Category Archives: Experiences

Armenian Road Trip

We generally prefer to get around by public transport when we travel – it’s much cheaper, there’s less to worry about and it can be a good way to learn how locals live and move around. However, when we were researching Armenia there were several sights that we were keen to see but seemed difficult to link together with public transport without using up more days than we had, so we decided to hire a car for just under a week.

Andrew with our Armenian rental car

After collecting the car in the centre of Yerevan we drove north for about an hour to Lake Sevan, one of the largest freshwater high-altitude lakes in the world. About 35km to the south along the lakeside road we arrived at the small village of Noratus and one of my favourite sights in Armenia. The graveyard here is incredible, it dates back to medieval times and contains over 800 khachkars (literally ‘cross stones’) carved between the 9th and 17th centuries. It looked even more magical as the ground was covered in a thick layer of snow and the sun came out just as we arrived.

One of the two small chapels at Noratus cemetery surrounded by khachkars

Walking around we could see how the khachkar developed from the early cradle stones, so called as they mimic the shape of a traditional hanging cradle, into more and more intricately carved crosses. Khachkars are found all over Armenia, particularly around churches and monasteries, and they seem to have a wider cultural rather than just religious significance. The cross often grows from a representation of the Tree of Life and they can be decorated with carvings of the sun and moon, plants or people.

Khachkars at Noratus (clockwise from top left): cradle stones from the 17th century; a row of simple crosses from the 10th-11th centuries; khachkars from the later stages of development; a modern take on the khachkar

The cemetery is still in use, unfortunately we didn’t have much time to look around the modern section as it was beginning to snow and, despite our best efforts, forging our own path through the snow had resulted in wet socks and cold feet. Nevertheless by the end of that first afternoon we’d already decided that the car hire had been a splendid idea.

Frozen Lake Sevan from our hotel room. It’s not usual for the lake to freeze, but locals told us that 2016/17 had been a particularly cold winter.

Next morning, we cleared 5cm of snow off the top of the car and set off on the longest drive of the week to Syunik, the southernmost province of Armenia. During the summer the journey might be a bit shorter, but in early March the most direct mountain pass is still closed by snow and our only option was to take the road back to Yerevan and continue from there along the main highway to the south.

Armenian roads require a lot of concentration to drive, even when we thought we’d found a smooth stretch of motorway it turned out that bridges were being built and we frequently had to slow down or detour off the main carriageway

By late afternoon, we arrived at another equally remarkable but even older site. Just outside the town of Sisian, Zorats Karer is also known as the Armenian Stonehenge but is actually even older. Sited on a plateau surrounded by hills, archaeologists have dated the stones and tombs to 3000BC. Again the weather was kind, the sun came out and we had the place to ourselves though it was bitterly cold on the exposed hilltop.

The standing stones at Zorats Karer

The standing stones are arranged in an oval around a central burial tumulus and sweeping off in two arms to the north and south so that it probably looks a bit like a galaxy from above. Around 80 of the 223 stones contain holes near their top which are believed to be aligned with the stars making it an ancient astronomical observatory.

Zorats Karer (clockwise from top left): the biggest stones stand 2.5-3m tall; many of the stones contain a neatly bored hole close to their top; the burial tumulus in the central oval

We spent the second night of our road trip in Sisian, a town which has fallen on hard times since the collapse of the Soviet Union

Next day our target was Goris, just 40km away, but we took advantage of the freedom we had driving ourselves to stop at a few places on the way.

The tower tomb at Aghitu dates to the 7th century and has seemingly been plonked in the centre of an otherwise small and unremarkable village. We had a good look around and were heading back to the car when we noticed an elderly lady walking down the road giving us a pretty obvious side-eye once over. We responded to this in our usual way by smiling broadly and calling out ‘barev dzez!’ (Hello!) to which we received the very unusual response of said elderly lady stopping and engaging us in fluent (though clearly not recently practiced) and unaccented English, telling us she was a graduate of the Foreign Languages Institute. You could have knocked us over with a feather!

Aghitu tower tomb

Just a bit further down the road is the monastery of Vorotnavank. In a commanding position above the river Vorotan the monastery was largely destroyed in an earthquake in 1931 and has been rebuilt. We enjoyed looking at the carved stone fragments which litter the grounds.

There’s a fantastic view down the valley from Vorotnavank monastery

After a bit of an adventure trying (and failing) to go up a road which we eventually decided was far too rocky and rutted for our car, we arrived at our final stop, Kotrats Caravanserai. With nothing more than a signpost pointing away from the road to guide us we trotted off down a snowy track. Fortunately the ruined caravanserai was quite easy to spot. A modestly sized building, which could easily have been mistaken for a barn were it not for the inscription in Persian and Armenian over the main entrance, the caravanserai dates to 1319 and the vaulted chambers inside were used as a secure resting place by merchants travelling along the Silk Road.

Kotrats caravanserai (clockwise from top): the ruins are in the middle of a field; inside are three vaulted chambers; over the main entrance is an inscription in Armenian and Persian

By the time we got back to the car we were hungry and as we drove the final 17km to Goris the weather turned into a steady downpour, making us very glad to arrive at our friendly B&B, home for the next few nights.

Scams and annoyances of Cuba

Beware the Buena Vista Social Club

Full Cuban band performing on stage in the Casa de la Trova in Camagüey

The main event at the Casa de la Trova (or House of Music) in Camagüey

We were approached a handful of times by very friendly older men with good English purporting to be musicians – and they’ll tell you their instrument too – so common is this introduction that we nearly collected the full band in Havana!

The first one we met walked us into the nearest bar with the suggestion that as he was playing tonight he’d get us in free – I’ll interject here and say that we were being open, friendly and curious, not especially after free entry, we’d been to many a Casa de la Trova already – as we sat down he ordered a round of drinks and at that point we saw the scam and declined the drink. The scam being that we’d be picking up the tab, likely at inflated prices. After we’d said ‘no gracias‘ to the drinks, the friendliness ended and he got up to leave.

Che for a CUC

Cuban 3 Nacional Peso banknote featuring Ernesto Che Guevara

The Cuban 3 Nacional Peso banknote, worth about £0.09 GBP and a great souvenir

We’d read about this one before we arrived and were only offered it 3 or 4 times during the 6 weeks we were there, but it’s worth including. The scam essentially is the sale of a 3 National Peso note for 1 Convertible Peso, or 8 times its face value. They do make nice souvenirs, but banks and money exchanges (CADECAs) will change CUCs for National Pesos and you can ask for 3 Peso notes as part of the denominations. Speaking of CADECAs..

Don’t trust the official CADECA

Specifically the one just north of Plaza de San Francisco de Asís in Havana’s Old Town. We changed £600 GBP for CUC, and the majority of the notes we received were in 20 CUCs. The lady on the desk entered the amount and pointed out on the computer screen that we’d get 28 20CUC notes, counted out the 28, and the rest of the smaller notes, then printed the receipt and handed over the money. Except the receipt said 30 20CUC notes. She’d re-entered the proper amount into the computer after counting out the money.

Take your time – Cubans are used to waiting! Use your phone or their calculator to check the exchange rate (which is printed in the window outside and at the counter) so you know roughly how much you’ll get and always check the count of notes against the receipt at the desk before you step away – it has the breakdown of each denomination on it.

A fellow tourist told us a similar story.. they’d been asked if they wanted some of the change in coins and agreed, then the lady at the desk handed over all of the notes and the receipt and waited to see if they remembered they’d asked for the coins. He said he counted the money 3 times at the desk before the lady offered up a handful of coins.

25 times the price. Because you’re a tourist

I only argued with him about the price because he had a signboard with the prices listed!

In our discussions between ourselves about Cuba, we’ve laid a lot of the blame for the country’s ills at the dual currency system. There are 25 National Pesos for 1 Convertible Peso, and in our experience we found it is separating the population into those who work in tourism and those who don’t. It is all too common as a tourist to be charged the same price in CUC as a Cuban National will pay in National Pesos – that’s an astounding 2400% price hike – and while we don’t mind paying a little more for some things (entrance to museums for example), there’s no arguable difference in the service we’d receive in a colectivo or a haircut that warrants the backsheesh-like expectation.

The result, according to one taxi driver we spoke to, was the Cubans realise there’s more money in tourism so the educated are leaving their jobs in hospitals and universities to drive taxis or work in bars and cafes, which made him worry about a deterioration in the quality of healthcare and education.

Bags and handling are included

We travelled around Cuba in the state-run Viazul and Cubanacan coach services, they’re very good and the ticket price includes you and your luggage. However, once you have your ticket there are a few opportunistic baggage handlers who will try to extract a fee for carrying your luggage to the bus or withholding the luggage tag until you pay. The worst one was in Trinidad where a big guy in a separate office had a little dish and demanded 1CUC per bag. I felt intimidated but stood my ground and refused to pay it.

In Santa Clara an older gentleman withheld the luggage tags until we paid, but as we’d already put our bags on the trolley we just said no and walked away. 5 minutes before the bus arrived he walked over and gave us the tags anyway!

Handouts and bad beggars

By far the most common annoyance was people just asking for money or gifts. Most of the time they were content when we politely refused but occasionally some would say something impolite back which left us with a bad feeling for Cuba. We understand these people are relatively poor, we empathise as best as we possibly can about the extremely hard times that they’ve lived through, but by visiting their country we are helping – they don’t know that we choose to stay in the spare rooms of local people, and deliberately search out street food not only for the variety but because it puts money directly into the hands of the people.

We have a saying in the north of England that we tried to remind ourselves of after these encounters: shy bairns (get nowt) – which means if you don’t ask you don’t get.

I think I read in the Lonely Planet that just when you think you understand how Cuba works, it’ll turn around and surprise you again. We’d just sat down in a back-street locals bar at the end of an exhausting day of sight-seeing and fending off scams in Santa Clara feeling a bit sorry for ourselves, when a very jovial deaf man with a group of friends started up a conversation with us. Over 4 beers José told us about his life and it remains one of our fondest memories of Cuba.

The handful of bad experiences make the good ones all the sweeter

Cuban Food

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Before we visited we’d heard that Cuban food is not very exciting so we didn’t have high hopes. There were high points, mostly in the dinners that we had in our casa particulars, but for the most part we found the food to be fairly dull and certainly not a highlight of the trip as it has been in so many of the countries that we’ve visited. We were surprised that, compared to their neighbours (either the surrounding Caribbean islands or nearby Mexico), neither chillis nor other spices were commonly used. It is perhaps telling that the best meal we had (by a long way) was at a Spanish restaurant – Castropol on the Malecon in Havana which is run by the local Spanish Asturianas society.

Breakfast

Breakfast in casa particulars is very standard and although priced separately to the room it seems to be expected that you’ll take it – fresh fruit (some combination of papaya, pineapple, guava or mango), freshly made juice (usually papaya or guava, on good days mango!), coffee (filter, pretty strong, never instant and we were very rarely offered tea), eggs (fried, scrambled or omelette as you like), bread (always white, sometimes dried out and crispy), sometimes cheese or ham (both processed) to go with the bread, or as a sandwich. It was tasty enough but got to be pretty boring by the end of 6 weeks!

Casa particular breakfast

Street food and snacks

It’s fairly easy to find a bite to eat when you’re wandering the streets in Cuban cities. Pizza shops are everywhere and, while it’s not what an Italian would recognise, the pizzas are served hot from the oven, the puffy dough topped with a slick of tomato paste and a sparse sprinkling of cheese, handed to you folded in half with a small piece of cardboard or paper to protect your fingers (asbestos hands required!). They became our go-to lunchtime filler, not so healthy, but Andrew would have had at least one a day if I’d have let him… At MN$5-10 each (about £0.15-0.30) Cuban pizzas are delicious and cheap.

Peso pizza Andrew looking very happy with his first Cuban pizza even though he had to deploy his handkerchief to protect his fingers from the steaming dough!

As an alternative to pizza, sandwiches are the other lunchtime option, also sold from little hole-in-the-wall shops. The bread is always soft and white with highly processed ham and/or cheese to fill it (interestingly cheese was often more expensive than ham). Sometimes we had bread with mayonnaise (i.e. a mayo sandwich, better than it sounds), or bread with tomatoes (the best option if it’s available), and occasionally fritters of savoury dough or mashed potato. If we were very lucky we found a stall selling pan con lechon, roast pork sandwiches.

Street food vendor We bought sandwiches and cake from this friendly vendor in Bayamo

Cuban street food Street food (clockwise from top left): peso pizza; ham sandwich; pan con lechon; fritter sandwich

In bars and cafes sandwiches were often toasted. The ‘Cuban sandwich’ contains roast pork, ham and cheese and somehow manages to transcend all three

Meat

Chicken and pork were the most common options, usually just fried with some garlic or onions, but the best meals we had were beef and lamb. Ropa vieja literally means ‘old clothes’ but it’s a lot tastier than that sounds, imagine pulled pork but made from beef in a sauce made from tomatoes and peppers. We were served lamb casserole a couple of times in different casa particulars and each time it was meltingly tender and deeply flavoured – why don’t they do something like this with all the chicken and pork?!

Cuban meats Clockwise from top left: fried pork with garlic; Ropa Vieja is not pretty but it is tasty; chicken leg; lamb casserole for dinner in Viñales

Liver We didn’t come across much offal but when I saw the unfamiliar word ‘hidalgo’ on a menu and found in our dictionary that it was liver I knew what I would be having for lunch! The liver was sauteed with onions and green peppers and made a nice change from the more usual options

Seafood and fish

Cuba is a long, narrow island which means that you’re never far from the sea and so it’s hardly surprising that fish and seafood are readily available. We had various kinds of fish as well as prawns, lobster and even octopus. Again we found that they would most commonly be prepared quite simply by either frying or grilling perhaps with a little garlic or a tomato based sauce.

Cuban seafood Clockwise from left: At St Pauli I had octopus salad and Andrew had prawns cooked with garlic; a mackerel like fish in tomato sauce; lobster in Baracoa

Rice and beans

The standard starch with a meal is rice, either plain white or the rather politically incorrectly named ‘moros y cristianos’ (moors and christians), a mix of rice with black beans which was our favoured option. I really enjoy bean soups and I think they’re probably a staple of Cuban home cooking but we hardly ever saw them on restaurant menus – I suspect it’s considered poor people’s food. We did sometimes get bean soup as a starter for dinner in casa particulars and when I requested it for dinner from our casa in Camagüey she looked very pleased to be asked for it. The beans are usually either black or kidney beans and the soup might also contain bits of ham, peppers and pumpkin.

Black bean soup in Camagüey – delicious but not easy to photograph!

Vegetables

A salad of tomatoes, cucumbers and white cabbage was the customary accompaniment with dinner. If we were lucky it had some grated carrot, beetroot or cooked french beans on the side too. Otherwise the only vegetables that we were served, apart from a rare bowl of pumpkin soup, were plantains or green bananas. Plantains seem to fall somewhere between vegetables and starch in terms of how they are used in Cuba. Sometimes deep-fried until they are crispy (chicharritas), sometimes fried but soft in the middle, sometimes baked into a tart shell and filled with prawns or meat as a starter, they seemed to function a bit like potatoes.

Cucumbers and tomatoes When we didn’t feel like pizza or a processed cheese sandwich for lunch we bought a handful of tomatoes and cucumbers and a loaf of bread.

Plantains in their various guises (clockwise from top left): this market stall gives an idea of how much plantains are used; fried plantains as a side dish; plantain shells stuffed with prawns and cheese as a starter; plantain crisps

Sweets

Satisfying your sweet tooth in Cuba is easy and cheap. Cakes, biscuits and pastels (little pasties containing guava jam) are available from street vendors and hole-in-the-wall shops and generally cost MN$1-3 each (£0.03-0.09). The cakes are heavy on the icing which looks like swirls of cream but is actually marshmallow fluff! We found quite a lot of sweets made from nuts, as well as the coconut based cucuruchu in Baracoa, we saw bars of pounded peanut in several places and cones of caramelised peanuts were for sale in all of the main squares on an evening. In restaurants flan (Spanish creme caramel) is the most common option.

Cuban sweets (clockwise from top left): cakes with a generous swirl of marshmallow fluff; bars of ground peanuts and guava membrillo for sale; flan; a cake vendor roams the streets in Matanzas

Cubans love their ice cream and there are cheap ice cream cafes in every city

Drinks

Soft drinks in Cuba fall into two categories: freshly made fruit juices or cans of Cuban made fizzy pop. Alongside the usual cola, lemonade and fizzy orange options is Malta, a malted soft drink which smells exactly like a Soreen malt loaf – too sweet for me but Andrew liked it. At peso food stands what looked like squash was served by the glass but as we weren’t sure about the water used to make it we never tried one. Coffee is also available at peso food stands and usually cost MN$1 (~£0.03) for an espresso size cup poured from a Thermos flask. Tea is practically unknown so if you’d struggle without it I would advise you to pack some teabags!

Cuban soft drinks Malta, natural lemonade made from lime juice and sugar topped up with mineral water and tuKola

Sugar cane juice (guarapo) in an idyllic setting near Viñales

As sugar is a major crop in Cuba, it’s unsurprising that the most common alcohol is rum which is distilled from sugar cane juice. Rum based cocktails, e.g. mojito, daiquiri, piña colada, were the order of the day if we weren’t sampling one of the various Cuban brands of lager-like beer. In Havana, there’s a micro brewery in Plaza Vieja in the heart of the old town. We tried one of their brews and really enjoyed it but sadly the service was so awful that we couldn’t bring ourselves to go back.

Cuban alcohol Clockwise from top left: daiquiris; mojitos; Cristal was my favourite of the local beers; piña coladas

Viñales, Cuba

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When we were planning our trip to Cuba, we’d decided to skip the green valleys of Cuba’s primary tobacco growing region as we’re non-smokers, we’d see two other national parks in the east and we’d read other travellers’ reports that the weather is unpredictable.

However, once we arrived in Cuba, everyone we met, and I do mean everyone, said that we simply had to fit it in because it’s so beautiful.

We did, and they were right!

Finding ourselves firmly on the typical tourist trail, we were able to try Cubanacan who are the other state-run coach company, which transfers from a lot of the swanky central hotels in Havana and is a lot more convenient (and cheaper) than getting a taxi to the Viazul bus station. The coach trip was pleasant and uneventful, until the final descent into the Valle de Viñales and we caught our first glimpse of the unique mogote strewn landscape..

View of the Viñales countryside from the bus

Our first glimpse of the unique Viñales landscape, lush fields strewn with limestone karsts called ‘mogotes’

From what we could make out, the little town of Viñales exists almost entirely for the service of tourists. The main street is lined with cafes and restaurants, a handful of shops, a bank, and a money exchange, while the rest of the town is comprised of casa particulars – we varied our route through the town’s back streets and it seemed like every house had a room for rent!

View of the church and town square in Viñales

The pretty little church in Viñales

Once we’d settled ourselves into our casa and had a spot of lunch, we picked a direction and went exploring. The main street isn’t very long and we soon found ourselves down a dirt track between the deep red fields dotted with tobacco drying sheds.

A typical trail through the countryside of Viñales - deep red earth and pointed roofs of tobacco leaf drying sheds

We could see from the hoof prints that we’d found one of the popular horse trails. These steep-roofed huts are tobacco drying sheds, the leaves are hung inside like kippers!

Horseback riding is a very popular activity in Viñales, and while we can see the appeal of letting the horse do the work so you can appreciate the scenery, we favoured the cycling option and arranged to hire a couple of bikes through our casa.

Julie and I with mountain bikes in Viñales

Just about to set off with a vague plan in our heads. Delightfully, my rental mountain bike was a ‘Flying Pigeon’!

No sooner had we set off than I attempted to change gears and the chain snapped! While a friendly gentleman helped me look for the missing link in the road, Julie made her way back to our casa to get in touch with the lad who’d rented us the bikes, who just happened to ride past, came over and simply swapped the disabled ‘Flying Pigeon’ for a double suspension ‘Mongoose’. I thanked them both, met up with Julie and we set off again..

Viñales national park entrance, a road heads off into the distance between two large limestone karsts

Just north of the town is the striking official entrance to the Parque Nacional Viñales

Not having intended to visit Viñales, we hadn’t done a lot of research about the area and the bike rental was simply that – here’s a bike, see you later! – no maps, hints, or suggestions! We used a combination of the Lonely Planet and the offline maps of Cuba on my phone to plan out a rough loop that took us past the Cueva del Indio, through a town called the Republica del Chile and the recommended Valle el Silencio.

The lush valleys of Viñales – as well as tobacco, the Cubans grow coffee, sugarcane, oranges, bananas, pineapples and avocados here

Cycling was a fantastic way to explore this amazing countryside

Viñales is a lovely place to cycle. It’s pretty flat, the scenery is varied and interesting, there are plenty of trails and when we were on the roads there wasn’t much traffic. Outside of the town there are a few places to stop for refreshments and lunch dotted here and there, though the further we travelled they were fewer and farther between. The second half of our route took us out into the wilds and it had gone 3pm by the time we found somewhere for lunch. We’d consumed all of our snacks and 4 bottles of water cycling through the heat of the day, and we hadn’t realised how ready for a break we were!

A glass of sugarcane juice in the Valle el Silencio

A well earned glass of sugarcane juice at our rest-stop in the Valle el Silencio

The eco-farm we found in the Valle el Silencio is very much on the independent tour guide itinerary as it’s well set up for small groups of tourists. We shared a main meal between us which was plenty, and included in the price was a tour of the adjacent organic farm which we were a little reluctant to do at first as we feared it’d be a hard sell. Our bottoms weren’t quite ready to get back onto the bikes so we relented to the tour and it turned out to be really interesting.

Collage of produce growing at tiny organic farm. Green coffee beans, a beehive and cocoa pods

Just some of the organic produce this tiny farm grows. Clockwise from the top: coffee; a beehive for pollination of their fruit trees and honey, of course; a cocoa tree

Our young guide explained that what they grow and harvest here is primarily used in the restaurant and to feed the family. They grow a little bit of everything, I lost count of the different types of fruit but something we hadn’t seen in our travels thus far was cocoa growing on the tree.

The tour also included one of the farmers demonstrating how cigars are made in the countryside and as we’d seen them made by hand in the Partagas factory in Havana, it was fun to spot the differences in their technique and unlike in Partagas he was happy for us to take pictures..

Before the final wrapper leaf is applied, the cigar would be tightly rolled in a scrap of paper for 2 days, a step that he skipped for the purposes of demonstration. And of course they’re for sale, any quantity you like for 3CUCs (£2.10) each

Apart from a short and deeply rutted part of track immediately after our late lunch stop, the remaining trail was easy going and we slowly descended through the Valle el Silencio back to Viñales. We tracked our ride on Strava and logged just over 20 miles!

For our final full day in Viñales we hiked in the other direction from our bicycle ride, notionally in the direction of a large, outdoor painting on the side of a mogote that depicts evolution and is totally panned in TripAdvisor reviews. How bad could it be? Could it be so bad that it’s actually good?

Fortunately there’s no entrance fee to stand in wonder at this almost undecipherable eyesore as it’s unmissable from the road

Moving somewhat swiftly on, the farm tracks circled round the defaced mogote and made for a fairly long but gentle walk through peaceful farmland. No noisy polluting engines, just the rustle of the gentle breeze through the fields.

Viñales countryside

Caballo, dinero, por favor

The track eventually met up with the main but not too busy road back into Viñales, and before we knew it we were back. Thank you to those that convinced us to change our plans – we’re really pleased we went – it was a peaceful, un-hassly, nature filled and relaxing change after our time in Havana.

Cars and transport of Cuba: a photo essay

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Before we arrived in Cuba we wondered how common the classic 1940s and ’50s American cars would be, given that the newest would be 57 years old by now and their maintenance would have been severely hampered by post-Revolution trade embargoes. The fuel shortages during the Special Period of the 1990s meant many vehicles sat unused as people took to bicycles and public transport.

However, we soon learned that the resourceful Cubans have worked miracles to keep so many of them running, their tough life evident in a patchwork of dints, bumps, scrapes, makeshift repairs and resprays which only added to the charm, and complemented the dilapidation of their surroundings.

Classic American 1950s green Ford, Camagüey, Cuba

The thing we noticed most was the size of the classic American cars – they’re huge!

Close up of the rear light cluster, green Ford, Camagüey

The modest tail fin puts this Ford in the mid to late 1950s, when pointed tailfins and chrome were the futuristic fashion – America was in the Space Race with the USSR at the time

At first glance, this de-badged 1958 Chevrolet Bel Air Coupe looked abandoned

Bright red and white interior of the white 1958 Chevrolet Bel Air Coupe

But its bright red interior and new seats mean someone’s looking after it and it’s slowly being restored

Green 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air Sedan sitting on stilts and covered in dust

Unlike this 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air Sedan, which is how I imagined I would see a lot of the cars in Cuba; up on stilts, patiently waiting for its owner’s fortunes to change

The oldest car we saw was this 1921 Ford Model T Touring which sadly doesn’t work anymore and sits in the back of a pottery factory in Trinidad

The largest ‘sedan’ we saw was this monstrous late 1950s Lincoln Premiere – even the 2-door version sits 6 people!

Colourful bicycle taxis lined up in Bici-taxis in Camagüey

Many people took to cycling as their mode of transport in during the economic crisis known as the Special Period and “bici-taxis” or bicycle taxis are still a popular form of employment and transport today. They typically have a simple roof providing shelter from the sun and the rain, but we loved the unique design and colourful artwork on these bici-taxis in Camagüey

Slightly larger than a bici-taxi and unique to Cuba are CoCo-taxis, small motorised vehicles that get their name because they resemble the shape of a coconut

We’ve written about a few of our public transport experiences, such as taking a bench-seat passenger truck from Baracoa to Moa, a Pontiac colectivo from Moa to Holguin, and a ‘camion’ or converted truck which was pretty much standing room only! For the longer distances we usually used the Viazul coaches for the comfort of the seats and the air conditioning (which was a bit too cold sometimes, even for me!). There’s a rival service called Cubanacan which runs between Havana, Viñales and Trinidad and we’d recommend them as their pick-up and drop-off locations are more central than the Viazul stations

We made use of private taxis for bus station transfers and the odd half-day excursion. Typically they’d be Ladas which were pretty common on the roads of every Cuban city we visited. I’d say about half of them had been modified, sporting huge drain-pipe or even sewer-pipe sized exhausts!

3 1970's Lada cars parked in a street in Camagüey

Lovely examples of the more original, unmodified Ladas we saw. From front to back, I think they’re an AvtoVAZ VAZ-2103 (exported from Serbia as the Lada 1500); It’s precursor and first AvtoVAZ car the VAZ-2101 (Lada 1200/1300); and the yellow one at the back is likely an earlier revision still, as it more closely resembles the car the other 2 are based on, the Fiat 124. 3 generations in a street!

Familiar to us from our travels in Russia is the Russian brand Kamaz. We saw plenty of their trucks on the main roads

There are mechanical garage services like we have here in the UK, but we also saw a bit of roadside maintenance being carried out in the street too..

Inside the boot of a classic 1950's American car in Old Havana, propped open and full of tools

An advantage of a huge car is the boot can hold all the tools for an owner’s workshop, like this one in a back street in Havana’s Old Town

We also saw a couple of chassis that had been stripped and resprayed, though I’m not sure this particular shade was one of the manufacture’s original swatches..

The result of the restorations are amazing – even though we were in Cuba for 6 weeks, we never tired of looking at them and we never saw two cars exactly alike either..

A 1954 Chevrolet Bel Air 2-door Hardtop in a lovely metallic baby-blue

And a slightly newer Bel Air Sport Sedan from 1957. Chevrolet was the most common marque of classic car we saw in Cuba, which isn’t surprising given how popular they were in 50s and 60s America

Unsurprisingly, the cars in the best condition were to be found nearest the tourist money in Havana and Varadero. We found that the main road along the Varadero peninsula was ideal for classic car spotting..

A two-tone pink and white Pontiac

There were very few non-American classics from the 1950s, but we did spot this Mercedes-Benz W120

Oldsmobile 98 Second Generation, Holguin

We spotted this near pristine Oldsmobile 98 sitting in a back street in Holguin. It looked even better when the sun came out!

I really liked seeing the whitewall tyres, and they’re a lovely complement to the paintwork on this beautiful Ford Fairlane 500

Line of classic cars in San Martin, Havana

And speaking of paintwork, there was always a line up of gleaming, vibrant motorcars at the end of Parque Central opposite the Gran Teatro de la Habana

Havana’s Malecón was another great place to spot cars as it’s on the itinerary of all the classic car tours

two year trip

Andrew and Julie's Travelling Adventures