Thursday November 27, 2014

Both Ralf and I didn’t have a good night sleep. We thought we were going to sleep well with the door open and a nice breeze from the ocean. We set up our mosquito net, to protect us from any bugs, but it was hot and uncomfortable. We are used to sleeping in a king sized bed, when we are sleeping in a small double bed and it is hot, it is really uncomfortable for us.

There is a fort in Puerte Padre, which we visited yesterday, but couldn\’t get a good photo of because of the sun.  It is undergoing renvoations, but the curator allowed us in for a quick look.

We set of early at 7:45 and the first 20 kms were on a good road, the weather was warm but we had a little bit of cloud cover. Then it started to rain, the first rain we have had in three weeks. It didn’t last long but the bikes got covered in road dirt and so did we.

We came passed the local bus terminal and were fortunate to see the \”\’Inter-Town buses\” and the local \’buses\”.

The roads became rougher as we got further away from any major Town. We started to go through more rural areas of sugar cane and started to climb into the hills. As we climbed we both commented on the lovely scenery – lovely scenery but we have to climb hills.

We made one wrong tur today and found ourselves in quite a large town with a steel works.

Ralf was close to bonking, not enough food yesterday at lunch, and a normal size meal at the restaurant. He said he was just feeling weak. I had eaten more of the peanut bars than Ralf and wasn’t feeling too bad, but I really needed to eat when we got into Holguin.

We arrived in Holguin and I spotted the street that the casa was on that Oscar had told us about. It was on the outskirts of the Town and we always want to be close to the centre, I didn’t tell Ralf about it. We got to the first of the five parks that make up Holguin and asked a bicycle taxi where the centre of Town was – he said two more parks. We carried on and when we got to the main square we spotted a casa sign. Unfortunately there was no room, but the owner called another casa and we went in search of that one. It didn’t have the official casa sign and the rooms were on the first floor with a steep set of stairs to carry the bikes up. We spotted another casa down the street, it was a lovely green colour. We cycled to that and Ralf asked if she had any rooms, she asked if he was married, he said we were and she showed us the room. Acutally she showed us the apartment. We have the run of the upstairs of the house which includes the kitchen, sitting room, patio, balcony, a large bedroom and a bathroom with a shower that I could stand under for an hour.

I never thought I would actually look forward to cooking but I really was getting fed up of pork and chicken. After showering and washing the bikes of the road crap, we went out and bought pasta and sauce with olives- menu meal # 1. We also bought some breakfast cereal which we are looking forward to having. Makes a change from eggs every day for the past month.

After we had bought our staples for dinner and breakfast, we decided we needed some bread buns to go with dinner. Finding bread at 4:30 in the afternoon is pretty hard. I asked a couple of people where there is a bread shop. We were directed down a few streets but I couldn’t see the sign for panaderia, so we resigned ourselves to having dinner with no bread. However, we spotted a couple of people with buns in their bags, we spotted the store they were coming from and recognized it to be a ration store. I went and asked if they had bread. One lady showed her ration book, the guy behind the counter asked if we needed buns and I said yes, he gave me 4 buns and we asked how much they cost. We needed a ration book and as we didn’t have one, we got the buns for free.

All Cubans get a certain amount of food each month. They get a book which allows them about 1 kg of rice, beans, a bottle of vegetable oil, flour, sugar, eggs, milk, butter, bread and some meat.

As we were walking back to the casa Ralf said that we had probably deprived someone his daily ration of 4 buns.  They were good buns.

We had a lovely meal and hopefully will have a good nights sleep.