Chapter 27: The End

We had a lovely few days together sampling all variety of terrible meals in old Havana and one awesome meal at a Paladar in Miramar with a pretty tranquil terrace setting, a great guitarist and great food and drinks. We were lucky enough to be in town during an international dance festival and were treated to several amazing dance performances on the street and in several of the various quaint squares and parks in the old city. On my parents last day in town we took a short wander through Vedado, dropped in to visit Cari at the house I had stayed at earlier in my trip, stocked up on rum and coffee and guava jelly – headed home for dinner in the city - which consisted of fermented orange juice, glue soup and raw chicken –all of which we sent promptly back to the kitchen because it was so foul tasting.

Dance festival parade

boxing ring - no fights on a Sunday apparently

Last and best pina colada

enjoying a rare awesome meal in miramar neighborhood

So my parents left me to pass one last day on my own in the one place on my trip that I just couldn’t manage to love. I wandered around took photos did some shopping, changed my last bit of money – ate one final questionable and inhospitable meal and spent the evening packing. In the morning I went out and bought some Cuban movie posters and then I got a cab to the airport. Thankfully my final ride out of the city was with an uncommonly friendly and chatty cab driver who talked with me all the way to the airport about life and learning a second language and wanting to move to the states. I passed through Cuban customs with no problems and was in no time on my way to Toronto feeling almost giddy at being free from Cuba.

So my final week in Cuba has been and gone and although the chill of the Toronto airport is making me rather miss the heat – I have to say that I am glad to be back in my home and native land – or at least glad to be out of Cuba. I just could not shake the perception that if someone there was being nice to me, it was because they wanted something from me, and though I’m certain that is probably not usually the case, I certainly felt that it was in at least 8 of 10 encounters – and I could never tell whether or not my rip-off radar was misfiring.

After passing some more time in the more touristy quarters of Havana and of Cuba in general, I began to feel like some kind of despised royalty – at least to people working in the hospitality industry – they will take your order, but when your back is turned they put someone’s left over beans and rice on your dinner plate. On one occasion a local travel agent – who was obviously not loving her job that day - rolled her eyes at me for asking a question after purchasing a bus ticket from her. I suppose this is what happens when highly educated people opt to work in tourism because it pays more (at least in tips) than they could ever hope to earn as an electrician, teacher, engineer, or doctor.

Last few sites in Havana

Anyhow – saying goodbye to the good the bad and the ugly of Cuba - I jumped off my plane in Toronto – jumped on a bus to Kingston – thought better of the decision of having to transfer busses and of spending 9 hours on a bus and of arriving in Montreal at 3:30 in the morning – jumped off the bus to Kingston – Jumped on a plane to Montreal – jumped on a bus to downtown – got confused trying to speak French to the bus driver when only Spanish words would come out of my mouth – said thank you and goodbye to the bus driver who turned out to be a Spanish speaker anyhow - wandered around lost on the streets of Montreal at midnight with an unruly amount of luggage –gave up trying to find the address and phoned Patricia - got unlost and spent my first night in Montreal shivering from the cold too exhausted to get up to throw a spare blanket on the bed but already quite content with this relatively unplanned post – holiday holiday.

The next day, we spent the whole day being lazy and not leaving the house until 7pm when we went off to Patricia’s Brazilian drumming class where I was lucky enough to enjoy a drumming orchestra all to myself – I thought of all the times I had tried to chase down the source of drumming in Cuba without success – and thought that this was probably better. Then we went out with some of the drummers to a quite little pub with probably the worst ever 1970s rock cover band – ever – had a drink and went home. The next few days were spent exploring Montreal and being lazy and eating poutine and smoking Cuban cigarillos and getting a sore throat, and before I knew it, it was time to go home to the west coast.

I quickly arranged to prepare some Canadian comfort food at my first opportunity

Montreal streescape - beautiful city!

Montreal smoked meat sandwich - not quite as good as the Montreal smoked meat poutine I had the night before - but good none the less.

For the first time ever I decided not to get to the airport too ridiculously early so planned on catching the bus that would get me there about an hour and a bit before my flight, and for the first time ever there was a disastrous traffic jam and the bus was late and didn’t get to the airport until about half an hour before my flight, but then for the first time ever, my flight was out and out cancelled so they put me on a later flight and gave me a voucher for a free meal and I was ok with that, and I got my free lunch and waited for the plane and ran into a friend that I hadn’t seen in at least a few years.

Then I got to Toronto to switch to my Vancouver bound flight –got amazed by the futuristic pod-like first class seats, got seated beside a smokey smelling guy – watched two movies – got home and found out my cousin had been on the same flight as me - went home and slept in a 20 year old bed that felt brand new compared to every bed I had slept on in Cuba – and sheets that felt like silk compared to all the sheets I had slept in Cuba. And it was nice to be home.

Chapter 26: Valley De Vinales

I made it to Vinales by about 6pm, and got off the bus to a swarm of about 20 casa particular owners trying to convince people to come to their houses. Vinales, I had read, had the most plentiful and the best selection of casa particulars in the country. For this reason I hadn’t made a reservation in advance but I did have an address of a recommended place – I made the mistake of telling someone the place I was planning on going and suddenly there were five people offering to take me there, or telling me they were full or claiming that it was their house – there was one women who tried all three consecutively so that by the time she got around to saying it was her house, it was 100% obvious that it wasn’t – but that didn’t stop her from trying to convince me it was her house- in a bid to escape this flurry I marched off in what I thought was the right direction, but then a helpful fireman steered me right.

I had to walk back past the bus station where a few straggling casa touters were still hanging around, including the “owner” of the casa I was looking for who once again offered to take me to her house – and when I refused one last time I she finally seemed to give up and said she’d be waiting there for me in case it was full. Just then the real owner of the casa (or at least the son of the real owner) drove by on his scooter and after some convincing, I agreed to let him take me there. It was the correct house and when we got there the very gracious host informed me she was full, so she took me next door to a little one room backyard bungalow, and with a quick look at the amazing view out the window, and a quick reassurance that the door (which had obviously been kicked in at some point in the past) was secure I accepted the room dumped my stuff and went for a walk around town.

When I got back, an amazing dinner of bean soup, salad and plantain chips awaited me. The moment I dug into the soup, a plate of rice appeared on the table – making it an amazingly large dinner. A moment later a potato omelet landed in front of me, followed by a plate of fruit and a jug of juice – making an absurdly large meal. I had told my hostess that I wasn’t very hungry and could just eat a small meal – like what they normally serve for breakfast, what I ended up with was breakfast plus lunch minus the meat entre. I decided to switch from beans to eggs thinking that the beans and rice would keep well for lunch the next day. I managed to eat the whole omelet, half of the plantain chips, and all the fruit. When I excused myself from the table my host declared with shock that I had hardly eaten anything. When I asked to save the beans and rice for the next day she was even more taken aback. So I took my leftover salad to store in the fridge in my bungalow and got ready to shower off the 12 hour bus ride.

It was pretty well dark now – so all the lights went on in my room and all the windows got closed. This is when I noticed some rat droppings around the bathroom window, and some other kind of dropping (later discovered to be from a lizard) all over the wall. Then I got in the shower and noticed it definitely hadn’t been cleaned in a while. Then I noticed that the hot water didn’t work. I was very used to taking cold showers in hot climates by now, and taking luke warm showers in cold climates but taking cold showers in cold climates I just cannot get used to so I had a very quick rinse and got ready for bed lamenting the fact that I had somehow managed to get a crappy casa in a town where I could have had the best in the country for the same price – then the pig next door started to have a very noisy snorting hissy fit about something, and I drifted off to sleep.

The next morning I very politely informed my hostess that I wouldn’t be staying a second night because there were droppings all around the room and the hot water didn’t work. I said I had another place in mind and she looked me squarely in the eye and said “you want to move because you are nervous about the door – I will find you another place with a secure room inside the house.” I thought for a moment about this response and then agreed that yes I wanted to move because I was nervous but that I could find another place on my own - in the end she insisted that she would find me a room in a nice house with neighbours and if I didn’t like it I could find my own place but that there were lots of bad people out there and that she would only place me with good people. The new room was nice and secure and free from mysterious animal droppings so I hastily agreed to take it and ran off to catch the bus for my day excursion to Cayo Levisa –

Cayo Levisa is a small beautiful tropical island just off the coast with a little bungalow type hotel and a few restaurants catering to the hotel visitors and day trippers. The road to the dock to get the ferry to the Cayo was amazingly scenic but also long – we finally reached the dock, got loaded into the boat and were on our way when a group of guests that arrived late and had the whole boat turned around to come back for them – taking up about 30 precious minutes of the five short hours the day trippers would have to spend on the island. The ferry landed and we took a five minute board -walk through the jungle before laying eyes on the pristine beach. I walked a little ways and picked out a nice spot for my sarong – parked my stuff and jumped in the water – it was COLD – but the day was hot so that was ok – then I got all suncreened up and spent the day catching a few last precious rays of Caribbean beach sun – conveniently interspersed with shady periods courtesy of the fluffy white clouds floating across the sky – it was the perfect day for beach bumming and I left perfectly content that it was four hours of well spent bus time.

The dock leaving the mainland for Cayo Levisa

Beautiful paradisaical beach

me on the beautiful paradisaical beach

Back in Vinales I had an amazing dinner in my new casa- composed of fish, plantain fries, beans, rice, fruit, veg and the most amazing pinacolada ever made – I went out late in the evening to meet up with some new friends from the Cayo Levisa trip at some kind of musical venue in town that was included with our day-trip. It was ten o’clock at night but I was assured that nothing bad ever happens in Vinales, so off I went with nothing to worry about except the rain and the stray dogs which, I was told can smell foreigners and love to bug them. The musical performances were very interesting and the most racy I had seen yet with female dancers decked out in sparkling thongs and male dancers wearing extremely tight spandex pants and apparently not much more. We were treated to some traditional cabaret type dancing and then to some kind of extremely cheesy emotional modern dance performance – by a guy in black spandex bellbottoms and ballet shoes. I drank my complementary martini, bid farewell my foreigner friends, and wandered home noticing that there was decidedly less harassment at night than in the day, I suppose because there were just less people around.

After a very good night’s sleep in my rat poo free room, I set off on my tour of the country side around Vinales. For ten bucks you get a tour guide almost all to yourself (plus 4 other people_ for four hours – which is a pretty great deal – especially for Cuba. We wandered through several farms, heard about how the hurricanes regularly tear through the homes and baseball stadiums in the area, heard about how tobacco is produced, heard about natural history, tasted some fresh local coffee, watched a cigar being rolled, tried a freshly rolled cigar – and that was it. I went home for a final delicious Vinales meal and then headed back to Havana to meet up with my parents.

Valle de Vinales

Farm in the valley



Tobacco drying shed in the valley

Inside the tobacco drying shed in the valley

Farm house in the valley

Chapter 25: Twenty-nine in Trinadad

The next day, which also happened to be my birthday, I ventured out at 5 in the morning to fetch my parents from the Varadero airport and whisk them off to Trinidad. Trinidad is a very beautiful town with ancient cobbled streets and quaint colonial buildings, it also sports a very lovely white sand beach just an 8 dollar cab ride away. We arrived at the bus stop and a row of casa particular owners were waiting in a neat line behind a rope trying to get the business of the new arrivals.

I had been warned by a woman in Havana that booked us the casa that there was a common scam where people are intercepted at the bus station and taken to different casas than the ones that they actually booked – with the story that the place they booked made an error and was full – but really they are just scammers out to steal all your stuff – or at least your payment for the night’s stay. When we arrived what I thought was our casa particular owner met us at the bus stop with my name on a sign – but when we were taken to a different address than the one I had written down – I became suspicious and demanded to be taken to the proper address – the owner tried to explain that the other house was full at which point I became even more suspicious. I got to the house of the casa we had booked and confirmed and the owner said that yes indeed they were full – I asked why she had said they could accommodate me in the first place and she went on with a lengthy story about what had happened and I told her about my concern about the scam, and my disappointment in being put in another location without first being consulted, and in the end she concluded that we could stay there.

Once we had gotten our stuff moved in she was kind enough to explain to me about how annoyed the other casa owner was since he had come to the station to meet us and I explained back how if someone had explained what was going to happen things could have gone much more smoothly, but that we felt very bad to have let down the other casa owner and were just reacting in a chaotic situation, and that we were very sorry that he was put out, and after enough apologizing she changed her tune and said that these things happen. Once settled in we wandered out in search of food and sights. We wandered the streets for a while and went for an excellent dinner at a paladar with dirty table cloths but tasty food. The following day we hit the beach – and what a beautiful beach it was – with white sand and blue water and much more loveliness than I had every expected – we walked to the end of the beach and back again, picked out a shady spot under a palm tree – and relaxed until it was time to go and meet our cab driver. We had a little driving tour back into Trinidad with a quick pass through a cute little fishing village called La Boca.

Quaint little street in Trinidad

Scoping out the evenings entertainment options

the beach near Trinidad

Birthday dinner at a very good paladar in trinidad

Breakfast in the courtyard at our casa particular

View from a church tower

different view, same church tower

We got cleaned up back at our casa particular, went begging at the hotel to get some money changed (since all the exchange offices were closed) and then, went out in search of somewhere to eat. After an intentional scenic detour and an unintentional lost detour we arrived at another palladar and waited in line for twenty minutes before getting seated at a very short table and getting served a very tasty meal of fish for me, and lamb for my parents, then we took in a brief musical spectacle before heading home to bed. We rose early the next morning to catch the bus back toward Havana. I let my folks off the bus in Havana (hoping they would make it to the casa particular a-ok) and continued on to the cute little town of Vinnales another three hours down the road.

Chapter 24: Matanzas Matanzes Matanzes

In the still dark early morning I got delivered to the Hershey Casablanca train station by a rather disorientated cab driver who claimed to have never taken a fair to this destination in the day time so how could I expect him to find his way in the dark. I waddled out to the train platform with my ten thousand bags and suddenly I had about a half dozen pairs of eyes on me as the only gringo at the station. After about twenty minutes it was time to board and after another 10 the creaky old electric train was chugging along as the guide wires above sent off showers of sparks that lit up snatches of the dark urban landscape slowly passing by outside. The day broke with palm trees silhouetted in front of a pale red sky, and soon misty fields were just barely visible through the very dirty train windows. With every tiny station we stopped at, more and more of the lush rural landscape came into view.

After boarding the train, it didn’t take long before the only under-30-year-old male passengers were sitting beside me chatting me up en espanol. One was a police officer and one was a conductor (formerly of the very train we happened to be on). Eventually the conductor went off to the other car of the train, so for the first few hours of the journey I was chatted up by the police officer who left me with his phone number and a love note written on the outside of the train window. About half way through the ride my motion sickness was starting to kick in as the train rocked from side to side more like it was a boat in rough water than a dinky little train on an electric track. The not faint enough odor of urine didn’t help matters in this department and the fact that the seats were entirely devoid of any padding made the rocking that much more painful – but despite all this it was a remarkably relaxing ride. There is something about train travel that is just so much better than a bus. For the second half of the ride I was joined by the former conductor who was far less chatty than his police officer friend and after trying unsuccessfully to get me to tell him exactly where I was staying, he left rather abruptly when we reached Matanzas (our final destination) without offering any kind of proposal or even a phone number.

The Hershey Train at Dawn

Declaration of love on a dirty train window

Cuban countryside in predawn mist out the Hershey train window

inside the train car

My massive pile of stuff (and the reason I didn't travel much in Cuba)

At the station in Matanzas there was nary a cab to be found – so the station master called my casa to see about getting me a ride. About 15 minutes later I was safely checked in and reading up on this lazy little town in my not so trusty lonely planet – which informed me that there was not much to do here – and especially not much shopping to speak of – but clearly whoever wrote this chapter of the book did not wander very far, because from what I could tell the only thing to do here is shop – there were more stores in a four block radius than I encountered in the whole of Havana. I popped into the first one I could find that didn’t require you to check in your bag, just to peruse and I came out with a charming 5 peso base ball hand made of recycled materials. Feeling absolutely at my wits end with respect to the constant male commentary on the street, and having been followed by a particularly persistent and pushy crazy man on a bicycle, I didn’t stay out for long. I went back to my casa for dinner and a bit of descansa and then I heard a symphony of drums coming from some unknown location. I ventured out again in search of the show – which of course was nowhere to be found – and so I went home to catch up on the sleep I’d lost the night before – serenaded by the occasional wave of sound blowing in from the drumming show – from who knows were.

Che mosaic in Matanzas

Elderly bicycle flower seller in front of a pink wall

The next day was Easter Sunday and I have to admit it is the most tranquil Easter Sunday I have ever experienced. I went to church in an ancient, very small and very simple wooden chapel next door to the ancient cathedral which, if it were open, would be depressingly empty since there don’t seem to be many Church goers in Cuba. I pondered what the contrast might be between Easter here and Easter in Nicaragua where nearly everyone is religious and Easter is the biggest event of the year. At any rate, I went to church – checked out a little craft market happening on the other side of the cathedral, bought some chicken-shaped pot holders, pondered buying some leather sandals, wandered down to the water in the wind, wandered back up through town, sat in the park, got chatted up by a young Santarian fellow all dressed in white who wanted to be my Spanish teacher and my salsa teacher and who hoped he would find a girlfriend just like me, I phoned home, bought some fiesta cola (cuba’s version of coke) in order to make a Cuba libre (rum and coke), bought six buns for 5 pesos, bought some water, and went back to my casa.

Easter Sunday Mass

At the present moment, I am “enjoying” the sounds of what is apparently the cheesiest Karaoke soundtrack ever made, complete with loud, obnoxious, obnoxiously drunk audience and very bad, very drunk vocalists. This concert, unlike the drumming show from last night, is very conveniently located right outside my window, and I hope since they started at about 5pm, they will finish by the time I want to go to bed. I have just finished my second Cuba libre and may have to go for a third if the music does not stop soon. Did I mention that Cuba had driven me to drink – and not just drink, but drink alone, not that I’ve developed an alcohol problem, I just haven’t met anyone here to drink with. It also helps that the rum is pretty good – though not as good as the Nicaraguan stuff.

In addition to the rum, I have developed several “bad” habits here that I will have to break when I go home including but not limited to: drinking a lot of coffee, consuming vast amounts of delicious tropical fruits, consuming vast amounts of fried foods, consuming vast amounts of very greasy foods, eating too much ice cream (though nowhere near as much as the Cubans eat) and last but not least listening to too much cheesy Latin American techno-pop (though that is entirely out of my control since it is just constantly going on somewhere in the background of my goings on – the problem is I’ve actually started to like it). It will be very hard to go back to my strictly oatmeal breakfasts and almost entirely grease, caffeine and alcohol free diet – hopefully I will be able to acquire a Daddy Yankee CD before I go home – and that will help alleviate the Latin American withdrawal symptoms.

And on that happy note, it looks like I have finally caught up with my travel blog – and hopefully very soon I will be uploading this for all my adoring readers to enjoy. Asta Luego