Rum, tobacco and colitis.Cuban chronicles. Viñales. Day 6.

8 am, time to get up for breakfast with pancakes, eggs and everything, finally, because I'd been awake since 5 am thanks to the royal rooster symphony of Viñales. If I thought the couple of roosters close to the apartment in Old Havana were annoying, these are ten times worse.

After breakfast, the tour guide came to pick us up and we went to park the car in her house that was right outside town. There, we started walking under the suffocating Caribbean sun.

This was one of the few parts of the walk that wasn't right under the Sun. Oh dear shadow.

The soil is red here, and we pass by several plantations until we made our first stop, a coffee and "guayabita" rum, which is a sort of rum made of a tiny fruit that is too hard for eating. I have a tree at home that gives a fruit that while different have the same name, I could try to make rum out of it. Spoiler -I don't know how to make guayaba rum, or any other type of rum-. Of course after the free tasting comes the selling moment of the day. I didn't buy anything, unlike my dad that bought some coffee that turned out to be tastless.

The bottles of rum, and coffee packed in plastic bottles.

After that, we walked up to our second stop, an atificial lake where we could swim and freshen up -and we did- and also a viewpoint that wasn't a big deal but whatever. After the pause we headed off to the most expected part of the tour, the tobacco plantations and manufacturing place, COHIBA. The guide of the establishment was kind of an a*shole, a.k.a sexist, but I let it go because I was enchanted with the smell of the drying tobacco. We were explained all the process from the plant to the actual cigars and the expected moment of trying them came. Yes, I broke my almost 5 year period of no smoking to try a Cuban cigar, and I'll do it again for sure. Besides, they give you the cigar with the tip dipped in honey, it's even tastier that way! Dad bought a pack and I'm going to take some of those to invite my friends over for a themed night of mojitos and cigars.

The view from the viewpoint wasn't exactly the best, but this little house on the foot of the hill was just adorable.

The ox brings the tobacco leaves from the plantations to the drying shed, where they stay for a few months.

At the end of the drying period, the tobacco leaves are wrapped in palm leaves with other herbs to add some fragances and hints of other tastes.

This is myself trying a cigar and the impossible mission of getting a photo of myself in focus.

We had antoher bit of a walk uner the sun before the end of the tour. Dad and R don't miss a chance to ask every person they talk to about the goverment and stuff. Most of them say they're in favour of it. Though they recognize the lack of some stuff -specially in matter of technology-, they value and put what they have over what they don't have.

Oh, what a nice thing is to take a fresh shower when you're about to pass out from the heat. At least I suffer from it quite a lot, and that's why I generally chose to travel during whatever season but summer. After that I'm ready for what's left of the day, we went to the town centre to exchange money, have lunch and keep seeing stuff. The money exchanging part only was exhausting.

This is the town centre. This place includes the town square, the church and a dancing club.

Afer having lunch in a cute restaurant on the main street, we walked a while, got into crafts places, I set myseld to ivestigate how some notebooks of recycled paper were made because I'm a curious bookbinder myself. We also bought bread in a local bakery and some other stuff for the days to come on the road.

Kind of as an obligation we went to see the big wall of the prehistoric times but we just watched it from the road and went to a viewpoint from where you can see all the valley and it's SPECTACULAR. Besides, the place is crowded with sculptures made by the owner of the place and they were also building and making more steps to have a viewpoint higher on the hill.

The famous Prehitoric wall, spotted from the road.

This viewpoint was really worth visiting. As you can see the view of the valley and the hills from there is superb. I imagine this can be a good spot to watch the sunrise.

The counter part of being on a roadtrip is making and unmaking your bag almost every night and that was exactly our chore before dinner. Today we were really tired so no salsa place tonight for us. That's why we asked Albertico to recommend us a place for dinner and we went to a family restaurant just around the corner from his house, on the road, called "El Rancho" and that I definetely recommend. The food was delicious and cheap AF! I wad a big plate of HOMEMADE spaghetti with pesto for only 2 CUC (almost 2 Euros)! The bad thing was that by the time I was finishing my meal I started feeling weird, probably for eating out of any schedule, having long periods of no eating at all, having too much beans and drinking rum almost as a substitute of water. As soon as we got to the house my stomach ache was total.

So, instead of dancing salsa, I spent my last night in Viñales in the bathroom and with temperature.

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