Ballerman de Cuba

Today was a beach day. I got up and ready for the beach. A very strong coffee later I was waiting at Vinales's church for the minibus, with some other tourists (four couples - alone again).
It took about an hour to get to Cayo Jutias to drive the 55km past the "mogotes" (meaning Haystack) mountains, which are remains of the more solid rock, while the limestone that covered the area, has been eroded away. It looks very much like Halong bay on dry land.

These mountains are famous for Vinales, and as we left them behind we passed through a different more jungle like area with many small, rural (even more than Vinales) villages. Many of the villages had large Murals on the walls announcing communist propaganda. People waiting at country road intersections in the the middle of nowhere (for what seems to be for hours) for a public bus to pass by. - All this did not feel wrong today, it made the trip very authentic and gave it a special atmosphere. - Maybe my culture shock was over now ?

We finally reached the water. We had to cross a little bridge, so we especially were on an Island now (well a smaller island than Cuba itself). It really did look wonderfully tropical and like a picture postcard from paradise.

Of course this beach was not for the locals so much as it was for us tourists. There was a little restaurant and we could rent sunbeds for 1.50 CUC for the day - fair enough.
The water was as clear as the bottled water in the shops and the sand was just slightly less white than a blanket of fresh snow.

All in all, very good... but what do I do here for 6 hours on my own? - Glad I brought a book.
I talked to some of the other tourists but it didn't feel like they wanted me to be around them very much (I don't blame them for that) - as opposed to some other places where I hung out with couples for a few hours.

So all I could do, was going swimming twice and read my book (Stephen King's Carrie - lovely choice for a beach day :-))

At 4 pm it was time to head back to Vinales. After a refreshing shower I went out for some food (the food at the beach was horrible).

To cheer me up a little I decided to go out for some fancy food. I chose one of the may restaurants along the main road where I got to talk to two girls from the UK, one of them working as a Tour guide in Cuba and her friend visiting. We had a good chat.

I was in the mood for a nice steak and there was one on the menu - it turned out to be a thinly sliced minute steak. Cuba really isn't the place to go if you want to eat a nice steak. To compensate for that little disappointment I ordered a desert: creme catalan - which is like a creme brulee but more liquid.
Who would have thought that I finally got my creme catalan/brulee, that I have been looking for since New Zealand in a little village in Western Cuba? :-)

To spend the rest of the evening, I went back to the Casa and wrote on my blog for a while, but you can do that only so long, so I watched a  documentary about Nepal to remember the good times and great place of this trip and followed it up with "Leon: The Professional" !