Cuba Photos Added

The previous Cuba posts now have the relevent photos added
O

La Habana, 11th-17th of December

So I´ve been spending the last few days of my trip here in Havana. A bit different from the rest of my trip really, as I haven't visited many cities, preferring to stay out in the countryside and do more outdoorsy things.On Friday I went for an explore of what is known as Habana vieja, or the oldest part of Havana. Really interesting just to walk around for a few hours and drop into a few museums. The buildings are truly amazing here. The grand colonial architecture is in some building beautifully restored and maintained, and crumbling to the point of falling down on others. Also, refreshingly for a big latin American city Havana is relatively safe. So even at night time you can wander the streets without being quite as on edge as you would in other big cities.On Saturday I went with a couple of girls (staying in the same casa as me) on a bit of a trip by bus out of the city. First we travelled out west to Marina Hemingway, were there are views of the coast and several foreign boats moored. We then travelled back into the city visited the necropolis Cristobal Colon. This is a huge graveyard, with over a million people interred there. Its a lot less imposing than Recoleta in Buenos Aires, but the shear scale of the place is quite amazing.Later in the afternoon I visited the Malecon, Havana´s famous promenade. A very pleasant place to wander, watching the waves and the numerous Cubans who go there to fish from the sea wall. To get back to my casa I took an open top bus back along the Malecon. Great sitting up on the top deck in the cool evening sea breeze.Sunday was another day for exploring the city, but this time Centro Havana. I started at the revolution museum, housed in the old presidential palace and detailing the whole history of the revolution from Independence to the present day. Obviously it all the information has to be taken with a pinch of salt (all revolutionaries killed in battle as referred to as being ´murdered´and those on the other side are referred to as criminals), but is still very interesting.On Monday I got out of Havana completely, taking the bus out to Playa del Este. This is a beach about 20km east of the city. Your stereotypical Caribbean beach really, with white sand and turquoise water. I found a nice spot of beach and spend the day lounging with my book, and the occasional mojito. I spent the evening wandering along the Malecon at sunsetYesterday was my last full day in the city. I first visited the biggest (and best) art gallery in Cuba the Museo National Bellas Artes. Several hours worth of mainly contemporary painting and sculpture, including a whole room of Wilfredo Lam.In the afternoon i visited the Museo del Ron. Housed in an old Havana Club (Cuba´s finest rum) factory. It makes for a very interesting tour of the rum making process, and of course there is the tasting at the end of the tour!That afternoon I managed to meet up with Emm and Elise, who I met in Tulum(Mexico). In the evening we decided to go with two other guys from my casa and watch the Cuban national sport of baseball. The whole country loves it and of the 3 tv channels they have here, one shows a game every night! We found are way to the Estadio Latinamerico, and paid our 3 pesos to get in (sport is very heavily subsidised here to make it accessible to all). A very nice, and very Cuban way to spend my last evening sat up in the stands. The very lax security (we could have got in for free as the old man who collected the tickets had gone to the toilet when we got to the gate.:!) meant we could bring in a bottle of Havana Club and cola to enjoy some Cuba Libres while watching the game. Afterwards we got a cab out to the Malecon and sat watching the waves for a while. Funny to think looking out that Florida was less than a hundred miles away to the north.My flight is not until this evening and I think i´m just going to have a fairly lazy day, maybe wander around my favourite parts of the city again.so yep, that's the end of my trip. I´m in a way looking forward to going home, but then again it means having to take things seriously again. I´m sure come January when i´m sat behind my desk i´ll be longing to be away again!I will try and upload photos of Cuba in the next day or two when I get back, so keep a look out for them.Hope you have enjoyed/found interesting reading this blog, and i hope to see you all soon.
O

Cuba, 5th-11th December

So, i have actually managed to find some reasonable priced Internet in Cuba so I will give you a brief update.
I arrived in to Havana last Friday (5th) and managed to find my way to my Casa Particular. In Cuba there are no cheap hostels to stay in, or even cheap hotels for that matter. Therefore the best places to stay are in rooms rented out in private homes, casas particulares. This is nice, because its good to stay with a local Cuban family. Although as I've found some are more friendly than others. The downside of this is of course not really being able to meet other travels, something which is especially important to me travelling on my own.
On Saturday morning I took a wander round the nearby plaza de la revolution. A huge open square, quite sovietesq really with big loud speakers positioned around the place. This is were Fidel used to hold rallies and make public addresses before he became to ill to do so. The plaza is dominated by the huge monument and statue of Jose Marti, Cuba's liberator. Unfortunately I couldn't go to the top of the monument as it was closed for refurbishment. I the afternoon I took the bus west to the small town of Vinales a few hours away. the next day I went on a guided walk around the surrounding countryside. It is a very pretty area with big limestone cliffs and lots of Tobacco fields. However due to the recent hurricanes here in Cuba a lot of the Tobacco crop was destroyed and also the houses they use for drying it. There is also a network of caves within the limestone hills, fun to explore but not quite as good as diving the Canecotes in Mexico.
Monday was spent travelling to the east of Havana and the town of Trinidad. This is a very pretty town (in fact a UNESCO world heritage site) with what are actually pretty lethal cobbled streets. Trinidad is famed for its music, and in the evening I went to a local bar with live music. It was your standard Cuban stuff really, but they also had a show of dance. This was really interesting as it came for the African slaves brought here by the Spanish, and therefore had an incredibly African feel to it.
I spent Wednesday wandering the streets of Trinidad and climbing the hill behind it for great views across the city to the Caribbean. There were a few museums there, but nothing to really hold your attention for that long. In the evening I took a bus to the city of Santa Clara.
Santa Clara is mainly famous for being the adopted home of Che Guevara after the revolution. Just outside the center of the city there is a large monument to him, again with a huge empty square in front of it. There is also a museum detailing his life as well as a mausoleum dedicated to him and his fellow Cubans who died in Bolivia. Its amazing how much he is revered here actually, you see far more images of Che in the towns and cities than you do of Fidel. I guess this (and the way he is an icon world wide) is mainly due to the way he was martyred by the CIA.
I also visited a small cigar factory in Santa Clara. Quite amazing to see about 150 people all lined up on benches rolling hundreds of cigars a day. Not a particularly fun job really, the whole set up looking incredibly old fashioned even with guards patrolling the benches to make sure employees don't steal any of the valuable cigars. Interestingly there was also a man at the front who's job it was to read the daily newspaper and notices to the workers over a loudspeaker.
I have now travelled back to Havana, and will be spending the last few days of my trip here before heading back home next week!
O

Cuba

hey guys, just to let you know there will be no Cuba updates while I am here. This is due to the internet costing almost 6 euros an hour. I will update it when I return home on the 18th though.
sorry, i´m not that rich......
O

Last Stop Cuba

Tikal and Cave Diving in Mexico, 2-4th December

Monday was spent travelling across Guatemala to the town of Flores. This started with bit of confusion as I thought my bus was at 4am, but it turned out it left at 2.30am! fortunately I manged to sleep for most of the bus journey.
On Tuesday morning I had another early start catching the 5am bus to Tikal. This is a huge park containing the ruins of one of the most important Mayan cities. Hidden in the jungle are numerous temples and pyramids, several sticking up high above the forest canopy. I spend the first 4 hours or so there with a guide who took us round the main sites and up several of the temples. The site is very spread out so you spend a lot of time walking down remote jungle pathways. After the tour I spent another 3 hours or so wandering around the site on my own. It was surprisingly quit and it was quite easy to find a spot on top of a temple for yourself and just look at the scenery for a while. Another entertaining thing to do was to watch the howler and spider monkeys that live in the trees around the temples. They can quite often be seen swinging through the branches above you. Very difficult to take photos of though as they camouflage very well and have a habit of throeing things down at you if you get too close.
Yesterday was another travel day (my last long bus of the trip hopefully!), passing through Belize and arriving in a town called Tulum in Mexico. A small town only a few hours south of Cancun.
This morning I went on a cave diving trip to the Cenotes. The entire Yucatan peninsular is riddles with limestone caves, and around Tulum there are several networks which can be dived. The first place we dived was called Gran Cenote. Filled with fresh water the visibility is incredible at up to 200m Swimming between the huge stalactites and stalagmites is quite an experience, but sadly my camera is not waterproof so there are no photos. There was also a surprising number of fish, who would dart about in our torch beams. For the next dive we went to another cave called Calavera. This had a slightly more tricky entry as we had to jump a couple of metres into the pool. This cave had a layer of both fresh water sitting on Salt water giving some interesting Halocline diving. Lucas my dive master liked to call it diving with LSD, but without LSD. As you pass though the halocline (junction between fresh and salt water) you get a very strange optical effect, kind of like the shimmering above a hot road surface, however a lot more extreme. Everything goes incredibly blurry and I couldn´t even make out Lucas a few feet in front of me. From underneath the halocline however you get even better optical effect with a kind of fake roof effect.
In the afternoon I just read my book on the pristine white sands of the local beach, very Caribbean.
Tomorrow i´l head up to Cancun from where I will take a flight to Havana.
O

Hiking in Guatemala, 26th-30th November

I left early on Wednesday morning on my trek to Lago de Atitlan. Just 4 of us in the group plus our guide Alex. An English guy called Nick and a couple of Spaniards (Gabirel and Axa, or something like that). We got a ride to just outside of Xela before starting on the trek proper which was several hours of step up hill through the woods. Eventually we came out onto the ridge line giving stunning views to the south, looking down Guatemala's string of Volcanoes. The rest of the day was spend walking on small tracks though local villages. The people of these villages speak Maya as their first language and in fact the children speak very little Spanish at all. This meant whenever we walked through a village they would all come running out shouting Hola! Hola! Hola! and waving. However whenever we tried to talk to them we either just got blank faces or they would smile, nod and say Si! no matter what you asked them. We spent the night sleeping on the floor of a local family home. The next day was a pretty tough down and up through a deep valley, walking up though coffee plantations. The afternoon was relatively easy hiking to Santa Clara la laguna, which sits on the ridge above the lake. On Friday we got up early to catch the sunrise over the lake, before heading down the last couple of hours to San Pedro. I unfortunately had to rush back to Xela, first by boat across the lake and then bus.Early on Saturday morning I set of on a hike up central America´s highest peak of Tajumulco (4222m). This was different from any tour i´d done before as the tour agency was completely non for profit volunteer run. This not only meant that all of the fee went to local charities, but also that the guides were volunteers mainly from Europe. This gave quite a different feel to the trip as it was more just like a bunch of friends hiking as no one was being paid to be there. Also it meant we had to have meetings to discuss what we were going to do, and got told about staying hydrated etc etc wheres with a local guide they just tear off into the distance and expect you to follow.We spent the morning getting buses to the base of the mountain. The second one was a combi which we manged to fit 21 people in, even though it only had 12 seats! as well as stacking our bags 4 high on the roof. It also had a bit of a dodgy dorr, which fell of about 10mins into the journey! It was relatively easy hiking for about 6 hours to reach our campsite at about 4000m. The clouds rolled in over the mountains so you had the great feeling of standing on an island on a sea of cloud. We hiked up to the lower peak of Conception to watch the sunset. However the thick cloud stopped anything spectacular being seen (apart from the clouds rolling through the trees in that photo). The evening was spent round the campfire, keeping warm and roasting marshmallows (though not as good as the lava ones). In the morning we set of at 4am to climb the last few hundred metres to the summit and watch the sun rise. It was bitterly cold though and I struggled to stay warm wearing a double t shirt, merino wool jumper, two fleeces, goretex jacket, and my down sleeping bag! Spectacular views of the sunrise over Volcan Pacaya, Agua, Fuego and Acatanengo, as well as the periodic eruption of Santiagito to the south sending plumes of smoke thousands of feet into the sky. Also quite fun to stand on the summit and know you are the highest person on the continent.
O

Volcano roasted marshmallows and rockclimbing, Guatemala 22nd-25th November

I spent Sunday morning in Antigua, just generally wandering around and visiting a few of the markets there. It is a very pretty city (perhaps a little artificially clean for the tourists), with nice brightly painted houses. Plenty of artisan things for sale, which I haven't really seen since Peru.The main activity of the day however was in the afternoon, as I went to climb Volcán Pacaya. This is the only active (and it definitely active), volcano near Antigua and stand at 2500m. It takes a couple of hours hiking, first through woodland and then up the barren landscape formed by numerous lava flows. We hiked to just below the summit, where we could actually stand right above an active lava flow! I was a little worried as the solidified lava crust we were standing on didn´t seem that thick and I didn´t really fancy falling into 2000degree molten lava. We got stunning views of the surrounding mountains in the sunset, before getting down to the real business of roasting marshmallows on the lava flow. This was actually kinda tricky as you had to use a stick about 2m long and hold it at a fulls arms length, as the heat from the lava was quite unbearable at close range. Probably the best tasting toasted marshmallows i´ve had though. It got dark while we were on the top, which gave a whole other aspect to the lava as you could literally see it glowing in the cracks beneath your feet! the darkness also made climbing down the scree slope quite exiting, if a little dangerous.Monday was mainly a travel day, getting up at 3.45 to catch the bus to the city of Questzaltenango (but referred to by its Mayan name of Xela). This took a lot longer than expected due to the very poor state of the bus I took. It broke down about halfway there, but we managed to get moving again after about 20mins. However later on in the trip there is a huge hill, where the road climbs over 1000m We made it nearly to the top of this mountain before the bus conked out again. After being stationary for about half an hour the driver manged to find a way of getting us very slowly up the hill. This involved revving the engine then jamming the engine into gear, making the bus leap forward about 10feet before it cut out again. We progresses slowly like this till we got to the crest of the hill and thankfully the rest of the journey was downhill. I spent the afternoon in Xela generally trying to figure out what i`m going to do with my next week and a half or so in Guatemala. I had a stroke of luck in the afternoon however when I ran into a group of 4 Israelis in the hostel. They were talking about doing some rock climbing in the area and I asked if I could join them the next day. We managed to find one of the tour agencies that had a bit of gear we could borrow, as well as a few bits and pieces they had brought with them. However the real adventure was going to be trying to find the crag to climb on. They had read on a website somewhere that there was good climbing near Xela. However the only directions we had was to a junction on one of the roads running out of Xela and then the4 name of a small village on that road, from where we could apparently see where to go. So this morning we set off on a mini adventure to try and find this place. It started with a bit of a run around town, eventually ending up at some random roundabout where apprently we coudl get a bus along the required road. We successfully manged to get dropped off at the junction only about 15mins out of town. From there we started walking the unknown distance up the hill towards the village we`d read about. Fortunately we didn`t have to walk far as we manged to hitch rides on the back of a couple of passing pickup trucks. From the village we then climbed up through a boulder field to what turned out to be obvious crags above the village. However it turns out this was no ordinary mountain, but actually a very religious site for the Mayan people. This meant there were numerous prayer groups scattered amongst the boulder field. Some where quietly praying, but others were working themselves in fairly extreme spiritual states, meaning a lot of shouting and wailing. No one seamed to mind us wandering through and climbing the rocks though. We manged to find a few lines of bolts on the limestone cliff, however as it has obviously only been bolted by some lone enthusiast the lines were incredibly hard. Combined with 6months of non climbing made for some very sore fingers and arms! (that phot is me rubbing my aching fingers) We never actually manged to top out any routes, but still had a fun day at least attempting some F7 and above routes.I ended up walking back down on my own, walking through the boulders and then through the village. It was really nice to get out into the proper Guatemalan countryside, where obviously very few other foreigners go. I manged to get a ride on the back of a pickup all the way back into the city, sharing the open back with an aging Guatemalan carpenter and his family have a chat to them trying to explain where the U.K was! I also learn´t an important leason in checking the age of the driver before you jump in the back, as it when I thanked him after he looked about 12! Tomorrow I am setting off on a 3 day trek to a place called San Pedro on Lago de Atitlàn, which is meant to be very beautiful. After that i`ll head back here, before setting off to climb central America`s highest peak of Tajumulco for a couple for a couple of days on Saturday.
O