Varadero - Tuesday March 4th 2008

One of my traveling companions, whom I'll call Vero (the other I'll call Barry) asked what Izmarie and her family usually had for breakfast and was told that on the rare ocassion when they had breakfast, they had tortillas. Now, we've been having eggs since we got here and I think Vero was getting tired of it so she asked if it was possible to have a tortilla for breakfast instead. Izmarie said no problem. We came down for breakfast this morning and found out that a tortilla in Cuba is very different from a tortilla in Mexico..... here it means....eggs, omelette style. So, for the fourth day in a row we had eggs (tortilla style this time), bread, honey, butter, pawpaw juice and espresso style coffee. Milk seems hard to come by here, so you either had your coffee black or with honey.

The plan was to go to Varadero today. So we walked to the bus stop afterwards to wait for the bus. There didn't seem to be a real system with the transportation. A bus would pull up half a block away and the throngs of people will rush towards it, like we do with trotros in Ghana. A lot of the times the bus will fill up fast and the unlucky crowd left will have to wait some more. The bus drivers didn't help matters by pulling up at different places everytime....sometimes as far away as a block and we'd all have run like sheep to try and get a spot on it. When we first rushed to a bus, Barry told Vero that she'd have to push her way through, if she wanted a seat. We'd lost the chance on one bus because she assumed there was some orderly queue in the chaos....she said she didn't want to have to fight to get on the bus. But after we missed getting on a couple more buses, she learnt to push her way to the front of the lines and we were able to finally get seats to varadero.

Varadero beach was beautiful!

Clear blue water, white sands.....just like on the brochures and postcards..it was amazing and it stretched for as far as the eyes could see. I got to go snorkelling for the first time ever. It was so cool to be swimming with fish all around...I could literally pick up a fish as i was swimming and this was all in pretty shallow water.

Coming back home was not as fun...It took about 2 hours to get an empty bus to Matanzas and the driver and mate were kind of rude. Idon't know why...I think it was because we were foreigners and we were paying in the local currency....but they ordered me off the bus, till Vero pleaded with them. Barry just thought they were being discriminatory because of me....who knows.

Despite our challenges with public transportation, we still plan to go back to
Varadero tomorrow. Jorge showed us a better way to get there..its litte more expensive as its in Convertible Pesos (CUC) , but at least we'll have some peace of mind.

Thursday we are going to go to Habana Vieja (old Havana).