Feb 18, Sackville to Havana

We started off our day early on Sunday morning. I stayed up too late watching the dunk contest, so I was only able to secure 2 hours of sleep. We were up at 1:45am and driving to Halifax airport at 2am. We arrived, parked the car, and made it through security without too much hassle. We boarded our 6 am flight to Varadero and spent about 50 minutes getting the plane deiced. The flight was about 5 hours, and we landed in 22-degree Cuba. We proceeded to wait in one of the longest customs lines I had ever seen. We got to the front where they were sorting everybody, and of course, we had a family in front of us that didn’t have any of their visas done or passports out. After border security, we picked up the SIM card and waited outside the airport for our bus. It turns out most people who fly into Varadero are on a vacation package, and there aren’t many tourists riding the public bus to Havana. We waited for about an hour when the Vial bus pulled up next to the airport.  We boarded and were soon escorted off to Havana.  Both me and Abi took about an hour to sleep on the bus after the mediocre sleep the night before.  

OK, this next part was not the best travelling, and I highly recommend you not do anything we did here.  When we got off the bus, we were greeted by a bunch of men hauling us for a taxi.  Without thinking, I gave the men the address, and they said they could take us.  I asked the price, and they said $10.  Without thinking, I said that sounds great because I heard that would be about the price of a taxi.  Unfortunately, these men had bike carriages.  We biked about 6 kilometres in these stupid little things before they gave up.  They said our place was too far.  We are staying about 8km outside of the main bus terminal.  I looked at the map and it said it was still 2 kilometres to the place and I said this is too far.  They then proceeded to tell us that if we wanted to get out, we needed to pay $80.  I assume they meant pesos. I said sure.  Unfortunately, it turns out that the bikes charge $10 USD per km.  They were trying to tell us it would be $80 for each of our bikes.  After getting into a long debate about them not being truthful with us, we were untruthful with them by paying them “all our money,” grabbing our bags and walking the remaining 2 km.  I can not remember how much we paid, but I was definitely not very happy about how the trip started and that Abi was dragging her roller bag 2km up hills through the streets of Havana.

It was also raining that day; when we made it to the Villa, the nice lady who managed looked at us in total confusion as to why we were walking with all our bags.  She showed us around, and we got accustomed. The next thing we had to figure out was the conversion rate.  There is not much that is said about the money situation granted that the currency is so volatile.  We were looking at the exchange rate online, and the government maintains that 1 USD equals 25 Pesos.  This, in truth, is not at all true, but initially, we had no way of knowing the actual street price of USD.  We walked into the first restaurant that the manager recommended, looked at the menu, and saw that pasta was going for 1000 pesos.  At this point, I almost had a breakdown and a realization that we might be eating ketchup packets for the rest of the trip.  $40 for pasta; maybe this food crisis is worse than we anticipated.  Stunned we walked out of the restaurant trying to find some street food that would be cheaper and found a little burger stand.  After trying unsuccessfully to order in Spanish, a nice girl who was hanging out at the cafe came to our rescue.  She helped translate, and I asked her what her conversion was from USD to pesos.  She said the street value of 1 USD could be sold for 285 pesos.  When she told me this, I felt a weight lifted off my shoulders, and everything made sense in the world once again.  We ate out 300 pesos burgers as happy as could be.  We were able to exchange our dollars for pesos the next day at a more favourable rate with a man that the Villa was able to hook us up with. We were off to bed early that night, and I slept for about 12 hours from 9 till 9.  

The Villa

View of Havana From the Villa