Last one to the oil refinery is a sissy!

February 18, 2008

PLAYA JIBACOA - "I know," someone must have said. "There's a really open and smelly road out to the oil refinery and back... Let's go that way!"

For us, there wasn't much choice. We wanted to get further along the north coast before cutting southwards to the Caribbean and the Bay of Pigs. But the local bike club had the choice of any road they wanted and of any direction except north, which would have put them in the sea, of course. Imagine our surprise, then, when a string of riders followed by a man on a motorbike, holding two spare wheels, came past us on this not especially appealing road.

Everyone shouted a greeting as the group passed, and those who had tailed off up the road and were sitting by the roadside waiting for the others to come back waved and shouted again. They all looked the part but they weren't going all that fast. I accelerated a little and despite my bags I held their pace, although maybe 10 metres back. The presence of the spare wheels suggested a training ride but the speed said a social outing - which made the choice of road all the stranger.

There is oil in Cuba and the nodding-donkey pumps and the concrete areas with red hydrants rising and then drooping like dying tulips prove the point. If you have the choice, ride the road with a tailwind. Not only will you get it over and done with faster but the fumes from the great steaming, whistling oil works with all its political slogans won't reach you. For us, confronting a face wind, they got stronger and stronger for a couple of hours.

We knew from the start that this was going to be a short day. The accommodation problem means choosing overnight towns that have a bed to offer. That in turn means thinking several days ahead to avoid being stuck between two distant places with no greater wish than to crawl into a ditch and die.

We were glad it was a short day, too, because we were feeling the effects of last night's stress of finding somewhere to sleep, of the hard ride from Havana, and from not having eaten quite enough. We pulled off the road and into a long village street of rambling brick and breezeblock houses, each as different from the neighbour's as the wildest imagination could make them, the entire population out on the street just chatting, walking, playing soccer. We bought sandwiches in one of those seemingly empty cafés we have become used to and we drank cold water because the only alternative was beer, which would have tasted wonderful but finished us for the rest of the afternoon.

The looks we get in places like this aren't hostile. In fact I have rarely met such friendly people. Rather, they're the looks you get when you ride into a village where people except to see only faces they know. The looks we attract are curiosity - none of that sensation of the bar falling silent as everyone turns to examine the stranger who's just walked in - and we probably wouldn't notice them at all except that there's a socially acceptable time for looking at someone and our oddness makes the looking last just a fraction of a second longer than normal. There is a tourist trail in Cuba, as everywhere, and it doesn't take much to leave it.

Smile and the smile is returned, wave and the wave is returned. Humans are more similar than they are different, even those dressed in Lycra and mounted on bikes.

Los Cocos: the only other westerner here is obviously crazy. Pass it on.

Tonight we are staying in another campismo, Los Cocos, built for the tourist trade and equipped with a pool that looks murky enough to have had half of Wisconsin tipped into it. But then I suppose in a land of shortages and blockades, pool-cleaning chemicals are not high on the government's mind. I think we are the only non-Cubans here, other than a strange man dressed as a Global Traveller but nevertheless in pristine hiking books who talks to nobody and stares into space. I think he may be crazy. I suspect he thinks that we are, too.

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