VD

I'm not usually a fan of Valentine's Day. Not because I don't like its commercial nature or couply-coupleness aspect, but because it feels a little forced. I have a wonderful boyfriend I'm very happy with, but up until this year he didn't remember Valentine's Day or think it was anything special and that was fine with me. In a smug sort of way I was content with his being quite lovely the rest of the year.

So this year I wasn't really expecting anything at all. I was happily wrong, when he came bouncing through the door with a thick package from Le Triomphe. I was treated to a delicious meal of amuse-bouches, foie gras, dorado with vegetables and heart-shaped chocolate delights. The meal was truly wonderful and we drank some delicious Alsace Gewurtztraminer with the starter and G's family's Chablis with the main course. The photos don't include the fish because the photo doesn't look quite as mouth-watering as it really was...

In fact we went to the theatre on the day itself, so all this was the day after. A two-day Valentine to make up for four years of no Valentine: I wonder what he's been up to...

Last Day

Our fabulous trip ended in Varadero, an extremely nauseating tourist-filled place with little else but roads and hotels. The fine, long sandy beach was gorgeous, yes, but the complete lack of atmosphere or real Cuban life was so blatant that we were ready to leave after just spending one night there. The glacial reception we received the hotel Villa La Mar was just the beginning of our adventure. Bare light fittings, grotty walls and a very vociferous porter who complained constantly about bad tips were to follow.

The hotel wasn't dangerous or particularly dirty, but we certainly had a much better reception in every single one of the casas we stayed in during our two-week trip.

Our flight home was long, but uneventful, and we fell into our beds early when we got back to Paris. Tanned, tired but happy to have spent two weeks discovering one of the most fascinating of countries, a communist nation with stunning natural beauty, amazingly resilient people and a history to fill thousands of pages. And we only did half of it!

Facebook

I have recently discovered a fantastic site, called facebook, which you use to share photos, stories and comments with loads of different friends and you can browse their photos too.

I discovered it during a little internet break, and was immediately hooked. In the five minutes per day of free time that I seem to have at the moment I've been checking it for new people and new photos. It's the new friends reunited on a worldwide scale!

Day 12 - 30 years old

The 12th January brought many thoughts, memories and feelings. I turned 30. In Cuba, and on the beach. Not a bad selection of events, but they did get me thinking.

I realised that it was the first time in my life I'd ever spent my birthday in the sunshine, not at work or school and without that post-Christmas blues which only lifts by late January. I know I shouldn't complain about anything; seeing the way Cubans struggle through their lives really showed me I could never be justified in moaning again. Nevertheless, every 0 birthday makes us reflect on the last ten years. While there was a huge gap between turning 10 and turning 20, moving from 20 to 30 hasn't felt so different, and I'm sure 30 to 40 will feel even less different, although hopefully by then there will have been some major changes in my family life.

We spent the day on Cayo Las Brujas and Cayo Santa Maria and stayed in Villa Las Brujas on the first island. The wind was pretty powerful and my fantasy of doing a scuba dive on my birthday was dashed by the waves. We did find a secluded beach at the far end of Santa Maria though, which had not yet been developed by the all-inclusive powers that be. It won't be long, there were construction vehicles and cranes on other parts of the island.

In the evening of my birthday we enjoyed a few cocktails in the bar and ate at the hotel restaurant, there being nothing else on the island. Our langouste was accompanied by a Spanish white, our first bottle of wine throughout the whole holiday, and it was delicious. Not a bowl of congri in sight. I haven't mentioned this dish up to now because we had it every single day and I'm trying to block out the memory....

Suffice to say I had a lovely birthday on the beach with good friends and good food, and that's all anyone can ask.

Day 9 - 11 - Trinidad

"Psssst! Cigar, cigar!"

That was the accompanying chorus during our two days in Trinidad. That and "skol!" from the German tourist groups bedecked with all-inclusive bracelets, downing rum cocktails in ten minutes flat and taking up the whole bar we'd just found tucked away in a discreet side street. No so discreet in the end.

Trinidad is truly beautiful place, with a peaceful main square, little cobbled streets you can lose yourself (and your balance) in, and gorgeous colonial houses partly restored with money from UNESCO. The streets are narrow and pedestrianised for the most part, and there is rhythmic salsa music wherever you turn.

So why didn't I love it? Trinidad has unfortunately turned into Disneyland, or at least as close as Cuba will get to that. In no other place in Cuba did I feel so much like a tourist. I felt rich, stared at, guilty and frustrated all at the same time. Cuba, generally, is not like other countries where people barter with you, pulling you over to see their products or insisting on selling you things, but in Trinidad it was. In Trinidad, pregnant mothers begged "for the baby" and children asked for pens and soap.

I can't decide if the beggars are more prominent in Trinidad because there are no jobs available, or because there are so many tourists milling around, easy pickings, that the people of Trinidad, exhausted from working for 20€ a month for the government, have found a new way to get what they need. Maybe it's because so many tourists go there on day trips from Varadero, eating in government restaurants and drinking in government bars, then get back on their coaches and to the safety of their government hotels (51% of all hotels in Cuba are owned by the government).

Perhaps if more people stayed in the casas particulars in Trinidad, eating with families there and contributing to the local economy, the people there would be able to stop harrassing tourists in the street and benefit from their presence in another way.

On a lighter note, we met my friend S and her boyfriend S while we were in Trinidad, they had booked their holiday in Cuba too, so we enjoyed the casa de la musica in Trinidad over mojitos and daiquiris (again...). S and S gave us a little salsa show from the lesson they'd had on the streets of Havana.

Days 6 - 8 Vinales to Playa Larga and Cienfuegos

Leaving Vinales and driving over to Playa Larga - in the Bay of Pigs - took us the best part of the day, so we arrived there with great expectations of golden sands and clear Caribbean Sea. The sands and the sea did not disappoint, and our brief stop-off on the beach at Playa Larga went a little way to calming my beach-obssession; I had been in Cuba for almost a week without seeing a beach!

One thing which surprised us in Playa Larga was that accommodation was rather thin on the ground. We consulted our Cuba-bibles and asked around the area, but everything was booked, except a casa on the outskirts of the village and the 'luxury' concrete block hotel. Being quite eager to enjoy a little luxury I assured our friends that G and I didn't mind paying extra and going to the hotel. As it turned out, the hotel was made of bungalows designed by the architect later assigned to Guantanamo Bay, or perhaps the one they fired for making it too harsh.

Swelteringly hot with brown and stained bathroom walls and an air-conditioner which would give a Harley Davidson's motor a run for its money, the bungalow we were given was the furthest one from any kind of civilisation (if 45 Germans on a package tour is in fact civilisation). All this for the twice the price of the casas.

We actually had dinner at the casa and enjoyed crocodile meat. I wasn't sure about the étiquette of eating crocodile, I have to say the dilemma had never crossed my mind before, but since coming back from Cuba I have realised that there is quite a debate about them, and eating their meat perhaps wasn't one of my finest choices. But it was delicious, kind of like chicken.

We set out for Cienfuegos the next day after a brief brush with disaster when our hire-car failed to start, but Havanautos came to the rescue, and we were soon on our way over to the colonial town.

Cienfuegos, home of the singer Benny Moré, was both truly beautiful and truly crumbling. The pedestrian mall running through the middle of the main street was atmospheric, filled with Cubans on evening strolls. The streets along either side of the roads stank of urine and waste, and the façades, like a Monet, were better from a distance than up close. The people of Cienfuegos seemed rather different from in Havana or Vinales, there were more beggars, more suspicious looks, and I felt uneasy walking back to our casa. I gave away some of the notebooks I'd taken, but the people wanted convertible pesos.

Further down from the main boulevard is a pretty stretch of land less than a kilometre across called Punta Gorda, with the sea on either side. Our casa was a large house on this strip, and we had a terrace which led out onto the sea just in front of our room.

With the sea lapping below, a mojito and a Habana cigar, we sat on our terrace and watched the moon.

Day 5 - Vinales

The Vinales Valley is home to tabacco plantations, farms, the stunning mogotes and the tiny village of Vinales, a tourist centre with little in the way of tourism facilities at all. There is no pool, no beach, no luxury restaurants or all-you-can-eat buffets. It is a simple Caribbean town with old people sitting on rocking chairs whiling away the hours with chat and cigars. What is surprising is that Vinales really is a tourist destination. There is plenty to see and do in the region, and every other house is a casa particular. The people of Vinales were the kindest and most welcoming of all the towns on our route, and Agnieska, our guest house host was very keen to speak better English (I gave her a mini-tutorial), hear about life in Europe and our comments on what we had seen in Cuba.

On the morning of our second day in Vinales after I suffered a slightly concerning digestive incident, we walked down to the Botanical Gardens. Mango trees, coffee trees, banana trees and ficus plants were dotted around the small garden and although it was winter, officially, in Cuba and so some fruits were not in season, the lush vegetation and strange looking plants were really fascinating.

In the afternoon we decided to rev up the wheels and took a rather hairy trip on pot-holed roads to Pinar del Rio. In French, pinard is a slang word for wine, and rio is obviously river in Spanish, so we were expecting a rather more fun scene than the run-down blocks of tumbledown flats, stray dogs and dirty streets. Here again the Castriste regime shows its true colours. Sure, everyone has the same, but "the same" for everyone is not comfort, it's not even enough. When a fifty year old man takes to his wobbling bike to lead you to the tabacco factory you're trying to visit, and is happy with 0.25c for his time, you know something is wrong.


The guide at Alejandro Robaina (the only privately owned cigar manufacturer in Cuba) was quite a surprise. He was wearing a Nike cap, a pair of Levis, and had a mobile phone! That phone was the only one I had seen throughout the whole trip that didn't belong to a tourist. He explained that even though the brand was privately owned by Mr Robaino, they are still obliged to sell all their production to the government first, so they have little control over pricing. The guide's French was good and his English was really excellent, he sounded like he'd spent at least a year in the United States. I asked him how he had such good English and he said, "I have friends in LA." In any other country I wouldn't be surprised, but how do you have friends in LA if you live in Cuba and they are American? Family in Miami, yes, but friends in LA? We never solved the mystery.

The trip back to Vinales was only an hour, but it seemed we chose the rush hour. We shared the road with horses, trucks packed with people, old French Canadian school buses with "Ecoliers" (schoolchildren) displayed on the front. One even had its engine hanging off. Transport in Cuba will probably be the first thing to change if the regime collapses, and if that means seven-year-old children stop hitch-hiking home from school on the backs of motorbikes without helmets then so much the better.

The Swing

Really back into the swing of things now in Paris, but more news from Cuba very soon, watch this space.

Can't believe I have gone from 29° and sunshine to -1° and snow in the space of a week. Some adjustment is needed.

Day 4 - Havana to Vinales

Leaving Havana was like trying to get out of a labyrinth. We picked up our hire car from the Hotel Nacional, (in the photo) which was extremely different from our hotel: Colina, and attempted to navigate the streets of Cuba for the first time. The road along the malecon, we discovered is located in some kind of Groundhog Day loop, you can't get on or off without starting again.

Our hire car, a Toyota Yaris from the early nineties seemed to be in pretty good shape when we considered the Ladas and Chevrolets we'd seen earlier. The lack of back seatbelts worried me, especially since we'd planned to drive over 1000km around the island. If I didn't mention it earlier, there were four of us, so I was a little concerned for our safety in the back. The classic hire car guy reassured us that "In Cuba... cinturón de seguridad no es necesario". I'm not sure I agreed with him, but we looked around and there were no other hire cars with seatbelts in the back, so we thought we may as well just get on with it and trust G to drive carefully. It's true that the other cars could only go up to about 80kph, and there were very few wherever we went.

Biting the bullet, we set off and got lost immediately. In Cuba there are no sealbelts OR roadsigns, so my non-existant Spanish was quickly brought up to being able to ask for directions. Somehow we managed to exit the loop and got out onto the motorway (with a total of one roadsign between the centre of Havana and the entrance to the motorway. We literally had to look at the sun and the time and guess where the right direction was.

After an hour or so, we called at Las Terrazas, an eco-tourism site with natural swimming pools, a canopy tour (like Go-Ape), an eco-hotel and several hikes through gorgeous woodlands.

Taking the road again, we arrived (with a young hitch-hiker in tow) in Vinales. The village itself is very laid-back and the surrounding scenery is stunning. The mogotes are huge land masses which kind of pop out of the ground between tabacco fields and farms. Fringed with palm trees and coffee plants it's a beautiful sight.

Our host in Vinales was a young girl named Agnieska (the name doesn't sound very Cuban but she was), who had only opened her casa particular just a week before. She was a great host, making sure everything was ok, telling us about the region and cooking us our very first real Cuban dinner. She told me she was a chef at the local (government owned) restaurant, but wanted to branch out, I suggested she try to open her own restaurant and she said "In other countries, it's possible, but not in Cuba." That was the first time anyone we'd met had in any way criticised the regime, and even then she said it with a smile and briskly changed the subject.

A small frog and a cockroach were our room-mates that night, as well as the snorts from the pigs and cock-a-doodle-doos from the roosters on the neighbouring farm. We were really starting to see the real Cuba.

Day 3 - Havana

I was starting to get used to the place by day 3, the crumbling buildings were no longer shocking, but surprising, the food no longer bland but variable, depending on the temperature of the rice and the greasiness of the chicken. The beautiful 28°C weather was very easy to get used to!

We decided to visit the Museo de la Revolucion, which was an extremely interesting place. It was full of information about what led up to the Cuban revolution, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro and all that. Preceding 1959, it also tells of the harsh conditions under the US-appointed dictator Batista. These conditions are thoroughly shown (and perhaps exaggerated), as the current Cuban leader has played on the horrific lead up to his own rise to power in order to continue convincing Cubans today that really, "Vamos Bien".

The propaganda in the museum is pretty impressive, and you can almost start believing that Cubans are better off now than they ever were before 1959. In fact plenty of the "socialist" systems were in place in the constitution of 1940 anyway, but I won't go into that in too much detail as you can see for yourself on other sites like this one.

Just for a taster of the general pro-revolucion advertising (because there is no other), here are some of my pictures:



On the evening of our last day in Havana, we visited a Paladar, a privately owned restaurant. The Hurón Azul restaurant was like a drink of water in a desert. I'm not one to turn my nose up at a bit of muck, but walking into the plush furnishings, sitting at a table with a table cloth and choosing from a menu which wasn't wet or dirty was just wonderful. The restaurant was great, delicious, interesting food and friendly service. This is Cuba as it could be, I think.