Warsaw to Bangkok

The first week has been a mixed bag for me. The lack of good sleep is becoming a serious issue.  Many places seem utterly devoid of things to see or do and I’m getting tired of drinking Bucanero Fuerte for entertainment.  Moreover, I often when travelling set a brutal pace.  I operate on little sleep, questionable food, brutal transportion regimens…and I love it.  Duncan maybe not so much.

We continued our exploration of Cuba’s Oriente in Bayamo.  The local hotel school, Telegraphó, is a steal at $20/night.  Draped in multiple shades of marble, with vaulted ceilings and a small patio, it is everything you’d want in a tropical hotel.  Well, almost.  The beds are once again rough and food in the restaurant is a tragedy.  But the small lobby bar is stylish and relaxing, as is the town overall.

The main square is attractive and well-treed, though without any standout architectural gems like many other of Cuba’s main squares.  The main shopping street is a pedestrian-only affair that has been re-done this year with a series of sculptures in an impressive and diverse display of public art.

Being new, it’s not to be found in any guidebook.  The next day I watched as a tour bus disgorged a selection of folks who basically just stood in the main square looking at their Lonely Planets thinking “I’ve got an hour in Bayamo, what the hell am I supposed to do?”. 

The previous night, after getting completely lost looking for a specific paladar for dinner, we stumbled across a series of peso barbeque stalls by the commuter rail station.  Not only did I enjoy a barbequed pork chop but I also exchanged some CUCs for pesos.  This really opened up Cuba for me, even more than before.  It was only the day before at the Coppelia that I’d acquired my first pesos.  These were enough to buy a doughnut from some lady on the street, and a bottle of pru.  (Pru is a refreshing soft drink with a raisin & molasses taste, not unlike kvass). 

Now I was going full-on Cuban.  I drank some rather terrible Hatuey beer in peso bars, but ultimately retreated to the safety of Bucanero, happy with some beer and dinner peso-style.

Bayamo has a massive party every Saturday night, in a nondescript plaza far from the touristy main square.  Duncan had, as usual, made friends with some touts.  “I like meeting people.  These guys speak English and want to talk.”  Anyway, there were thousands of people there – all Cubans.  So it wasn’t all bad.  A band was playing.  I had a peso sausage that contained shockingly little meat.  At some point – things were becoming blurry by this stage mind you – someone passed around a large tin carafe containing “local beer”.  This was the infamous and heretofore bloody hard to find “claro”.  That’s not a brand but just a ubiquitous draught brew sold to Cubans for a few peso a litre.

It’s terrible.  I mean, it made the poor Hatuey look like Bucanero in comparison. It was thin, maybe 3.5% if that, and clearly made with little barley and possibly no hops at all.  It took me three sips just to figure out if I was drinking beer of backwash.

The next stop in the evening was an espectaculo, a show.  These are a staple of Cuban nightlife.  Again, there were no other foreigners present.  We only caught a couple of acts- singers and dancers in elaborate costumes and professional performances.  

After the show comes the disco.  At this point, the party really busts loose.  We stuck around, attempted to dance (on a floor with a couple hundred Cubans, I’m not even sure ‘attempted’ is an acceptable term).  The rest of the evening was, as they say, interesting.  It’s a long story and I’m short on details but I’ll do my best.

Well, first there was some gangster wanna-be trying to crash the party.  We’d bought a bunch of beers and rum for our guides and of course, my Cubana.  You missed the part where I acquired a Cubana?  Yeah, so did I.  Like I said, details are a little lacking.

So Tony Montana or whatever his name was had some friends.  For some reason, we had ordered food.  And it was closing time.  Hmmm…alcohol, a little bit of jealousy, some arseholes and closing time…yeah, Blind Freddy can see what was going to happen next.

We were trying our best to bail but our hosts, having apparently never seen a bad situation develop before, insisted on sticking around for the food.  It arrived in the nick of time for some of us, but not all.  One of our hosts was on the receiving end of what would later be remembered as The Smack Heard Round Bayamo.  Yeah, it was a big shot and immediately following that we all peeled out of there.  Apparently I was at the wheel, which would have to be considered “not a good thing.”  But Duncan was trying to round up everybody before things got out of hand and none of the Cubans knew how to drive.  Car ownership is beyond the category of pipe dream for them.  You sort of take it for granted that someone can drive, but seriously, they can’t. 

Well, the cops were already converging on the scene and very quickly put the kibosh on my driving away, which was fine by pretty much everybody.  Since the brawl had been averted at this point, this was a pretty solid outcome.

There was of course more drunken silliness that followed, involving a scam artist chicken vendor, before we retired for the night.  Ah, going big on a Saturday night…it’s been a while.

DAY SIX:

I quite like Santiago.  It has a vibrant feel to it.  People are moving here.  Yes, that means lots of honking horns and belching fumes, but it beats Havana’s chronic vagrancy.  I don’t feel as much the Walking Whitey Show that I did in the capital.

At first I went for a short orientation walk.  I noticed a lack of restaurants, but did find the local branch of famous ice cream maker Coppelia.  Eating there is a challenge, no doubt, as there are numerous counters to choose from and no one seems terribly keen to deal with you.  In the end, I was thwarted by staff apathy and shuffled along, still without a taste of Cuba’s most famous helado.

A bit later it was time for live music, at both Artex and Casa de la Trova.  The latter is a very famous venue and as such is now mainly the domain of tourists.  And a couple of hookers, much to my dismay.  In fact, touts and prossies are both more blatant here.  Duncan, being a nice guy and Third World rookie, engages them all in conversation.  Inevitably it ends with some guy following us down the street for ten minutes or trying to hawk some phony cigars on you.  Or in one case, six guys following us, crowding around us, almost getting beaten with a stick by us.  Damn I hate touts.

The music at Casa de la Trova was very good and ultimately we returned at the end of the evening to catch the tail end of the show.  The main square, Parque Cespedes, is right down the street and incredibly beautiful.  Peppered with lush trees, bordered by a swanky ‘50s James Bondy kind of hotel and a magnificent cathedral, Cespedes is clearly the place to see and be seen in Santiago.

The back streets are fairly quiet by night and the temperature is civilized.  As many reasons as there are not to like Santiago (touts, heat), I think you’d be hard-pressed not to dig its charm.

DAY SEVEN:

The next day we were met with oppressive heat.  I woke up once again feeling like I’d gone 12 rounds with the champ.  The fact is, beds in this country are brutal.  The One Pillow Program is killing my neck and I’ve had more terrible nights thus far on this trip than my whole expedition from Warsaw to Bangkok.

This blistering afternoon was time to explore the Morro, a fort perched on a cliff above the entrance to the harbour.  A very impressive structure, with impeccable views of the verdant Sierra Maestra and glistening Caribbean.  The walls were thick and solid, with but a few turrets to break up the intimidating right angles.  Definitely a highlight.

After that, a return to Coppelia.   I was determined this time, sitting down at a table. It took a while, but someone finally came by.  Of course, the menu was entirely in moneda nacional, of which we had none.  Dunc wanted to leave but I had to progress with the experiment.  Whereas I’m cautious with people, he’s cautious with situations. 

Anyway, the ice cream arrived.  Three scoops each of chocolate, with cake.  The flavour was good and I like the almost crystalline texture, though it’s pretty far from the ultra-creamy stuff we eat back home.  Cost – 11 local pesos.  That’s not much, less than fifty convertible cents, so I handed over 1 CUC, not knowing what would happen.

I’d already told them we didn’t have any moneda nacional so they couldn’t really be mad at us.  But maybe they had set prices for those paying in CUC, higher ones than for pesos.  Maybe I’d get moneda nacional change back.  Maybe I’d get no change back.  It took a while, but after consulting with a few other staffers the waitress returned with moneda nacional change.  Finally!  Now I can live the Oakes dream of street food and local dive bars!

But not just yet.  Dunc had had enough of dodgy dinners and opted for a local paladar, which is a private restaurant, typically in someone’s house…sort of the food equivalent to a casa particular.  This involved us walking down the unmarked pitch-black streets for fifteen minutes to get to a rooftop restaurant.  Well, that was solid.  Cream soup, salad, two giant skewers of perfectly seasoned and barbequed chicken, the best flan I’ve ever eaten, three beers and two coffees for $13.  Awesome.

Now, the waitress tried to slip some extra coffee on the bill, which was annoying, but whichever.  It was a quality feed.

All the coffee, however, made sleeping all but impossible.  As usual, I was up bright and cracking feeling like a punching bag.  It would soon be time to leave lovely Santiago.

The next sign took forever to arrive and when it did I got a sense of how messed up we were.  I hastily put together a Plan B and away we went to a place called Santa Lucia.  There’s a beach here, and a couple of crappy hotels.  I get the impression it’s mainly used as a backup plan for when all the real resorts are fully booked because there is not much going on here at all.  A total hole.

A dirt road at the end of town leads to a fishing hamlet and another beach.  That beach is nicer and the open-air restaurant seemed like a pretty good plan.  But the only accommodation option was renting a resident’s home for forty CUCs.   It was right on the beach but was exposed to mosquitoes.   I mean, for the price of a couple of mozzie nets they could do good business but alas it was not to be.  We ended up back in town at a training hotel.  Even the beach in Santa Lucia isn’t much – tons of grass both in the ocean and scattered on the beach just got in the way.

HOLGUÍN

From there, it was south towards Holguín.  The roads started to deteriorate a bit at this point.  The truth is, though, is that the horrible roads we’d been promised hadn’t materialized yet.  Not to say that roads in Cuba are pristine.  There are potholes, there aren’t lights, there are people and horsecarts and chaos.  Passing horse carts is the worst.  You see them coming up, and want to pass.  But there is an oncoming vehicle so you don’t.  The horsecart is doing almost nothing.  But you’re thinking all you have to do is slow down a bit and bide your time.  No.  You need to come to a virtual stop if you don’t want to crash into the cart.  That takes some getting used to.

Holguín was a bit frustrating.  It’s pretty tightly packed.  Density in most Cubans cities is high. There is an acute housing shortage.  Extended families live in two-room shacks.  So you can drive through a city like Holguín, which has several hundred thousand people, in about fifteen minutes.  There wasn’t much for accommodation here and we ended up in a Bulgarian hotel on the edge of town. 

We were given a really crappy room.  Nothing worked.  We’d paid for a safe, but there wasn’t one.  We went back to the desk and requested another room.  We got it.  This has modern everything, nice furnishings and a safe. It seems that we’d originally been given a Cuban room, not a tourist room.  You see, Cubans pay in local pesos and thus pay significantly less.  But they get significantly less.  Nice of them to try and stick us with the cheap room for the expensive price.  It was a quiet night, and we watched Cuba’s national baseball team playing a tournament in Taiwan.  Baseball season started the day we left Cuba, so we missed out on that experience.

Next stop was Santiago de Cuba.  People in the Spanish world often differentiate between Santiago de Chile and Santiago de Cuba, whereas Anglophones are often oblivious to the Cuban one at all.  Getting out of Holguín was an adventure.  You see, they don’t really “do” road signs.  The role of navigator is something you need to take seriously, as it involves piecing together multiple clues.  I had two maps to work with, plus various hints in the guidebook.

The road east was pretty abysmal – the worst yet.  Thankfully, upon entering Santiago province the road improved immeasurably.  For a while it was uneventful, passing plantations for sugarcane, corn, plantains and tamarind before reaching a small, random town (Palma Soriano, to be specific).

When they started building the Autopista, the national highway, they started at both ends.  At the eastern end, it didn’t get far.  So just outside Palma Soriano, the Autopista dies out.  For real, it just gradually dries up, like a river in the desert.  It’s as if they literally were working on it one afternoon and the foreman came over and said “Yeah, we’re done with this Autopista.  No more money.  Go home, don’t come back until we call you.”  And they just left it there.

Still, with even a little freeway the remainder of the trip is fast and easy, save for the odd crater-sized pothole.

Approaching Santiago, you come into the Sierra Maestra mountains.  The vegetation is especially lush and varied.  In the glens it almost looks like every single tree and plant is from a different species.  Amazing.

As densely packed as any Cuban town, Santiago arrives quickly and within a matter of minutes, the Autopista plunges you into the heart of the city.  Accomodations were again quite tight and we ended up a casa on a very busy road.  The Santiago accent was near impenetrable, too, I noticed.  When I approached the first casa, the guy there said something and I couldn’t understand a single word.  The other thing they do a lot is when you first approach them, or ring their bell, they say “Digame!”  which means “Talk to me!”  Not so many pleasantries exchanged, huh.  Still, Santiago is the reason we came out so far and it lived up to expectations, really bringing the trip to life after a couple of moribund days of hard driving.

Foggy-eyed and bleary-brained, I tried to ignore the hostess.  That didn’t last long.  First came the realization that Hosh was me.  Then the rest of that sentence clicked in.

I snapped to attention.  All of the alcohol that remained in my bloodstream vanished in an instant.  My vacation flashed before me eyes.  I was now staring down two weeks in Havana trying to get my buddy out of jail.  For I knew, he’d run over Fidel’s dog and was on his way to the gas chamber.

I grabbed as much paperwork as I could and followed Nolan and his wife.  (That’s the sports writer, who had come to inform me of the present situation).  We went to the corner to hail a cab.  It was after one, but there were still quite a few people milling about the busy Calle 23.  A “cab” in Cuba is, as in most of the world, whatever car will stop when you wave money at it.  The first couple of cars pulled over and after hearing where we wanted to go summarily sped away.

A bus came by and we took that instead.  I was amazed.  I was able to sit down.  All day I’d seen buses with people packed inside to a level I’d previously only thought possible in India.  And here I was sitting.  

Anyway, we arrived at the police station.  Well, I did.  Nolan and his wife stayed on the other side of the street, leaving me to wander into the Cuban police station, alone, in the middle of the night.  I envisioned spending fifteen minutes trying to explain what I was doing there.  I settled on “Mí amigo…el gordo.”

I walked in.  Four young tourists were sitting on the curb just inside the gates.  At least I’m not the only one here, I thought.  I entered the building and Duncan was standing right there by the phone.  He was about to call home as he’d forgotten my cell phone.  I’d only written it down for him earlier in the day, for exactly this type of situation.

Evidently, he’d been pulled over and didn’t have his ID nor rental car papers.  (Hey, they said they’d charge us $200 if we lost those!)  I produced said documents and that was all they needed.  Five minutes later we were gone.  We took the four Irish with us, back to their hotel. The girl had her backpack stolen, with her passport and all her money.  Now that sucks.

We dropped them off and went to celebrate our bullet-dodging.  I don’t know how Duncan and Nolan communicated without me as we didn’t get too much going with me this time out.  He does a morning radio show, that part I got.  We knows Félix Savón, too, one of the greatest heavyweights in history. 

I wasn’t sure what else he was saying.  I was listening for “I’ll give him a call you can stay with him…”  Now that would be cool.  I could challenge him to a few rounds and familiarize myself with Cuba’s medical system! 

Anyway, I think it was just name-dropping but no worries.

DAY THREE:

With the next day came the first adventure outside of Havana.  The freeway does not run through the city and the city’s streets are not in straight lines.  I’d say it took about an hour to get out of Havana and onto the Autopista.  I think it’s a safe bet we did not take the most direct route.

Cuba is relatively flat and covered in sugar cane.  The holes in the transportation network are evident quickly.  Aside from the lack of signs pointing us to the Autopista, when we got there we saw hordes of people hitchhiking.  Though we saw the odd long-haul bus, for the most part hitching is how people get around in Cuba. There are official stops with a government worker there organizing things, and beyond those there are people waving money as an inducement to skip by the official stop.  Being that it is illegal for Cubans to ride with foreigners (not illegal for you, of course, just them) they usually put the money down when they see your tourist plates.  This probably took longer with our clapped-out rattler than with most tourist cars…it didn’t take long to notice we got the car shaft, the worst rental in Cuba probably.   Some, however, are willing to take the risk and will seek a ride from you anyway. 

The Autopista is the equivalent of an Interstate.  There are a few differences, though.  For one, there are no lines.  It’s just a free-for-all.  Thankfully, there aren’t all that many cars.  Another key difference is that they never finished the Autopista.  It runs halfway across the island and then disappears, only to reappear about 45 kilometres from Santiago de Cuba at the far end of the country.

Some things, however, are just like home.  Some guy in an Audi blasted by us at 150.  A few minutes later we blew by him as he was engaged in conversation with La Policia.

At Santa Clara, we got off the Autopista and headed north for Remedios.  The driving got trickier as the roads became a clutter of people, cars, animals and bicycles.  Those vintage cars that Cuba is famous for, by the way, are mainly beyond the scrapyard – held together with duct tape and wishful thinking, belching and lurching along within an inch of death, spewing noxious fumes as they go. 

The antique furniture in people’s homes, on the other hand, is outstanding.  I live in a neighbourhood with a lot of antique furniture stores and don’t give them a second look, so it’s not something I’m into at all.  But trust me, this stuff down here is amazing.

Remedios is a beautiful little town with houses pressed against narrow streets.  The town square features a large church and small park and is the centre of life.  I wandered around the back streets for a while before settling in at the café to relax.  And that’s about all there is to do in Remedios.  It reminds me of Savannakhet, in southern Laos.  In fact, Cuba reminds me of Laos.  There’s not a whole lot to see or do, but you just go, wander, sleep and eat.  And drink lots of beer at night.

DAY FOUR:

The next day was a long trek “off the Autopista.”  Following the northern road (yes, there is only one northern road), we headed east in search of Cuba’s best-and-least-known beach.  The first town we past was Yaguajay, scene of a famous revolutionary battle.  It has a bit of a wild west feel to it, and has clearly been treated as a friend of the Revolution, as it seemed wealthier than it ought to be so far off the beaten track.

As the afternoon went on, the signage became increasingly lacking and it was getting tougher to track our precise location.  We missed the turnoff for the beach.  But that was no big deal.  You see, the turnoff was supposed to be hard to find.

However, I’d said all along that the turnoff wasn’t mandatory because we’d soon be hitting a town and from that town there was another road.  I think aliens came by one night, and used their evaporator rays to wipe that town off the face of the earth because man, did that town ever not exist.  And so the sun started to set and we had no clue where we were.

As usual, departure day snuck up on me.  Not in a quaint oh it’s here sort of way, but more like a cougar pouncing on me from behind, sinking his teeth into my jugular.  Worse yet, I knew deep down I couldn’t afford two weeks in Cuba.  But on the other hand, with Fidel Castro sequestered in Cuba’s finest hospital room suffering what many believed to be a terminal illness, I knew I had to go now.  With hundreds of millions of dollars on standby to be pumped into Cuba upon the collapse of the Revolution, and with the eagerness of the US and the Miami Cubans to enact swift change upon the island at such time, it seemed evident to me that Cuba’s days as a unique, iconic timewarp were numbered.  And so there I was, standing in the multi-hour customs lineup at José Martí International Airport in Havana, ready to explore.