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Posted On Friday, March 27, 2015 at
at
8:22 PM
by Alvin
Leaving the (many) Che icons behind, we left Santa Clara on a midday Viazul bus for the elegant city of Cienfuegos. As luck had it, we found a very nice Casa Particular with our own terrace in the middle of the city close to the main avenue of Prado. The prosperous family cooked up some serious breakfasts and dinners during our stay and we enjoyed our post-dinner hot tea on the terrace in the gentle evening breeze. And boy did we need all that food and rest as the following day we ventured around Parque Marti and were impressed by the elegance of the UNESCO lauded landmarks of Catedral de la Purisima Concepcion, Teatro Tomas Terry and Palacio de Gobierno. We also walked about 10km return, to Punta Gorda for a fine view of the Bahia of Cienfuegos and that was where we first met Michael, the swashbuckling Dane, cycling around in his flashy Hawaiian shirt. We were to meet up and had a great chat with him later on at the Parque Marti and he regaled to us his impressive journey around Cuba - hopping on Army trucks, cycling on a faulty bike, came close to dying of thirst in the rural Cuban villages and giving out T-shirt as gratitude to the locals. We promised to visit his 1950s-themed club in Copenhagen when we visit Denmark and said our fond farewell.
Our bus leaving Cienfuegos managed to bridge the connection to Vinales, a world and scenery far removed from that of Cienfuegos. Basically, Vinales used to be a sleepy village on the western part of Cuba, where farmers just busied all year round in tending to their tobacco fields; then some clever dude one day said - hey, look at these strange looking karst hills with their tunnels and caves ... and presto, before anyone knew it, all the houses in Vinales turned into Casa Particulars and tourists arrived in coaches after coaches - yeh, the birth of a major tourist attraction in Cuba. We managed to walk around the fields and hills for one morning and it was pleasant to chill out in this little village before we headed back to Havana for our flight home.
