Sunday adventure 🌞

Next, I’m going to share some clips I filmed yesterday during our Sunday adventure to El Salado Beach. But let me explain what you’re about to see. 🤣

The first thing you see is the road in the locality of Santa Fe, which connects to the Pan-American highway. That’s us leaving Santa Fe… and that’s when I felt like joking around with the unknown cyclist. I told him he was slacking. We overtook him, and then, when you hear the whistle, that’s him right beside us. He caught up. We started chatting, and he thought we were riding with a group called Fastéate, who go on routes from time to time.

This time they were heading to Playa Banes, a bit further than where Azrael and I planned to go. We exchanged phone numbers and told him we might spend some time there with them.

Then you see Azrael and me fooling around, and me filming the Santa Ana River, near the Latin American School of Medicine. A bit further on we met up with @muhammadhalim, whom I called when we passed the school and told him to wait for us around the Los Cocos area in Baracoa Beach. 😁

Muhammad showed us where they were selling cold guarapo (sugarcane juice). We love that!

Later we saw some of the cyclists from the group at a cafeteria, including the one we had first met. After passing El Salado I caught up with them, filmed them, and then turned back. From there we stuck to our original plan, although a few more things happened afterwards…

_YouTube

I was really happy for my friend Muhammad, who was able to take lots of photos, and I’m sure they’re all as great as the ones he shared in his post today.

My stats? Yes, just a moment. You can see that those stats were uploaded through my alternative account for the Strava2Hive service, @traininglog.

So, here they come… And the good news I have for you is that I’m improving every day, because I can feel it in my body and in how it responds the day after...

... even though I’m completely sunburnt because the sunscreen didn’t even realise it was supposed to do its job.

Yesterday I recorded the route in two sections, the outward ride and the return. Although on the way back we added that brief visit to Playa Banes.

Metric	Outbound (to Playa El Salado)	Return (to home)
Distance	26.41 km	31.12 km
Elevation gain	54 m	64 m
Moving time	1:19:01	1:41:17
Average power	68 W	59 W
Calories	400	511
Heart rate	134–170 bpm	137–156 bpm
Average speed	20.1 km/h	18.4 km/h
Max speed	49.7 km/h	38.9 km/h

El Salado

Don’t get the wrong idea that we went to the beach to get drunk… we only had one beer each there at El Salado. Honestly, it’s perfect for cooling off…

Near that dock we swam a little, laughed, and also pulled out a few beer cans from the water that careless people had left behind… We did a bit of volunteer work.

The beach looked quite clean, and since there weren’t many people, it still kept that virginal air that all beaches have early in the morning hahaha… this turned out rather poetic.

The water was very clear and you could see small fish swimming there.

The beaches along the coast of Artemisa Province are very interesting, but if they have their charm, even more so does cycling through those remote places where you hardly see a soul—only nature on both sides of the road, with birds providing the perfect background. In fact, since Muhammad and I share the same passion for birdwatching, many of our conversations revolved around that topic. And also around the fact that the people living there must rely on alternative means of transport, because public transport simply doesn’t exist in those areas. And if it does, it’s so sporadic that we didn’t see a single one pass by.

After swimming and hanging out there for a while, we decided to go to Playa Banes where the other cyclists were. It’s really close, about 5 km or so. On the way we saw some vendors selling a rather unusual fruit. Haha… it’s called caimito. They told us it was very, very sweet. So we went and bought two to try. Later I was laughing with Muhammad in Banes when he decided to eat his, because it looked so strange. And he was being really funny filming how to open it. It was also funny that we were buying a caimito in Caimito, since we were already in that town with the same name.

The fruit didn’t taste like anything, but let me explain… when we left Havana, the last town in the capital is Santa Fe. Then we entered Artemisa Province in the municipality of Bauta, and both El Salado and Banes belong to the municipality of Caimito. 😆

I really wanted another beer, but they convinced me to have it at the other beach. So you could say that on our route we tasted different beer brands in three different places…