Friday

If you are a shopaholic you'd better not come to Cuba. Apart from the supermarket near Hotel Nacional which is probably rigged up for tourists, there are no shops. The last time I encountered this was while crossing the Namib Desert in Southern Africa. Over there it seemed quite logical because springboks have not learned to shop yet. Excluding the types wearing green and gold jersys. But in the middle of Havana it is a strange phenomenon.

The fact that there are no hardware stores is obvious when you look at the decay of the buildings. But surely people must buy their salt and vinegar chips somewhere? How do they manage without their Estee Lauder Face Masks and their Molton Brown Bath and Shower Therapy? Also, mustn't every housewife have a Tupperware to keep fresh slices of lemon for their gin and tonics?

The absence of the USA does not come as a total surprise, but not even China has found Cuba on their GPSs yet. There are a few local craft markets around the hotel selling carved wooden figurines, Fidel Castro caps and oil paintings to tourists.

The tourists are mostly from Canada and Europe but strangely enough there is not the usual onslaught of badly dressed Germans. And no Russians. Havana is definitely not child friendly so leave your kids at home in front of their X-boxes. Disneyland Havana has not been built yet, so there is not much for them to do and they can't sink down in the oblivion of alcohol like the rest of us.

Next to our hotel is the Museo de la Revolucion where they keep the boat called "Grandma", an old luxury yacht that the revolutionaries used when they entered into Cuba from Mexico. It is now the centerpiece of the museum and stays inside a glass house. I hope it doesn't decide to start throwing stones.

Trying to find a place to consume supper outside the tourist hotels is not for the faint hearted. We have tried for three nights and walked past many restaurants completely empty. Perhaps the cooks are also trying to find a shop.

Thursday

We are slowly regaining our strength and have become real tourists doing real touristy things. For breakfast today, Kirsten ate the equivalent of a year's supply to a Ugandan orphanage. Myself, I was still queasy after a night filled with daemons whispering to me that I would end up in a Cuban jail because I wrote that the security guide at the airport had bad breath.

Soon thereafter we put on our walking sandals and walked 8 km to see a statue of Jose Marti. The statue was made from marble and is bigger than Mount Etna. Jose Marti is to the Cuban people what Nelson Mandela is to the world, except that Jose Marti was never in jail and Nelson Mandela did not write poems.

The path to there went along a busy road with lots of hooting cars and general chaos. It was not so much a bumper to bumper chaos as a rather few cars moving at Schumacher speed while veering freely over six lanes chaos. We brought bicycle helmets for this trip, but gas masks would have been better. People stopped to speak to us and offered us coffee in their homes. One woman had only two teeth but she could speak French. I have not encountered that combination before.

Later in the day we moved to a hotel in Old Havana where Al Capone once rented the whole of the fifth floor, apparently to seal some Mafia drug deal. We stayed on the third floor and no drugs were involved, unless you count the Aspirins Kirsten takes when she remembers to thin her blood. Graham Greene's "Our Man in Havana" starring Alec Guinness was filmed in the hotel.

The hotel is a beautiful old Spanish colonial style building, reasonably well kept under the circumstances. It is however surrounded by blocks and blocks of beautiful colonial style, baroque, neoclassical and art deco buildings in various stages of decay. Sadly they have not seen any hammer and nail since the 50s. They just loom there as mostly empty ghosts with broken windows swaying on their hinges. "Music turned into stone" like someone once famously said. Here and there amidst these houses are charmless blobs of more recently poured concrete.

We ventured out into the streets after dark, trying to find a restaurant for a nice evening meal. The restaurant we headed for was rated as excellent by the Lonely Planet guide book, and with the best food in Havana. On arrival we found out that it was closed for sanitary reasons. The chef next door gesticulated something about rats running on the floor. After hearing that, we crawled back to our hotel and had rum and pizza.

Wednesday

One of the unwritten rules of long haul flights is that the person sitting in front of you will wait no more than two minutes into the flight before pressing the recline button on his seat and throw himself into your anterior personal space with the velocity of an Olympic diver performing a backward somersault. Luckily it is still too early for gin and tonics so you just end up bruised instead of wet and bruised. Unless you are now bleeding.

Then, just as you are getting acclimatised to the proximity of the front seat, the person behind you will start pounding the "Ride of the Valkyries" theme on his unresponsive in-flight entertainment system, rocking your head back and forth like a chicken pecking corn.

But, this was all forgotten the next morning when we woke up in the soothing atmosphere of the Hotel Nacional -- ready to take Havana by storm.

First we had breakfast served with loads of aromatic Cuban coffee and all the varieties of white bread and fiber-free pastries known to mankind. Then we discussed the plans for the day and decided to do some more discussing while laying horizontal in our comfortable beds.

Soon it became time for lunch and we were still discussing in our room while devouring the total collection of salty snacks which was planned to last for three weeks. Soon we were so thirsty that we were forced to leave the Hotel Nacionale to buy some water at the local supermarket.

In the streets we noticed the old American cars and discovered that the smouldering look, which now has become extinct in Sweden was still very much alive and thriving in Cuba. I am talking about the sort of look that James Dean had when he was looking at Elizabet Taylor in "Giant". A very hot look that would make anyone melt. That the look was actually meant for Rock Hudson is another detail.

After all the hot looks we arrived at the supermarket where they sold both frozen chicken and rum and not much in between. The people were very friendly and asked where we came from. Kirsten answered in fluent Spanish that we came from a frozen country at the edge of the map.

Tuesday

Holidays on the other side of the globe often involve intricate planning and a set of hurdles to overcome before you can finally wake up in some exotic setting where the sun is shining and the booze is cheap. 

For me, the final hurdle is walking onto an aircraft, which is always bigger than a small African country and therefore according to my logical brain unable to be air-bound for any period of time.

The air hostess then says, "Please turn right and find your seat on row 92". Not even the Sidney opera House has 92 rows... I can't hear her because my heart is beating too loud, even louder than the engines being revved up.

As I walk down the aisle that never ends I start fretting about how full the aeroplane will be and who will be sharing my personal space for the next 12 hours. Will it be the obese man that I saw in the espresso queue or will it be the family with the three screaming brats? It is never the Brad Pitt look-alike with a personality of Hemingway. That guy is probably flying the plane. 

Eventually the boarding will be completed and I will thank the gods for the empty space next to me, just to see how the last person entering the plane moves straight to my row and my next 12 hours turns into living hell. The only way to deal with the situation is the simple classic solution of alcohol and Valium.

All of the above came true yesterday when Kirsten and I found ourselves at the Charles De Gaulle airport in Paris, boarding Air France flight AF 3532 to Havana, Cuba. The gate area was crowded. The last time I saw so many people was at a Saturday morning market in Calcutta. Why on earth would all these people want to travel to Cuba? Maybe I will soon learn the answer to that.

Kirsten and I are spending the next three weeks cycling around rural Cuba after a short visit to Havana, nursing our jetlags and drinking Mojitos.

We expected it to be a bumpy ride because of the reigning storm Sandy and its repercussions on the East coast of the USA. It happened to be the smoothest flight ever. We might as well have glided on satin all the way to the Caribbean. I watched French movies and Kirsten watched Woody Allen being neurotic in Rome and 'Salmon fishing in the Yemen'.

Entering Cuba was as easy as the Pope entering Vatican City. The expected horror stories of interviews in dark rooms with and without gloves never happened. After passport control it was a safety check again and against all odds I was allowed to take my 300 ml of water into the country. Kirsten was stopped by a security guard and he opened her bag. He ignored her collection of stage three prescription drugs but paused at her breath refreshment tablets. She offered him one but he politely declined, despite his vile cigar breath. 

The bumpy ride started when it was luggage collection time. The bags appeared on the carousel at the same pace as Syrian refugees entering Sweden. One per minute. My bag arrived last. Maybe because it was the biggest. It had to accomodate my usual minimum of 10 pairs of shoes.

Out through 'Nothing to declare' and into the chaos of everyday Havana. The next ordeal was to change Euros into the local CUC's. Spelled with C not K. It was a stampede only to be exceeded by the queue into West Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Then the mandatory hell ride into town by local taxi. We saw only one accident and found ourselves on the wrong side of the road only for half a kilometer. We were heading to the oasis of Havanas best hotel, the Nacional. Unfortunately it has seen better days and this is not a good prognosis for our future sleeping arrangements in this country.

The room was as dark and as cold as any winter on Greenland. The air conditioner sounded like a jet plane starting on a runway but at last we could stretch out between white sheets and dream of Brad Pitt with a personality of Hemingway.