Hello from Cuba (3) - Hiking Vinales and Exploring Nature
Hotel Havana Libre, Tuesday, April 5, 2005, 6:54 pm
On Sunday it was gorgeous. The cold front had finally passed
through, the rain was gone and we had a beautiful warm sunny day
without any humidity.
My hostess is also a guide for the National Park System and
Vinales is a nationally protected natural habitat. She had a
tour planned through a side valley of Vinales (Valle del Ancon)
with 3 participants, an older couple from Germany and me.
The tour was fabulous, we got picked up by a local in a taxi and
went about 20 minutes outside of town and got dropped off at a
local primary school, which had several communist slogans
painted on the outside. Political graffiti, paintings and
message boards are extremely common in Cuba. Although there is
no western style advertising, there are plenty of political
slogans (a collection of a few of which I will summarize at a
later point).
This is a very strange experience when you come from a Western
capitalist country like Canada, and then you see all these
political slogans about Communism and defending the Revolution.
Truly fascinating indeed, a completely different world.
On our 3 hour trip we walked through local fields, were told
about local wildlife, special birds (the Cuban Tocororo, Turkey
vultures and other birds. We also heard about local farming
which still takes place with human labour, manual ploughs and
oxen. We were introduced to crops such as Malanga (pureed and
given to babies), Yucca, various types of sweet potatoes, corn
and yams.
One of the highlights was a 20 minute walk through a limestone
cave through one of the Mogote hills. We saw some interesting
stone formations and even strange pale plants growing inside the
pitch-dark cave. Our guide had illuminated the cave with a
strong flashlight for the 4 of us and it was a pretty easy walk
with no cave-dwelling animals in sight, only one political
slogan spray-painted in the cave (apparently this was a hideout
for the revolutionary army at some point..).
After exiting the cave, we ended up in an uninhabited small
valley completely surrounded by mountains and we ran into a
local farmer of 60 years, whose leathery face and slim body gave
him the appearance of an 80 year old man, evidence of many
decades of sun and hard work.
He had a flock of turkeys (with 61 young chicks), a dog and some
fields of corn and beans. And he generally spends most of his
days working manually in this little valley, completely
isolated, sometimes staying overnight in a single hut made from
the wood and leaves of the royal palm tree, Cuba