6 a.m. in Viñales and the only people awake were the tourists waiting to catch the bus to Trinidad and their hosts and drivers. The Viazul office in the village, where you have to exchange the voucher for a ticket as usual, is one miserable room on the main street where a tired employee will most probably not give a shit about you and leave you wondering whether you’re in the right place.

It’s somewhere in there where the tourists are queuing…

The best advice I can give you about moving around Cuba is DON’T TRAVEL WITH LUGGAGE. These people have no idea how to handle it. One poor little man will be in charge of the bags as you get ready to get on the bus, but it’s like he’s a tiny floppy disk and he can’t take in all the information about where to place them, how to handle them, how to take them out. There’s just no space on the disk for this. So as everyone with large bags was struggling to get them inside the designated area on the bus, together with the clueless little man, I could just waltz right in and grab a seat.

The journey from Viñales to Trinidad took about 10 hours, although it’s just about 500 km. Naturally we stopped in every shithole except proper holes to shit in, if you’ll pardon my French. There was only ONE toilet stop, at around lunchtime, at a highway restaurant where we were given about 20 minutes to buy lunch and use the loo. After that break, we continued along the obscure coastal villages around Playa Larga and Playa Girón, making a last stop in Cienfuegos before finally reaching Trinidad.

I wanted to visit this town because it looked very colorful, thus perfect for photos. Through some miracle, we arrived one hour earlier than what was written in my ticket. I couldn’t reach my host on the phone, because this is Cuba and when one thing works another won’t, so I just had to find the first best taxi and schlep myself to my little Airbnb house, hoping someone would be there to let me in eventually.

The bus terminal in Trinidad is also worth an award. I don’t know the category yet, but if you don’t piss yourself laughing when you arrive there, you’re not doing it right.

The third door from the left is the ticket office, the white one is the door to the storage room. On the opposite side, as you arrive, hoards of taxi drivers and apartment owners will be waiting for you just like in Viñales, shouting and throwing cards in your face behind an improvised fence.

This is where they gather and the line is drawn from the left blue corner of the station to the little shed on the right. This photo was definitely not taken at rush hour at the bus station, because when I arrived, you could barely get out of the area – that’s how many people were waiting for us.

I found myself a taxi straight away. A bici-taxi. I thought to myself, surely this can’t be bad, I’m not carrying heavy luggage and the place is like five blocks from here. Good price, friendly dude. But soon enough I felt incredibly sorry for him, because the streets of Trinidad are mostly stone-paved. And with paved I mean not really paved, more like a pile of stones thrown in and left to chance. So this guy was basically dying on that bike and I could have walked right next to him and arrived at our destination faster. He was drenched in sweat when we arrived a few minutes later, also because my place was a bit uphill.

The place was a cute Airbnb house in a really good location. Trinidad is much bigger than Viñales, it’s a proper town, but still very small and you can reach everything easily.

My host was there since his family’s house was 20 meters from the rental and they all welcomed me with open arms and a hospitality that is hard to find here in Sweden. This has been my general impression of Cuban families, in spite of the miserable situation they’re in, these people will do anything to make you feel at home.

The house was great, perfect for me, a very good place to have a rest, no fuss. It had a living room, a bedroom, a small kitchen and bathroom, but the best part was the rooftop terrace where I could enjoy the nice evening air.

After a quick shower, I went to check out the town and have dinner. Trinidad is touristy, there are more souvenir shops and restaurants but still pretty, relatively quiet and friendly. Unlike Viñales, it doesn’t (constantly) smell of hay, but that doesn’t mean you won’t find horses and farmers all over the place.

Finding the internet spot right next to my house was a bonus and the other highlight of the evening was having a whole lobster for very little money at a nice terrace with a view. Cuba does have its perks.

In the morning, my hosts made me breakfast, what can I tell you, delicious and so sweet of them to get up early to cater to my needs.

After that, I found out that even Trinidad had a beach and since I didn’t really want to do any other tours, they got me a taxi to take me to Playa Ancón. First of all, let me show you the taxi. What do you say? You say holy shit I shouldn’t be wearing shorts in this heat on this guy’s leather seats…

The beach was one of the best I’ve ever been to. I really can’t describe the water, it was like a crystal clear paradise. I don’t swim, but if it’s a nice place, you’ll have trouble getting me out of there. That’s what happened here too, it was just perfect, I could just splash around in a fantastically calm and clear sea and then relax on a cheap chair all day.

After five hours of being a complete sloth on this fabulous beach and acquiring the fantastic color of BURN, I found myself another taxi to take me back to town. Naturally, my tin box on wheels had to stop at a gas station, where the driver left me in the car with the tacky soundtrack for about 10 minutes. Of the musical potpourri I especially remember the hit song about a man telling his friend that said friend’s wife had been cheating:

I rest my case…

I had hoped to be able to do some shopping, I thought to myself come on, this is a town. It’s GOTTA have SOME shops. Well, don’t get your hopes up high, because unless you love fans, postcards and crochet, you will not really become commercially satisfied in Trinidad either. The supply is just as “Cuban” as everywhere else, meaning you can’t just go buy a pair of shoes in a shop. I found two dresses that weren’t crochet and two pairs of really comfy pants. That, shopping-wise in Cuba is a miracle. Another miracle is the 50 CUC bill, which for Cubans is so rare that you have to show your passport when handling one of those bills. That’s really strange, given that an ATM will cough out lots of 50s if you take out a large amount of money. So they give you the big bills, but you can’t really use the big bills because they usually don’t have change for them and are generally reluctant to accept them…

I paid with a 50 and the lady looked at me as if I were an alien. Then she took my passport and wrote down my details in an old notebook where I could read names of other tourists. People from Belgium, France and the Netherlands had also been there that day. No Cubans on that particular page… Then she held the bill up in the air to see if it’s genuine. I wondered, how would I get my hands on a fake if nobody else here has one and you can’t get Cuban money anywhere else in the world? They barely know what it looks like… I also thought, lady, I got this from the ATM, you don’t even trust your own system, do you? Wherever and whenever I had to deal with employees in state-owned businesses, they desperately wanted me to feel they had the upper hand. They will look at you with suspicious eyes, they will make you wait and they will lie to your face. They’ll always pretend to be doing something more important than attend to you when in fact nothing is being done.

I finally got my clothes and passport back and continued my little tour of the town.

A waitress pretty much pulled me inside from the street so I couldn’t really refuse her, ended up having a cheap but delicious lunch at her joint.

I don’t know what this dessert she brought me was, a sort of flan but better and the drink her colleague made me was to die for. I’d go back anytime, in spite of the questionable decor and the fact that they kept staring at me while I ate because I was their only customer.

After schlepping my sweaty ass back to the house, I had a nice afternoon on the terrace before hitting the town once again. Apparently, I’d completely missed THE place to be at in Trinidad the previous evening, the steps. That’s where everyone was, locals, tourists with hats and the groovy live band.

The steps had wifi. I could even do a live video on Instagram. The steps also had really nice mojitos, I’ll tell you, if you’re not careful you could get very, very drunk in Cuba.

The following day, I just chilled, packed my bags and got some last minute souvenirs after a quiet lunch at a pretty place right next to the steps. My little escapade to Trinidad turned out to be cozy and quiet, which is often underrated. My hosts were very sweet and they called me a cab to the bus terminal. When you get to ride in something like this, you’ve basically done it all.

http://www.flickriver.com/photos/13501545@N00/8430122295/

https://www.instagram.com/p/BdnI1YOnjhK/?taken-by=cristinablendea

I still can’t tell if my brain is intact after those rides, but hey I had a great time!

At the terminal, the inevitable confusion, sweaty tourists who were starting to get tired of Cuba, the little luggage man who couldn’t handle any luggage at all and the prospect of a seven-hour bus ride back to Havana without a functioning toilet. The usual…

Before returning to the Cuban capital, I leave you with the words of wisdom of our friendly, solution-oriented driver, who, when I asked “But sir, what if someone has a bathroom emergency?” replied: “If you have a bathroom emergency, we stop and you do it in the bushes.”