Trinidad (no Tobago)

  Trinidad, Trinidad, Cuba
Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Tuesday 15th April, we were picked up at the Saratoga Hotel for the five hour drive to Trinidad, just off of the south coast of the centre of the island. On the way we stopped off in Cienfuegos (according to Jane, pronounced 'Cinfoss'....a bit unnatural, until you think of Leicester...) for a quick look around the town square.



On one side of the square was the Teatro Tomas Terry (Terry Thomas Theatre)....well, my first thought was that this was some tit-for-tat blow against the Peoples Republic of Albania ( 'Fidel....Enver Hoch and his band of running dog counter revolutionaries in Albania have metaphorically abducted the great pratfall artist Norman Wisdom and installed him as the officially adopted English Comedian to the state....what are we to do?'

'Don't worry Che, I have a plan....we'll make it appear that we are interested in Arthur Askey and Charles Haughtry by issuing a series of NHS spectacle retospective postage stamps, then when all are looking the other way, we will unveil the Theatro Tomas Terry upon an unsuspecting world, affirming our rights over one of the most deviously Latin English comics of all time....')

Unfortunately, there was no plot, only a Cuban industrialist called Tomas Terry, who had the theatre built.

We drove on to Trinidad. The deeper we travelled into the heartland of Cuba, the more rural it all became. There were still plenty of 50s American cars on the road, but they were being supplemented by more and more four legged forms of transport. Farmers on horses, donkey and cart or horse and cart taxis became increasingly common.

Trinidad itself was a small town that had been built on the wealth generated by local sugar plantations. It was also quite close to the infamous 'Bay of Pigs', where US-backed insurgents tried to invade Cuba in the early 60s in order to seize power from Castro.




History records that this effort was a complete fiasco which firmly rubbed the noses of the Americans into the dirt, and Trinidad had a museum to celebrate that fact, with artefacts from the attempted invasion as well as, intriguingly, a sidepod from a downed American U2 spy plane, shot down on some other occasion.




We also had a good look around the town, which was pretty picture-postcard in places. Our first night there, we ate at our hotel - the Iberostar - which was OK but nothing special. The next day, we spent some time in the sunshine at a bar off the town square drinking Mojito(s) and listening to a live band. Lunch was an uninspiring but not quite inedible buffet at a local restaurant. On our second night we thought we would venture out and find a Paladar.




We shouldn't have bothered. Having done our on-line research, the best restaurant was closed and the next best was empty and looked singularly unappealing. We finally chose a small restaurant close by the hotel for what had to be the worst meal and, surprisingly, the worst value for money meal, I've had in my life.

OK, so the starter salads were only £1.50 each. But they consisted of four small slices of tomato and four of cucumber aligned down each side of the plate, with something that sort of smelled like an open sewer running down in between the two lines. I think that it had cabbage in it, but couldn't swear to it. I pushed it around the plate for a couple of minutes, but couldn't bring myself to eat it. Never mind; the main event was about to arrive, and it was steak and chips. Only it wasn't really. The small piece of meat looked like it had been fried, grilled and boiled into shoe-leather like submission. But at least it was warm. The chips however were covered in grease and stone cold. Not cold like they had been in a refrigerator or anything, just cold like they had been sitting alone on a shelf in the kitchen for about five hours after being fried. It's not easy to capture that temperature. Some more plate-pushing and no, we won't have a desert or coffee thank you very much. Just pay our £12 (so that's about £3 per mouthful each) and leave.

A rather downbeat end to our otherwise very pleasant stay in Trinidad.