Horizontes Playa Larga Matanzas

Dear friends,

I will write this in my best Hemingway-style. I have only read Old Man and the Sea and didn't like it, but here we go.
The Cuban border patrol is the harshest I have ever seen. The had
a detector I haven´t seen before that seemed to detect if you had
anything in your pocket. I made a sound for two of my pockets and I had
to pick up my tissues and my passport and put them through the X-ray.
After that they had five dogs and let no bag be ...

... were in a different era, people had their washing out by the street !!! Not long after, we stopped to fill up, and it was just like a scene from Back to the Future. Guys came running to fill, check the air and water and all the cars were out of the 50's.

After they had completed their work, we moved onwards. The first big town was a place called Colon. Not named after your ******* but in Cuba, that is the name for Christopher ...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbxvH-tB RwM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9 K1Z91gf0sw

Alright well So i migt not update this for a few days coz a friend of mine invited me to her familys beach house, So depending on how fun, or how boring it is, i will be back within the next few days or maybe in 2 weeks. The thing is this small town is so small it doesnt even have internet! Its gonna be like going back to 1990 or something :P Apart from that i had a great week in santiago and a great weekend, and i will really miss my chileano friends ...

(Originally published at http://www.troysgonewalkabout.com)
< br>After a relatively idle morning the Cuban season of the Golden Girls finished as I said my goodbyes to my three companions when their taxi (driven by a friend of the people from our casa) came to take them to the airport. Though by this point I also felt ready to depart I still had most of the afternoon to while away, and as I hit the streets for the final time I came up with a new strategy to fend off ...

(Originally published at http://www.troysgonewalkabout.com)
< br>All four of us split up and did our own things in the morning, and my plan was to walk to the Plaza de la Revolución. From the look of my map I figured it would take forty five minutes to an hour at most, a proposition over breakfast that made Gato put his paws over his eyes as he gave a little exhausted groan. Ben thought it would take substantially longer and suggested I take a coco taxi (the Cuban version of ...

... central square, yet another landmark named for José Martí (a late nineteenth century figurehead of the fight for Cuban independence from Spain), was lined with the most ornate and best maintained civic buildings we had seen. I also saw my pick of the finest vintage cars, and would dearly have loved to have swapped our wheels for a rather delectable black Plymouth.

Alas, the chances of that happening were about as high as an army of crabs crossing the road ...

(Originally published at http://www.troysgonewalkabout.com)
< br>I felt an uncharacteristic sense of unease as I left Geneva on the morning flight to Paris Charles de Gaulle in advance of crossing the Atlantic for the second time in two days. For the most part I had enjoyed the previous two weeks on the Caribbean island of Grenada, watching six matches of the Super Eights stage of the 2007 Cricket World Cup with friends from my former cricket team in Sydney. But Grenada ...

... on Thursday because I had a meeting with my friends from Santiago on Tursday evening. Hershey train was built by the Hershey family (producers of Hershey Chocolate). Now the name has changed (well, it cannot keep its capitalistic name, now, can it?) into Cienfuegos train (Cienfuegos was one of the revolutionarists in Fidel's revolution who misteriously disappeared in a plane ...

We spent a few days at a casa in this lovely town. On the first day we hired bikes and cycled to the beach. The second day was spent watching England lose to Portugal and then cycling out to the Valle de los Ingenios, an area of beautiful scenery that formerly contained huge sugar plantations worked by slaves. The ride was pretty hilly and our bikes and no gears and dubious brakes so we hitched a ride back to Trinidad on the back of ...