Stories

Hi there,

How are you?

This is my final post on Cuba. And I start with thinking of the hundred (or more?) victims who died in the plane crash in Havana yesterday.

I love colors, whether it is in decorating, in the yard, or in the photos I take.

What’s your favorite color?

No fifty shades of grey for me. If there is one shade I hate, it is grey. It lacks color.  Black and white can be beautiful, in photography or design, or fashion. But not grey. As I think of grey as in grey people, I think of people without humor, boring people.

That’s what I adored about Cuba, its colors. The colors in the streets, inside the houses – oh how I would have loved to have taken all these beautiful old tiles home – of the cars, and of the people. By color of the people I don’t mean their physique, but just the happy and original way they are. How they are creative (in my mind, creativity has color) in dealing with the little resources in their country.

So I am just going to overwhelm you with photos today!

People of Cuba

Commerce

Nature

Streets

Tiles

Traffic

Just a quick word on traffic. There is one highway, with three lanes (the A1-A4). Most of the time you are driving there alone, except for some encounters with a horse and carriage or people biking. People also hitchhike. They wave with a banknote, as a sign they want a ride, and they are willing to pay.
In the cities you see a lot of bici-taxi’s, a taxi on a bike. We took one in Havana, oh dear, they were fast!

Flag

The three blue stripes represent the three departments in which Cuba was divided at the time.  The white is the purity of ideals:  the three ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity.  These, like the red triangle are from the French revolution.  The red is for the blood and the courage; the star was the new state that should be added to the United States.

Well, I hope you have enjoyed my Cuban photos and stories. If you’ve read some, please let me know your opinion of Cuba! And I hope it triggers the desire to travel to this magical country yourselves. Tourism is where the majority of income comes from. So help out and have a wonderful getaway, a win-win situation 😉

Let me finish with a quote of José Julián Martí, one of Cuba’s great authors:

Like stones rolling down hills, fair ideas reach
their objectives despite all obstacles and
barriers. It may be possible to speed or hinder
them, but impossible to stop them.

And it is about time, in the world as it is today.

Sophia

Hi Everyone!

Well, the best of Cuba is yet to come. Although, to be honest, everything was captivating to us, in many ways…

It is a personal taste, but I preferred the city of Trinidad over all the places. These colors, Ah! I have never been to such a photogenic place before. Breathtaking. Such a cute little town. Again, it was as if we were zipped back in time.

On the way to Trinidad we stopped at the Jardín Botánico, fifteen kilometers from Cienfuegos. Because of my addiction to tropical plants, we couldn’t miss this one, right? It surely was worth a visit, especially because we were there in the Spring when all these plants were blooming. But they (it is now owned and run by the government) could have made a lot more out of it. We were given no information, just simple nameplates would have been enough.

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After the visit to the Girón museum, we continued our drive towards Cienfuegos. Cienfuegos was established in 1819 and although it’s located in Spanish territory, many of its first settlers were from France or French colonies such as Louisiana. It is a Unesco World Heritage Site and was named “Pearl of the South” in the colonial era.

We had to drive back and forth for an hour on the peninsula before we found our casa for the day: Casa Wong. Mr. Wong invited us into his neat and pretty casa, a real treat until we saw the disappointing bed, again a very narrow one. But he gave excellent advice, which we followed and had lunch at Aché.  It was one of the best meals we had in Cuba! Continue Reading

On Tuesday morning we walked around the small but gorgeous city of Viñales and then decided to hit the road again.  On to the ecovillage Las Terrazas! Our hotel was called the Tree House, and that is just what it was! The lodge was on a hill, looking down into a valley dazzling with tropical beauty. We walked down to the valley and came across a worn out playground. But hey, the children playing there were happy – not playing with their phones. Continue Reading

This is what Lonely Planet says on Cuba, and I couldn’t agree more:

Cuba is like a prince in a poor man’s coat: behind the sometimes shabby facades, gold dust lingers. It’s these rich dichotomies that make travel here the exciting, exhilarating roller-coaster ride it is. Trapped in a time warp and reeling from an economic embargo that has grated for more than half a century, this is a country where you can wave goodbye to Western certainties and expect the unexpected. If Cuba were a book, it would be James Joyce’s Ulysses: layered, hard to grasp, serially misunderstood, but – above all – a classic

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