Thursday January 8, 2015

A really early start, we were on the road before the sun came up. We had our lights on and I almost wore my yellow windbreaker as it was a little chilly. This is the first time that my feet have been cold in 3 months!

Todays route we passed large orchards and orange groves and only a few sugar canes. The farms were highly mechanized and some of the farming communities had apartment blocks to house the workers.

The ride was relatively flat until we went through Coliseo then we had some small hills to climb. The worst part of todays ride was the wind. We started of with a head wind, which turned to a side wind and eventually for a short time a tail wind and then back to a side wind. It was a windy day and was constant, we had about 5 kms of tail wind which wasn’t very much over an 89 kms day. Even though we had a constant wind we still made good time and it was nice scenery.

As we came into Matanzas we noticed the wind on the water, there were a lot of white caps and the waves were quite large.

We found the casa, that we were going to stay in on the way out to Varadero (2 months ago). Fortunately this time it had vacancies and we settled into a nice room with the best shower that we have had in Cuba.   It is strange the things that we now get excited about – yeah hot water, yeah water pressure.

We wandered down to the centre of Town which was a couple of kilometres away. I checked the email. Because we are a week ahead of schedule I had to change the arrangements at the casa in Havana. Not a problem we can stay there on Saturday for five days. We have to decide whether to stay there until our flight or find a cheaper hotel for the remaining week in Havana. We have been easily sticking to our budget in Cuba, we don’t want to blow it in the last two weeks.