Tour Days 18 and 19 Friday and Saturday 13th and 14th February in Remedios

We were woken by the sound of cocks crowing and the trip trap of the occasional horse in the street. On Friday we spent a very pleasant day in this very low key rural town, barely more than a large village. After late breakfast the management lounged around while the stoker did washing chores. This house is run by women and the stoker soon had a good relationship going. They commented that she couldn’t be used to washing by hand. She made them realise that she did similar chores to their’s at home.

Our position here as tourists is very different from that in Europe or anywhere we have been before. Even without the tandem we are immediately spotted as tourists by everyone. Whatever we do our status is impossible to hide. We suppose it must be our clothing or the way we behave, there are plenty of Cubans who don’t look very different from us. In almost every way we are favoured over local people. In some queues we are either pushed to the front or moved to the correct queue for us.

The interesting and indeed nice thing about the way we are treated is that it is done without servility or in the main avarice. Fidel can be proud of them. For example if we buy street food and, like the locals, pay in pesos we queue as they do. It is when we use Cuban “tourist” dollars we get the dubious “advantages”. We are also subject to the attention of touts and hustlers. We try to treat them politely and they go away often with a mutual smile when they realise there are no dollars to be had.

The tourist attractions of Remedios are theoretically limited to its church and some minority interest museums. We did look at these, no doubt most people stay on the bus.

The real interest is in the street life. The town has a large central plaza with a pleasant bar in a shady corner. People meet, chat, do business and live in the street and plaza. There is a constant human pageant going on free to the idle management and stoker. None of this is spoilt by motor vehicles, not because it is a pedestrian area, but because there are so few.

Returning to the casa we heard the sound of live music in the distance. Cubans are a noisy lot to conservative Northern European ears and there is often a cacophony of recorded sound, but this was different. We came across what looked like a garment factory where a loud Cuban band was playing local music for the workers.

Here was the stoker’s downfall. She took herself away from the door to get a better look through an open window. Stepping back off the high pavement and probably not helped by her wobbly left leg she fell into the road. A kindly woman from a house opposite took her and the management in. Nothing seemed to be broken. Once her dizziness had gone we gave our thanks and went slowly back the couple of blocks to the casa. Once there cold compresses were applied to her hand and we hope rest and good food will provide the cure.

On Saturday, as we had hoped, the stoker’s bruised hand seemed to be getting better. We made a late start with a view to cycling up the road a few kms to visit a sugar factory museum. We could not find the museum but a little further on from where it should have been we reached the coast at a town called Caibarién.

Caibarién is a working town rather like Remedios but not as nice. It is at the foot of a deep bay but though the sea is blue there is no beach. A new promenade has been built but neither this nor the blue sea was very inviting. Unsurprisingly we saw no tourists or any one swimming. In view of the raw sewage in all Cuban towns it would be sheer foolishness to swim near one. We would also not swim in a “fresh” water pool here.

At lunch time we made for the large town square for the street food. That is pizzas and ice cream eaten in the shade of the plaza and costing a few pence. It does involve much friendly interchange with the locals but that is no hardship.

Going back we wandered off the main road in search of the lost sugar factory museum. The wooden shacks and tumble down communist built tenements all show signs of “bad lands”. It may once have been different before sugar production stopped. In most countries we would keep well clear. Here we felt no danger and gave and received friendly greetings as we went along our way.

We found the museum closed even though it should be open and we don’t think we missed much. The most interesting thing was the four or five steam trains which we looked at in the yard. We continued along the backroads and out into the countryside. There are no maps here and all we could do was follow our noses. As we got further off the direction south to Remedios we saw a woman on a bike go left.

Two pony carts came by and we asked directions. The general consensus of the two elderly and apparently partially sighted drivers was that we should retrace. Before the management could ignore such philosophically inappropriate directions a younger man on a cart came the other way. He decreed that no harm would be done to go the same way as the woman on the bike. The stoker, well aware of the trouble the management had got into in the past, was unsure. Should we take the advice of two almost blind old men or a younger man who looked too fat to have ever been on the route he suggested?

As usual the management went on and was lucky enough to find the way back to the casa. A word needs to be said about the man who comes to this house each day at tea time. The two lovely women who run it so well should ditch him. Tomorrow we are going to the off shore islands for a couple of days. We had arranged to leave some bags here and return on the way back. We had also arranged early breakfast as we do on cycling days. The silly man decided to upset the management by hustling him to take a taxi. Bearing in mind he will get the equivalent of about twenty months’ state earnings from our four day stay he should learn to stop while he is ahead. To be fair he is charging the going rate for the casa which we are happy to pay, and also many of the people in this area are the descendants of pirates.

Tour Days 20, 21 and 22 Sunday, Monday and Tuesday 15th, 16th and 17th February Remedios to Las Brujas and back to Remedios

Elisabeth, the management’s daughter, had managed to get a booking for us at a hotel at Las Brujas via the internet in the UK. We had been unable to do this in Cuba. This will enable us to enjoy a very unusual experience.

Last night our Cuban neighbours, always noisy, partied all night. The management slept through it but not the stoker. We also needed to be away early to get going before the sun got very hot and the head wind set in. Still, once we were on the quiet cool early morning roads everything was fine.

Las Brujas is one of the small islands off the north coast of Cuba connected to the mainland by an amazing causeway 50km long. It was built in the late 1990s, together with some huge hotels. Fidel, 30 years too late, wanted to attract foreign tourists. The regime also probably liked the idea of keeping the tourists 50km from influencing the workers with our wicked capitalist ways.

We had to show and have our passports noted at the start of the causeway. The official seemed amazed that we were cycling its length despite the fact that every one here uses a bike. Unlike in the UK this distance should not seem daunting to them.

Cycling the causeway is the main reason for us coming. The experience at cycling speed is almost surreal. The road is smooth, wide and flat and soon sets out to cross the deep blue ocean. We had a slight headwind but the sea breeze had not yet set in and the warm sunshine was pleasant.

There was only a very occasional vehicle and, as the mainland slipped away behind us, it was like taking a sea voyage. After 10 or 12 km we approached our first sign of land, a small island densely covered in low vegetation. The road hardly more than touched the end of the island before going along beside it leaving a broad blue canal between us and it.

Soon we passed Fidel's monument to the brave vigilantes and party activists who had built the causeway for the economic benefit of all Cubans. One assumes that Charles Windsor was not invited to the opening which has to be a good thing. If he got the idea of a 50km causeway on the Western Isles of Scotland he could do even more damage then he has already done there.

From here on the sea becomes shallower and the causeway passes through mangrove swamps, clear water and tiny islands. The sea, always crystal clear, sometimes looks lighter blue or even milky blue. Except for the very occasional vehicle it was silent.

During the crossing there was a variety of bird life, some we recognised including many herons. Others, some looking like pelicans, we did not. We did not see flamingos though it is their habitat and much to the management’s disappointment there were no iguanas basking in the sun.

The Las Brujas hotel is in a lovely place. The wooden cabins are perched on a rocky headland. There is a palm fringed beach on one side and a small marina for trip yachts and dive boats on the other. We spent our time here swimming in the clear water and watching the sea birds from our balcony above the rocky edge of the sea.

Based on a pinnacle of rock were four large sea birds which we named pterodactyls. Despite their prehistoric looks and large bills they were very impressive fliers. They circled on the wind within a few metres of our balcony looking for fish in the sea below. Seeing a fish they plunged straight down, catching it near the surface with a great splash and taking off again. It was a performance we did not tire of watching.

In many ways this development is reminiscent of a high altitude ski resort. It can only be sustained by an infrastructure on the mainland. All the services including water have to be brought across the causeway. The islands were previously uninhabited.

We had a very unpleasant experience here, a plague of flies. It culminated in us going to the dining room for buffet breakfast and finding the food laid out and covered with flies. Amazingly people were actually taking the food and eating it. We left and complained and the area was fumigated and cleaned but it hardly made us feel much better.

We were told that the fly problem was happening on all these islands. It resulted from the waste from the tourist industry not being properly dealt with in this second world country. Closing it down seems the only safe option.

Our trip back to the mainland was quicker than the way out but just as beautiful. This time we had a strong following wind. We were glad to be back in the spotlessly clean casa with lots of properly cooked safe food.