The Rain Came Down and the Floods Came Up

14/10/10 But thankfully, Otto and Mylena's House stayed firm.

It was the most spectacular wind a rain shower I've ever seen and as we peered through the shutters the street started to run like a river. Occasionally Mylena brushed the water out to stop the house filling up as well but told us that it was actually a tropical storm and NOT a hurricane (it had actually been demoted) and sometimes the winds were so bad that they had to hold the doors close and put metal bars accross them. Inevitably, the power went off - it's quite common for the authorities to turn the power off in these situations before it gets taken out by a falling tree. Quite sensible really if you think about it. We were concerned abour Otto who was supposed to be coming back from work on his moped. He did eventually arrive telling us how the wind had blown his helmet off as he'd been riding along. It certainly wasn't moped-weather. We'd planned to go to the cheapo restaurant that evening but with no power we reckoned it would be closed. As we never expected to be there anyway we had no food so we threw ourselves on Otto and Mylena's mercy and they shared their dinner with us. I played some tunes and gave them the chat about Scottish music in return, kind of literally singing for my supper. It turned out to be a really pleasant evening despite the circumstances. Otto and Mylena were extremely kind and welcoming to us, partucularly in our hour of need. We really felt we made some friends there and we'll always be grateful. It was great to have another experience of the trials that Cubans regularly go through and there was definitely a feeling of cameraderie with the locals that we'd all survived a crazy storm. It did however give rise to the second part of our Cuba video with the band in Santa Clara as well.

15/10/10 A Chinese Graveyard

The power stayed off all night and didn't come on until next morning after Mylena had made us a small-but-perfectly-formed breakfast with the little food they had in the house ('hurricane bread' and 'emergency quail eggs'). We had a look out the window and saw part of the reason we didn't have any power - a tree that had fallen and hit the power lines. A guy with a machete was dilligantly chopping branches off it while a bunch of other folk watched. As we walked around the town that day there were trees and branches down all over the place.

We'd really got all we wanted out of Havana by that point but we had spotted an interesting looking graveyard from the airport taxi the previous day so we decided to investigate. It turned out to be a graveyard for Cubans of Chinese origin and they all had really interesting Spanish/Chinese names like "Fernando Wong Dovales" and "Alejandro Chui Wong". There is a reason that there's a big Chinese diaspora here which I read about but I can't remember it now. At some point I'll check it out.

We decided to brave the market again in order to live and eat like Cubans but the money change place was closed due to the lack of power. The market was open though so we managed to buy things by converting the price (in pesos) they gave us into CUCs (at a rate of 24 pesos per CUC) and giving them slightly more than that. It seemed to work.

After that we headed back to the big hotel with the super-expensive internet as we still had no idea what the story was with our flight. We knew that we were booked on the flight to the Bahamas on the Sunday but we still had our (re-arranged and paid for) tranfer flight to Miami. The lady at Bahamasair hd said that she would contact Bahamasair in Nassau and they could speak to American Airlines there who might (might) be able to re-arrange a new flight for no cost but it was by no means certain. I was wondering that if American Airlines heard the word "Cuba" mentioned in connection with us they might just refuse to cooperate altogether. We'd also contacted our travel agent who was also trying to sort things out but with all communication being difficult and expensive it was very frustrating trying to find out what the story was. Eventually after much emailling and thrashing around I came up with the idea of checking the American Airlines system with our original booking number and lo and behold, we found that we were booked on a flight to Miami at 7.18pm on Sunday 17th October, just as we wanted. Someone had been working in our favour and at the moment it looks like it was the Bahamasair lady as she'd left a message on Otto and Mylena's 'phone back at the Casa.

We managed to make ourselves a reasonable tomatao/okra/spring onion/pasta/GARLIC concoction and ate it before settling down to watch Dr. Who on the wee computer for the evening.

Our last day in Cuba was pretty unexciting with more Dr. Who watched, books read and stuff listened to on the iPod feeling a little like refugees. We went to bed feeling a little nervous that we might be cancelled again (you know how your mind works in such situations!) but thank goodness, that wasn't the case. The next morning our taxi arrived far too early for us but Mylena said it didn't matter and we should continue to have a leasurely breakfast. Otto spoke to the taxi driver to make sure we were charged CUC20 and not CUC25 as the opportunistic taxi driver had charged us two days before. It turned out that the deal was sealed with a few of the "Old England" toffees (with an interetinly uber-Scottish decorated bag) that we had given Otto and Mylena as a thank you gift. Inspired! Our flight took off a it late but at least it took off this time and after some spectacular views over the Carribean we landed in the Bahamas. We were a bit concerned about crossing the US border having just come from Cuba. We thought we'd be doing that when we landed in Miami but it turned out that there's a border crossing at Nassau Airport. After a few questions from the humourless border guard (who didn't seem to notice "Cuba" on the list of countries we'd visited or chose to ignore it...) we were in the departures lounge and off to the US of A and the next section of our adventure.

Our memories of Cuba will always be mixed. Once the regime changes we'd like to go back and maybe explore more of the island but, despite it's best efforts it remains a bit of a challenge for tourists and especially the impoverished backpackers like us. We will however have extremely fond memories of the lovely Casa owners we met to here's to Carlos and his wife in vinales, Maria and her lovely family in Trinidad, Mary and her family in Santa Clara and the ultimate stars of the Paul and Charlotte in Cuba show, Otto and Mylena.

Miami here we come!