Juanita was totally unfazed by our unannounced appearance, sweaty and exhausted, at her front door. My husband, Ludo, and I had left Havana that morning, wobbling past crumbling mansions with the unfamiliar weight of the panniers on the back of our bikes. The suburbs petered out, we zipped past flat, scrubby farmland and after a couple of hours turned off the main road and, still heading west, found ourselves on narrower roads that wound through greener, hillier land. After 76km, thighs aching and knees burning, Juanita's “Room to Rent” sign was like sighting land after a rough sea crossing.
She ushered us in through the garage showing us where we could safely leave our bikes and we followed her upstairs to a small immaculate bedroom, private bathroom and a large fridge full of local beer. In her slow-for-tourists Spanish she offered us dinner with a choice of pork, chicken or some animal we couldn't identify until she showed us the head of one mounted on the wall; it was some sort of deer.
We'd talked about going to Cuba for years. We wanted to see Castro's Cuba, away from the film set atmosphere of Havana and the for-foreigners-only all-inclusive resorts. Traveling around the island by bike, staying at casas particulares — the Cuban equivalent of B&Bs — seemed like the perfect solution. We'd never done what the Americans seem to call “cycle touring” before, but it was amazing how quickly we became accustomed to being on a bike for several hours a day, how quickly it became more enjoyable and less painful — although ibuprofen (or as some other cyclists we met called it, vitamin I) did play a large part in that.
The scenery of western Cuba is gorgeous. The main place that tourists visit in this area is the small town of Vinales. The town itself is no prettier or more exciting than any other town we found ourselves in, but it sits in a steep-sided fertile valley dotted with large limestone outcrops known locally as mogotes. Their sides are often too sheer to support any vegetation, but the tops are lush with tropical trees and vines and they appear like islands rising up from the flat valley floor.
We had one of the most beautiful days of the whole trip cycling around here. We'd stayed the night in the capital of the province, Pinar del Rio, and spent the evening at the Casa de la Musica. It was Sunday, over-60s night, and the place was a mass of wiggling bottoms and jiggling orthopedic sandals.
Still humming salsa tunes, we left Pinar the next morning, heading for Guane, a small town about 80km away. A long steady climb took us out of the valley, a long exhilarating downhill into the next. Fields of dark red soil were being ploughed by teams of oxen, and in their wake white cattle egrets poked at the newly turned soil with yellow beaks. Pigs, chickens, dogs, goats and turkeys wandered about at the side or sometimes in the middle of the road. Occasionally we were engulfed in thick, choking black exhaust fumes from old American cars. As we cycled further down the valley, the road became so little used by traffic that people spread out rice and beans to dry on the cracked tarmac. For the last hour we saw no one, the valley was silent, distant turkey vultures soaring in the thermals above the mogotes.
Ready to tackle the tougher terrain in the east of the island, but wanting to avoid a long slog against the prevailing wind, we went to Santiago by bus, bikes in the luggage hold. Santiago is hotter and steamier than Havana, its streets steep and narrow and there's music everywhere, seeping from behind doors and through shutters. We headed north to Bayamo on the first leg of a 500km loop around the Sierra Maestra, the mountain range which was the heartland of the revolution. We climbed all morning and stopped, ravenous, at a roadside stall where a man with a broad smile and filthy fingernails gave us hunks of roast pork squashed between thick slices of bread for a few pesos.
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