Varadero, Cuba

[Stevo985]

After the usual debating of holiday destinations, it seems I've won for once and I'm heading to Cuba with the missus in June for 2 weeks, specifically Varadero.

 

Anyone been? Any tips or things not to miss?

Already scoped out a trip to Havana.

[tonyh29]

Been there

 

It's a couple of hours transfer from Havana if I recall .. loved the fact that even though we had a private transfer the driver would stop and pick random people up on the street and drop them off a few miles down the road ( seems to be the done /polite thing in Cuba)  .... usually involved someone getting in smiling and making baby faces at our little one who was about 2 at the time  , us shearing some sweets with them and then a polite thank you and goodbye as they got out

The beach is Ok .. the sea was pretty much empty of fish ... I spent hours snorkelling around looking for conch shells and didn't see more than about 4 fish ... they do however run you out to a nearby reef in a boat and that's got the usual amount of tropical fish to enjoy .. I even saw a small shark and had a little swim with him before he got bored and swam off

nice sunsets if I recall

 

Excursions - Mrs h and I did a trip put in the Mangroves , which involved driving speedboats through mangrove trees and a short stop at some form of animal sanctuary ... was enjoyable enough , the boy racer in you will want to get every last bit of speed out the boat

Also did a day trip to Havana , definitely worth spending some time there  , maybe even see if you can get a twin centre trip and have a couple of nights in Havana ? it's got all the old cars , street markets and a nice sort of general vibe to the place

I believe you can do a swim with dolphins trip and also the usual go see the local people  , but tbh we mainly spent it in the resort just chilling

One tip is to take loads of packets aspirins / medicines and little packets of sweets ... you leave a small gift of them each day on the bed for the chamber maids  ... and get rewarded with an elaborate artwork made out of your bathroom towels  .... Medicine as simple as aspirin  was scarce out there when we went , this situation may well have changed  , but I'm sure a quick trip advisor search will update you on that front ...

I'd like to go back to Cuba and explore it a bit more than I did during my visit

[Stevo985]

Cheers Tone, I may as well DM you when I start these topics

I think we fly straight to Varadero, so a 30 min transfer. Not bad.

I'd heard the snorkelling was good on the beach, but I had heard the same thing about that nearby reef. Will be doing that as I've never really snorkelled before.

The Havana trip we're looking at is a guided tour. They pick you up in one of the old cars and yo uhave a tour guide the whole day. Works out about £50 each for the day. I think the hotel do overnight trips to Havana so we'd have that option too.

I'll look into the mangrove trip  

 

I'm chuffed we're going with this. The all inclusive to please the other half, but an interesting country to please me!

 

[tonyh29]

If you've not seen it previously , Chris Tarrant did a railway journey around Cuba .. wouldn't suggest you necessarily follow in his footsteps but it gives an interesting insight in bits of Cuba you may not have seen before

[sharkyvilla]

I went to Cuba last year but it was further east at a place that's only open for tourists, not locals, round where Ernest Hemingway lived.  It was a really nice place to spend a relaxing week but it was too far for us to go to Havana, which was a shame.  Can't go wrong with the Carribean really, though I think I preferred St Lucia (for testing my batting skills against some pretty nifty local bowlers in beach cricket as much as anything).

[Stevo985]

14 hours ago, sharkyvilla said:

I went to Cuba last year but it was further east at a place that's only open for tourists, not locals, round where Ernest Hemingway lived.  It was a really nice place to spend a relaxing week but it was too far for us to go to Havana, which was a shame.  Can't go wrong with the Carribean really, though I think I preferred St Lucia (for testing my batting skills against some pretty nifty local bowlers in beach cricket as much as anything).

Was it the Cayos? Cayo Coco or Cayo Santa Maria, somewhere like that?

 

We looked at that first as that's where all the resorts are, think the other half preferred there. But I wasn't about to go to Cuba and not visit havana and, as you say, it's a fair old trek from that side of the country.

Varadero should give us the best of both. In the resorts but close enough to go and explore places like Havana.

[Stevo985]

It's funny because our first choice was Cuba, months ago, and then we've gone pretty muc round the world discussing destinations and arrived back at Cuba.

I had to convince her that she won't get the Zika virus and we won't get blown away by a hurricane (going in June) but I think she's convinced  

[peterms]

I'm just back from Cuba a couple of weeks ago.  Really interesting place, though I found the heat challenging even at this time of year, which the locals seem to regard as comfortably cool.

We went to Havana, Vinales, Trinidad and Cienfuegos, staying in family homes.  We had two of our sons with us, one of whom is comfortable with Spanish and the other who is fluent.  We would have struggled without them because very few people speak any English and I hadn't managed to fulfill my aim of learning some Spanish before I went.  Maybe it's different in resorts, but we didn't go anywhere like that.

The people are really nice, friendly and helpful, except when they are working in some kind of customer service capacity in banks and bigger shops.  Guards in banks and many shops will literally slam the door in your face, or people serving from a hatch will close the hatch without a word of explanation and reopen it 20 minutes later and resume serving, and people accept it as normal, where over here there would be a good chance of an assault. It's bizarre, and I still don't understand the contradiction between the personal warmth and the officious behaviour.  People in smaller shops and restaurants aren't like that - it's something about controlling access.  We also had a problem booking a bus from one town to another, where the woman refused to sell us tickets because they had to be arranged a day beforehand.  There was no discernible reason why this would be, and it just seemed that there was in some situations a really officious and bureaucratic mindset that was completely at odds with private behaviour.

The queuing system is unusual.  It looks like there is no queue and just a random mob of people waiting to get into the bank or whatever.  But there is a queue, it just doesn't form a line like we do.  You have to ask who is the last person by saying "El ultimo?".  Someone will identify themselves, and you are then next after that person.  When the next person arrives, you need to identify yourself as the last in the queue.  If you don't do this, you can stand there all day and they will not recognise that you have joined the queue.

The internet is a nightmare (again, maybe resorts are different, I don't know).  You have to queue for maybe an hour and a half to buy a card to access the wifi, which only works in public squares.  The cards are for one hour or five hours.  If I went again, I would buy a stock of 5-hour cards to save more queuing.  Take your passport, because they record your details and cross-reference the passport, the card number, and the IP addresses you visit.

We found restaurants to be hit and miss, ok at basics but the food generally pretty bland, to the point where I cut up some dried chillis and took them everywhere with me to use as seasoning.  Often a better shout was to get ordinary families to cook for you.  When we stayed in Vinales we were spread around three houses because each had only one spare room.  We asked if they could do a meal, and the three women had a quick conference to agree what they would offer and who would do what, and we came back later to find they had done a real spread which was good quality and better value than a restaurant - though again, pretty lacking in spicing.  We had good family meals in a couple of other houses as well.  In restaurants, lobster is about the same price as fish where over here it's much dearer, so we had that a few times.

They like their music, and often there are people playing in the restaurants, some of the Buena Vista Social Club material and other traditional stuff.  We gave one old guy a good tip and he did some more songs for us, including "Comandante Che Guevara".  One place we stayed, the patron was very keen on music and started playing us the Beatles.  The next morning he got his guitar out and held an impromptu jam session with our son.  A German tourist wandered in the open door to leave his bags (he was staying that night), and started filming it on his phone.

We found a good taxi driver, unofficial, who we used repeatedly and who gave us better rates than stopping someone in the street.  When he got to know us a bit, he was happy to have some in-depth discussions about daily life, which is where having someone fluent with us was helpful - we wouldn't have learned any of that otherwise.

Driving behaviour is better and more considerate, and certainly less aggressive, than the UK.  Partly it's the poor roads and the need to be careful with the old motors, I expect.  Motorway journeys will entail meeting people cycling the wrong way on your side of the road, people crossing six-lane roads in a horse and cart, and people standing at the side of the road holding up half a dozen cooked chickens in case you fancy a snack.  Repairs to the overhead gantry are done by putting up a ladder, parking a truck in front of it as a health and safety measure, laying a couple of branches behind the truck as a warning to oncoming traffic, and climbing the ladder while the traffic whizzes past.

Generally we found the place pretty relaxed, and never felt we had to be cautious and aware of people around us as you are in many places - we never felt uncomfortable like in many places in the UK.  Yet there seemed to be a presumption that there were thieves everywhere, with shops carefully controlling the people going in and checking receipts as they left.  But we had no problems at all, and the closest we came to any hassle was the number of people shouting "taxi, taxi" at us, or stopping and sounding their horn as though that might prompt a sudden desire on our part to get a taxi.

One tip.  On the plane, they make you fill in a card to say if you are bringing in any controlled materials.  Don't do what my partner did.  She ticked the boxes to say she was bringing with her fruit and vegetables, pornography, drugs, weapons, and live animals.  Luckily we found out before landing and filled in another card, or we might still be trying to explain.

However I did find when we arrived that she had brought with her six pints of milk, on the basis that she doesn't like black coffee and wouldn't like the local milk.  She froze them and packed them in an ice bag, reasoning that the hold of the plane would keep them frozen and we could quickly get them into a freezer where we were staying.  And so we travelled round Cuba with a gradually depleting stock of semi-skimmed, which kept her going until about a day before we returned.  Daft old bugger.

[sharkyvilla]

23 hours ago, Stevo985 said:

Was it the Cayos? Cayo Coco or Cayo Santa Maria, somewhere like that?

 

We looked at that first as that's where all the resorts are, think the other half preferred there. But I wasn't about to go to Cuba and not visit havana and, as you say, it's a fair old trek from that side of the country.

Varadero should give us the best of both. In the resorts but close enough to go and explore places like Havana.

Yes it was Cayo Guillermo.  I think it'd we'd stayed ten days we'd have done the trip anyway, it's probably easier by boat as to get there by car you have to back on yourself for about and hour to get back to the mainland then drive all the way across to Havana.  I agree with Peter, the most Communist bit I found was the Cubans love a good 'system' i.e. a pointless way of making something quite simple overly complicated, for example waiting for the luggage at the airport instead of letting people wait for their stuff on the conveyer belt a couple of men were there taking it off and dumping it in the middle of the floor meaning you had to rifle through hundreds of bags.  It took forever.  I like it hot so the weather didn't bother me, though it was quite windy to cool it down a bit.

[Stevo985]

Cheers both, really good stuff.

@peterms I'm a bit worried about the heat myself. It's not so much the temperature, but the sweat. it's going to be humid in June. I went to Mexico in June and sweated like a really bad person, and this is going to be worse. I'll survive though.

I speak a little spanish. Not enough to have proper conversations, but enough to get by in restaurants and asking for directions and other things so i think I should manage in the towns. I've got by in Seville and Madrid in the past, where not many people spoke English (Seville especially), so I should be ok.
But we're staying in a resort anyway so I'm sure they'll speak English there, it'll only be when we venture out.

I've heard the same about the food. It seems Cuba in general doesn't really do much good food. However again the resort we're going to book is "5 stars" (the quotation marks are because I understand Cuban 5 star isn't exactly like 5 stars elsewhere in the world!) so the food should be of a decent standard, relatively speaking.

About the thieves thing, I think that's why there's actually no theft there. I'm only going by what i read, but apparently theft is so strictly policed, and the punishments so severe (7 years in prison for basic theft, again just going by what i read) that nobody really does it. it's allegedly comfortably the safest caribbean island in terms of crime (of great comfort to my paranoid other half)

[Stevo985]

I'm not going anymore

Maybe next year