Finally I get to go to Cuba :D

Well I've always wanted to go to Cuba, but it was a really quick decision I made to have a two week break from Mexico in the beginning of March. I hadn't really done to much planning or research for what I wanted to do while I visited the island. I got some good help from Rosmy who had been living on Cuba earlier and knew a family who had a room for me. I had been trying to find hostels on Cuba, but I found out they don't really have hostels because of the government controlling the tourism. They only want tourists that come to spend a lot of money in their country. They only have expensive hotels, or an alternative to hostels, casa particulares, which was what this family offered me. The family had made a plan for what I could do during my stay, but it was a fairly expensive and touristic plan, so the first days I decided I just wanted to walk around Havana and get to know the city. I did like the first meeting with the traffic!

The family I was staying with thought I was crazy wanting to walk around, and ment the city was to big for that, but they helped me out with a tourist map and explained where things were. One of the first places I visited was the important Plaza de la Revolucíon. This is the place where Fidel Castro held his speach for several thousand people after the Cuban Revolution. Unfortunately I could not go all the way up to the top because of some maintenance work, but from the top you should get a great view of Havana!

So I continued walking around exploring new places, getting a ground view of Havana :) It is actually very interesting walking around in the city, there are so many different things to see! I walked by the university of Cuba and at the moment they were preparing for some big event. Curious as I was I had to ask someone what was going to happen. Walking around in the city I had seen many posters with the five faces you can see in the back. I got an explanation from some cubans that these men had been taken into custody in the USA for espionage on the government. These were the Cuban Five, and one of them had just been released to Cuba, so they would have a big celebration in the streets that night.

I kept on walking around to get to know the city. On Cuba they have two currencies, Cuban pesos (pesos) which the locals use, and Cuban Convertible pesos (CUC) for tourists. It is a good idea to have some of both while walking the streets of Havana. On every street you find the so called peso shops where everything is really cheap. These are "hole-in-the-wall" shops the locals use, but tourists may also shop there. Families just open a window or their door and sell whatever they have. You also find food and groceries in the peso shops. Very typical are the shops selling pizzas, where you can get a personal pizza for a bit less than US$1,

There are several places where you can buy handcrafts and souvenirs, but there is one big market where people rent booths and sell different things. It is impossible to walk past a booth without having cubans shout out to you trying to sell everything or anything they have.

A very typical thing on Cuba is sitting in the streets playing domino. I met this group and asked to take a picture of them, and they invited me to play with them. I don't know if they made me win, but I won twice in a row :) One of them wanted to play some chess with me, but couldn't find his board, so instead he asked me if I wanted to go to Callejón de Hamel. I had no idea what this was, but he said that they always have a big party on Sundays, and lucky for me it was Sunday!

I joined him to this funny alley with lots of colors and culture! This is the place to know the Afro-Cuban culture :) So much interesting art on the buildings and I could hear and feel the mood was great when entering the street. The rumba was playing and people were dancing in the packed street! My friend took me in to El Barracón de Hamel, a popular restaurant with typical Afro-Cuban food and some great drinks.

After a couple of drinks I felt like going out in the street to feel the energy and dance!!

The next day I had a trip with one of the sons in the family I was living at. We went to Viñales, a valley well known for production of tobacco. In the valley there is a cave I went down into, and took a boat ride through it. Then we just passed through Pinar del Río on our way back, and ended off our trip with some delicious cuban food!

When I had been walking around in Havana I found a hostel with several backpackers. This was a better option for me, so I went to stay there. It was a great option to meet other travelers, and I went sightseeing with some of them. Together with two guys from Norway and one from Denmark we got one of the old cabs to drive us around the city, and also to a beach nearby.

One other traveler at the hostel was leaving Cuba and arranged a dinner out with travelers from the hostel. This was an amazing restaurant, and my friend had booked our own diningroom. The restaurant was so classy, the service great and the food was so delicious. I had one of my best lobster meals! At the end of the meal we got cuban rum and cigars on the house.

At the dinner I talked some with a local girl my friend had invited. She was very sweet and suggested places to see and things to do in Havana. One of the things I found very interesting was seeing Havana from en eagles perspective. This is one of the 74 Camera Obscuras in the world, and the only one in Latin America and the Caribbean. You go to the top of a building on Plaza Vieja and enter a dark room. With two lenses and a mirror on a periscope a clear and live picture of Havana is projected onto a 1.8 meter concave platform in the dark room.

During my stay on Cuba I also wanted to travel around and see more of the country. Together with my norwegian and danish friends we rented a car and headed out on a road trip.

Our first stop would be Cienfuegos, an old city about 3 hours south of Havana. On our way we made a couple of stops. The first was to check out all the crabs that were running across the street from the forest towards the ocean. There were thousands of them, and it was impossible to not run over them with the car. The second stop was to have a meal. They are really famous for their lobster on Cuba, but at the place we stopped we also could choose to have crocodile. Crocodile was a white-greyish meat and had a very different taste, but I preffered the lobster during my stay on Cuba.

We had just a short stay in Cienfuegos to do the sightseeing downtown. When we moved on towards Trinidad, further south, we stopped by Guanaroca Lagoon and the Delfinario of Cienfuegos. We rowed out in the lagoon with some local guides.

The lagoon is a mangrove lagoon and home of hundreds of flamengos. From far away we could just see a pink line on the surface of the water.

Closing up on the flamengos was an amazing view. When we were close enough for one flamengo to get scared it started to run for lift off, and the rest of the flamengos would follow, creating pink clouds of flamengos!

Arriving Trinidad was interesting, as one of the oldest and best preserved cities in the Caribbean, you certainly can see and feel this entering the narrow brick streets. The night we arrived and the sun was setting we thought there was a burning car driving around in the streets, but it is normal that a car drives around spraying some gas against insects at sunset.

We had a little longer stay in Trinidad, and really enjoyed our stay there! It was a nice and realaxed city to walk around exploring, and by night we went to a cave party with some spanish friends we just met in the street. The next day we went to the beach and ended up meeting the spanish, and also by surprise I met a swedish girl from the hostel in Havana! The best experience from Trinidad was our horseback ride to a waterfall in the hills. It was so much fun riding the horse, and for the first time galloping in the cuban nature! When we arrived to the waterfall we had some time to relax and swim a little, which was very refreshing in the hot weather.

Our continuing travel was heading towards Varadero to enjoy cuban beaches for some of our last days. On the way there we made a quick stop in Santa Clara to se the famous monument of Che Guevara. This is the city where the last battle of the cuban revolution was held in 1958, and Che Guevara is burried here.

We arrived late in Varadero, but we were all very ready to enjoy the famous beach the next morning! It was so clear and good in the water, and the white beach would stretch as far as you could see :D

When our stay on Cuba was getting close to the end we headed back towards Havana. We still had a day in Havana, and also the rental car, so we decided to go out to see Ernest Hemingways house a bit outside of the city. 

I had a great stay on Cuba without any problems until I was going to leave the country. I got to the airport with a couple from Australia who were taking the same flight as me. We got in line for check-in and didn't really think to much about it. After some time, when it was getting close to boarding time we were still in the same spot. We asked someone about the check-in, and somehow they had changed the line for our flight without any notice, so they told us we were to late for the check-in. We tried to explain that we had been in line the last 3 hours, and asked if they could help us. They said there was no possibility to get us on the plane now because it was leaving. There was still half an hour to take off. Without anyone willing to help us we had to go to the company's office and find a solution. The only solution was to change for a later flight later that day going to Cancún, and then catch a new flight to Mexico City. All in all I had a great time on Cuba, and I loved the country and it's culture :D

And their cars ;)