Vinales

After breakfast at our casa we waited around for our taxi to Vinales at 11.30 – a journey that turned out to be quite a tour in itself, particularly for those of us who had to sit up front (Beck shared the back seat with our fellow passengers, a mother and daughter, we presumed, from Columbia): I saw a goose riding a horse, a flock of vultures picking over a prize at the side of the road, numerous horse-and-cart combos enjoying the hard shoulder, not to mention cows, goats, oxen and particularly foolhardy cyclists. All human life was here, it seemed, moving at varying speeds. Our driver performed a very efficient u-turn over the central reservation and then drove the wrong way up the autopista for several hundred metres so that we could make a stop at some particularly grim service station toilets. The scenery though was beautiful, particularly as we climbed into the mountains and then down into the Valle de Vinales. We were dropped right outside our casa, where we had a very nice little annex next door to the main house with our own little porch and two rocking chairs – after walking up and down the main street a few times, checking out the street market for souvenirs and eating some pasta and Cuban Rice we settled down to make use of them…