04/04/2019 – Travel day, London to Cuba

2 hours of sleep in and our alarms were going off. Time for a quick shower before our bus… or so we thought. As I stepped out the shower there was a knock at our door and mum said we were late. In their dressing gowns she and Trudie grabbed my bag, dad and Pete (in their pyjamas) called the lift and josh and I mine swept the room and ran down to the bus. Mum and Trudie had managed to hold the bus for us, and Josh and I ran through a crowd of people cheering us on. We made it by the skin of out teeth! No time for emotional goodbyes, but a few quick final pecks and squeezes and we were waved off by everyone outside the front of the hotel. As I waved back at mum I realised she was waving with my swimming costume in her hand. Never mind, I had a further 2 in my rucksack – packing light is not my forte!

We found the Eurowings check in counter, and were asked for our Cuban tourist visas (which we didn’t have!). Fortunately I had email evidence that the airline had promised to provide them at our stopover in Dusseldorf, and if it weren’t for this email the check in lady wouldn’t have let us board! Straight through security, and to Leon for some breakfast and Wi-Fi. Much to my resistance Mum pressured me into getting find my friends on my phone so she can stalk me whilst I’m away and we thought Google translate could come in handy seeing as our Spanish is pretty basic. A cheeky few squirts of some perfume, some last minute goodbye calls/messages and we were waiting to board, still buzzing with excitement. First stop Dusseldorf (of course!). On the flight we were sat next to a geezor called Luke who was a similar age and was also going to Cuba. We got chatting– turns out he knew nothing of the Cuban tourist Visa either, so we made it our mission to sort it out together as the three musketeers once landing in Dusseldorf. Luke had lost a leg after kneeling on a mine in Afghanistan and had plenty of interesting stories to tell us, both pre incident in the military as a paratrooper, but also post incident as an amputee – he is a qualified rescue scuba diver and also a solo skydiver, has done lots of travelling, and has even left one of his old prosthetic legs in a bar in Thailand – people drink out it as part of a drinking game! We sorted the Visas together and continued to chat with a coffee until it was time to board the plane for Cuba. Josh and I were sat in a two-seat lane together and got cosy and napped for the first half of the flight. We didn’t realise we had bought the most basic flight fare so we weren’t provided with any food or drinks on board. The diet starts…now! Luckily we had brought the ipad with a whole load of entertainment downloaded, as you had to pay for on flight entertainment. We watched the Michael Jackson documentary that lots of people were talking about back at home, and the flight seemed to pass pretty quickly. It was hot but spitting with rain when we landed in Havana. We regrouped with Luke and went through passport control and luggage reclaim together. We all went to find some Cuban currency, which you can’t get outside of Cuba. There are two currencies running alongside one another here – the CUC (for tourists) and CUP (for locals) which are sometimes interchangeable and sometimes not. 1 CUC is 24 CUP. We got 250 CUC in exchange for 200 GBP. Luke found his pre organised transfer to his hotel, and Josh and I were swept up by one of the many taxi drivers trying to get us into their cars. We were given a quote for our fare and I tried my most friendly but very basic Spanish on the taxi driver - he seemed fairly uninterested in me asking how he was! Our car was a pretty standard yellow taxi, but at the airport there were loads of the classic old Cuban cars! They are everywhere. They are huge! We got in our taxi and I showed him the address of our casa we were headed for. There was a very… very… VERY long and uncomfortable silence whilst he studied the address/map we had given him. Eventually he said that for 5 more CUC he would probably be able to find it. By this point, after 20 hours of travelling, we gave in and agreed, just get us into bed! We drove through the most incredible pink and orange sunset – probably the best sunset I have ever seen, the old colourful Cuban architecture silhouetted by palm trees and punctuated with the locals hitchhiking. I had read that in Cuban culture it is impolite to blow your nose in public so poor josh struggled for the whole journey, trying to subtly wipe with his t-shirt. We pulled up in a narrow street full of locals sat on their porches, music blasting, and kids playing in the road. I knocked on the door and peered through the window to a lounge with three ladies sat watching TV. We had made it! A lady called Susannah let us in, introduced us to her mother and her grandmother in law who also live here, and showed us to our room. We have a double bed, a fridge, a fan, a balcony with a couple of chairs and a bathroom. We freshened up quickly and ventured out to find some dinner, warm enough for us to just wear shorts and tee shirts. It became apparent very quickly that resources here are pretty scarce, and we had no map to go by! Eventually we found a little restaurant in old Havana that served us some rice and chicken and then bed was calling us. We got approached by many locals asking where we are from and wanting a friendly chat – we definitely stand out like a sore thumb here! The funny thing is that they reference Ali G when we say London, which just seems like an amusing reference! Somehow we managed to find our way back to our casa, showered and crashed out in bed with a little fan blowing on us to try and keep cool.