Colonial Cuba and beach time in Trinidad
Trinidad is a small and very beautiful colonial town near the south coast of Cuba. The centre is full of cobbled streets, brightly painted buildings with ornate iron grills and red tiled roofs. Above the main plaza there was a wide flights of stone steps with a large area half way up. On Saturday night we spent most of the evening sitting on the steps along with apparently everybody else in Trinidad listening to a local salsa band and dancing along with the locals with the help of two new-found friends from Santa Clara who were lovely and very patient!
We managed to persuade Caz to try horse riding for the first time and we organised a trip out to a nearby farm. Unknown to us, the pleasant mornings ride would actually wind all the way up a series of highly steep stony paths in the hills and then all the way down equally steeply. Not the ideal terrain to be on a horse for the first time. Caz managed to look fairly calm during the ride but afterwards quite definitely announced that she didn’t think it was the really the activity for her! Afterwards we walked an hour through the forest to a small waterfall that fell into a wonderfully refreshing swimming hole where you could swim into the cave behind and look up at the stalactites or jump off the nearby rocks into the depths. I managed to face plant into the water whilst doing this which looked particularly graceful!
Trinidad is only 11km from Playa Ancon, a sandy peninsula with a few large all-inclusive hotels along the stretch. We spent the day further down from the main tourist area in a quiet stretch of rock strewn white sand. The girls happily read and worked on their tans and I spent the whole afternoon drinking Mojitos and playing a highly competitive game of cards with a Canadian guy called Mike who stayed in our Casa for a night. He taught me a brilliant card game, the name of which is a mystery but the girls later christened ‘Mike’ in his honour!
The next day Kristy and Caz headed off to an offshore island of large Iguanas and I went diving for the day. The reefs around Ancon are cute but not quite the proliferation of colourful corals and fish that I’m used to. I still enjoyed the dives for the whole underwater environment and I did get to see a giant crab and lobster as well as playing around with Dad’s underwater camera housing! By the time I got back from the second dive and took off my short wetsuit I discovered my legs had helpfully tanned a very dark shade of brown below the suit line and the stripe was incredibly obvious. I decided to find a small palm tree along the beach and lay with my legs in the sun but with SPF30 on the bottom bits until the tan had evened out a little!