Havana to Trinidad, January 2012

Havana lives up to all expectations of the romantic imagination – from being serenaded by two old rascals on 8km seaside Malecon Drive to astoundingly beautiful old buildings in the old town. Walking down the ramshackle streets a barrage of life in its most chaotic but surprisingly relaxed form just hits you smack between the eyes. Street music is everywhere whether is the African beat of the drum, the lone guitar and singer or even the constant roar of the gas guzzler 1950s cars that are so iconically Cuban (amazingly still working if only through mechanical creativity and a few bits of wire).

What struck me time and again in Havana and the rest of Cuba is the amazing friendliness of people, both to their neighbours and random strangers on the street. I think this stems both from necessity of survival but also from the pure appreciation for life despite the many challenges that the Cuban people face…might have something to do with the beautiful weather too.

John and I knew that we would be lost-in-translation quite a bit on this trip given that our Spanish is pretty slim even in a generous light. Thus it gave us great joy to see a Cuban walking down the street on our first day, proudly wearing ‘Sphincter Boy’ emblazoned across his T-shirt…me thinks another victim of a foreign language. But despite the many laughable mistakes that I am sure we are making it was fun to navigate our way through the maze of ridiculously paced Spanish that Cubans speak. And of course, as is true anywhere in the world, as soon as you make an effort to speak in the countries lingo, people immediately open up and become a lot more understanding of your particular situation.

Thankfully the owner of our ‘casa particular’ (basically a Homestay cross B&B and the only real option for accommodation other than expensive hotels) spoke great English and helped us out with info about the area and all the new food put on our plate in the casa. We were to discover over the next couple of weeks that food does not vary very much in Cuba. Basically your choice is between pork, chicken, fish or lobster (if you are feeling a little more rich) and always served with rice & beans along with plantain or banana in various cooked forms. That said, we ate like kings every night as clearly the notion of portion control has not hit Cuba, or at least not when cooking for foreigners.

It took us a little while to get used to the ‘flexible economy’ by which Cuba runs which basically means that if there is a chance to take advantage of a couple of naïve looking foreigners it will be taken. Of course this is always done with a hugely friendly smile, which makes it all the more difficult to spot when you are being taken to the cleaners. The first example of this and there were numerous to follow, I am ashamed to admit, was the first night in Havana where we paid about 3 times more than we should have done for beers. Stupidly we admitted to just having arrived in Cuba and so the restaurant owner must have seen the glint of gold shining off of us. We have subsequently spoken to lots of backpackers on the road that went via Cuba and I am glad to say that we were not the only stupid foreigners to be seduced by the fast talking entrepreneurial but oh-so-friendly Cubans 🙂

Our 3 days spent in Havana was mostly just slow meanderings through the labyrinth of streets, some beautiful, clean and newly restored (a massive restoration project in the old town ongoing since the 1980s) and some dirty and dilapidated but no less beautiful and colourful. Slow meanderings were broken up with some lazy ‘people watching’ in the old plazas.

We then hopped on the bus on headed down to Trinidad. For those of you who are a little confused on how we managed to get to Trinidad via bus, this is actually a town in Cuba and not the island of Trinidad. Don’t worry I made the same rather confused assumption when John first suggested we go to Trinidad. It’s a beautiful old colonial town with cobbled streets, colourful quaint houses and lots of old men chilling on the street puffing on vast Cuban cigars. It’s a much slower pace than Havana but still has enough hustle and bustle to keep you on your toes. In fact Trinidad is rather famous for its large number of ‘jiniteros’ (hustlers) so that walking down the street is quite often a cacophony of ‘taxi, taxi, cheap taxi’. However it feels like Trinidad would lose some of its character without all the vocal exchanges on the streets.

We found an amazing ‘casa familiar’ in Trinidad. It was basically a house to ourselves that we shared with Libor and Lenka, a Czech couple who we met in Havana and ended up travelling with for the whole of Cuba. It was really nice to have the freedom of a living area and veranda to ourselves so that we could sit and read, play cards and people watch from our high vantage point. The casa family were so nice. There were a few funny moments of being lost in translation with them, in particular I thought we were talking about the weather the next and how rainy and cold it was going to be, thus scuppering our plans for the beach when in fact we were actually talking about how to turn on the hot water for the shower and in fact the weather was beach-perfect the next day. I wondered why the casa mama had such a weirded out look on her face.

We made a couple of trips to the beach while we were there. I had not really thought of Cuba as a great beach place but the beaches were absolutely stunning and the epitome of the Caribbean, with white sands, coconut palms and crystal clear water. And most importantly for me, the water was perfect temperature. Libor and John spent most of their time snorkelling – boys do not seem to like chilling on the beach quite as much as girls do. Lenka and I spent our time lying on the beach, swimming, snorkelling a bit and then punctuating it with a cold beer and 1 dollar pizza…ahh what a life! The first day we cycled to the peninsular called Playa Ancon. Most of the peninsular is taken up by stinky big resorts, but the start of the peninsular is the place to be as there is nobody on those beaches and every couple of kilometers are simple seafood restaurants under palm thatched roves that sell cold beer, great fish and are all signposted by ginormous statues of lobsters out the front.

We also made our way up the long, dusty and winding road to Parque El Cubano and were rewarded a beautiful hike through the forest and a refreshingly chilly waterfall which fed into a swimming hole with some caves. Too cold for Lenka and I so we amused ourselves with trying to urge the tiny fish to give us a ‘fish pedicure’ (basically the fish nibble on your feet) which has become so popular in the UK. Unfortunately Cuban fish are a lot more discerning and much prefer bread to feet.

Most of the time, we used to find ourselves going to bed at 9 o’clock, I think because of the huge dinners that we ended being fed, but we managed to keep ourselves awake a couple of nights to head off to the Casa de la Musica which is basically an open air nightclub on the step of an old church. There are live musicians pumping out the foot-tapping, hip twisting Cuban rhythm while some the salsa dancers do the most amazing twists and turns. Made us feel like we did not have a rhythmic bone in our body but really cool to watch!

I think we spent about 6 days in Trinidad and then headed back north-west towards Vinales…but that is for another day and another blog post.