Havana

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Hi all. We are alive and well. It took a few days to get to a place with internet. My mobile phone also doesn´t work here, so Irene or Nick or Eugene, if you can let my mum know I´m alive and having fun, that would be much appreciated.

I can´t say much about Havana. We got there late in the afternoon, had dinner, went for drinks, then bed, then got up in the morning the next day and left town. Hopefully we´ll get a day or half a day to visit the place at the end of the trip.

The trip from Mexico to Cuba had only a small hitch. We thought Merryn had an eTicket for her flight, but found out that she needed the good old paper tickets, which of course she didn´t have. They also struggled to find her booking. They did in the end... but for a little while there, we were a bit worried.

Our transfer also didn´t show up at Havana airport. Apparently that happens a lot. We were directed from one tour operator to another to another, all saying they didn´t know anything about us. Oh well. Eventually one nice lady got us into a taxi and off we went to find our hotel.

I was raining when we arrived. So much for the sunny hot place we had pictured.

Our hotel was fairly basic, but by Cuban standards would have been pretty nice.

We met a few people from our group to be who were nice and went out for an Italian dinner. Once we had stuffed ourselves silly, as we hadn´t eaten since breakfast, we then went to a local bar and got our first taste of the Cuba we were expecting. The average age of the band was probably 80. These crusty old guys pumped out fabulous Cuban salsa and Cha Cha Cha songs for us. I´m pleased to see this repeated in each of the places we´ve visted since.

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