To Havana, Cuba

Monday, January 11, 2016

Inside our very nice new Chinese-made bus

We have had a long day of hurry up and wait. We are told that waiting is a Cuban tradition. So, we must be doing it right. We were up and at breakfast at least an hour too early and I guess that was our fault. Anyway we had the Crowne Plaza’s complimentary breakfast buffet at 7am. We were finished by 7:30am and planned to check out around 8:30am. I guess we made the right move anyway because people that went to breakfast later found themselves automatically checked out of their rooms and they couldn’t use their keycards to get back in their rooms. Evidently they were able to get new key cards until they were actually ready to vacate. Still. We found no line to checkout and again I guess it was because we were so early so I guess we still did right.

Outside the airport in Cuba

Scene coming into Havana from the airport

Last night Amit told us how lucky we were that the way ABC Charters and Friendly Planet streamline everything that we would have no lines and no waiting. Not true. There were long lines and long waits. Suffice to say that it was a normal flying day. Five hours in airports for 45 minutes in the air. I am exhausted and we had a noon flight. It was a short flight and no time zone change. I think it is time for me to stay home for a while. I am not enjoying traveling anymore. We spent at least 3 hours today just waiting to either give or receive luggage! That seems excessive. With the 44 lbs. per person weight limit of checked and carry-on combined, we had all packed in carry-on only size limit bags. Amit advised that it would be wiser to check the small rollaboards anyway so as not to have to deal with onboard luggage space. I still don't know which would have been better. The overhead bins were smaller than some we've seen and the flight was completely full with a lot of people traveling heavy so we didn't have to worry about that. If we hadn't checked our bags, we still would have spent the same amount of time standing at either end waiting for the group anyway. It seems like a lose-lose situation either way.

So, I was pleased to get a passport stamp on arrival here in Cuba, my 75^th country. Now I also have a sheaf of papers to carry with me every time I leave and re-enter the USA for at least the next 5 years to prove that I visited Cuba legally. It really will be time to stay home! 

Entering La Casa, our 1st paladar, for a late lunch

We had animals by our table!

After a very long wait for our luggage, we rode directly to La Casa, a paladar. A paladar is a private restaurant in a private home. They are the most highly prized places to eat in Cuba. Not having eaten in a normal restaurant yet, I don’t understand why. I am sure I will eventually. Grency told us a story about the Cuban love affair with Spanish language/Latin American (or even American) soap operas. The point of the story was that the first popular Brazilian soap opera that Cuba went nuts for had a woman who lived on a beach and started selling pizza there. Eventually the woman had a chain of 3 Italian food/pizza restaurants. The woman named her first restaurant Paladar. So, when the first privately owned restaurants opened in Cuba, the populace immediately called them paladars. Now you know. The food was tasty and plentiful. It was a 3 course meal between 3 and 4:30p.  

The bird was dangling above this turtle pond

Bucanero was everyone's favorite beer. Yes, we took a poll.

 

1st mojito - Looks like a plant rooting, tasted about like that too.

Mom's sangria was the best of the trip

Chicken soup? Awful! Judy made a better choice with pumpkin, tasty.

There was live music.

Pork, very tasty

Fish, good also

Plantains side dish, almost as ubiquitous as black beans and rice

Mom liked her shrimp

Warm cheesecake with ice cream for dessert

Our bus - 1/2 of all the tour buses in Cuba look just like this!

 

Entrance to Cristóbal Colón cemetery

Afterwards we went to the Christopher Columbus cemetery for a quick guided tour. The day was overcast, breezy and chilly but we only got drizzled on a bit. We walked a short distance from the entrance gate and the gate focused on telling us a lot of detail about a few selected monuments. Our guide ended her brief tour at a grave marked by a woman holding a baby. If you touch the baby's bottom where her arm supports it and ask for something while backing away, she (or the baby?) is supposed to grant it. It was a busy spot and there were lots of testimonial thank you markers all over that section of the cemetery.

See how dirty where people touch it?

First you knock on the foot of the tomb

 

Room 574 - Only 2 working lights!

We checked in to the Hotel Nacional around 6pm. The Hotel Nacional is a magnificent looking building at a distance. But our room is nearly inadequate. Hardly all the modern luxury amenities our guide promised us on the bus. There is a working minibar which was a surprise but we only have 2 working light bulbs and fewer than half the electrical outlets work. There isn’t room to swing a cat and no storage space at all in the small bathroom. We have one full size bed. The floor is gritty and has dust bunnies. We are in room 574. Mom and Judy are in 401 and Clay says their is room is more than double the size with 3 beds and a corner room. Luck of the draw I guess. None of us have any kind of view. The rooms across the hall should overlook the Malecón. We waited until 7pm for the luggage to be delivered to the room.

Working TV & minbar in there.

Door to adjoining vacant room with no furniture

Hotel cashier's exchange rates

 

Cuba's other national beer

 

Dinner is included tonight. We are supposed to go to the basement restaurant and give our room number to get it at our leisure. There was a large and spread out buffet but much of it was not too appetizing. The soup I ladled from the bottom of the pot was not hot and neither was the other hot food I selected. The meat/fish grilled to order was evidently good and the right temperature but I didn't have that. I made the mistake of pointing out to Clay what I thought was a seafood salads buffet. I thought it had a couple of kinds of baby squid/octopi, Clay corrected me. It was all baby squid/octopi and there were at least 8 different salads of it! He enjoyed his gross meal. Clay made the mistake of pointing out what was a big bowl of cajeta on the dessert buffet when I asked him if he'd found the self-service ice cream sundae bar. Mom & I went for dessert first and put the "cajeta" on our ice cream. It was not cajeta. Several people in the group tried it (we all declined to try the bowl that looked like ketchup!) and when we discussed it, no one had any idea what it was except not caramel or cajeta and maybe some kind of fruit. It was sweet was all anyone could identify.

Clay's dinner!

We are back from dinner. Admittedly, we are not night owls so when I say it is past our bedtime it isn’t too meaningful. But it is past 9pm. We were told that all our included meals include one domestic beverage. We were told that we did not need a voucher for dinner in the basement restaurant or breakfast tomorrow. We were told to just go and give our room number and that they would check a list and we’d have our included meal. The list part was true. We were offered domestic beverages and we each took one. Two beers, one sangria and one water. When we got up to leave we were told that we owed $13 for drinks. We balked. The waitress went to the manager and he said we had to sign for the drinks to our rooms and not pay for them now. We balked again and I went to the manager. He said the tour guide from Havana has to provide him (or us to him) vouchers or else the drinks are not included. He offered to call her but we don’t know her cell number. We don’t even really know her name. We have an Atlanta cell phone number for our tour director, but it is not good in Cuba. He asked us to bring her to him by morning or to get her cell phone number to him. I told him that we didn’t expect to see her before 9am tomorrow when we board the bus. He said then we’d just have to pay. I’d write more but I am quite literally done. You can stick a fork in me. I usually hate short trips but this one at under a week may be too long here in Cuba with Friendly Planet. Suffice to say the buffet dinner was pretty bad. Not high hopes for the morning tomorrow.

Havana. It is not what I expected. The locals keep telling us it is like time travel. The land that time forgot. It isn’t. Neglect is not the same thing as historic preservation. There are some old cars but a lot more newer ones. We are told that the old cars are special now and not so many. You have to pay to photograph them or ride in them.

I'd like to address the hardest part of visiting Cuba, in a word, WATER. This problem is over the entire country and has a few manifestations. One, you cannot flush used toilet paper. You have to put it in a plastic bucket by the toilet. Two, the tap water is not potable. Three, the water pressure is insufficient which affects any floors above ground level so figure all hotel rooms. This problem is unavoidable no matter how much money you spend to visit Cuba. I predict that cruise ships will go a long way to improving this issue for a large number of visitors. Now, we were aware of this problem before coming here, but it is something that you have to think about a lot more when you are actually here. It is not something that we are used to dealing with 24/7. Friendly Planet gives us each a small bottle of water every day on the bus (or we can ask for it). When we leave the bus in the afternoon, they give us each a 2 liter bottle. In addition, we can almost always get potable water with our meals sometimes as our included drink and sometimes in addition to an included drink. It is something we have to think about, but I found that Friendly Planet supplied plenty of water for us.

 

Another issue we were warned about in advance which never seemed as big a problem was the CUC, or kook. This is a convertible peso and it is what tourists are supposed to use. In reality, most people would accept regular pesos or dollars, Canadian dollars or Euros. Cuba has a complicated 2 currency system that is so unfair to the average Cuban that I don't imagine can last much longer. Knowing what we knew from Friendly Planet's advance information we bought Euros before coming and we went with  their overestimated amount to bring as well. That and the fact that there was a penalty for Euros that Friendly Planet did not tell us about until the night we arrived in Miami cost us some. Just enough to be an annoyance, no real harm. The other thing was that Friendly Planet documents said we could get CUCs at the airport. In reality, that was not possible and we had to wait to do it at the hotel. It was just as convenient at hotels, but since we hadn't yet learned about regular pesos and US Dollars or Euros and all being accepted and in regular circulation, that I don't think anyone tipped anybody until after the first night at the hotel because we all thought we needed CUCs which we didn't have yet. Just saying. We thought it would be an issue but it wasn't. The issue was the CUC vs. peso in reality. Officially a CUC is worth 24 pesos. On the street, in shops, it was negotiable. The first price you agree to is never the price they will try to extract from you when you pull out those CUCs. This happened to us all except for government stores whatever that means. A store looked like a store to us.

Good night, Havana.

Miami

We are in Miami waiting for our 7:30pm Friendly Planet tour to Havana and Varadero Cuba information meeting. We will fly to Havana tomorrow. We got checked in to the Crown Plaza Miami Airport a little after 3pm with ease. No waiting. We parked onsite after reserving and prepaying online at United Airport Parking of around $3 per day. The price through the hotel's front desk is about $15 per day. Hopefully that will handle it when we go to checkout of the lot! The parking attendant took the receipt that we had to print out and bring with us like it was normal. We'll see when we take the shuttle back from the airport in 6 days. The Crowne Plaza is very nice but I don't know if it is as nice as the price would indicate. Mom & Judy got a room overlooking the pool so that is added value. Ours is at the end of the same hallway and overlooks the dumpster and street behind. Not so nice. I guess our room was much quieter though. Here are some photos.

There was a nice and friendly and affordable and tasty place to eat right across the street. That was good since the hotel's restaurant was closed! The only problem was that we are in the middle of a block so to cross the very busy 6 lanes of traffic, we had to walk to the corner cross walk and back. So, while Latin Cafe 2000 was right across the street we had to walk a block to get there and back. We had looked at the menu online but when we got there the waiter pointed out the 2 for $20 menu on the back and recommended it. We all chose it. Clay got house salad and pork chimichurri. I got Greek style white bean soup (I don't like that) and chicken chimichurri. Clay got black beans and rice mixed with fried sweet plantains as his 2 sides. I got white rice and black beans as mine. It was a huge amount of food. Judy got salad, black beans and white rice with some kind of grilled chicken and Mom got malanga soup, mixed black beans and rice and fufu with vaca frita de pollo. Mom got the prize for most adventurous. She also might have had the best though it was all good. You could add a flan, rice pudding or bread pudding for $1.99 or any other for $3.99. They had a flan and we shared churros with dulce de leche dipping sauce. Oh, and I forgot that they brought out a basket of warm buttered flattened Cuban bread to start. It was a huge amount of food and all very good and very reasonably priced.

I will post this before the meeting and maybe try to come back and update with any important meeting information before we leave here because we are told we will have no Internet in Cuba. So, I'll keep notes and post all about it on our return.

So the only thing we heard at the meeting which was new and unexpected was the 5% surcharge to convert Euros to CUC. Our pre-trip documents had spelled out pretty clearly that only US Dollars had a 10% Cuban government penalty charge to convert to CUC. The woman at the meeting tonight said that and that Euros would have a 5% charge. She also told us we would not have time to exchange money at the airport contrary to the pretrip docs. She told us to change money to CUC after we arrived at the hotel. She said that we would depart this hotel at 9am as a group for a group checkin to ABC charters of an American Airlines flight that will depart at noon. We should arrive at 1pm. After we pass customs, immigration and a health screen we will pick up luggage and be bused to Havana. We will have lunch and an afternoon walking tour before going to the Hotel Nacional to checkin and exchange money. We were advised to make reservations for anything we want to do in our post-4pm free time that first afternoon as everything is booked far out. She said there were no hotel rooms unreserved in Havana for the entire year of 2016! We only have one night free for dinner and we haven't thought about where to eat, hoping to find somewhere within walking distance! More later...

Kayaking

First of all, Happy New Year!

Map of our kayak route

Man made oyster quarry bay where we put in

On January 5th we went to Rookery Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve, which is nearby. I had seen their guided kayak tours listed in the local newspaper several times as a great outdoor tourism opportunity and wanted to do it. Clay went along a little reluctantly. It was a 2 hour tour and cost $59 pp. There was a limit of 10 participants. Ours had 9 and 2 guides. I was the weak link. I seriously struggled. We won't plan to kayak ever again. It was not near as fun as our only previous experience kayaking in Hobart Bay, Alaska. It was windy and that didn't help. It was overcast and cloudy which surprisingly did help. We saw about a dozen kinds of birds but nothing we hadn't seen before I don't think. We were a little disappointed in the lack of other forms of wildlife but we only saw mangrove crabs and snails outside of the birds. Oh well. They're wild animals and they do want they want.

Me working hard!

Our kayak tour group

An island full of pelicans

Me taking a breather

"Tales"

Afterwards we walked a 1/2 mile boardwalk loop looking for other plants, animals and birds. We only saw vultures. We laughed ourselves silly over a sign about skinks and anoles. It said they use their tales defensively. Tales! I had to point it out to Clay before he finally read what it actually said and not what he expected it to say. Another spell checker fail.

We ended our excursion at the Rookery Bay Environmental Learning Center. We watched a film that showed more of what we had hoped to see on our kayak trip. It was interesting. Entrance was included in our kayak excursion ticket price. I can recommend a visit if just for the walking trails. The reserve is huge at over 100,000 acres but the parts we visited were easily accessible and scenic.