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  • Day 99

    Trindad, Cuba

    January 24, 2017 in Cuba ⋅ ☀️ 12 °C

    Cavaillas y El Rey des Tortillas.

    Two nights in Trinidad allowed just one day and a hot afternoon by the time we added our transport at each end. It's a small town, unnecessarily confined and hosting very basic amenities. Tourism is dominant. Every second house is a 'casa particulares' or 'hostal'. Every restaurant targets tourists and every man and his dog are pushing horse treks or taxis.

    The town is quaint; old but not tired. The colours are bright and streets cobbled, and the daily scenes are reminiscent of the stone age. Life is simple here.

    We spent the afternoon wandering the streets, visiting Plaza Major, and ascending a hill for a vista overlooking the town - ever more confused on how this country operates. A cowboy atop the hill showed us up a rickety and definitely not safe ladder to a roof top with quite a spectacular view of the town, surrounding valley and distant beach - playa Ancon. No hablo espanõl was not enough to deter his sales pitch, and we ended up buying horse rides off him, almost because we'd rather do that than pay the obligatory tip.

    So day two in Trindad was on horseback, very unhealthy horseback. We trekked out of town and into the valley, from cobbles to asphalt to dirt tracks. It was fantastic! Amusement from the horses' bowel movements was plentiful (yes, some of us are late bloomers in maturity), races regular and well beyond our control and in the saddle crotches bruised and backs ached. The destination was a natural pool and (unnatural) bar, which we embraced with swims and mojitos. We made friends who spoke english and spent the remainder of the trek enjoying some welcome understandable chat! A day well spent despite our feelings for the treatment of animals.

    Scott spent the remainder of the day trying to get cash and internet which took him around two and a half hours and he returned a broken man.

    We had dinner that night at our casa. After accepting a dinner invitation earlier that evening, we thought we would be dining with our host family. That was not the case. We spent the majority of the meal, awkwardly accepting our courses and stumbling over spanish vocabulary and formalities, as our hosts waited eagerly upon us. Such a strange world.

    Our tickets out of Trinidad were again in the form of taxi, as the bus had sold out for the next few days and the taxi turned out, in the end, to be the cheaper option. Just to clarify, now that we know - 'taxi' in Cuban (I suppose the same in english) refers to a car you can pay money to for a ride. In the absence of laws or a regulatory body, there is no limit to the number of humans and/or bags (or anything for that matter) in which that taxi may carry. Or for that matter, when you're paying a predetermined fee, the route it may take, and the number of different cars you can ride in. Lets just say when we got to Viñales seven hours later, we had sore bums, sore backs, symptoms of heatstroke and one debateable case of carbon monoxide poisoning. And, we were far from the most irritable of the passengers. Surprisingly, the booked out buses could have been the better option.
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