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Published: September 14th 2006
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Ok, so we have lost our bikes and need to get the hang of acting like normal tourists and use public buses to get around. It´s quite unlike bus travel in Australia. For a start, the bus drivers here do quite a bit of their own business during the journey, making unscheduled stops to pick up cigars and beers for passengers, and bananas, chicas and family members. In a country where there is very little motorised transportation, it makes sense to use (value add to?) these buses that are being paid for by tourists who are rich in comparison to Cubans.
Our first stop was at Sancti Spiritus, a sleepy provincial capital with quaint cobbled streets and an air-conditioned ice-cream parlour! In the heat, this was a real blessing.
An eleven hour bus journey later, we arrived at Santiago de Cuba, the country´s first capital and the heart of most Cuban independence fights since the years of slavery. It was in the Sierra Maestra, the rainforested range east of Santiago, that Fidel Castro, Camilo Cienfuegos, Che Guevarra and 79 others planned the Cuban revolution. They succeeded in 1959, after a few early losses. In Santiago, we enjoyed the historical
Dave self-portrait
Mirror in a large colonial house, Sancti Spiritus sites of the beginning of the revolution as well as great music and a close shave with hurricane Ernesto.
Santiago is the launching point to the lovely seaside town of Baracoa, five hours drive east (and three hours past Guantanamo). Part of the charm of Baracoa may lie in it having had road access to the rest of the country for only 40 years. The construction of the road, through a steep and beautiful range, was one of Fidel´s first public works. In Baracoa we hired local bikes and headed for the hills. One hill along, Claire discovered a slow leak, and without a puncture repair kit that was the end of the ride.
Having heard that our bikes had arrived at Havana airport, we started back westwards, stopping at Camagüay and Trinidad along the way.
Camagüay is an attractive provincial capital noted for its twisting streets, unusual in a Spanish colonial city. (The Spaniards like grid systems.) It was built with twists to confuse pirates; the ploy failed, and the town was ransacked many times. However, we managed to lose ourselves.
Trinidad and a nearby valley are World Heritage listed because of their importance to
Pull up a chair
Neighbours chatting in the street, Sancti Spiritus Cuban history and economic development, and the good repair in which the centre of the town has been kept. Trinidad was a centre of sugar growing, with the wealth of the local sugar barons, Spanish colonials, being based on their use of slaves, mostly from Africa and also from Haiti where the slave trade had collapsed. The barons got too greedy, though, and began to clear-fell larger areas of forest in poorer soils and further from the sugar mills. This was to increase the amount of land under sugar production and to fuel the mills. Contrary to their plans, both these actions made production uneconomical, and the industry failed. The money that the colonials poured into their mansions in town can be seen today in the preserved old city with its picturesque cobbled streets and pastel-coloured buildings. The town also has a couple of museums dedicated to describing life for slaves and poor farmers, and to the revolutionary activities that were fuelled by the differences in power and wealth.
We also visited Viñales, in the centre of the best tobacco-growing country in Cuba. It is a different landscape to the rest of the country, marked by steep limestone hills
(called mogotes) that rise straight out of the plains. (They are a similar formation to hills in Guilin, China, and the islands in Ha Long Bay, Vietnam.) The limestone has given rise to hundreds of caves, and attracts speleologists and rockclimbers from around the world. It also attracted us as bushwalkers.
Back in Havana, we picked up our bikes (see next entry) and did some last sightseeing before catching a 3am flight to Santiago de Chile.
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Mark And Becky
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Images
Wow - amazing images! Really enjoyed the pictures. Keep up the good work. Love, Mark and Becky