Tour Days 10, 11 and 12 Thursday, Friday and Saturday 5th, 6th and 7th February Villa Yaguanabo to Trinidad

With only 30km to ride we delayed our start to take advantage of the breakfast included in the motel price. This was very useful because Pincho the barman gave us his card for a casa to rent later on the route.

It was sunny with the bright blue sea to our right. It was not as warm as usual making it good for cycling. We cycled over a series of bridges built in the 1950s to open up the route to Trinidad for tourism. They are built right over lovely white sandy beaches. It sounds a dreadful thing to do but there is so little traffic it hardly harms the beach and the curve of the bridges over the beaches looks quite good.

A good 10km before we reached Trinidad, on a slight descent, we overtook a man on his work bike. On the next climb he overtook us. This happened a number of times on the way into Trinidad and developed much amusement and healthy competition between us which only ended at the outskirts of town.

Our friend’s bike looked as if it had once been a post office type bike though it was not of a kind used in the UK. It had very strong wheels and curved frame tubes. There was a huge steel carrier with a stand hinging down from behind the rear wheel to support bike and load upright. Like many bikes here the front forks were strengthened with concrete reinforcing rods from dropouts to stem and on this bike it was nicely done. This may sound like overkill but here solo bikes are beasts of burden. They are used to carry heavy loads over very rough roads. It is also not unusual to see three adults on one bike, one passenger on the cross bar and one riding side saddle on the carrier.

We entered Trinidad and headed for the Hotel Las Cuevas. It is the oldest hotel in town and hopefully for the tourist trade the worst. We were to meet our friends Mick and Sue here and stay for a couple of nights. The stoker managed to establish after much effort that Mick and Sue were still there. She then managed to obtain a rather high price for a room before after much further poking at a computer the three reception staff decided the hotel was full.

They did us a favour. We went down the hill and soon found a casa that suits us better at about half the price. Our next job was to send Stuart our web site update which had already been delayed several days for lack of a connection. It took about 90 minutes of frustration and annoyance to do a job which would take 10 minutes on UK adsl.

We met Mick and Sue who are on a walking holiday organised by the Ramblers Association. It was lovely to chat and interesting to exchange our very different experiences of Cuba. Having three guides they had gleaned much more information about how the systems work. We for our part had seen, lived in and enjoyed the smaller places which with a group they were unable to do. It was a very pleasant evening and strange to meet up 5,000 miles from home.

On Friday we explored Trinidad, the centre of which has UNESCO status as a World Heritage site. Unlike most such places it has not been spoiled by excessive renovation. The streets in the centre are cobbled. Many of the houses, built with the ill gotten gains from the blood and toil of slaves, are opulent with shady courtyards. It is a tourist area but, as with most of these places, ok for a day’s wandering. We did however stray out into the real part of the town to buy street food for lunch and relax with the locals in the shady Parque Céspedes.

On Saturday we caught the delightful little steam train from Trinidad to the Valle de los Ingenios. The locomotive was built in 1911 and looks it. It pulls two open wooden carriages, taking on water and wood for the boiler on the way. It goes so slowly that it could be quicker to cycle but we are always reluctant to miss a steam train ride. The destination is a now defunct sugar plantation deep in the countryside fringed by mountains. We climbed a 45 metre high bell tower on rickety steps for the view.

On our return to Trinidad we went to the Museum Romantico. The exhibits of beautiful and valuable furniture, artefacts, glass and crockery are laid out in fourteen rooms of the nineteenth century house of a wealthy sugar baron.

Today we have experienced part of the appalling history of Cuba. The tower we climbed housed a bell to signal when slaves started and stopped work. Until the 1890’s they were driven with whips and brutal punishment for even minor misdemeanours. They were forced to live in barrack blocks and suicides were common. The slave owners who lived in the house we visited became fabulously rich on the back of the slaves’ misery. They imported luxury items from all over Europe and North America and had an opulent life style.

Tour Day 13 Sunday 8th February Trinidad to Topes de Collantes

We left our lovely casa with Anais and Cayuco bright and early with kisses. Their hostal on Piro Guinart is highly recommended, being better for us than any of the hotels we have seen in Cuba and half the price.

We bumped down the cobbles and had an 8km undulating ride. We knew that then there would be some 800 metres of climb in the next 12km. It is of course almost impossible to ride a loaded bike up that kind of gradient. The management failed to use his head and realise this. His fuzzy logic said that if the decrepit Cuban vehicles could get up so could we.

He had to consider that the Cubans might not bring their old vehicles up. The crafty devils bring most of the tourists up in lorries equipped with lines of plastic chairs. They do look funny but they work grinding up in their crawler gears. Most other vehicles, of which there were few, were modern hire cars and taxis. There was also the odd cowboy, but no other bikes.

After just a couple of kms we realised how impossible getting up would be. We could not ride and it was even too steep for the management to use his normal ploy. On some steep hills he rides alone and pushes up the worst bits. The stoker also has a badly bruised leg from the wilderness ride. We were about to do the unheard of and turn back.

At that moment a hire car passed us some way but then reversed back. They were a European couple who realised our difficulty. They very kindly took our entire luggage to the top together with the stoker. They helped her find the only hotel available which was down in a nasty hole off their route.

Even without the luggage the management still had to push up the short steeper sections and was in bottom gear for much of the rest of the ups. He says he enjoyed the peace and quiet of the mountain and even the steady rhythm of the climb. The stoker, who had by now settled into the hotel and showered, walked out of the hotel hole and met him at the top of the climb. We had taken just less than the minimum cycling time the Lonely Planet suggested.

We came here mainly because it sounded a nice place high in the mountains and we thought we might go walking for a day. The Rough Guide calls it a once popular resort now lacking investment. It has gone seriously downhill since the guide was published and the prices have increased significantly. It can now only be described as a money grabbing tip where many of the facilities not actually shut are falling down. They even want to charge us 13 dollars to walk in their national park.

We have no alternative but to stay tonight but unsurprisingly will leave first thing tomorrow. Amusingly this is where the state sends its exemplary workers and the party faithful for holidays as a reward. Perhaps that is why we seldom see Cubans doing any work, as we know it in Europe, at all.