Vinales

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Vinales
Monday 4th. February
The owners of our Casa organised our taxi for the next stop.
The bus system can be a bit hit and miss but a collectivo taxi by which you share with other people can sometimes cost similar and they pick you up from home and take you to your next address!
We were picked up by a 1946 Dodge and luckily for us it had a new refinement of AC.
We shared with another English couple and another Cuban guy so 6 in total including the driver and quite comfortable. Stopping on route for some of the tastiest chicken rice and beans that a lady was cooking in a little cabin on the side of the road.
The drive down was very pretty a few sugar cane fields but this area is known for coffee.
Our Casa is right in the country and surrounded by mango , banana and palms and lots of chickens!!...guess we will be getting an early call in the morning....
The guy In front of the Casa has horses and we have signed up for tomorrow to go with him...... David is very excited!!
I have asked that we have biggish horses as some of the ones I’ve seen are very tiny and look very under nourished and I’m not sure they’d cope with my/our weight!!

Tuesday
Just returned from a 4hr. Ride!! David has just told me that he enjoyed it more than he was expecting...that could have something to do with having a mojito before 10am whilst visiting a tobacco farm. We were told how the tobacco was grown and then watched how they were rolled. They actually used honey to seal the leaf around. Next stop was a coffee farm and a bit of a talk about the growing and harvesting etc and this farm also grows a special little guava that they use to make...rum! Without using sugar cane, we had a little try of this too and again very nice! They took us through some beautiful countryside through tobacco fields and cooling pine forests. Luckily for David we were told that the horses were semi automatic but after a mojito they were fully automatic!
We had a nice surprise last night as a couple of bars in town offer free WiFi... Now you might wonder ...so what but in Cuba you have to buy a special card and then this enables you to perhaps access the 'free' WiFi in certain locations such as parks or squares. We couldn’t even find anywhere that we could buy a card in Havana and if you did find somewhere they quite often didn’t have any left.... there’s quite a black market in these.
So I have had 5 days detox from the internet!....So you can imagine that once we’d logged on it took quite a while to delete most of my emails.
Looking around the bar it was very sad to see that most of the people checking their phone’s were wearing beige and our age! Actually it was very noticeable on the plane over that about 75% of the passengers must have been over 65...... obviously we brought the average down a tadge!
But it has ment that I have been able to write this blog and get it sent when I go for a drink!
Wed
Amazingly not too sore from yesterday’s ride but decided to go for a walk into the country and up to a great vantage point and have a late lunch and a rest this afternoon......the cockerels start early!
Vinales is so different from the city, quite touristy so at least there’s plenty of restaurants to choose from. Most of the buildings are single storied and very colourful. Most if not all the houses have a room for rent these are called Casa Particular and that’s what we are staying in. Sitting on the porch at the moment watching the odd ox cart or horse trundle past. People walking past and everyone says Hola
The owners are busy in their garden taking cuttings they seem to have a bit of a nursery going on I can’t see that they’re going to use them all. It’s all the type of foliage that I have to buy..and lots of air plants. There’s a 100 year old baobab tree in the garden covered in air plants and monsteria leaves.
It's really a beautiful place!

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