Baracoa, Guardalavaca and Havana pt 2

Our collectivo ride from Santiago de Cuba to Baracoa was uncomfortable but fairly uneventful, apart from meeting a Russian guy who was doing the journey as a day trip and was returning in the afternoon (the trip took 5 hours one way). We arrived at the Casa that had been arranged for us, and went to look around. Baracoa had for a long time been isolated from the rest of Cuba, only being reachable by sea until a road was built to it in 1964. The town was small and within an hour we had pretty much done a lap of it. There was a peninsula with a fort and a wrecked ship, and a kind of high street with lots of tourist restaurants.

Photo stop before Baracoa

Slightly weathered boat

Some kind of angry sea woman at the end

While Jonno had been developing his caveman look for a few weeks, I had been prompting him to maybe look for somewhere to get his hair and beard cut. As we walked down the high street, out jumped a barber from his shop, clearly noticing the same thing. He started sweet talking Jonno to persuade him to come and use his business, and of course I was already sold on it. Realising there was no escape, Jonno gave in and negotiated the price to $5 for a haircut and beard trim. From where I was sitting, it all looked okay, but from Jonno's reports it was the roughest experience he had ever had, with an extremely blunt razor and being yanked about. On closer inspection it was definitely not a great haircut, it was extremely uneven and Jonno had to prompt him to try and even it out a bit. Also Jonno noticed the sign for the local prices, 5 local pesos for a haircut, a 25th of the price we paid. He clearly knew that he could make a lot more from an unsuspecting tourist.
After doing another lap of the town and stopping a while at the seafront, we concluded it probably was a town you could do as a day trip. Oh well.

Main street of Baracoa- must have walked up and down it 20 times

Battle of the pups- street pup VS roof pup

'Cuba is ours'

For dinner we had been given a leaflet for a vegetarian restaurant, which sounded like a nice change from my mostly chicken and rice based dishes. It wasn't easy to find and was at the opposite end of town, but eventually we found the tiny sign in an alleyway that lead to the 'restaurant'. We were greeted by an extremely over enthusiastic man, who squealed and cackled at us in a serial killer kind of way, and showed to the tables, one in the kitchen and some large logs in the garden. The food was a selection of dishes laid out in the kitchen, and although it was difficult at first to work out what it actually was, it was actually pretty good and had more flavour than most other meals we had in Cuba.
As we were eating, the heavens had opened again and it didn't look like it was stopping anytime soon. We had no choice but to make a run for it, and even with our raincoats we were still getting drenched.
Thankfully a guy in a bicycle taxi took pity on us and took us the last half of the journey and was really reluctant to take any money from us.
We arrived back in the casa to the husband of the house having an extremely intense game of dominos with his friends. This was no game for kids, and involved slamming the domino down as hard as possible and insulting the other players.

EMBED THE DOMINO IN THE TABLE 

We had one more day in Baracoa, and felt we had done enough laps of the town. The area was surrounded by mountains and forests, so we decided to try one of the walking trails, which first took us through some neighbouring villages. The further we went out of town the more basic it became, with dirt roads, huts and chickens wandering around. At the end of the last village, before the forest, we were stopped by a guy with a machete who started asking us questions about where we were going. When we told him, he said the paths were not in a good condition because of the rain, and although we couldn't work out if this was the truth or not, it then started to rain so we agreed to sit with him under a nearby tree. He was then joined by some friends who brought rum (there doesn't seem to be an unacceptable drinking time here, people start with beer at 8am).

Town...

...To countryside

As far as we got into our walk

Taking the essentials across the river. Laundry,pup...

When the rain calmed down we decided against going any further in case the weather turned again, so started to head back towards town, although now the guy decided he was going to take us on a tour of the village first. He took us firstly to a house where a man was making chocolate and the local sweets made from dried fruits, then to his own house to meet his aunt and gave us coffee, then to another woman's house who sold some kind of herbal drink. As we were sitting on the woman's porch watching baby chicks using their mother as a slide, and wondering how much money this guy was going to ask us for, a policeman walked past and started questioning the guy and woman about why they had foreigners in their house. We were not sure what was and wasn't allowed so we decided to play ignorant and keep quiet, and the guy said something that seemed to be acceptable, as the policeman then left. Using this as a good excuse to leave, the guy told us he would walk us to the outskirts of the village, and didn't actually ask us for any money, which left us feeling more shocked as this was not our usual experience.

WHO ARE YOU AND WHY ARE YOU COPYING ME

Our next stop was guardalavaca, a town which we heard had stunning beaches, and there didn't seem like there was a bus directly there. The woman at the casa  said she could arrange a collectivo which would go directly there, with no changes, which would take 5 hours. We agreed to leave the next morning.

As we had started breakfast there was a knock on the door, the transport had come early. We are as fast as we could, and found a truck waiting for us, similar to the ones that carry pigs to the slaughterhouse, lined with metal benches. We got in, unsure whether this was going to be our punishment for the next 5 hours. We drove around town, picking 10 more people up, until one of the drivers announced that because of the heavy rain we could not take the road and would have to take a boat over the river instead. Okay, sure, this was definitely not going to be a one vehicle affair then. We were taken to the river, where 2 row boats were waiting for us. Our bags were precariously balanced and we squashed in for the ride. We got to the other side, expecting to have a jeep waiting for us, but no, instead we were greeted by a number of horse and carts in which we were piled into, and were lurched through the muddy trails of a forest. By this time we reached a road, we were only about 5km away from where we started and an hour and a half into the journey. The 5 hour journey was definitely not happening. But at least we were now in a jeep and making some progress. After a quick stop for all the staff to grab a 9am beer, we continued for another hour and a half, until a petrol station, where we were moved to another jeep. This took us for another couple of hours to the nearest city, where we were handed back some of our money and told that we would be dropped off at another collectivo stop and we could use the returned money to get another car. We had just enough time for Jonno to run around in a frantic search for something vaguely edible for lunch, which was almost impossible to find and the only option was a sort of deep fried crumpet, before taking our 5th vehicle of the trip the last leg of the journey to Guardalavaca, totaling the journey time to 8 hours.
Whilst we were waiting for this last vehicle, one woman asked us where we were staying and we showed her the address arranged by the previous Casa, to which she exclaimed 'that's my neighbour!'. Turns out, the place was so small it was pretty much inevitable that we would bump into her neighbour- the residential area consisted of about 5 blocks of flats.

Stage 1- extremely uncomfortable truck

Stage 2- row boat

Stage 3- horse and cart

Oncoming traffic

Stage 4 and 5- jeeps

We were greeted by our host, Dayse, who sympathetically listened to our 'all inclusive' journey story and gave us coffee, telling us we could relax on the balcony in the rocking chairs. Not long after, an English man burst in, asking if he could use the WiFi. WiFi? In a house in Cuba? Wasn't that the same as asking if there was WiFi in the Amazon?  To our amazement and utter shock, Dayse actually did have WiFi in the flat, albeit extremely slow and only limited to 30 hours a month so it was mostly switched off. But when it was on it could be used by numerous devices so we had the luxury of tapping into the WiFi a couple of times a day.
This English man claimed he needed to check his emails as he was in the middle of an insurance claim as his boat had been damaged in the hurricane in Puerto Rico, although really he just wanted to talk. A lot. In fact, we were kept for hours waiting for a pause in his narrative before we could escape to get some food. In this time, we learned that as a retired man he spends some of his time on his boat but some of his time in Cuba, where he had managed to find a Cuban lady 30-40 years his junior, and intentionally or unintentionally conceived a child who was now 4 years old. He married the lady, but she wouldn't leave Cuba and had been denied a visitor visa into the UK even if she wanted to, so it left him making trips into Cuba every so often to visit his wife and child. His wife was also staying in the Casa, but they had left their child with her family, which gave us the impression that while he liked seeing her,  he wasn't completely keen on being the hands on father of a toddler in his 60s or 70s.
After managing to make an escape to find some dinner, we discovered there was one main local place to eat, and for around $1 for a chicken and rice meal and 0.25 cents for an omelette with bread, it became our regular go to place for our stay in Guardalavaca.

 Pretty much the whole town of Guardalavaca here

Guardalavaca, or 'Save the cow' is mainly visited by tourists for the all inclusive resorts, and there is not much to do except visit the beach. Which is very pretty. After managing to escape after listening to another hour of monologue (Dayse saved us by ushering us out the door, talking to us in very fast Spanish so he couldn't understand) we took a walk to the beach, and although it was fairly overcast, found a spot under a tree to chill, or chill as much as possible despite at least 5 local people around us playing their music on speakers as loudly as possible.
It wasn't a bad way to spend a day, so we decided to stay another night and repeat this the next day, learning our lesson and going further down the beach to get a bit more peace.

Not sure who is watching the cow but top marks for the beach

This boy just loves the sand

Two tough days of beaching

We had now ticked off all our places we wanted to visit in Cuba, but were still 800km from Havana which we needed to get to for our flight to Mexico. We decided to try and get it done in one painful night bus leaving from the nearby city of Holguin, so took a taxi for an hour to the main bus station to get our tickets, hoping we could store our bags there too and kill a day in Holguin. As we got to the bus station, a guy outside asked us if we wanted a collectivo to Havana, it would take 9 hours and it would cost less than the bus and leave at 1pm. It was still long, but sounded better than a night bus so we agreed. We expected to be waiting a lot later than 1pm for more people to want a collectivo for such a long journey, but at about 1.15 we were told it was ready to go.
It was an actual car which was also surprising, although sitting in the middle seat of a small car wasn't the most enjoyable experience, especially when the journey totaled 11 hours in the end. Luckily our arranged Casa was awake to expect us at midnight, and the sleep in an actual bed was far better than a bus.

'Fatherland or death'. Friendly.

We had 2 full days in Havana before our flight, which we used wandering around the old town again, discovering the less touristy more run down areas, finding a China town which was only a sign and no other hint of anything Chinese, and dreaming of eating something other than bread or flavourless pizza. We also took a trip to a place called 'Fusterlandia', about 15km out of town, which was a bizarre colourful tiled building created by an artist with lots of vibrant sculptures. Unfortunately, on the way back we had to change buses and while waiting for our second bus we were discovered by our stalking, taking advantage of the tourists to pay for an expensive lunching friend Daniel. He didn't directly ask us why we didn't get in contact with him to stay with him again in Havana and luckily he did say he had other people staying at his flat, but he made us reassure him that when we come back to Cuba or any of our friends do we will be sure to stay with him. Of course, of course, we want to supply you with endless free meals...

Does it have a big old building and an old car? Its probably Havana

The entirety of Chinatown. 

I'm guessing this is state approved? 

Sheila's wheels posse

WHY ARE YOU SO SMALL?

We initially thought that our only option to get to the airport was by taxi which would cost $25, then we found a place marked on the map as a bus to the airport, which had to be cheaper than the taxi. We  weren't expecting it to be so cheap- 1 local peso ($0.04) each. More crowded and sweaty, but it meant we had money left to change into Mexican pesos. Result!

Fusterlandia- When you accidentally order 20 tonnes of tiles on ebay and have a lot of time to kill

Cuba, you have been both interesting and frustrating. You have given us a taste of what a society developed without capitalism is like, and we are not ashamed to say we would like some back. Bring on 20 different brands of everything!

Half of a half of a half of a half of our heart is in Havana, but we were happy to leave it there

Jaipur Part 2

Holi is a Hindu festival held in India to welcome the start of spring. It is a time to forget differences and is also called the festival of colours, as everyone celebrates by throwing coloured powder over each other.

So we woke up to the sound of drums on the morning of Holi, and rushed to the window to see the party that had started. Unfortunately it was only 2 boys drumming at the entrance of the hotel and wanting money. Okay, well we were sure the celebrations would be bigger a bit later on. We got ready in clothes we didn’t mind throwing away as we had some idea of what to expect, and went up to the rooftop restaurant for breakfast. As soon as we sat down, the chef and some of the boys working there shouted “wait, wait” and ran off. They returned a few seconds later with a plate full of bags of the coloured powder, and then proceeded to cover us with it, looking really pleased with themselves. We knew this would happen but didn’t think it would be quite so immediate. We proceeded to eat our breakfast which had multicoloured specks covering it from the powder falling from our faces.\

After breakfast we decided to go and see the festivities out on the streets. We thought if we walked towards the town, a 40 minute walk usually, we could see things going on in the streets and there would probably be music and dancing happening in the town. So we set off on foot, and immediately became surrounded by people shouting “HAPPY HOLI!” and smearing us with powder. This was quite amusing at first and we were enjoying the excitement. We carried on in the direction of the town, but soon realized that the journey was going to take a fair bit longer than 40 minutes. Every 5 steps there was another rush of people armed with coloured powder, and each person wanted to smear powder on us, give us a hug and wish us happy holi. I say people, they were pretty much all men and boys. I had been warned previously that as men are allowed to have physical contact with women on Holi which is usually not accepted, combined with the bhang lassis (milkshake made with marijuana) and/or beer, this can lead to some men getting a bit carried away. What I had not realized is this was the case with most of the men. As we walked down the street, two or three mopeds would ride up to us and park up next to us, with six to ten men armed with the powder stopping us and crowding around us with powder and each expecting hugs, particularly from me. Unfortunately the hugs were not always innocent and I found myself being groped at every opportunity which did not make for a pleasant experience. I found a way of trying to fend off the gropes by using a water bottle as a kind of shield and sometimes resorting to shouting “no!” very loudly but still felt very vulnerable when groups of men approached. We kept walking, however, in search of some kind of event. We did find and briefly stopped at the tourist event that was being put on, but it was, as advertised, full of tourists standing around with not much atmosphere, so we left quickly. In hindsight we probably should have stayed there for a bit longer but we still had high hopes of reaching the town centre and finding things there. So we carried on.

As we neared the town centre, we were approached by a Nepalese man who was obviously on something but very keen to speak to us and shake our hands….again and again. He followed us down the road until we stopped at a market stall to buy some more coloured powder. As we were paying, we heard a loud thud from behind us, turned around and saw the man we had been talking to lying in the road. He was bleeding from his head and was unconscious; he had been hit by a vehicle. We ran to help him, and with a few more people, managed to lift him and carry him to the side of the road.  He regained consciousness, but was still bleeding from his head, so I started asking people what the number was to call an ambulance. One man sat with him but was telling me not to call an ambulance, and that he would take the injured man to his house. He then proceeded to haul the injured man to his feet, still with blood dripping from his head, and walked him away. Someone else had called an ambulance which arrived 2 minutes later, but the injured man had already been taken away, I have some suspicion that the man who took him away might have been the person who was driving the vehicle that hit him, and he did not want to get into trouble or pay a hospital fee, and I hope the injured man is okay and did get any treatment he needed but we will never find out. Its hard to step back and accept that the culture is different and you can’t change it, despite what you think is right.

After this event we were a bit shaken up, but still carried on. We reached the town centre, but the streets seemed to be empty apart from the occasional group of men whom I was liking less and less. After walking through the main town and the old town, and still not finding any form of event, feeling tired, violated and fed up of getting powder out of our mouths and noses, we eventually gave up and tried to head back to the hotel. At the time, there was one man on a motorbike hassling us to get on his bike, and one old man with a cycle rickshaw bugging us to get in the rickshaw. We went for the cycle rickshaw, thinking it was the safer option. It may have been, but unfortunately still wasn’t a great option. The man pedaling the rickshaw was obviously drunk and wasn’t in the greatest mood, especially where Holi was concerned. Jonno managed to record some of the event, see below.

The man was also not in the greatest shape for cycling two people around. If there was a downhill he seemed okay but as soon as there was an incline, he forced Jonno to get off and walk next to the rickshaw. After a while of not getting very far at all and the man getting more and more irate, we stopped him and told him we didn’t want him to take us any further. He then pestered us until we gave him 50 rupees for his drunken efforts and then left us alone, to then try and find another mode of transport back to the hotel. Luckily we found a motor rickshaw who did a better job.

We got back to the hotel and decided that we were not ready to just go and sit in the room, so went up to the rooftop restaurant to have some chai. There were a few other travelers there who had also retreated to the hotel early, so we started chatting to them. The chef also came out to talk to us, and was very enthusiastic and flailing around, obviously having had a few drinks. He then disappeared, and the manager of the restaurant came up to us to tell us that unfortunately there would be no food being served for the rest of the day as the chef was too drunk to cook. The chef returned soon after, to tell us that the manager had hit him and fired him. He told us this about 50 times and each time he slapped his own face, telling us how ashamed he was. After a while he left to go back to his village, where he had to face up to his wife.

Seeing as we were in a restaurant chef-less, we decided to go and find somewhere to go and eat and managed to find a basic restaurant which was full of travelers, and had a very disappointing meal of what was claimed to be veg and mushroom noodles but was actually spaghetti with a few scrapings of cabbage. We went back to the hotel, accepting that while Holi may not have been quite what we had expected, it had definitely been an eventful day.

The day after Holi was our last day in Jaipur. While we had managed to keep ourselves busy the whole time we had been here, we were pretty ready to move on to the next place. There was one place that we had not been to which intrigued us, a place called ‘Janter Manter’ which apart from the awesome name, claimed to hold all sorts of interesting contraptions. Its main attraction was a giant sundial, which apparently told the time accurately to the nearest 2 seconds just by the position of the sun on it. It may or may not have done this, as it was not easy to interpret, all we could see was that there was indeed a shadow cast on the sundial but that was all we could work out. Its size was impressive though, although the fact there were steps all the way to the top which we could not climb took away any fun we could have had. There was also numerous mini sundials, and huge bowl shaped items for working out which star sign the sun was in at any given time. This held our attention for all of 2 minutes, and then we got bored and decided it was not worth the hype, so we left.

While walking down the road I spotted a barbers shop, and as Jonno has been looking more and more like a caveman every day, he was persuaded into getting a haircut. We entered the barbers, Jonno looking slightly apprehensive, and he was put into the hotseat. The barber approaching him had an extremely thick pair of glasses, and it seemed like even these were not doing the job, as he had to get his face right up close to Jonno’s head. In fact, the barber looked eerily like my grandfather, who also had similar eyesight. This was bad for Jonno, who ended up with a pretty dodgy looking haircut, but great for me as I was highly entertained, watching the efforts of an Indian Dof and also watching Jonno’s face with an expression of terror as a near blind man approached him with a cut-throat razor.

We also needed to book our onward journey to Udaipur, a seven hour train ride. We went on the train booking website, and selected our train which claimed to have 3 available spaces, but once we had confirmed it and booked it, then informed us that both seats were waitlisted, a similar situation to the last train journey from Mumbai. As we were a short walk from the station, we thought this could easily be overcome by visiting the booking office and obtaining confirmed train tickets. We got to the station, found the booking office and explained our problem to the lady behind the desk. She listened, wobbled her head and said ‘one confirmed, no problem’. We probed further, trying to imply we did indeed think there would be a problem, and she then explained in very broken English that as the train was a daytime one and not a sleeper that we could just use the one confirmed ticket to both get on the train, and by the morning they would probably both be confirmed anyway. Realising that this was the best answer we were going to get, we accepted this and just hoped the ticket inspector on the train would too.

Now there was one major problem that Jonno had which was a great source of angst. The laptop we had purchased in Pondicherry did not meet his expectations, which he claimed was all my fault. Apparently I had put some sort of spell on him which caused him to think more like me and go for the cheapest laptop there was which would do the job but was very basic, and immediately after the transaction had been completed the spell was broken and he realized it was not the laptop for an IT man (Jonno – She’s got me thinking spending 30p for a tea and 1 pound for 2 grilled sandwiches is too expensive, I’ve been brainwashed and wasn’t thinking straight at time. Plus, Lenovo lied to me saying the RAM could be upgraded…). This had caused many sleepless nights for him and he was consumed by regret. He paced rooms, wondering how he was going to cope with a small, slow laptop for another year. We had tried to take the laptop back to the shop for a refund or exchange but they wouldn’t accept it. So we came up with another solution; to buy another laptop which would make Jonno happy, and then try and sell the cheaper laptop privately. We had a look at some computer shops and found one that Jonno wouldn’t be embarrassed to be seen with. The only problem was that they wanted cash for it, and we were feeling apprehensive about walking through the streets with a large amount of cash or a brand new laptop on us. So instead we decided to take a rickshaw there via a cash machine, who could then take us straight back to the hotel afterwards. This was a good plan apart from the fact the rickshaw man then knew we went to an ATM then to a computer shop. We spent a while trying to plan a cover story until the rickshaw driver walked into the shop as we were making the transaction, so all we could do was hope the driver was an honest man who wouldn’t rob us. Luckily he was, and Jonno’s life was now complete, save for now carrying a dead weight of a shoddy laptop around.

We then returned back to the hotel, and packed our bags ready for a very early train to Udaipur in the morning.