We were sad to leave the Nacional this morning - we’d really loved staying there. We caught the ‘tourist’ bus to Vinales. Tourist buses are ‘dollar only’ buses which means the locals can’t use them and tourists are discouraged (well it’s nigh on impossible) to use anything else. Just a word here about transport. Havana (and the other bit of Cuba we’ve seen so far) is full of ‘classic’ cars. They are cars that pre-date the 1959 revolution and some are just about held together with fibre glass and glue, others are in near-immaculate condition. It must be the best collection of classic cars in the world, better than any museum.
This is partly because no-one can buy cars here now. If you owned your car before the revolution then it’s yours, you hang on to it and keep repairing it, even though you can’t get the parts. They call mechanics here ‘magicians’ and they must be to keep these cars going. Privately owned cars like these have yellow number plates. Then there are the blue number plates – these are all other cars, government owned but given to people to use because of their jobs or other ‘qualifying’ criteria.
Red number plates are for hire cars – which our guide used for ferrying us around. The local buses are full to the brim – like the tube on the worst of days, but less regular! On our first day in Havana we wondered why masses of people stood in the centre of the road by traffic lights, but now we know. They are waiting for lifts. Most people who have cars, stop, say where they are going and offer lifts to anyone going in the same direction. This happens all over the city and today, we discovered, in the coutryside also. Our driving guide explained it to us the other day as ‘supporting each other so we don’t have to suffer more’. (That was when she also said that Cubans will always remain loyal to Fidel, almost as a grandfather figure, because he has done so much for the country. ‘It really annoys America,’ she said, ‘that here is this little island just 90 miles off their coast and they can’t control us, they can’t defeat us, even though they rule the rest of the world. Why should they rule us and bully us? Of course we want some changes and they will come, but it will take time.’So back to today - a very comfortable ride in a highly air conditioned coach for the three and a half hour ride. Vinales is in the province of Pinar del Rio, the biggest tobacco growing area (no comments, there please), and very rural/provincial. The Vinales valley is marked by a series of unusual flat-topped mountains (magotes)
and the scenery is beautiful. Our hotel (Los Jazmines) just outside the town of Vinales is very nice if somewhat outdated, like most things here. We stayed around the pool for the afternoon as we plan to do some walking tomorrow. We had dinner in the hotel, which did not meet the criteria of ‘barely edible’ and so I rounded it off with a cheese toastie from the bar, which was great – exactly what a cheese toastie should be: two slices of toasted bread with melted cheese in the middle. Now, how difficult was that? There are more English in this hotel than we have met anywhere else on the trip so far. (Canada must be empty, they’re all in Havana!) But again, here in the countryside, great bands playing – music with dinner and an African/Cuban band in the bar.
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