes yes.”
Her hook was irresistibly attractive. “Do you want to come to a free festival with the Buena Vista Social Group?”
It’s hard to argue with a free festival of Cuban music with lots of people around, and given point eight of the travellers charter to be open to new experiences, we thought why not. We followed them through the streets, keeping our distance from them when we saw a policeman as they advised us that it’s not good for locals to be seen with tourists. We ended up at a nice looking cafe where there was indeed a Cuban band with an old guy who could well have been in Buena Vista Social Club. It was mojitos all round while the band whipped through some classic Cuban tunes. I reluctantly had a dance with the aunt who didn’t make eye contact as I tried to avoid stepping on her feet with my much admired five finger shoes. Sarah danced with the mother in a much more flamboyant way. They all looked incredibly bored when they weren’t flattering us or pretending to be interested. We bought a $12 CD from the band which was autographed by the band leader who also took a photo with us. Then our interlocutor’s voice dropped as she confided in Sarah in a low voice that she needed money to buy beans and rice for her family. She pitched a price and we gave her less. Then we paid the massively over-inflated bill for the drinks, effectively the same as buying them at the Opera Bar. So although we got ripped-off slightly (well, quite a lot by local standards), we had about as authentic an Havanan experience as you can get.
Our street smarts only got worse at the Hotel Plaza where we went to get a big stack of money out using our credit card. Getting money out in Cuba is not straight forward. None of our cards worked at the ATM at the airport and we had limited cash on us, so getting a large amount out now was essential for our travels lest we end up bedraggled backpackers living on one meal per day. The Hotel Plaza has a little teller with a security guard where tourists go to extract money. Only one person may approach the counter at a time so Sarah went first for her money blessing but the card was rejected. The second card was rejected as well. I now approached with our last chance or the thirty days we were spending in Cuba would be off to a very rocky start.
The internet in Cuba is woeful. Forget accessing wifi, you’re lucky if the bank can make a connection to the outside world. The card slid through the reader and then we waited while whatever passes for telecommunications in Cuba kicked into life and my request for cash slowly made its way to the outside world. Then we waited for an answer and waited some more. There is a lot of waiting in Cuba, less so for tourists than the locals who have to line up for everything. Finally a promising looking Spanish word flashed up on the card reader and we had access to a big pile of convertible pesos. Even though we were getting CUCs from the Hotel Plaza money grille this was cash to last at least a couple of weeks and it added up to a fat stack of notes. We stuffed them in Sarah’s hat for the trip across the lobby to arrange money belts in the toilets. I went in first, counted out roughly half the money and was getting my money belt organised when I heard Sarah open the door to the men’s toilet and yell out “Is everything ok in there?”. “Fine thanks,” I yelled back. “Just counting out this huge pile of cash.” Actually, I think I just yelled back YES and came out with money belt strapped on and half the cash still in Sarah’s hat. In the time I had been in the toilet Sarah forgot what we were doing and just began to focus on her new urge to use the toilet for its more traditional purpose. When I handed her the hat she forgot it had a pile of money in it which promptly spilled all over the floor. The two female cleaners standing nearby got wide eyes. It was possibly more money than they make in a year (a Cuban doctor gets about CUC$24 a month). “Cuidado”, one of the ladies said. Be careful, especially out on the street. I think we got all the kinks out of the system in that one morning. We walked back to the casa trying to ignore all the touts saying “Where are you from?” but still gave money to one beggar who wouldn’t stop hugging me, an old guy who needed to travel a long way to get new glasses, a guy playing his weathered trombone while sitting on the sea wall, and drew the line at the rapper / primary school English teacher who wanted to have a few drinks with us. Being a tourist in Havana can be tiring.
The casa particulares, government sanctioned private homes which have a spare room or two for tourists, might not sound like the most attractive offer but the homes are often incredible with vast high-ceilinged buildings and spacious internal courtyards. They are much more inviting than most of the hotels. Really, they’re just like B&Bs with an optional dinner, a B&B&D.
The food suffers from a similar problem to Argentina, lack of variety. It’s hard to say what the food was like before the revolution, but since the US embargo and rationing was introduced it’s fair to say that there is not an international smorgasbord of options. The standard of cooking has been very good with some beautiful fresh seafood. Lobster is common as muck, so much so that we’ve turned it down because we don’t want it twice in a row. The fish has been very fresh as well, served in a simple way with some salt and fresh lime. All meals come with sliced cucumber, sliced tomato, avocado with optional oil and vinegar, rice and either fried potato or fried banana. When you go east beans and rice starts popping up on the menu as well. Fresh tropical fruit and juices are plentiful as is the beer. The rum is cheap as chips – 90 cents for a shot of the super smooth Havana Club 7-year old. You can’t get Bacardi here as the family left the country and has been involved in attempts to unseat Castro. Beef is very uncommon as Castro owns all the cows (note: a lot of facts about the political system are coming from conversations we’ve had with people and haven’t been thoroughly cross-checked, but that piece of info is in the guide as well). People eat mainly pork with some chicken. Breakfast is eggs, some kind of bread and fresh fruit and juices. In one casa we got all-bran and warm milk but I’m not sure how common that is.
It’s common for a casa to take your booking and then when you arrive give their apologies and palm you off to a nearby casa. This hasn’t worked out too badly for us. You will always find somewhere to stay as there is an incredible informal network of casa particulare owners across the country who hook each other up. In Havana we had just this experience. We stayed our first night at a nice old place with antique furnishings where we had a three-course lobster dinner for about $12 each. The casa we were palmed off to for the second night felt a bit more like staying in someone’s house as we had to traipse through their living room and up the stairs to reach our room, but it was large with a balcony viewing the sea and a terrace on the roof. Across the road the Santeria drumming started early. Santeria is a Cuban religion, a mixture of the African religious beliefs brought to Cuba with the slaves and the ornate Catholicism introduced by the Spanish. Practitioners wear all-white or yellow outfits, depending when they were born and who their saint is, and listen to a lot of drumming. The drums across the street went for a good seven hours in front of a room full of people crammed into what looked like the living room on the second floor of a house. There wasn’t a lot of dancing, just chanting and drumming. It added some flavour to our siesta.
We had a brief stay in Havana initially as we wanted to get to the coast for a break. We will return before we fly out for more in depth investigations. Our dinner before leaving was in the open air on a balcony in the balmy night air overlooking the fort and sea wall with some ridiculously cheap and tasty seafood.
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