Viva La Revolucion... (pt 2 of 3)

T r i n i d a d

After enjoying the hustle and bustle of Havana, it was time to get into the cuban country-side. So we headed down to the historic old town of Trinidad via the city of Cienfuegos (just past the bay of pigs...)

Apart form old cars, Cuba is famous for two things: Cigars and Rum.
... and this is rum country. Well, more specifically, this is sugar country - from which the rum is made...and they don't let you forget it either. Where ever you go, rum's $2 a bottle and you're more likely to be able to get a mojito than a coke. It catches up to you after a while...

Guide books tell you that Trinidad is a museum in itself - and they're kinda right the hundreds of tourists visiting the 500-year-old city find Spanish colonial architecture and cobbled stone streets that mark the tiny city as one of the country’s greatest attractions. Only a few square blocks in size, historic Trinidad is famous for its lovely, cobblestone streets, pastel coloured houses with elaborate wrought-iron grills, as well as majestic palaces and plazas. This area is a world heritage site and cars are banned, so it's nice to be able to just walk around.

A church at the Plaza Mayor
There's no shortage of locals enjoying cigars...
no cars means a nice quite ride through town

Apart from the big resort areas (which we didn't go to) Cuba doesn't actually have that many "hotels" - There's a few government run places and a few big chains are moving in (especially in Havana), but the main place to stay are the hundreds of casa particulars (private houses) in towns all over the country.

It's exactly as it sounds - you stay at someone's house! Ever since the special period in the '90's when the economy fell into a massive hole after the split of the USSR, cubans have been looking for ways to earn additional income by playing to their strengths. If you're a good cook - your house is a restaurant, if you make coffee - sell it out the front window, if you have a spare room - you're house is a hotel... Now it's fully legalised and houses actually do extensions to create more room for their "casa" to generate business. We stayed at a place where we had a room on the top floor and an outdoor spot for meals - it was awesome!! all for $20-25 a night.

We'd originally only planned to stay in Trinidad for a few days, but there was so much stuff to do just outside town we ended up staying longer. The Topes de Collantes is a national park in the mountains behind the town where the only way to get in is on the back of an old russian military transport. We took a ride with a cool bunch of italian, brittish, dutch and french folk and went for a hike to one of the waterfalls...

swimming pool

being on the coast, there were plenty of beaches to lie on and a few reefs to dive. Unfortunately many of the reefs got trashes by hurricane Gustav last season, but we still had fun. We took a catamaran out to this tiny little atoll to do some snorkelling - awesome.


We'd planned to do something for Christmas, however we hadn't realised that it doesn't really exist here...

Appartenly, following the declaration of Cuba as an atheist nation, Christmas was removed from list of holidays of Cuban calendar in 1969 when Fidel Castro decided it was interfering with the sugar harvest festival. Cuban authorities banned the public display of Christmas trees and nativity scenes, other than in places frequented by tourists, such as hotels. But in 1997, President Castro restored the holiday to honor, in the honor of the visit of Pope John Paul II in the island. So while the island is quite catholic - there ain't no Santa here, baby...

Despite all that we had a great time drinking Crystal (beer) by the sea

Viva La Revolucion... (pt 3 of 3)

V i n a l e s

The sleepy little town of Vinales seems to have become quite a major tourist destination without being overrun like so many places on the planet. There's a couple of big hotels out of town in the hills, but the town itself is still the snoozy little farming town it's always been - surrounded by tobacco plantations in a rich valley enclosed by amazing limestone cliffs called mogotes. The valley is actually a UNESCO world heritage site, though the locals don't really seem to care as they quietly go about their lives - riding donkey carts out to the field and harvesting tobacco leaves...

[click on pic for full size]

As with Trinidad, we stayed in peoples homes "casas" again - our hosts in Trinidad had actually called trough to friends of theirs to expect us. At the end of a little track just off the main road was a little house that belonged to Mario and Elizabeth - "Las Bicarios"

These two (both old enough and short enough to be our grandparents) were the nicest people I think I've ever met. They didn't speak a word of english but were happy to sit and chat in broken spanish to me - and if we didn't understand a good laugh would erupt and we;d move on to something else...

[l-r Elizabeth's daughter (back for new years eve), Elizabeth, Mario and John]

Elizabeth could really cook as well!! We'd planned on staying for a night or two and ended up there for four nights - every night being treated to a vast array of fresh fruit and salads and fish or pork (as well as the obligatory rice and beans...)

Sleepy Vinales waking up
(you can see one of the mogote rock formations in the background)
The vinales valley
The government has set up this little tourist bus that drives around the valleys all day and you just get on and off as you please for one price - or you can ride bikes or horses
(there's no traffic coz no one owns a car..)
As the limestone is porous, there are huge networks of caves
throughout the area (some stretch for 10's of km)

Here's a video of us inside one (it's full of water so we're in a little boat)


This is where the boat eventually come out - quite bizarre...
the main mode of transport around here is man or animal powered
thought the roads are often lined with people hoping to catch a lift on a truck or one of the occasional buses
Everyone around here has beautiful - well maintained gardens
The main export form the Vinales valley is tobacco.
This is inside one of the huge drying huts
(unfortunately a lot of these were damaged last season by hurricane Gustav)
As smoking cigars comes a close second to drinking rum as the top national pastime around here, you need blokes like this who can roll cigars in their sleep!! This guy could create a work of art in a minute or two whilst chatting away and still smoking his own cigar (balancing on the corner of his desk in the bottom half of the picture) - classy stuff!!

Thanksgiving '08

After a few months in H-town, we've managed to get our stuff together, our shipment's arrived from Nigeria and is all unpacked and we're embarking on our first local holiday (we were conveniently overseas for halloween...)

Rob and Rachel had come back from Nigeria to have thanksgiving with rach's family, and we were kindly invited to indulge in their turkey fest. It was awesome

As a send-off, we had a little shin-dig at our place

(we've got more furniture than when we started, but still no chairs for out table...)

IKE

Don't really know what to say...

The folk at wikipedia had this to say about the third most destructive hurricane to make landfall in the continental US: (full article here)

On the morning of September 13, 2008, the eye of Hurricane Ike approached the upper Texas coast, making landfall at 2:10 a.m. CDT over the east end of Galveston Island, with a high storm surge, and travelled north up Galveston Bay, along the east side of Houston. People in low-lying areas who had not heeded evacuation orders, in single-family one- or two-story homes, were warned by the weather service that they may "face certain death" from the overnight storm surge, a statement that unfortunately turned out to be true for some who refused to evacuate.
In regional Texas towns, electrical power began failing on Sept. 12 before 8 p.m. CDT, leaving millions without power (estimates range from 2.8 million to 4.5 million customers). Grocery store shelves in the Houston area were left empty for weeks in the aftermath of the storm.

The Houston Chronicle also has good coverage of the hurricane aftermath

George and I were stranded in Canada as the airport was closed in Houston for a few days, but our place survived and all our friends were unharmed thank god.

I see no need to post photos of everyone's tragedy here, but here's few that caught my eye...

The heavy rains that came withIke changed the usually busy I-10 fwy near our house to this.
And Buffalo Bayou by our place rose to the top of it's banks - a good 30ft

Places with cool names... Banff

We'd barely landed in Houston (still only had a sofa we'd bought off a friend, a TV someone gave us and a plastic fold out table from Home Depot... yep matress still on the floor... classy) and we were off to Canada for a conference. Run, by a local Alberta company, the boys new exactly where to have it - the Fairmont Banff Springs!! Look at this place... it's disneyland meets switzerland... thank go we weren't paying for it.

Anyway, once the conference was over we took a long weekend to drive from Banff through the Icefields Parkway to Jasper and back.

As you can probably tell, it's freekin' cold in that part of the world, and coming from Nigeria where there's only two seasons: HOT and HOT & WET, we weren't quite ready for so much nature...


Thanks to Ryan and Desi, we managed to borrow a bunch of thermals, puffy jackets, gloves and tuks (beanies) which saved us from freezing to death.

Our trusty Dodge Caravan - the mummy wagon of choice for discerning campers
There were tiny squirrels (much smaller than the ones that dig up my garden back in houston) everywhere. This little fella was happy to sit around and eat wild berries while we took pictures..
The Glacial lakes (this one's Peyto lake) are full of sediment and so have this amazing aquamarine colour.
It actually felt quite alien being up in the mountains after three years living in the tropics. We'd got used to jungle plants and stifling humidity, yet here it was so cold and dry our lips cracked immediatly and I had to use a heater instead of AC for the first time in years!!
Along the highway is the Athabascar Glacier where you can travel up on to the glacier on these huge ice buggies and look at the clomubia icefields...
This is the Athabasca Glacier, in the old days (mid 1800's) it would've covered me where I stood taking this photos, now it's a good kilmetre shorter...
For good reason, they don't really want you to walk on the glacier by yourself
These huge 6 wheel drive buggies (specially made for ice travel apparently) carry hundreds of people up on to the glacier. It was the first time either of us had been on a glacier, so we just had to do it...
it was freezing...
We had a couple of days, so we headed up to Jasper, a small mountain town at the far end of the icefields parkway. Whilst it was still a little touristy (mainly for skiing and hiking) it was a hell of a lot better than Banff - which had a kinda fake northpole elf village vibe going on (complete with sushi restraunts for the japanese tourists staffed by aussies waiting for the ski season to start)
our neigbour in Japser one morning...
Being further away from the hype of Banff and Lake Louise, the trails around Jasper are practically empty and you can enjoy awesome hikes in the surrounding mountains. We spent some time near Mt Edith cavell at the Angel glacier...
There was a small lake caused by the toe morraine holding the melt water from the retreating glacier which was full of these really cool mini icebergs. It's so cold here that huge lumps of ice are scattered all over the place...
Angel glacier

When the glacial chunks of ice melt during the day, they create quite amazing shapes...