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Viñales: Cuba Pt. 3

With Fidel stepping down this week, it seems only right for me to dig out my notes from our trip to Cuba last year and try to finish off the job of blogging it.

In case you missed or don’t remember the first half of this story, we’d begun in Havana, where we skilfully avoided any serious run-ins with the touts and spent the rest of the time attempting to speak bad Spanish, visiting the rum museum and the Capitol and drinking a lot of mojitos along the way…

After a few days in Havana, we moved on, catching an almost empty Viazul tourist bus bound for Viñales: tobacco country. It was a bumpy journey, and we weren’t sure if it was a great sign when the driver stalled at least once before he had even left the bus terminal car park, but we made it to Viñales in one piece and somehow on time despite us stopping to pick up and drop off assorted random people along the way. As we left the bus, we were mobbed by the owners of the town’s casas particulares (this being low season, they far outnumbered the passengers on the bus). As we’d already booked and paid for our accommodation, we tried to get past them with some polite “No”s and move down the street to get our bearings and check the map.

Unfortunately “No” apparently wasn’t an answer they were accustomed to taking, and it took me a while to work out that in fact the magic words were “reservacion… los jazmines… pagado”

“Ah!” said the closest tout, in English. “You want taxi!” And off she went to produce a taxi driver, who duly drove us up to our hotel (although not without him trying one final time to get us to change our minds and go to his mate’s casa instead…)

The Los Jazmines hotel where we were staying sits up in the hills a couple of miles outside of Viñales itself, with stunning views over the valley. We were lucky enough to have a room on the end of the row of rooms on the top floor, with views out in two different directions.

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The following day we were up early and foolishly opted to set out on foot in search of the Visitor’s Centre to find out about walks into the beautiful countryside. Unfortunately it turned out not to be quite as close as it appeared on the map in our otherwise reliable Lonely Planet, and not quite as useful as the book pretended it might be.

“Oh no”, said the bloke inside the half-finished building. “You can’t arrange the walks from here. You have to go into town for that.”

Luckily, at that moment a bus came whizzing round the corner. We thanked the chap and legged it across the street to jump on board. It turned out to be the tourist bus, which runs all day in a circuit through the town and links up the other attractions in the area. It took us to the Mural de la Prehistoria, a garish mural painted on the side of a mogote, and then on to town, where we ate pizzas that cost about 50p and went to find the real tourist centre (where we arranged to join a guided tour through the valley the next day). We opted to cab it back to the hotel…

Having made the mistake of eating the predictably poor hotel food the previous evening, and not wanting to repeat the error, we set off a couple of hours later back into town. As we emerged from the hotel reception, there was the same taxi driver waiting outside. He started chatting to us on the way in, and I did my best to talk back. And then he reached into the glove compartment.

“Un Regalo!” he announced, offering a cigar in our direction. Not wanting to turn down the gift we felt duty bound to accept, although we didn’t spark up in the back of his cab, as he suggested.

Later that night, as we sat outside one of the town’s bars, he popped up again, wearing a baseball cap with “Jesus is my best friend” written on the top. I bought him a beer and took the opportunity to brush up on my Spanish…

2 thoughts on “Viñales: Cuba Pt. 3”

  1. WRT the stupid comments re Natasha Horsey. The name is French, from d’Horsey, nothing to do with horses. Plus, she is not a sloane and she exists. So you guys get a life and stop posting complete rubbish on the web.

  2. Ah. I see, you’re referring to this

    Has someone been googling themselves, then? It really is the lowest form of vanity, you know…

    “Stop posting complete rubbish on the web”? But how would I get through boring days in the office then. By googling myself?

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