Our extra excursion through Infotur with JesĂşs and Orlando was great. We drove out of Havana via a different route than from the airport the previous night as was cool to see the city, the people, the colours and the buildings in sunshine.
Once we were on the motorway, we made pretty good progress although it was very weird to find ourselves overtaking small horse and cart vehicles as well as loads of people trying to hitch a lift at the side of the road. The first was explained to us because of the cost of buying and maintaining a car, even though most of the people using horse and cart transport looked like poor country folk anyway. The hitching was explained as being due to a general lack of petrol in the country and the exorbitant price of what there is. so it's quite normal to see well-dressed people hitching into the city for work or emerging from the fields after a day's work and trying to hitch home.
We made good progress on the motorway and after a couple of hours stopped for a toilet and drinks break at Las Palmas roadside bar/restaurant/private accommodation where we learned two more Cuban lessons - 1. it is customary to pay a small amount to use the public toilets and there is usually a woman sitting outside as a guardian of the toilet paper, so you don't really have a choice. It was no problem doing so here, except we had no Pesos, as the toilets were spotless and 2, you can pay fot things in USD or EUR in most places and they have an exchange rate in CUP (300 to the Euro) so in the bar we ordered 2 drinks, paid in Euros, received our change in CUP, paid a relative pittance for the toilets and were ready to continue on to Viñales.
Once off the motorway, things were very different. The uncovered roads were terrible to be driven along in places with enormous potholes and general erosion due to the weather. This made for a very bouncy ride, so anyone prone to travel sickness should be wary. However, we drove through village after village on the outskirts of Viñales with brightly coloured houses, neat little gardens at the front. and probably fruit and vegetables growing at the rear. There were lots of well-fed dogs running around as well as goats and cattle. Once we were in Viñales itself the road improved and we stopped at a building that looked like the village church. Jesús got out of the minibus and went inside and after about 10 minutes came back out and beckoned us to go with him.
inside the building there were rows of desks with a couple of women - they were all women - sitting in each row and which reminded me of a 1920s school. it turned out we were in a place where huge bundles of tobacco leaves would come straight from the farms/plantations and the women at the desks were sorting the leaves individually and by hand into 3 different types of leaf to be used in different stages of the cigar making process. A woman who seemed to be the boss and with whom JesĂşs was giving some paperwork gave us a very thorough explanation of the entire process. It was so educational that we didn't have any questions at the end. It was also a relief to get out and back into 34Âş heat as inside it felt much hotter and the humidity was so fierce, I was sweating rivers!
Next, we continued up a mountain where we ere greeted with a small cocktail and allowed time to cool down from high above the famous Viñales Valley, which we were told dates from the Jurassic period. Just a shame there' so little fauna in Cuba...After having recovered from the tobacco experience, we went to see the Mural of Prehistory before having lunch beside it in what we would become used to in Cuba - very basic, but good quality food included for lunch every day, but no choices and no menus. Everyone gets the same. Before leaving I went to a real Cuban public toilet. Despite being part of the restaurant, I would soon get used to the dark, very humid cubicles often with no seat on the porcelain.re leaving.
Heading back to Havana seemed a lot quicker than it felt heading to Viñales earlier in the day, but the potholes and bumpy roads were still there. On the motorway we got caught in a torrential downpour which required Orlando to improvise repairs to the windscreen wipers as the rain was too hard for them. He managed to do this and get us back to Havana and the enormous puddles that had overflowed the drains. Now I found out the answer to a question I'd been meaning to ask about why the kerbs are so high!
