Hostal Park Santa Clara

... with loads of different sayings. It was quite interesting.

Santa Clara

As we arrived on the outskirts, the memorial loomed large. You could not miss it. A huge statue of Ernesto 'Che' Guevara was on top of a concrete monolith. We parked up and went and explored this monument.

It had been erected in 1987 to mark 20 years since he had died and in 1997 his body was buried inside. Around the outside were some sayings in Spanish, and ...

... passed us - we never did really work out why, so we walked back to town, stopping for some cool drinks on the way as by this stage the temperature was in the high 20s. We walked across the small river on the other side of town to Monumento a la Toma del Tren Blindado, which marks the spot where in 1958 Che Guevara and his 18 guerrillas bulldozed the railway line and captured a 22-car armoured train containing 350 heavily-armed Batista troops. The bulldozer and the ...

... s ever met an American. I thought it was way past all that by now, what with reasonably priced flights from TJ and anywhere in Canada. It's not. "I'm fifty-one years old and you're the first American I've ever talked to," a friend of the house I'm staying in just told me. "We're not much different, are we?" "Not at all, five fingers, two hands, two arms, two legs." We trade travel stories, he telling me of his trips to the ...

... suggested, just to see where we'd end up. We were running out of choices and running out of time so we eventually agreed to stay there for a night and had him take us there. After all, I guess he was offering the place at CUC15 which was loads less than we've paid previously.

On arrival, we met Michel's brother Lazaro and his wife, Jesal. Such nice people!!! And also crazily enough, this was the most beautiful home we'd stayed at yet. The absurdity of all of this ...

Saturday 12th July We got up relatively early to sort out plans for getting to Santa Clara. It turned out the old woman who owned our casa thought the bus was at 11.20pm, so we got there in plenty of time for then. But when we got to the bus station it wasn't going to be until 12.40 or something. Instead of hanging around the bus station for ages we decided to go and have a chat ...

... Cuba (together with most of the contents of the treasury). As I understand it, he spent most of the rest of his life selling life assurance in Spain. Just as well they didn't have timeshares back in those days or who knows how he would have ended up. As part of the battle to liberate Santa Clara, the rebels had to overcome a Government Armoured train. They did so using that infallible ...

... been no surprises – Australia had far too easily triumphed for the third straight World Cup.

I was trying to put my fifteen minutes access to slightly more pressing use. Though my Swiss mobile phone had a signal with a local network most of the time, and despite sending numerous text messages home, I had still not heard a thing from my parents about my Grandad’s funeral. I was hoping they had e-mailed me, but unfortunately the internet connection was so slow ...

... we had seen in Grenada during our stay, and it was a natural source of analysis during our hours in the car. From the local Grenadian programming like the SGU Knowledge Bowl competition for high school students (a collective favourite) to the many cable channels beamed in from the US, in particular the ultra-conservative shrillness of Fox News (a collective object of disdain, particularly in the immediate aftermath of the terrible massacre at Virginia Tech). But one that was more ...

... confirm (by the fingerprints) that it was really Che that died. The thing was, that before he went to Bolivia, he underwent a plastic surgery that helped him change his image completely. The hand was put in formaldehide and sent to the States. Than it got lost. His body was burried in Bolivia and later sent to Cuba to be burried in Santa Clara. The hand reappeared in Russia some years later and the story goes that now is in possession of Fidel. Pretty weard, no?

Saying goodbye to Federico and Yamelis the next morning, I got a cab out to the bus terminal, where I was beseiged by hawkers trying to offer me a cheap ride to Santa Clara. Still on my own at this stage, and not too confident with my spanish, I opted to pay an extra $5 and just get the bus. The scenery was quite sparse on the 6 hour drive, with the most interesting thing being the baby crocodile I held at our one and only toilet ...