Days 30–37: Havana

My last week in Cuba, waiting out the time between finishing my End to End and my flight home, had the feeling of marking time.

The bike wasn’t really involved, which explained my limited enthusiasm. I walked everywhere, mostly between cheap bars and tourist lobster restaurants.

Several of my intended big-ticket attractions (Capitol [pic], Motor Museum, Model of Havan) were closed, and many of the ones that were open (Museum of the Revolution, overseas art museum) were a bit dull.

This snap of a passing daredevil (pic) is my only photo of the period that features a bicycle.

Still, I enjoyed a visit to a jazz club that had some outstanding music.

And – from the cosy safety of my casa – I marvelled at a tropical storm that filled the streets with sloshing water for a couple of hours and which blacked out the electricity with a mighty pop.

The energy supply was eventually restored, of course. I hoped mine wouldn't be long in returning either.

I was looking forward to getting back on my bike, and cycling to the airport, so I could go home. It had been a fabulous trip, but you can have too much of a good thing. I think I can live without lobster, or Bucanero (pic) for a while, for example.

Finally, I set off to ride the 13 miles to the airport for my evening flight. Another storm was forecast for the afternoon, so I set off in the morning’s fine weather.

A final peso burger and juice from a stall, a final bit of email admin from the Hotel Vedado’s internet, and a pleasant ride through countryside, little towns and villages, one of which yielded a sneaky shortcut to Terminal 3.

I was ten hours early, but thought that preferable to getting drenched.

In contrast to the obstructive attitude I’d had at checkin back in England on the way out, the guy here was helpful and accommodating, getting me and bike onboard in the cheapest and best way.

With bike disassembled, packed up and dispatched through the scanner, I invested my remaining CUCs on a few pricey beers, chatted to fellow passengers about this and that, and clambered aboard nervously as always.



Cuba had been a six-week long party (pic). But now was the time to dream of new journeys, as I dozed fitfully on the long, long haul back to my world.

Days 26–30: Viñales

With the End to End done, but two weeks left before my flight home, it all felt like being at school after final exams but before the end of term. From Fri 24 Apr to Tue 28 Apr I explored Viñales, a tourist town surrounded by spectacular lush scenery of mogotes, sugarloaf hills (pic).



I stumped up to go on a sunset guided walk around local farms (pic). Very good it was too. We saw growing pineapples, mangos, guavas, tomatoes, cashews (bless you!), corn, lychees, tobacco, sapotle (woodapple?), manioc, chilli, palms, and lots of other edible and rubbable things that cure colds and diarrhoea and bad skin – ailments all miraculously avoided during my bike trip. And hummingbirds too, of course, but that's, like, yeah, so what, round here.



I did a few other touristy things, such as visiting the Indian Cave, and paying over the odds in CUCs for food and drink, but mostly enjoyed a lot of short circular rides round the area that took me a bit more off the beaten track (pic).



It was hot – record-breakingly so, locals told me with a shake of the head – and one afternoon I was pleased to cool off with a wild swim in the local lake (pic).

It was fun in Viñales, I was glad I went, and I liked mooching round the villages by bike (pic).

But I was getting a bit bored by the end. My most pleasing discovery was Vino de Pasa, a sweet wine and fruit juice concoction made locally in Pinar del Río that tasted like soft sherry and cost far less than a coffee in a tourist cafe.

It was time to return to Havana for my final week in Cuba. I'd spent a couple of days there on the way out, but had only had a brief glimpse.



So I disassembled my bike for storage in the undercroft of the Viazul coach (pic) and headed back to explore the capital...

Day 25: San Juan y Martinez to La Fe

The final day – of the End to End part of my Cuban trip, anyway.

I set out in the dark from my miserable little hutch in San Juan and rolled cautiously through the black predawn. There were three cafes open in the town, and several people about. So at the first I had a quick coffee to set me on my way.

Thaty proved enough for me to make it all the way to the second one fifty yards on, where I repeated the process. And hence to the third, etc.



I polished off the last stretch of the Carretera Central, scoring a few cold refrescos en route. I bypassed the humdrum-looking town of Sandino and got to the village of La Fe (pic) around ten.

I’d decided to make this point the end of the trip. There’s still another 100km of beautiful coastline road from here to the lighthouse at Roncali, at the island’s very western tip. However... the peninsula beyond La Fe is a nature reserve, Guanahacabibes, and access is by permit only.

Organised dive- and tour-groups make visits and stay in an expensive hotel at Maria La Gorda, and no doubt a TV crew could have set up a trip to the end by burning a few dollars. It’s also possible to enter in a car with an official guide... but there’s no casual access for cycle-tourists on a peso budget.



So, with a mixture of reluctance and relief, I took a few souvenir snaps at La Fe’s very low-key low quay (pic) and celebrated with a can of cold pop. And La Fe seemed an appropriate place to end, in a terminus, tiny-community, John-o’-Groats kind of way. The Carretera Central, my magic carpet for much of the thousand-mile span of Cuba, peters out apologetically here onto a tiny bit of sand. There was a bloke with a fishing boat on stilts.

Done. Finished. One thousand seven hundred and forty kilometres; 1088 miles. Twenty-five days during which I’ve seen tourist gems and, more fulfillingly, plenty of real-life Cuba, the towns and villages and peso stalls and local bars, ordinary and extraordinary homes.

Good people seemed to outnumber bad people by about 99 to 1, and everyday encounters were always pleasant. They were aware of the disparity between their purchasing power and mine, but were self-confident, proud of their country, full of mutual respect, and eternally friendly and helpful. It’s been a quite wonderful trip.

So what now? I had two weeks before my flight back from Havana, and planned to spend them being a tourist with a bike, rather than a cycle tourist. A week in honeypot Viñales, then a week exploring Havana, then home at last.



So, first, I had to find a place to sleep and celebrate tonight, and that place was to be Pinar del Río. I rode eastwards for the first time in nearly a month, past Sandino scenically to Guane. En route I was entertained by the background hills and foreground palms and ponds (pic)...



...bucolic horses and shacks (pic)...

...and local cyclists nonchalantly riding one-handed with parasols (pic).

I was in Guane for its tiny train station, hoping to get to Pinar del Río the easy way. (Not the faster way, of course. Cuban trains go slower than cyclists. Even me.) But there had been no easy way to check the timetable in advance.

In fact, I’m not sure there is even a timetable, let alone a website displaying it, let alone any internet access to find it.

But, as it happened, the 11.30, or possibly 11.50, or maybe 12 noon, or anyway, today’s train, was there waiting to depart. It was a ‘steam train’, though not ‘steam’ in the fluffy white Thomas the Tank Engine style.



Even ticking over, as passengers laconically clambered aboard opening, shutting and re-opening doors, the engine was generating not ‘steam’ but ‘vast black cumulonimbus clouds of sheer poison that would have put Bikini Atoll to shame’. Hmm; funny how the picture doesn’t show it (pic).

I bought my ticket from the dusty, sleepy kiosk. My two-and-a-half-hour trip cost $1.70, the foreigner rate no doubt: locals evidently paid 1.70 pesos. I hauled my bike into the goods wagon at the front.



Cuban trains are notoriously slow, shabby and underfunded, and this wasn’t exactly up to German standards. The seating section (pic) was all bare painted metal with sideways plastic seats and bare metal grab rails, like some 1950s industrial tin shed minimally upgraded to a military canteen. The goods wagon was like some 1950s industrial tin shed downgraded for abattoir-bound cattle.

The train filled up as we clanked and bucked wildly, and very slowly, through the west Cuban countryside, and I wasn’t the only person travelling with a bike. There were nearly 30 on board at one point (pic), most suspended by their handlebars from a bare metal rail that my drops wouldn’t fit on.

Overall I was delighted with my train experience, mostly because I won’t ever have to ride a Cuban train again.



At long last we lumbered into Pinar (pic). It’s a likeable place, lively and easy on the eye, with a bustling centre, a lot of nice painted colonnaded buildings, and some striking art deco facades.

I checked into an ensuite room in a very nice casa recommended in the guidebook, in a pleasant art-deco-y part of the town centre (pic).

But there was a lot of banging, hammering and drilling from next door, who were evidently knocking down an extension, building a new one, and destruction-testing a cement mixer simultaneously, so the casa owner used me as a bargaining chip to get them to stop for the evening.

We had a plan. He did all the talking, explaining that I was an important writer from England hoping to encourage people to visit Pinar del Río, but with all that din I couldn’t write my article; I frowned and shrugged in an I’m-trying-to-help-us-all-here sort of way.

The twin notions of respect for artistic endeavour, and desperation for hard currency, did the trick. We had peace and quiet for the rest of the evening.

So, with plenty feel good about, I walked out for a celebration beer or two at El Rápido in town.

This cheery signpost (pic) seemed appropriate for the occasion: today was not the End of Something, it’s the Beginning of Something Else.

I just don’t know what that Something Else is yet.

Anyway, as I wandered round the sunny centre (pic) I found an internet cafe with, astoundingly, no queue.

Most of my session was taken up deleting spam emails that had built up in the last two weeks rather than maintaining my social media profile.

I’ve had more lobster in the last fortnight than prawn cocktails in my life, and was rather fed up of them. But the owner had clearly been very keen for me to opt in to the lobster dinner, mindful of his profits. At $8, I could hardly disappoint him, so I signed up for the similarly inexpensive slap-up breakfast too.

I enjoyed the ideal accompaniment to it (the dinner, not breakfast): a bottle of cheap Spanish white ($3.85) from the offie down the road, chilled in my room fridge.

I lounged about my apartment-like room all evening, watching a US film on telly, the onslaught of English unfamiliar; I had to rely on the Spanish subtitles at some points.

So, my End to End of Cuba is finished. And it was fantastic. A once-in-a-lifetime experience. Never again.

CUBA END TO END 2015 SUMMARY
Miles today: 38
Miles from Baracoa to La Fe: 1088
Time taken: 25 days (inc. 2 rest days)
Lobster dinners eaten: 8
Beers (small) drunk: 101
Power cuts: 2
Punctures: 0
Insect bites: 0
Cigars bought: 1
Cigars smoked: 0.06
Near-leg-breaking comedy falls on collapsed bridges : 1
Total End to End budget in Cuba: c.$900 / £650
Airfare, UK transport expenses etc: c.$950 / £700
Total value: Priceless

Day 24: San Diego de los Baños to San Juan y Martinez

The penultimate End to End day, so I was keen to get on with it. I was out before sun-up, my bike twinklingy under-illuminated by three-euro mini-LED lights, picked up from an Albert Heijn in Amsterdam historically, and recently rediscovered in my tool bag.

It was quite special to be sliding silently through the quiet edge of town, past wooden villas with veranda lights still on, a few people inside blearily making breakfast, or standing around outside waiting for buses or lifts.

By the time I was back on the Carretera Central it was light. I whizzed along, enjoying the imperative and the decisiveness and clarity of it all: San Juan tonight; La Fe – my End to End Endpoint – tomorrow.



I stopped for refrescos here and there and had a nice hamburguesa at a stall where the owner clearly had the right skills for the new economy: she was smiley, quick serving, chatty with the regulars, multitasking, and in good-natured control. I hurtled to, and through (pic), and past, the biggish town of Pinar del Río, chatting briefly with a local cyclist who is a fan of Bradley Wiggins.

This was tobacco country. The farms and villages and houses, worn but comfy-looking like old pairs of shoes, made a picturesque background for easy cycling: friendly and green, quiet but not empty.



I got to San Juan y Martinez (pic) by half ten, too early really, but I didn’t fancy another 50km to Sandino in the afternoon heat. And time isn’t an issue: my flight back home is a fortnight away. So – after a false start with a guy who tried to cycle me way out of town to ‘his’ casa – I got myself a ‘Cubans-only’ room through a man I met at the ice cream stall.



It was a grim shabby box with no toilet paper, and I was gently fleeced for the foreigners’ rate of $20 (Cubans would pay 20 pesos). But it was the literal price to pay for staying off the beaten track, it was big enough for me and my bike, it was right in the centre of town (pic), had very welcome aircon, and there was a just-about-lockable door.



Beyond two colourfully colonnaded shopping streets (pic), San Juan was short of selfie opportunities. But it was an amiable enough backwoods Cuban town with plenty of peso stalls catering for the locals out on their evening stroll, and for hungry, thirsty, budget-conscious cycle-tourists. I was able to spin the evening out with fresh fruit juices, pizzas, pork rolls and milk shakes.



Now and then I would get approached by a tout, who would get shooed away by a local, who would then apologise to me and insist Cubans are not all like that, but it was amusing rather than threatening.

By gum, though, I’ll be pleased to get to La Fe tomorrow.

Miles today: 48
Miles since Baracoa: 1084

Day 23: Soroa to San Diego de los Baños

After two lovely and memorable days, today was a rather routine, even dee you double-ell. I'm near the End of the End to End, and I want to finish things and get on with the rest of my life, assuming there is one.

My lovely casa in Soroa supplied a stylish fruit-based breakfast (pic), sculpted like a modernist artwork. I was tempted to write a white card:

BREAKFAST by Casa Soroa. Mixed media, 2015. Blurring boundaries between notions of literal, and artistic, sustenance, Soroa's work, laboriously constructed entirely from locally sourced fruit, not only references Quixotic idealism, hinted at in the manchego cheese and ironic quince jelly, but also Cubist (and hence 'Cuba-ist') principles of deconstruction and recomposition, and patterns recalling traditional native art, which challenge the viewer with questions of innocence versus experience, authenticity versus commercialism, and co-operation versus exploitation, as they are confronted with the 'sustain/consume' dichotomy.

I didn't, of course. I ate it.



And after that... a rather forgettable day, down the hill to the plains and along a mostly deserted autopista. This picture of a car park was about as interesting as sights got (pic).

I had a refresco stop at the little town of Santa Cruz, and then punctuated a pleasant, flattish jaunt along the little-trafficked Carretera Central with another drinks stopoff at Fierro.

I arrived at the purported spa town of San Diego de los Baños, with its hot springs (pic), just as a light shower started.

This was, however, the only contact with water outside a bathroom I had in the town: the Balneario and Termas were closed for refurb.

Accommodation was suboptimal too. My intended hotel, adjacent, was said to be full, despite there being no sign of any guests. The other hotel, in town, was Cubans-only. I found an adequate casa but it was a bit unfriendly.

San Diego continued to disappoint: it felt the sort of tourist town (largely for Cuban tourists, not international ones) that doesn't both trying very hard because you'll never come again anyway.

Ice cream seemed the only food available at non-hotel-ripoff prices; I eventually found a good, if pricey, pork steak in a local restaurant.



My sunset stroll was pleasant enough, though, past trotting horsecarts, young people playing baseball in the park, families taking a dip in the river, and the odd friendly garlic-seller (pic), and I found a stall for some refrescos.

I had a quiet, sober, early night. Just now, over a thousand miles on from Baracoa, I'm mentally weary, and keen to finish my ride.

Miles today: 36
Miles since Baracoa: 1036

Day 22: Las Terrazas to Soroa

A very short riding day, as planned – in fact I spent more time having breakfast than I did cycling. My fabulous little casa did me proud, serving up lots of fresh local mango juice (the surplus of which I diverted into my water bottles), omelette, bread, local honey and local coffee. Then, a local swim: my room was right on the lake shore (pic), and I hadn’t lugged my trunks three-quarters of the way across Cuba as ballast.



I headed out of Las Terrazas back across the lake (pic) and thinking of how much it resembled Stevenage, which wasn’t perhaps as much as I suggested yesterday.

There was zero traffic on the twelve-mile country-lane trip through lush scenery and rolling hills to my target town, the nature haven of Soroa.

I was taking my time, stopping to admire the scenery, and trying to match up the map’s inventiveness with reality: the ‘village’ of ‘Mango Bonito’, for instance, consisted solely of a derelict bus shelter.

I had a stiff pass to overcome, some of it on dirt road, but then a beautiful downhill freewheel (pic) into the headwind to arrive in Soroa by tenish.

Another guidebook-recommended casa proved a cracker, comfy and stylish and right in the centre. I walked up to El Mirador (pic) for the sweeping panorama of the surrounding mountains and the plains to the south and west (where I’m headed tomorrow).

Soroa is known for its birdwatching opportunities, and I invested $15 in a personal tour of the forests by local expert Yoanni.

My notes tell me that in the forty-five minutes we saw a red legged thrush; Great Antillean grackle; Northern mockingbird; West Indian woodpecker; mourning dove; warbling vireo; white crowned pigeon; common ground dove; Cuban emerald hummingbird; grey king bird; least grebe; and little blue heron.

I doubt I could identify any of them now, though, so if I’m called as a witness for some avian court case, I’m in trouble.

Yoanni’s expertise was impressive. But just as he was patiently explaining to me that the little blue heron was the little, blue, heron-shaped thing over there, and not the cat I was training my binoculars on, his mobile went off and brought worrying news: his distraught wife told him that their daughter had just downed a bottle of perfume under the impression it was fruit juice.

He apologised profusely for breaking off the tour, but quite understandably had more important things to do than instruct a gormless cyclist in how to distinguish a Great Antillean grackle from a plastic bag, and he scurried off for a bus home refusing any payment for the half-tour he’d given.



For my pre-dinner stroll I walked up to the Castello de las Nubes to enjoy the view back down over Soroa (pic). Back at the casa I enjoyed a whopping spread for $8: home made chicken soup, two lobster tails with veg, salad and trimmings, fresh fruit for pudding.

It had taken plenty of prep: the hostess started in the kitchen at lunchtime, and had coped with a two-hour power cut at the end, using emergency lights.

Without a trace of guilt – knowing that anything I bought from her was money going direct into the local economy – I also indulged in a bottle of local wine: Soroa red (pic), made at San Cristobal just a few kilometres away.

It’s generally agreed to be the best wine produced in Cuba. Largely because it’s the only wine produced in Cuba, made from imported musts. It was, to be honest, a bit vinegary, thin, with little body, and the colour and nose of diluted Ribena.

However, the second glass tasted better than the first. And the third better than the second.

And it provided some welcome relief from my fellow guest tonight, a German who had come here for two reasons. First, for birdwatching; second, to rant to English cyclists about how much better South Africa had been under apartheid, quelling any demur by shouting ‘Listen! I have been there! You have not! I know this!’.

I agreed with him on one thing: that one has to have been to a place to be able to comment on it. So I suggested that he visit the real world sometime.

Or at least I would have done, if the fourth glass of Soroa hadn’t made my brilliant rejoinder totally unintelligible. Which was probably just as well.

Then Yoanni called the casa to let me know his daughter was fine, following swift drainage work at the local hospital – which was thoughtful of him; I had genuinely been worried, and he was a decent guy who cared for his family – and that she had decided to stick to real fruit juice in future.

Bird images swirled round my mind as I went up to bed very happy. Emerald hummingbirds; warbling vireos; common ground doves, crapping on the safari suit of a pompous German holidaymaker.

I slept the sleep of the righteous, after perhaps the most enjoyable two days of the trip so far.

Miles today: 12
Miles since Baracoa: 1000

Day 21: San Antonio de los Baños to Las Terrazas

An easy day in prospect – a holiday, almost – but first I had to escape my horrible accommodation.

This involved retrieving my bike from the cluttered downstairs reception area. In the dark. This was also the living space of the hosts, who were snoring on a makeshift bed.

The battered old wooden door to the outside, and freedom, was secured by an improvised locking mechanism of repurposed spoons and salvaged nuts and bolts. I managed to undo it without waking anyone, but I couldn’t then lock it up again from the outside. Oh well; there was nothing anybody could take from inside the house, except perhaps fright.

I cycled away from Humour Town with the manic laughter of relief. This was delightful country to bike through: gently winding, flat lanes with no traffic, through mango orchards and palm fields, and the odd village.



The approach to Artemisa was notable for a long line of bas-relief portraits of correct-thinking local political figures (pic). It felt weird, like you were being watched. Which was presumably the point. This is what it's like having fifteen big brothers.



In the town itself, I stopped to schlurp a batido, admired the church full of Sunday worshippers (pic) and handsome main square, and caught up on emails in the aircon comfort of an Etecsa internet branch.

I had a sudden thought: My emails aren’t being watched too, are they? Just in case, I wrote them in code, hiding my true feelings behind layers of irony, ambiguity and sarcasm. So no change there.



I cycled past the Romanesque Ancient Coffee Plantation Monument (pic) and into the Reserve of Las Terrazas. In contrast to the featureless plains of central Cuba, this was all beautiful mountain and hill scenery scenery, winding lanes, twittering birds, and beautiful happy riding.



It was local election day, and municipal buildings were decked in flags with queues of voters outside (pic). Elections are non-partisan, free and fair: citizens can vote for any candidate they wish, so long as they’re Communist.



I arrived at Las Terrazas at noonish (pic), approaching grandly by a bridge over the lake.



It’s unlike virtually anywhere else in Cuba (pic): an eco-village that dates back only to a 1968 reforestation project, close enough to Havana to be a day-trip favourite. The signature view is bright idealistic concrete villas round that lake, rather than colonial colonnades round a market square. A tropical New Town, a Greater Antilles Garden Village, the Stevenage of the Caribbean.

Things started unpromisingly. I didn’t fancy the guidebook’s suggested hotel: the cost, queue at reception, and tourist shtick, drove me away. I tried at some cabins by the swimming-hole, but didn’t like the staff or the vibe. Oh dear: Las Terrazas was looking like a place for dollar-happy holidaymakers, not low-impact cyclists.

So I did what I always do, and it always works: find a local place for coffee and ask nicely for suggestions. Maria’s Cafe served me a small but quality coffee for $1, and they recommended a casa right in the centre. It seemed a touch unofficial – no paperwork, just handshakes and smiles, and was that a wink? – but it proved excellent. Yet again, being able to speak enough Spanish turned what could have been a deflating, alienating experience into an uplifting, inclusive one.

Pleased, and showered, and rehydrated with fresh fruit juice courtesy of my friendly hosts, I walked out to explore the village. Up at the community Plaza I saw a hall full of local families with beer towers and plates of grub.

Before 2013 I’d have been too timid to join in. But in winter that year I spent a few weeks in Salamanca, Spain, on a language course – followed by a few weeks travelling round Spain to put my skills into practice. That had given me the language confidence to go in to the hall and engage with people now.

Which is what I did, and Cubans being Cubans, it proved a sociable delight. I had a plastic plate of yucca and slices of pork and a glass of Cristal beer dispensed from a keg, $2 the lot, and chatted to local families while children larked around us.



One beer was enough to embolden me, but not enough to affect my ability to operate machinery, so I booked myself on the Zipline Canopy trip. Las Terrazas is one of the few places in Cuba (perhaps the only one) that you can do this. It’s a luxury experience: a whopping $25 for just two 40-second tramos (locals pay $10 for three). But from my casa I’d seen them doing it, soaring through the trees and over the lake, at first mistaking the whirring for electric buggies. I couldn’t resist (pic).



It was a glorious, if brief, experience on a beautiful day, and I was adrenalined-up and happy. I came gently down to earth with a couple of beers at a lakeside cafe (pic)...



...and dropped into the museum-house of late local musician Polo Montañez (pic). It had been a fabulous day, and I went back to my casa buzzing. Or maybe that was the mosquitoes...

Miles today: 37
Miles since Baracoa: 988

Day 20: Guanabo to San Antonio de los Baños

Knowing that I’d be in Havana later on, to sit out the spare days between the end of my trip and my flight home, I decided to bypass the capital today and head on to the Comedy Capital of Cuba, San Antonio de los Baños. (I was told by various locals that you’re not allowed to cycle through the tunnel to the capital’s Old Town, so I’d have to take the southern by-pass anyway.)

Signage was sparse and cryptic, so I navigated my way through the southern suburbs by Cuban Satnav: in other words, asking people.

It was all shambolic factories, nondescript grey buildings, scruff and fumes. Eventually I found my way to the autopista west, which I knew would take me the right way. I chugged along it till the turnoff south to San Antonio de los Baños, just after which was what I had been looking for all along: a friendly local kiosk selling me refrescos and the best hamburguesa so far for pesos. I wasn’t now far from San Antonio, perhaps just one and half fruit juices.



I admired the remarkable University of Information Science and its grounds (pic), the project aiming to computerise Cuba. From the look of the half-finished buildings, it appeared progress on this project was even slower than mine. But it did mean wide, smooth, empty roads, waiting for traffic.



I got to San Antonio around midday. The shabby but lively town centre looked inviting (pic)...



...with posters still up for the recent annual festival of humour (pic). I asked around for accommodation, found what appeared the town’s only option, handed over my $20 and clambered up the pokey, creaky stairs to my room.

Strictly, foreigners weren’t allowed to stay in the town; no paperwork was filled out for my stay. This place was Cubans-only, and they’d pay the local rate of 20 pesos. And even they were getting a bad deal.

Perhaps one day I’ll create a website called Hobson’s Guide, with details of how to survive the Only Choice in Town. This room offered comfortable, silky accommodation with complimentary snacks, but only if you were a spider exploring the cobwebs that decorated every crevice for trapped flies.

From a less arachnid and more mammalian point of view it was the worst accomm I’ve ever stayed in. And I speak as someone who stayed in Delhi’s most dismal in the 1980s.

The casa room's walls were peeling and bare, the floors were dusty, and there was no furniture except for a grubby bed. I wouldn’t have leant my bike against the sheets for fear they soiled it, not the other way round. The window didn’t open and the door didn’t close; the bathroom tap ran dry but the shower head dribbled unstoppably.

A loudspeaker pumped a high-volume pop radio station and had no off button. To stop the din I had to disconnect the wires at the back. Before quickly reconnecting them: ah, the radio was there to drown the noise from the adjacent rooms. A noise which was either emergency dental work being conducted without anaesthetic and with pliers, or else highly energetic, and I suspected transactional, sex.

Hmm... perhaps this explained why I was asked at check-in not how many days I wanted to stay, but how many hours.

To calm down, I opened one of the bottles of water I’d bought from the street vendor outside and drank. And spat it out immediately. The water tasted vile, of rotten cabbages. How does water go off?

Rob, you said you wanted to experience the Real Cuba. Well, here it is. I felt anxious, trapped and vulnerable for a while, and thought about cycling off to take my chances elsewhere.



But gradually I rationalised things. I had my own padlock for the door; I had a sheet sleeping bag to laminate me from the stained bedclothes; I had pesos in my pocket and a friendly-looking town centre (pic) a short walk away.

So, without showering (I doubted that I would come out any cleaner than I went in), and having put my toxic water to good use by flushing the toilet with it, I went straight out into town to look around.



And things got better, as they always do in Cuba. The Museo del Humor was just round corner from here (pic), so just beyond earshot of my energetic fellow casa guests. The staff thought I was Cuban (I think because I seemed poor-but-happy and scruffy-but-fit, rather than for the quality of my Spanish) and so charged me only two pesos. It was basically a collection of cartoons, most clumpingly obvious in their labelled symbolism (pencils=authorial freedom, doves=peace, bombs=war etc), but I spent a happy hour or so poking around.

Humour, especially satire, finds it notoriously difficult to jump cultural divides. While I understood the Spanish, I usually didn’t get the jokes (though I did laugh out loud at one of a bemused Jesus being presented with the bill for the Last Supper).

Beer, on the other hand, jumps cultural divides with ease. Round the corner (pic), I had some at El Rápido, the cheapo fast-food bar chain that’s becoming a regular haunt for me. Real Madrid were playing Málaga on the telly, watched by the rapt staff.

Then I wandered up to find Don Oliva, the ‘cheapest lobster in Cuba’ place recommended by the guidebook.

I wasn’t disappointed: a tail covered in cheese and pineapple cubes, with rice and salad, all perfectly tasty, for $6 (pic).

I chatted amiably to the waiter who was the right sort of chatty, developing my Spanish, and so I did something extremely rare for a Yorkshireman: I tipped him.

I staved off the horror of returning to my room with more beers at The Fast One, and trod gingerly back to my squalid little cell with a bottle of coke in a desperate attempt at hydration, and a carton of rum in a desperate attempt at sleep.

Ah well, maybe a sense of humour is necessary for a visit to San Antonio. And Cuba. But it certainly seemed a place quick to laugh: in several shops and stores I heard and saw people chortling away in good-humoured banter, and shop staff were always up for a smile and a joke. In one little refresco stop there were three guffawing local woman, generously including me in it all, laughing at anything I said. I don’t think they understood exactly what I was talking about. Neither did I.



Most enjoyably of all, there were the celebratory wall illustrations in El Rápido, cartoons and funny twists presumably on po-faced official health notices (pic):

Quien toma cerveza vive menos – Menos preocupado menos estresado
(‘Drink beer and you live less – Less stressed, less worried’).

Evita la resaca – Mantengase siempre borracho
(‘Avoid hangovers – Stay drunk’).

Dicen que el alcohol mata lentamente – Yo no tengo apuro
(‘They say alcohol gradually kills you – I’m not in a hurry’).

So, you know what, I’m pleased I came to San Antonio. I laughed a lot. Once I’d escaped that room... cheers!

Miles today: 43
Miles since Baracoa: 951