This is how we do it

Day 15

With the cold front on the way, we decide to go to Havana for a few days. We rent a car, and decide to pick up hitchhikers. Because a person would have to work for about four months to fill up a tank, they tend to hitchhike.

We give a lady who works in a hotel a ride to her home in Moron. She tells us her husbands heart stopped for 15 minutes, and he is still unwell. I'm not surprised, I thought brain death happens well before that, perhaps we didn't understand her very well.

The next ride is with some hard looking man, who gives us very detailed instructions on how to find the highway. We don't understand a single word. Then we pick up a doctor, then a policeman and the hottest policewoman I have ever seen, and we take them some 400km to Havana, a trip that they hike twice a week!

The highway is a laugh, 500km of pot holes, masses and masses of Cuban hitchikers and dudes trying to sell cheese. It suddenly terminates into a suburban street, no fanfare or nothing, one minute highway, next minute grotty backstreet. It is hard to tell Havana is coming up, as there is very little light polution.

We pick up a few hitchikers in the city too, on the way to the hotel, a nurse who looks like a prostitute (why else would a pretty lady in a short white skirt be standing on the traffic island on a busy road) and then a prostitute who looks like a prostitute.

The city is dark, with sickly green light coming out of some windows. We find a hotel, and go to get a drink. Some guy trys to hustle me for 5 cents, trying to buy a drink for me and keep the extra, which is pretty small time, when you think about it, compared to the rest of the Carribean. On the other islands, it is pathetic what grown men do and then ask for money - tie up your ships rope, $5, give you a tiddly fish, $30. Grown men, it's a sad sight to see, these guys who have been spoilt by weak-willed tourists.

Day 14

The Cubans are generous people. As my father fixes the boats, the many men who work the big game fishing boats pop in to offer their expertiese and skills free of charge, and we give the coffee and the odd old fishing line and things like that. I practice my Spanish skills on the guards, and manage to communicate on such topics as whether they have any children, and if they like to go fishing. Learning a language is a bloody hard task that us native English speakers are spared from, and thank God for that. Who wants to sit around all day memorising the words for things that we already have names for?

Vincent mentions that a cold front is coming, and that the weather is going to be bad for a few days.




Day 13

I talk for a while with Vincent, a man who trained as a navigator for a merchant marine ship, the kind that lugs various goods back and forward across the world, who is now working as the host of a catamaran which takes big groups of toursits out to get drunk, and snorkel. He loves his job, as the tips mean he makes great money (read US $10 a day) and he gets to meet the laideehz.

He has married foreigners twice, and is considering going to the UK to live with his wife, but is afraid he will lose this job, one of the most highly prised in Cuba no doubt, though he could make a packet more in the UK. Decisions decisions. I leave him with his conundrum, and go to look at some of the local hotels, where ruddy Englishmen and their wives, with their wristbands, and their dago waiters, and their wotneys red barrel. It is as limp and as languid as any resort hotel you would find anywhere in the world, and I, the independant traveler scoff at them, as they lie indolently in the sun. Who the hell wants to lie in the sun all day? Them, thats who, so they can go hime to their chilly northern countrys, and rub their tan in their less fortunate workmate's faces.