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Day 2: From Havana to Pinar del Rio and back again
So, by reading our travel guides, we had found out that Pinar del Rio was a place we had to go and see. Lovely landscapes, the tobacco culture, and not least: playa Maria La Gorda, which is supposed to be some sort of paradise. We were there dudes!
In the morning we got up “early” (hey, we’re on vacation!) packed our bags and took our rattling Toyota Tercel. We were headed for Pinar!
At that point in time, we still had our European mindset: we were convinced that Havana would have traffic signs gently showing us “Out of town” or “to the Ring” and then “to Pinar del Rio”. Well, it took us one hour driving in exactly the wrong direction ( by 'via blanca' into the east, but we did not know) before we accepted that we were going nowhere. Again: all we had to do was ask. In 10 minutes we were shown the highway and we were on our way…..
This was the day we discovered that for Cubans, the best way to go from A to B is hitchhiking. On the higway, there are many “fly overs” or bridges. About one every two kilometers. Where there’s a bridge, there’s a crossroads, and, perhaps more importantly, there’s lots of shade. So at every one of these bridges, there’s about 20-50 people waiting. When you pass in your shiny, air-conditioned, well kept , fully lubricated rent-a-car, they make frantic gestures urging you to take them with you. To be honest, we were afraid to take anyone on that first day trip. It would just take us some getting used to. Later we found out that taking hitchhikers is actually great fun, especially if you speak Spanish. And sure enough, when it comes to navigating Cuban villages and crossovers, hitchhikers can be your guides. We started out by taking women & children, moving up to Policemen & military and even some sugar cane workers wielding HUGE knives later on in the journey. All it took for us was getting to know the Cubans a bit better. Most of them are more friendly than many people you’d meet in western europe.
So we drove and drove, just about 200 kilometers to Viñales. His is were Hotel “los Jazmines” is located, one of the Horizontes Hoteles where we could cash our vouchers.
The scenery gets really beautiful as soon as you enter the Pinar de Rio province. From Pinar itself, a winding county road takes you up to Viñales.
The view at the Los Jazmines hotel is amazing. You see the whole valley rolled out in front of you. We were looking forward to staying there!!. Alas. The Hotel was full, and the receptionist was quick to tell us that all other Horizontes Hotels in the Region were full also. He was unwilling to make some phonecalls and was generally incooperative, so we were quickly fed up, and decided to drive all the way back, and see if we could perhaps find something in Santa Maria del Mar, not too far from Havana.
Driving down the winding road, two guys literally jumped in front of our car and forced us to stop. Then they asked politely if we could take them to Pinar. We decided we would. They told us they were tobacco workers, and when they heard our situation they immediately offered to take us for a trip. They wanted to show us the tobacco fields, eat something, go to Maria La Gorda, and according to them we would have plenty of time to do all this and drive to Havana. We declined, as we knew this would be impossible. They warned us that we would loose some of the best things in Cuba, and perhaps they were right. At that moment we were just extremely pissed of about not being able to stay in one of the four Horizontes Hotels in the region.
So we drove all the way back to Havana, had big trouble finding the entrance to the Bay tunnel (el tunnel de la bahia). It's being repaired, and some entrances are closed and there’s some traffic control police deciding who can go in and who cannot. If you take the tunnel you are on the other side of the bay in 30 seconds. If you have to take 'Via Blanca' it will take you about 45 minutes.
Then we drove to Santa Maria del Mar (we had to ask directions several times), were there are about 5 Horizontes Hotels. Yup, you guessed it: 4 of those were full. After driving 450 km over potholed roads you can imagine we were getting fed up walking to the reception and hearing “No sorry, we’re full”. Luckily “Las Terazas” had some space. We spent about half an hour finding the place though, because it had no visible name sign placed anywhere. We had passed it about 5 times when we decided it was time to ask for directions yet again.
The las Terazas hotel was nothing special. We had a very very nice refreshing swim on the beach
(Huge waves and quite some current, not for people who aren’t used to swimming in the sea) and watched the sun set. This made us feel a lot better .
Food was mediocre (there were no other restaurants nearby) and we spotted there were quite a few single gentlemen (older germans and Italians, in their late 40’s early 50’s) vacationing there. We would soon find some clues to why that could be…..
After dinner we decided to have a walk and see if we could get a drink somewhere.
Santa Maria del Mar is little more than a collection of Hotels along a boulevard. There’s not much to do. We found a little thatch-roofed bar practically across the road from the Hotel. We ordered two Mojito’s and they turned out to be the worst Mojito’s we would have on Cuba. There was a band playing. Cuban women were taking advantage of single german guys, teasing them for drinks. It did not look like big time prostitution, it wasn’t even clear who was taking advantage of who. It looked like the Cuban women were on the winning side though….Anyway, it was not really our scene so we decided to leave the bar and get some sleep. That night some Danish teenagers made lots of noise outside (there was probably some disco nearby were they had been) screaming a lot. We slept fine anyway.
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