Miles and miles of sugar cane fields
It's been 3 days on the road. My body is adjusting, my shoulders are in pain and my butt is sore. It turns out my bike is too big for me but all the same I'm getting used to it. I expected some hardships on the road with my beater bike. Im thinking I'll name my bike Smokey, in dedication to it's birth as a Marlboro cigarette bike but also in tribute to its new life in the land of rolling tobacco fields.
Cuba is...just like how I imagined it! There are palm trees, murals of Fidel Castro and Che Guevera everywhere, rolling hills of green, old cars from the 50s that rumble through dusty roads...its easy to feel you've stepped into a movie scene, but this is real life.
Many people ride bareback, or fly by on carriages pulled by horses, giant bulls with septum piercings slowly walk the potholed roads pulling heavy loads.
Some things take adjusting. To get WiFi you go to a government building where you stand in a long line to buy a WiFi card, the card is good for an hours worth of access, you then go to a nearby park where you can sign into a public network. People don't have data readily available on their phones or internet in their homes and while this isn't the instant gratification I'm used to, I appreciate the break.
Food is scarce in the supermarkets. You can find things like dried potatoes, dried milk, sugar, rum, and juice. We find veggie stands throughout the day to buy things like plantains, yam, yuca, garlic, onion, green pepper, and tomatoes. In the towns people walk around yelling "piña, ajo, cebolla". We biked through a region yesterday with the most delicious Mandarins, they were sour, tart, juicy, and sweet. We bought a basket of 30 from a roadside stand and I quickly stuffed 5 in my face and enjoyed the flavor explosion.
About an hour before sunset we typically begin to look for a place to camp. We find horse or cow trails leading to flat, fairly hidden patches of grass or dirt, and pitch our tents for the night.
Sometimes your best experiences come when you can't find a camp spot. Last night exhausted after biking through the mountains we realised that sundown was quickly approaching. We couldn't find a cheeky place to camp and asked a family for permission to pitch our tents in thier field. Before I knew it we were introduced to 3 generations of family that live on the farm. We were invited on a tour of their property and were shown the sugar cane fields and mandarin trees, the family loaded up our bikes with such giant bundles of sugar cane that I wasn't sure our bikes would move again.
We laughed and chatted over steeming pots of beans and plantains and the kids peered timidly from behind their parents legs. Soon mango juice was being poured from old Heineken bottles and one by one we made our way back to our tents. I could hear the jingling bells coming from the reins of the horse carriages that traveled the nearby road. It's a mystery to me how they navigate the potholed roads in the dark. I said goodnight to the crooked moon and we all slept like babies.
@wolfcatSee my first post following my Cuba bike tour here: I'm bike touring Cuba!!
