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...

Our new home...

After all the packing and parties in Lagos and a month in a hotel in Houston whilst looking for a house and a car and seeting up a new life with new bank accounts social security numbers, drivers licences...etc.... we have a new home!!!
We still don't have any furniture - apart form on old ikea couch we bought of some friends for $100 and a plastic fold out table... but we're getting there

oh yeah, we bought a barbie too - very important in these parts

The garden needs a bit of work...