TRAVEL AND LIFESTYLE DIARIES

One of the things we did in Vinales was horseback riding. It was Blondine’s fabulous idea, she really, really wanted to ride a horse on the valley. So we made it happen. Luckily there were enough horseback riding activity offers in the valley. Our hotel, Los Jazmines , offers this activity as well for a minimum of 2 hours under the supervision of a local farmer. If I remember it correctly, it wasn’t really that expensive. We even paid it with the credit card (as well as the Viñales Tour we had the day before). This was surprisingly the only hotel we had in Cuba that accepted a credit card. So on the morning of our equestrian adventure, we first had our last picture together in our room’s balcony with the backdrop, the UNESCO world heritage Vinales Valley. We will be leaving Vinales for Havana in the early afternoon. I tell you, it is so lovely to wake up early in the morning to this view. I sat here on the balcony for two mornings just gazing out into the horizon. There were n...

Blondine and I much preferred the downtown rustic village of Vinales over Pinar del Rio . Here at Vinales we  were left alone by the locals. We were free to go around without someone following us, offering a hotel stay here, a paladar there, a tour or whatever. It was admittedly a breath of fresh air, having been harassed by these touts in Pinar del Rio. The Vinales town is about 2-3 minutes’ drive from Los Jazmines Hotel in the Vinales Valley . We spent an afternoon of chilling out with a cold mojito at the corner café restaurant beside the towns’ central plaza and church. The mood is very relaxed and laid back here. We also went to the bank here to cash in money against our Mastercard credit cards. We were quite lucky that Mastercard is accepted in Cuba because our bank cards were not accepted and we both only had 100 Euros in our wallets. You bet we almost panicked, haha. Thus, Mastercard saved our Cuban trip so to speak. They are over the counter bank transactions ...

So, we are now at our last stop of the Vinales Valley Tour. We will be doing a little bit of caving and then we will go boating inside the ‘Cuevas del Indio’ (Indian Caves). It is not going to be a long boat trip, in fact it is very quick. We will exit to a small stream, and then afterwards, the tour will be concluded with a hearty ‘Creole lunch’. But before we go inside the caves, there’s going to be some freshly squeezed sugarcane juice at the gate and there are options to make it into a cocktail by adding rum into it. I told you, this Viñales Valley Tour is a Cuban Cocktail Tour in disguise =) The Sugarcane Rum cocktail was actually quite nice. I am not foreign to sugarcane. My parent’s house in Cebu, Philippines before was ringed with hectares and hectares of land. Corn is usually planted but there were times that sugarcane was. When I was little, I used to sneak in the fields together with some girlfriends and we would cut some of the sugarcane and suck the juice out of it ju...