Category: Carrots and Claret

One day I took a lazy horse ride along the path behind my cabana, from where the sound of the horses had came on that first morning.  Once a horse mad child, I hadnt ridden for a long while.  As I expected the poor horses were quite thin and their tack was tatty.  The people are poor and the horses are poor.  The smiling guide asked me if Id ridden before and I told him I had, however, not wanting a spirited mount after such a long break I didnt elaborate.  This didn’t develop into a favourable tactic.  As a result of this short survey I started out at the back with only the expedition leader behind me and there I remained.

I heard the swish of a fresh strong twig and felt the flinch of my mount a couple of times before I was somehow compelled out of a cocoon of cowardice and not wanting to ‘rock the boat’ to tell him to stop it.  Of course he didnt like it one bit but immeadiately flung the stick into the countryside and sulked, tantrumesque for the rest of the ride.  He could no longer keep the whole thing going by beating my mount, who would, when whipped, crowd the horse in front in compelling him to go faster.  He had a strategy in ordering his horses and keeping the whole thing going.

The scenery winding through the valley was spectacular.  I had chosen to go at four o clock to avoid the mad dogs and midday sun and the late afternoon had a dreamy sun drenched and shadowed quality and the only sounds were the sounds of the horses hooves and the man behind me occasionally shouting ‘Rosella!’ at a apparently troublesome mare.  We meandered through the narrow gullies in the fertile red soil.

I had just about cleared the first (metaphorical) hurdle.  My horse was no longer flinching, the man behind me was no longer surreptitiously whipping him and the red soil was blazing spectacularly in the early evening sun.  Then the German woman in front of me decided that she was so relaxed that she needed a cigarette.  I had been enjoying the fresh fresh air in the valley and felt this tainting of it an affront but rather than create the cinemaesque tension that ensues after telling someone to stop talking I decided simply to overtake.  This wasnt simple.  Everytime the I egged my switch freed steed forward the German woman’s horse speeded up.  I retried this manoeuvre a couple of times before it dawned on me that it wasnt the German woman’s reluctance for me to overtake but her horse’s, she wasnt actually doing anything other than sitting back in an almost post coital way and smoking into the cleanest air I had breathed for years.  It dawned on me that the horses always went in this order, her horse was outraged that mine, the obedient one was trying to disrupt the order of things.

So eventually of course her cigarette was finished and my horse continued to plod nose to tail behind hers on the journey he probably made a couple of times a day like a commuter.  And my mind wandering away from the marvels of the scenery to dwell on the characters of the horses.  Ascribing ‘human’ traits such as the compulsion to keep up one’s place in some sort of social order to beings other than human or to inanimate objects we call anthropormothism.  But humans dont have the monopoly on so called human feelings and traits just as they dont have the monopoly on joy, pain and sadness…

The pretty little town in Vinales is easily reached using the hop on hop off open top bus thats stops at various places in the area.  I used it to get in and out of town but also just to sit upstairs for the hour long circuitous journey and enjoy the sights along the road with the horses and carts and the oxen.

During the day the small cafes are wonderful places to watch the town go by.  They serve small cheese heavy vegetable pizzas some of which have viandas on them.  I thought at first that these might be meat due to the similarity to the French ‘viande’  but found out that viandas was a collective term for seasonal tubers such as plantains, yams or cassava.  Im not sure which ones I had, I was just pleased to have established that the small brown pieces on top were vegetables and not meat.  As a vegetarian this was the most exotic choice in town.  They were tasty enough and pleasant to wash down with the local Bucanero beer.

I first woke up to the almost forgotten sound of a cock crowing and a little later to the sounds of horses being led close by.  When I opened the curtains the views of the mountains and the valley were breathtaking.

All that had been available when I booked had been a junior suite and I seemed to have landed the best room in the house or rather the best room leading away from the house.  It was simple and clean with huge bed and a sofa and a TV (with several Chinese programs since a cultural sharing initiative began between the two countries in 2008) and had the wonderful advantage of being the last one in a row of little chalets, the furthest from the main hotel building.  In front of my veranda, decked with the two obligatory rocking chairs a well kept lawn sloped down to the trees leading to the valley.

When I eventually went up for breakfast there was no sign of any other guests in this hotel that was supposed to be full.  I later found out that there was a Saga Holidays group and the old folk had gotten up much earlier to go on one of their excursions.  The breezy dining room above the lobby was empty apart from a few staff members wandering in and out and tiny birds swooping in for crumbs left on the uncleared tables.  All around doors opened onto balconies and the panoramic views beyond.  Breakfast at the wonderfully pink Hotel Los Jazmines was fine, chopped guava and papaya and the same fruits juiced along with a selection of others, bread cheese, tomatoes and salads and cakes.  There was a bored looking chef standing by an omelette station and various hot dishes for carnivores.  (A word of caution for vegetarians, all the bean dishes I saw at breakfast in Cuba had some sort of meat in them).

After breakfast I went up to the hilltop-perched pool which was peaceful for most of the time apart from, as I had been forewarned by Trip Advisor, the regular coach strip stops when tourists would descend of the area to take photos of the spectacular views and drink pina coladas or mojitos from the bar that flanked it.  Sometimes annoying, these noisy visitors swooping in like the sparrows at breakfast would occasionally provide an interesting distraction.

So the outbound journey was thirteen hours as opposed to the less claustrophobia inducing nine hour return.  I’d booked rather late and the extra four hours didnt really make it the non stop flight advertised.  But when we stopped at Holguin (a place I would later read beautifully described by Renaldo Arenas in his biography Before Night Falls) and a few people disbanded and the fuel fumes permeated the cabin it was a relief to be told we could get off.  I headed for the small charming bar with windows overlooking the sleepy runway.  Here, as everywhere else, change and exchange rates need to be checked carefully.  My mental arithmetic was seemingly not too blunted by the journey and my challenge was met with polite apology and more Convertible Pesos in my hand.  Its nothing personal, its the norm I’m told and my first transactions on Cuban soil did nothing to dispel this.

From England I had arranged an expensive 90 euro taxi ride to Vinales rather than take a ride to Havana just to rummage around in a suitcase, scatter things around, sleep for one night, pick up the scattered things and set off again in the morning.  I had read that the views in Valle de Vinales were spectacular and wanted to wake up to them.  It took two hours and I hurtled along the almost empty motorway answering Jorge’s barrage of questions in broken Spanish until exhausted I gave up and and decided to continue improving my Spanish after some sleep.  Once off the main road, poor Jorge, probably two hours away from home had trouble finding the hotel.  I helped him decide at ambiguously sign-posted junctions and kept a list in my head of all the times I had read that Cuba was a very safe country, especially when he stopped the car a couple of times to turn around and try to understand my disappearing Spanish.  I kept quiet.  Finally I checked into the Hotel Los Jazmines and was taken down a path leading away from the main building and down some steps with little terraced bungalows to my left and the warm pitch black night to my right.  The darkness was alive with the chorus of a trillion insects.  I realised that I had almost forgotten the smell of fresh air.

Cuba

I recently visited Cuba for the first time and loved it!  This is definitely a place I would like to visit again.  Having said that finding delicious meat free dinners was a challenge at times.

But my first little episodes of exasperation began before I even set foot on that beautiful island curtesy of the Cuban national airline Cubana.  As my flight from Gatwick wasnt until 12.40 I had brunch at the ever bland but the best of a bad South Terminal bunch that is Cafe Rouge.  I trod the much trod but ever hopeful baggage-free semi-euphoric exotic location expectant route of looking at the Vs on the food outlet menus around the big bright wide holding/shopping hangar.  I knew already that I could have a good glass or two of red with my brunch, this is Gatwick not Karnataka after all.  But after a credit card bashing instant buy of an entry level DSLR (this was imperative as I hadnt been able to locate my Coolpix on a last minute trawl of the clutter of my flat) …I ended up with the soggy circle of pastry on mixed mushrooms on the almost nice ‘Feuillete de Champignons’ £5.95.  Comfort food, almost nice but to be more comforting it needed a side of French Fries £2.95 and a salad £3.50. Boring boring boring!  But more than boring I suppose, scandalous almost as this had to be paid for after all.  I’ve noticed a penchant in French (and pseudo French) restaurants for using unsalted butter.  To my not quite Francophile palette unsalted butter just tastes like unsalted grease.  Also scandalous for a French or pseudo French or has given itself a French name chain the ‘Baguette’ for which the unsalted grease was an accompaniment and for which they charge £2.25 is a little cheap basket of stiff airy inconsequential cardboard.

To add insult to injury all the staff were fawning over two uber serious speaking and miserable looking suited types who seemed to be trying every dish on the menu, on closer inspection I discovered they actually were trying every dish on the menu bite by bite and then after serious discussion they were writing things down.  These people it transpired worked for the company and were taste testing or would have been if anything had had a taste.  With these two to be sucked up to service was slow.   The salad was anaemic, the fries were flaccid, the wine was fine. I havent even got to the diabolical interpretation of vegetarianism I encountered on the plane yet.  Its a good job I didnt have a sandwich on the train.

I am not one of those people who wave away airline food when its brought to me especially as I am one of those people who everyone stares at to see what they’ve got because the vegetarian meals are invariably served first.  So less than four hours after my expensive Cafe Rouge stodge I removed the foil lid of the small adequate almost tasty portion of pasta in tomato sauce, another anaemic salad and the obligatory cup of chilled melon.  I wasnt hungry so didnt envy my neighbours chocolatey cake.  I have noticed a definite pattern in the delivery of lacto ovo vegetarian meals.  There may be cheese in the main part of the meal but its not usually given with crackers afterwards as it is with the non vegetarian meals.  Anything sweet and sticky is replaced by icy melon cubes and the pat of butter is replaced by white margarine (this would make sense of course for a vegan meal but there was cheese on the pasta).  I drank the wine that was served with dinner and as I was to be find out was only to be served with dinner and was not for sale.  At one stage there seemed to be a man at the back of the plane selling plastic cups of rum (or maybe this was a hypoglycemic hallucination) but he was gone by the time I decided it was time for another drink.  The flight was thirteen hours as there was a stop for dropping off passengers and refueling at Holguin.

No more refreshments were served for what seemed like eight hours and by then I was really hungry again.  The next offering was preceded by the welcome flourish of activity of the crew, this state of anticipation was cut short for me when a steward with a deadpan expression place a banana in a plastic tray in front of me.  I asked him what was in the sandwiches that were now being handed out.  They looked like cheese.  They were cheese.  ‘These are not for vegetarian, this is for vegetarian’ he scolded me holding up my banana.  ‘But I would like a sandwich as they are cheese’.  I was seated near the galley and a stewardess started to read the ingredients label on the sandwich.  ‘There is cheese.  You eat cheese?  Anyway you cannot have, you order vegetarian’  Now I was subject to suspicious looks, the fake vegetarian.  ‘There was cheese on the pasta you brought me’ I told them, my nerves now jangling in famished irritation.  Eventually after everyone had been given a sandwich one was placed in front of me, luckily there was one left for the awkward vegetarian.

Coming soon!

Beautiful Valle de Vinales and amazing Havana, books, films, recipes and more!