Next came long stretches where the boulders’ colouring was almost equally astounding: marbled blue and silver, green and pink – bright, shining colours. These rocks were friable and on steep inclines the many little slivers – some transparent – made the track slippy.
When there are no fellow humans around one’s mind rambles off in odd directions. Thinking about how close we all are, in time, to our primitive ancestors, I wondered if in some individuals certain genes skip thousands of generations – then reappear. Can one miss out on a whole evolutionary stage? My own gatherer gene is notably assertive: I’ll happily spend many hours gathering watercress, wild garlic, blueberries, wild strawberries, mushrooms, blackberries, crab-apples, sloes, chestnuts. Yet I feel no impulse to grow anything, despite having a fertile acre or so on which enough could be grown to feed several families. This does suggest a missing gene, the one that enabled my ancestors to evolve from being wandering hunter-gatherers to being settled cultivators. And that lack may have a contemporary manifestation in my failure to keep up with our present evolutionary stage. My genes reject car ownership, TV, washing-machines, cell phones, computers, iPods and other such complex innovations. Were I a species rather than an individual I’d be doomed to extinction as a creature unable to adapt to its changing environment.
By mid-afternoon I could see, in the distance, my track ascending to the crest of a treeless, grassy ridge. Half an hour later it became a boulder stairway before ending – just like that. I stood on the brink of a deep inaccessible ravine, directly below me lay an almost sheer pine-covered mountainside.
At the foot of the stairway I should have taken a narrow pathlet which now led me across a level saddle to a lightly forested mountain where woodpeckers were busy. Descending to the meeting of three paths, at a stream crossing, I erected a ‘tent’ of pine branches to ensure a dew-free sleep. But of course the mosquitoes came to dinner; most streams have adjacent pools of stagnant water.
Next morning I chose the stream-side path. It climbed briefly, before winding for hours from mountain to mountain through cool forest – a few pines, mostly a tangle of unfamiliar trees and shrubs. Sometimes ground-creepers formed trip-wires and vine-swathes hung at face level and the birds – rarely visible – were numerous and melodious. Then came an open plain where a sandy track showed – not recent – traces of equine traffic. No trees remained, only hundreds of stumps and occasional charcoal-burning residues amidst low, red-leaved bushes, slender saplings and tall clumps of delicately tinted flowers – ideal bird-watching territory. Of the half-dozen species on view I could identify only hawks, woodpeckers and finches. I mistook the cartacuba for the zunzuncito – the smallest bird in the world, weighing one-fourteenth of an ounce. As cartacubas make wrens look burly this was an understandable error. Several of these exquisites flashed by me and at noon, when I had been sitting motionless beside a bush for some moments, one perched a mere yard from my face. I could see its eyes glinting, its long needle-like beak, its emerald back and crimson throat. That made my day.
The sandy track continued for miles across gently undulating deforested territory, brightened all the way by those glorious wild flowers and cooled by a steady breeze. In every direction long ridges and rounded summits stretched to far horizons.
At 5.15 I paused beside a small isolated hill, hereabouts a geological aberration. Near its base huge slabs of grey rock protruded and beneath one such shelf the sandy level ground looked like a comfort zone. I hesitated; my supplies were running low and it might be more prudent to walk on until dusk. But looking ahead I could discern no raw material for a ‘tent’ and that site was very tempting …
While eating my last tin of sardines I noticed dark clouds massing to the west – rain clouds? So perhaps I had been wise to give in to temptation.
Any Cuban could have told me that strong winds accompany blue-black clouds and unluckily this quasi-cave faced the wrong way. For an hour around midnight a gale drove heavy rain into my refuge. Then the clouds were swept away, the stars twinkled again and I deeply regretted not having an emergency flask of warming rum.
Day Four permitted no loitering; all those multi-course meals had done me well but now my hump felt empty. For eleven hours I walked with occasional five-minute pauses. An alarmingly reduced water supply made me grateful for that rain storm; it had left deep puddles on the track, slightly muddy but otherwise pure. Although not yet suffering from thirst I soon would be. When a mini-snake darted across the track – about a foot long, whip-thin, jet black – I hoped it augured well, like meeting a black cat.
At 1.20 the sand track joined a tractor-wide loggers’ earth road, forming a T-junction. Should I turn left or right? Where was the nearest bohio/water? As this track – crudely bulldozed through the landscape – bore no signs of regular traffic it would probably be safer to go west, towards Viñales, instead of gambling on a nearer bohio.
During the next three hours I found myself listening anxiously for sounds of human habitation – playing children, barking dogs, crowing cocks. But the silence remained unbroken on this wide plateau, so long deforested that secondary growth flourished: scrawny trees, thick scrub. I met two families of feral pigs, the large sows wearing stiff crests of carroty hair, the tiny furry red-brown piglets reminding me of their Andean cousins. For an astonished moment they stood and stared, before fleeing into the bushes.
By mid-afternoon I knew I had a parasite problem; the itchiness earlier attributed to mosquito bites came from something very much worse – of which more anon.
At 4.00-ish my track could be seen turning left to climb a ridge and forty minutes later I was overlooking the extraordinary Viñales Valley, at which point I drank my last few mouthfuls of water. The descent took me to a hamlet on the edge of a motor-road, but I didn’t ask for agua; my mind was veering towards Buccaneros – many Buccaneros. Beside a milestone saying ‘Vinales: 10 km.’ I sat waiting for a lift and soon a school bus illegally picked me up, the driver refusing any payment.
Viñales is a congenial small town, farm-based, founded in 1607. Its two tourist hotels are discreetly invisible from the centre where I was immediately captured by an elderly white woman waving a scrap of cardboard inscribed: ‘BLANCA $20’. Blanca assured me her home was just around the corner. She lied. Around a corner, yes – but at the end of a mile-long street of single-storey casas. If uncaptured, I would have chosen one of the several main street lodgings. As we walked – Blanca wheeling a rattling bicycle – oxen were ambling back from the fields to their stables behind the houses and children were shoo-ing hens to their coops and next door to Blanca’s home (which didn’t display the logo) excited porcine noises greeted the filling of troughs.
In a stuffy room almost filled by two single beds I stripped quickly to inspect my tortured body and colonised garments. The invaders were bigger than human fleas but smaller than bedbugs: dark brown, hard-shelled, shiny, fast-moving – though easier to catch than fleas. They had fed chiefly off my buttocks, crotch, thighs and armpits with a few experimental forays elsewhere. Their bites were spectacular: crimson welts ten times their own size, extremely painful – throbbing that evening – and of an incomparable itchiness. The itch persisted for a week and as time passed the bites oozed a nasty goo; then the painfulness became soreness. A fortnight later, at home in Ireland, I was still suffering enough to crave sympathy from those of my intimates who could decently be invited to view my buttocks and adjacent areas. Presumably these insects normally reside in my quasi-cave, feeding off small mammals. Despite my long walk, I did not sleep well that night or for several nights to come.
As the missing logo indicated, Blanca and her large, lumbering mulatto husband were skiving. Together, looking slightly tense, they requested me to sign an obviously phoney register which neither the immigration officer not the tax inspector was ever going to see. I pretended not to notice though I should have haggled about those CP20, the tariff for first-class accommodation. My room didn’t even have an interior lig
ht switch; at bedtime I had to cross the hallway. The bathroom lacked towel, soap, mirror, loo seat, shower curtain – and the shower was no more than a sporadic drip. Apart from that last, such ‘lacks’ don’t bother me but when a daughter appeared, speaking basic English, it seemed kind to warn her that some fussy foreigners, if charged the top rate for this accommodation, might complain to officialdom. She took my warning with a light laugh; maybe her parents had ‘an arrangement’ …
Although the mogote-studded Viñales Valley attracts so many tourists, the town itself seems indifferent to Cuba’s new industry. There was not a souvenir shop to be seen, or an open-air café featuring ‘traditional’ music, or a tourist office or taxi rank. The long pine-lined main street, of red-tiled, one-storey, porticoed houses with deep verandahs, is being officially preserved as a classic example of a colonial agricultural settlement. As some guide-books complain, there is ‘nothing to do’ in Viñales. This suited me: I needed a ‘do nothing’ day and dawdled around enjoying the nearby mogotes and noticing an unusual concentration on the Miami Five; all over the town their photographs and protesting posters were prominently displayed. Also, with the assistance of a small boy I found the beginning of the track to La Palma: this halves the road distance, making for an easy day’s walk.
Being again in a supervised area, my track plan was thwarted in the first hamlet en route. A panting middle-aged woman pursued me. Where was my guide? No guide? She frowned and sighed and patted my shoulder sympathetically before turning me around: I must follow the motor-road or hire a guide. In the Viñales Valley – she consoled me – there is much for tourists to do. Everyone likes to visit the village where healing waters are sold, and the caves where runaway slaves used to hide, and the underground lakes where the fish are blind – and so on. At one of the hotels I could hire a guide. Thanking her for her advice, I took a short-cut to the main road, through tobacco fields.
The wide Viñales Valley and its numerous side-valleys (of which I was now being deprived) are populous and prosperous, the red soil fertile, the mogotes improbable – Nature at its most eccentric. ‘Mogote’ means ‘haystack’: an ill-chosen simile, lacking respect and dignity. Many of these freestanding, conical limestone outcrops rise to a thousand feet and one fantasises about their having been separately transported to this flatness from some sierra’s foothills. In fact their formation is estimated to have begun one hundred and sixty million years ago. All are domed and sheer-sided and vividly green, supporting an immense variety of trees, shrubs, lianas, mosses, epiphytes, ferns. This specialised environment wildly excites a whole range of ‘experts’. Here are more than twenty species of endemic flora, the cork palm grows nowhere else and Chondropomete is found only at a certain altitude on a few mogotes. This snail has long, fluorescent orange eyestalks visible by night from a considerable distance and a unique self-defence mechanism; extruding a length of elastic glue, it hangs beneath rocky shelves. (As I scratched, I wondered if my invaders are also something special, endemic to that sandy plateau.) Thrice I sat at a mogote’s base, gazing up in awe at its dense variety of vegetation, exhibited on so small a space.
Now hitch-hiking was inevitable; Cuba’s least hot months (January and February) were over and I couldn’t walk eighteen miles on that shadeless tarred road. At a junction ten miles from La Palma, I joined several would-be passengers in a collapsing bus-stop shelter surrounded by acres of tobacco, malanga, yuca, sweet potatoes. One man spoke English – Raúl, a high school teacher on his way home to La Palma. Within half an hour two young men had jumped aboard a horse-cart going towards Viñales, then a young woman got a ride on a motor-bike. When an ambulance appeared Raúl waved and shouted and pursued it, then vigorously beckoned me. We were in luck, the driver was his cousin and the ambulance was off-duty having just delivered a patient to Pinar del Rios’s cardiac unit. Proudly Raúl showed off the paramedical equipment which reminded me of the control room of a nuclear power station. According to the statistics, patients rarely die in Cuban ambulances, whatever their fate on arrival. Raúl remarked that if the government has to choose, because of the US blockade, between the health service and public transport, he regards spending hours by the roadside as a lesser evil. An admirable attitude, yet it worried me. Using the blockade to explain all Cuba’s difficulties is a thought-stopper. Cubans need to be asking, ‘What else has gone wrong?’
La Palma – about the same size as Viñales but off the tourist trail – has no hotel or casas particulares. As a leading citizen known to everybody (many his past pupils), Raúl set about breaking the law on my behalf with the assistance of a young army officer who recommended a certain casa on condition I paid in national pesos; were the family noticed spending convertible pesos they could be in trouble. The more I saw of the dual currency system the more it exasperated me.
As we walked through dreary streets to a pleasantly rural suburb, Raúl gave me some disappointing advice. I had hoped to find a track from La Palma into the Sierra Rosario but – ‘only with a guide … ’ Raúl, himself an enthusiastic hiker and amateur botanist, recommended instead a three-day walk from Bahia Honda to the little town of Los Arroyos a few miles from San Cristobal. He knew those mountains well, it was a clear path and if I kept well away from Soroa, where ecotourism was being developed, I should escape observation.
Outside the four-room casa non-particular, Raúl paused to ‘explain’ the family: a white octogenarian abuelo who had been senile for some years, his much younger mulatto wife, their two sons, a daughter-in-law and a grandson. The older son, Juan, worked in an agricultural co-op; his wife, Odelia, was a vet. Jorge, aged twenty, was jobless and a bit of a problem; Raúl left the problem undefined.
My arrival bewildered everyone but recovery was rapid. Raúl didn’t linger: he had to attend what he described as ‘a local democracy’ meeting.
Behind the living-room, with its TV set and floor of polished cement, a small dark kitchen held a large fridge (Soviet made, long since defunct, now a cupboard), a homemade tin wood-stove and a chipped sink. Everything looked dingy, rusty, cracked, dented – but spotlessly clean. As in Jagua, the fully furnished bathroom was waterless. The verandah served as a fifth room where abuelo sat in his rocking chair, dribbling slightly and wearing a vague, sad smile while his wife chopped vegetables and sifted rice, keeping one eye on the year-old who had just begun to walk and was often held up to kiss his grandfather. As the family went to and fro everyone (including the problematic Jorge) paused to greet abuelo, to check that he was sitting comfortably, to dry his chin, to ask if he needed a drink – or just to stroke his forehead. This was a poor household in material terms but otherwise rich.
At sunset Odelia summoned me to eat in the kitchen at a little table under which sat a hopeful black and white cat very like my own beloved Francis; he stimulated a rare pang of homesickness. Soon his hopes were fulfilled: the boniness of the fish course defeated me. But the rice and chicken wing and green tomato salad were delicious.
Jorge didn’t seem to resent being ousted from his room, a lean-to shed off the kitchen, its camp bed beneath an unshuttered window. Outside, within arm’s length, a magnificent fighting-cock occupied a spacious cage and crowed aggressively from 12.50 a.m. but the tick bites were keeping me awake anyway. They bled that evening, surely a positive development – poison being eliminated.
The next day’s heavily overcast sky made it possible to walk the twenty-four miles to Playa La Mulata on an equine earth-track beside a traffic-free road. This was a subtly tinted landscape of palm-filled hollows and goat-supporting hillocks, new-ploughed tobacco fields, coffee groves, orange orchards and paddy-fields. From these last rose swarms of daytime mosquitoes – and whoever said mosquitoes don’t go for moving objects was wrong. That day’s most durable memory is of a pearly grey sky above the navy blue Sierra Rosario above sloping expanses of orange ploughland.
In the little town of Playa La Mulata the vibes were rather disagreeable. Why do I say that? What right does one have t
o judge a place on fifteen minutes acquaintanceship? But that’s too wide a debate for here and now. Let’s just say that at 5.40 p.m. on 7 March those residents of La Mulata I chanced to meet didn’t like me. (And come to think of it, why should they?)
A signpost directed me to the only casa particular (two kilometres) and to a simple cliff-top motel (three kilometres) – the latter, alas! forbidden to foreigners. Mentally I congratulated the authorities who had reserved for Cubans this superb coastal stretch, undefiled by developers. But Pedro, the son of the casa particular, later pointed out that jagged rocky shorelines do not appeal to tourists. Beautiful they may be, but not economically viable. That phrase caught my attention and I discovered that Pedro, through a cousin in New Jersey, was doing a business management correspondence course.
Outside this substantial tiled farmhouse, its six rooms high-ceilinged and bright, a flock of noisy turkeys gubble-gubble-gubbled under lime and mango trees while beside the verandah a sow nursed ten two-day-old bonhams. In the dining room and front parlour china cabinets were filled with cut-glass brought back from ‘reward’ trips to Czechoslovakia and gay tiles patterned the floors. Marta, a tabby cat, rarely left her cushioned chair in the parlour where a nylon rice sack draped the TV, even when Roberto and Angelica were sitting in front of the set, listening attentively. Pedro explained. TV images greatly agitated Marta whose first litter was imminent. Her owners had diagnosed ultra-sensitivity to unnatural movements and lighting effects. Pedro, smiling indulgently at his parents, diagnosed premature senility.
The register revealed that I was the first guest in over three months. Hence the low tariff: CP19 for B&B, the breakfast a sustaining three-course meal served at 6.30 to convenience me.
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