Lost in Viñales. Cuban chronicles. Day 5.

After many, many come and go's, we got ourselves a car to go to Viñales first and the rest of Cuba later. The owner of the car seems an honest guy, but when we went up to the apartment to arrange the details and get paid, he kept winking at me, can you believe it? Well, I guess Cubans are like that, they flirt...a lot.

About 10:30 am, we took off to Viñales, taking the highway that -contrary to what we had been told- was in pretty good shape and with almost no traffic. The thing is that here, there are few little cars compared to the amount of population. Actually, I love driving on these almost desertic roads.

The empty road and this landscape on the sides.

When we had been seeing mogotes for a while and we were getting closer to them, we had to exit the highway, and the road from this point was a different story. It was crowded with bumps and potholes that were under reapir and when the road was in good shape again, we were going up and down the hills and doing all sorts of curves, so it took us over an hour to drive 30 kilometres.

Little by little the landscape changes. First these hills, then the mogotes.

After noon we got to Viñales and it's just beautiful. Narrow streets, almost every house is open for rent, and all of them colorful and with the same architectural style. Al first, I thought that there was a building plan or something, but then, a Cuban guy told me that there was no such plan.

Viñales gets lots of tourism nowadays, but it is a well-known area because of its tobacco plantations.

Viñales is a small town, really small, so one would think that with a little help of the gps there was no chance of mistaking the adress of our next house, right? Wrong, you can always be mistaken and get lost and so we did. We went straight to the place we thought our house was, but wasn't. There, two people saw us all foreigners and lost and called the phone number we had from the house and we could finally get to Mirtha and Albertico's house. Later, I confirmed my belief that everything happens for a reason. Getting lost and be helped by these people was no exception.

Mitha and Albertico's house, at the end of 2nd st of Laurel area.

Our hosts are super Cuban - if there's such thing -, Albertico is like a character, specially because of his stressed accent. They are very hard working people, with no more ambition than living each day. To me, that lack of greed is admirable. I know that most people don't see it the same way, but I think the human race would be happier and healthier this way. Alfter all, most of the World's historic problems come from some people's excessive greed, right?

After quickly accomodating ourselves, we headed off to a place we could see in an afternoon: The Indian Cave. This is a huge cave inside a mogote, just a few miles outside Viñales. The rock formations are just spectacular, and also combined with the human hand. Inside, there are pathways and electric lights. The end of the path is next to an underground river where you take a boat that sails to the outside of the cave. It was on this spot that we had the only bitter moment of the trip when a tourist guide wanted that her entire group boarded a boat together passing over us, who were before half of her group in the line. Sorry lady, but you should have kept your group together before this spot. It was a very unpleasant moment.

This is the entrance to Indian''s Cave. A little but too much touristic for my taste.

The real show was inside the cave. My apologies for the quality of the photo, darkness and my camera's ISO don't get along as I'd like them to.

After finishing the walking pathway, you take a motor boat through this underground river to the way out of the cave.

We went back home to take a shower and craving for our mate before having dinner at a place next to Mirtha and Albertico's. This was a rather strange experience, as the food all came but not together and with extra stuff like soup, salads and fruit. We ended up extremely full and somewhat clueless. Oh, and it wasn't expensive at all!

Now it was nightlife time. We went for a walk around the town centre. Every single house has the name of its owner. I even found one with my name!

Sunset from Mirtha and Albertico's terrace.

Wherever I might be in the World, having mate at some point of the day is essential.

The plan was going to a place where they supposedly played salsa and the guy that helped us recommended us. But, when we got in, there was reggaetón instead of salsa, there was no one there and honestly, it looked rather shady. So we left. We had just stepped away from that place when we heard salsa coming out of somewhere. It came from a club across the street, located between the town square, a church, and God knows what else. Its name is Polo Montañez* and we got in because the tickets were only 1CUC. Luckily. There was this guy, alone, sitting on a table on the back. I had seen him from the outside. Undoubtely gringo, but didn't know from where exactly. Somehow, the only three available chairs in the place were the ones from his table, so after asking if they were free we joined him. Of course I sat on the opposite side because sorry, I'm an introvert. Meanwhile, on the other side, a Cuban fella started talking to me. His name was Johnny or something like that, and insisted that I danced with him and I kinda didn't want to because these guys can be very touchy and I could kick some ass. When the Cuban guy was starting to get really annoying, all I heard was a "she's the one that speaks English" coming from my dad, who kinda set me up with the American guy, which he had been wanting to do for a while with no success. We got to talk and it turned out that he's a video maker and he had just been in Uruguay, crazy, right? We talked for a while when I realized we didn't know each other's names. Oh, two socially akward people gathered. We exchanged our social media and agreed that we needed A LOT more of Cuba Libre in our bloodstream to dance there. A while after, we left. Honestly, I wanted to stay but once more I didn't know the way back to the house and that's how my first day in Viñales ended: crazy about the landscape, disorientated and with a new friend.

A house with my name in Viñales. I better go there.

* The next day, I found out that Polo Montañez was a popular singer from Pinar del Río and I even knew some of his songs. Here I leave you some of them, maybe you know them as well :)

*You can read the original version of this post in Spanish here.