Trinidad, Cuba (and other stuff)

Sorry for the delay in posts. I was sailing through a remote part of the South Cuban coastline. Can’t tell you where because the fishing was too good. But I will, eventually, share some pictures. It might be paradise.

One more thing: I’m taking a step backwards on the Cuban coffee. It’s good. But I really do prefer Colombian (and even some Panamanian) coffee. So there.

And since we’re sidetracked, as you can see in the picture – if you turn left, you’ll find your chariot to heaven.

Anyways. Where was I?

Trinidad, Cuba

 

So we woke up very hungover and very tired from our night of rum tasting with Jaco and Cristelle on Songerie (there, finally, I’ve spelled the names right) in the harbor of Cienfuegos. And then we had coffee and threw stuff in backpacks and then it was time for the cab and we were on our way. Much of this part of Cuba resembles desert and on the road there are land-crabs that migrate in droves and the smell of the unlucky ones on the road is so strong you smell them before you see them. The smell is similar to seaweed that has rotted and then been heated.

Sundried crab

Trinidad is cool. It’s very touristic, which makes it slightly less of my-kind-of-place.

Trinidad, Cuba and transport

It’s quaint and beautiful and has real cobblestone streets, very narrow, that wind up and down hills. The sun roasts you, so you wear straw hats. There are tractors in the streets. Horses and mules are a big part of transportation.

Cuba’s only Harley

Moto

The market

Cars!

During the middle of the day there is very little to do, and so you either walk and roast and burn looking at the sights – or you sit in the shade and drink too many mojitos and smoke fine cigars and watch people and listen to music.

We did a little of both, but I’ll let you guess which of the two scenarios I prefer.

The winner

In Trinidad there is a plaza. It is a fine place. But just up the hill from this plaza there is a stage and a place to drink and at the top of the hill there is the Casa De Musica. On the stage they play Buena Vista Social Club and people dance and sweat and smile. You can see excellent dancing, or maybe you can dance excellently and therefore you would be dancing excellently and I would be watching you dance excellently and drinking excellent mojitos and smoking fine cigars.

And we would both be happy.

The spot

The spot

There is a man with a donkey that so personifies Cuba that he charges money to take a picture. But he is Cuba, so the picture is priceless and we love him. Here is this man.

Cuba, personified

When he’s not standing in the Plaza, he is walking ever-so-slowly to a new spot in the Plaza or he is napping in the shade of a building or his donkey with his cigar falling out of his mouth.

For rent, photos

In Cuba, you usually stay (besides hotels – which are really for the uber-tourist) in casa-particulars. These are typically a couple of rooms in a Cuban’s house that have been converted so that guests can stay there. We stay in casa-particulars. They are fine, and they have A/C (usually) and hot showers (usually). For me, those two things are very luxurious.  And they let you smoke cigars there…

Cigars and our room

So we had A/C and hot showers. And during the day we were asked directions to the Cave Bar. We had no idea what it was, but quickly decided it was somewhere worth visiting. That night we found it and it was, as the name implies, a bar in a cave. Complete with bathrooms in cave rooms.

Not just any bar, though. It’s luxurious and clubby and it stands in stark contrast to virtually everything around it. Looking back, it’s a very strange thing. But it has a remarkable turnout and once inside you could just as well be in a club in Miami – which I used to frequent once in a while. We danced and sweated a lot and then ran out of money for drinks and were having trouble standing without weaving so we went back down the long hill and through the dark alleys to our room.

Streets

Gator-stairs

And on the way we met a Russian guy that was coupled up with a Cuban woman. They insisted that we eat with them. We were very drunk and not hungry but we agreed and I’m not exactly sure why. They were quite a pair. She kept telling us how in love they were, and it was in rapid-fire Spanish and I was having trouble understanding her. His English was even harder to understand so she did most of the talking as none of us spoke Russian. They had known each other two weeks and she had two children with another man and since she couldn’t leave Cuba and he wasn’t immigrating it made the whole thing seem very strange.

Then we left the restaurant with most of our meals in to-go containers and laughed and weaved our way back to our room where we slept in A/C, took hot showers woke up late still a little groggy.

Then we went back to the plaza and the stage and had mojitos.

Then it was time to get back to the boat.

Back Home

Everything was how we left it and getting back to the boat was a major relief and it made me want to just sleep and read and play chess and drink Cuba Libre’s.

That wasn’t in the cards.

Instead we needed to plan and resupply and buy things and use the Internet (which is an adventure in itself). For all of this we needed to fight the money fight, which is tough for Americans and only slightly less so for Brazilians. That’s the thing about Cuba – it’s a pain in the ass to do anything.

We were desperate to leave and see the coast. I was desperate to freedive and explore the reefs and chase giant Grouper and Hogfish and Cubera Snapper. Without the diving and the sailing I was gaining weight and without eating fish I was in withdrawals. And without a beautiful coastline we both felt cheated. And without blue water under my keels I felt my time was being wasted. Why, if there is no bluewater under my keels, did I put all of my money in a rapidly depreciating maintenance headache?

So we hurried and rushed and ran and shopped and carried things too heavy. Then I worked on the boat. Then I found a variety of other problems so I did more boatwork. Then I fixed most of those problems and I found water in my starboard saildrive oil and that is a problem that I couldn’t fix and it infuriated me (it was my fault – fishing line in the prop again). But it was time to leave and time doesn’t sleep and so neither did we.

We pulled up anchor at 6PM that evening, with 15 knots of wind in our face.   We knew we were going the right way, because the wind was in our face. That is, afterall, how sailing works in the Caribe. So we motored until we got out of the harbor.

The weatherman told us that the wind would die after sunset and then we’d motor down the coast. But he lied. Once we left the harbor the wind picked up. Now it was gusting 30 knots in our face and I was only able to do 4 knots into the wind with both engines. The waves were smashing us too. Things were bouncing around and knives were dropping and glass stuff was breaking. Jaco was pretty unhappy (Songerie has become our official sailing buddy) about the whole thing, but it was great to have him and Cristelle with us in the shit.

After a couple of hours I checked the engines and the saildrives and found that the starboard saildrive was worryingly low on oil. This was a major problem and when I shut off the starboard engine we were now doing 3 knots, sometimes 2.5 into the wind. I’ll save you the technical details, but some numbnut wrapped fishing line in his brand new oil seal (around the prop) which allowed water in and then experimented with a solution that made the problem worse and then that numbnut found himself in desperate need of both engines/saildrives. Of course that numbnut is the captain and that captain is me, just in case self-deprecating humor isn’t clear on the interwebs.

Anyways, now that I had heavy winds on the nose – I was trying to power NOMAD with only a single 29 horsepower engine. To make a long story short, I used some very colorful (and, I might add, creative) language and then we pushed on and then the wind let up and then we were sailing a little. Then the wind died and we were back to motoring and I was worried about everything and so we took a route that was shorter and motored all night and most of the following day.

Then we saw our destination. There was a reef line and it looked impenetrable and as if to emphasize this, there was a very recent wreck laying on top of the reef. Another yacht on the reef, another dream ruined. Another reminder to stay vigilant and not make mistakes and pay attention and think quickly and move even more quickly.

You can lose it all so quickly. That kind of heartbreak that will make you sick of love.

But we had some waypoints and we had some old charts and we had Songerie leading us in – they had beaten us quite soundly as we were down to one motor/saildrive. Coming through the reef made me nervous and then it was suddenly only two meters deep and that makes me nervous too. After an hour of tense single-motoring through coral-strewn shallow-water we dropped our anchor and looked around.

NOMAD and Songerie were the only two boats in 100 miles and it was stunningly beautiful and remarkably remote. Desert scrub turns to mangrove turns to beach turns to shimmering, crystal clear water over healthy and untouched reef.

And I remembered again why I work so hard to get to places where people haven’t screwed it up yet.

You guys can have all of the cities.

You can have all of the well-charted and well-explored and well-settled lands and waters. If there are roads there, it’s already ruined.  I’m sticking to my guns: the most beautiful places on Earth are places where few humans have been and where none live.

You can argue with me if you want, but if you do – it just means you haven’t seen what I have. And that’s The Truth.

Trinidad, Cuba (and other stuff)