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 Antes que anochezca) y unas pocas personas se disolvieron y los gases del combustible impregnados de la cabina era un alivio y nos dijeron que podíamos bajar. Me dirigí hacia el pequeño bar encantador con ventanales con vistas a la pista de aterrizaje con sueño. Aquí, como en todas partes, cambian y los tipos de cambio deben ser controlados cuidadosamente. Mi cálculo mental fue aparentemente no muy mitigado por el viaje y mi reto fue recibida con disculpa cortés y más Pesos Convertibles en mi mano. Su nada personal, su la norma que me dicen y mis primeras transacciones en suelo cubano no hicieron nada para disipar esta.

De Inglaterra me había organizado un costoso 90 euros en taxi a Vinales en lugar de dar un paseo a La Habana sólo para hurgar en una maleta, dispersar las cosas, dormir por una noche, recoger las cosas dispersas y partió de nuevo en la mañana. 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.