Running: Ballybunion Half Marathon

So much for a post a day, but I'm not going to beat myself up over it (although I imagine all of you avid readers out there are devastated...), it turns out that finding stuff to write about without sounding like an opinionated moron is pretty difficult.  Particularly when you're an opinionated moron.  So sporadic posts it is until I have something interesting(ish) to say.

Anyway, yesterday I took part in the Ballybunion Half Marathon.  This was to be my first half marathon, and I can't say that I was the most prepared, both with regard to training and nutrition and time management, so basically did the whole thing like a complete cowboy.  Minus the spurs, hat and yeehaws.

Training-wise, I had been doing alright up until a few weeks ago, when I was trying to get out running at least two or three times a week.  One fine day at the end of March, I decided that instead of running around one of my usual loops in the town - ranging from 6-12km - I would run TO somewhere.  So I set my sights on Beal Strand, just outside Asdee, and, according to Google Maps, 13km from Listowel, where it was arranged that I'd meet up with Anne-Sophie and her visiting friend who would drive me back home.  I hadn't taken into account the fact that I would be using back roads I didn't really know, so the 13km turned out to be 18.9km (very nearly longer as I wavered at a junction unsure of which direction to take - thankfully I chose right).  I also hadn't realised quite how big Cnoc an Oir, the hill, or as I like to call it - mountain, between Listowel and Asdee is, or that it's another 6km or so from the peak to the shore (all downhill though).  It was a tough climb.  

A quick dip in the sea was as good as any plunge pool, although a young German Shepherd stood watching me warily as I splashed around, barking furiously as I started wading back in.  I thought he wasn't going to let me back on dry land, but soon realised he didn't know what the hell this thing coming out of the water was.  While still at a safe distance I splashed water everywhere an lurched towards him and he took off down the beach like a scalded cat.

Anyway, long story short, I took a few days to let a few little blisters heal up and didn't get out again since.  

On the nutrition side of things I finally got my list of food intolerances back from the nutritionist, basically a list of foods that I shouldn't eat for three months while my system heals up, including wheat, corn and potatoes, which meant that loading up on carbs the night before was a bit tricky.  I made a huge helping of Thai Red Chicken Curry for dinner and had half before work on Friday, putting the rest aside for the following day, but in the end deciding I'd be better served eating it at 1am Saturday morning when I got home from work and just before bed.  Breakfast on the day consisted of a couple of bananas and bits of chicken that I had cooked up for my post race dinner of curried fried rice, which I threw together before hand, because a) my intollerances would prevent me from eatingh any of the food that they had prepared for the runners at the event and b) because I would be hard pressed to get ready for work for 6 after the run.

I signed up for the race last minute, and, truth be told, I probably wouldn't have done it if a friend hadn't been driving from Tralee for it, and tore the house apart looking for running gear.

I set out at a decent pace, and kept it up until just after the four mile mark, where I started to feel the onset of blisters on the heel and toes my left foot.  I don't know if it was because I hadn't tightened the shoe properly or if that foot is the softer of the two, but I felt that if I stopped to straighten things out I would have difficulty getting going again.  So I decided to motor on and see how I went.  At that stage, with another nine miles ahead of me I just hoped I'd be able to finish.

The weather was gorgeous, although a lot of people grumbled about the heat, I always like running in the sunshine, especially with the fabulous views of the Atlantic and Shannon Estuary for the first seven miles.  A cool breeze blew in our faces for the seven miles out of Ballybunion, one consoling aspect of this being that it would be a comforting tail-wind on our way back, but by means of some bizarre meteorological phenomenon we found ourselves running against the wind on our return as well.

As I went further my pace dropped gradually as the blisters got worse and more developed on my right foot.  Having passed people pretty consistently for the first quarter of the race I was now only being passed.  Counting down the miles helped me through it, and once I got to mile eight I felt sure I'd make it.  The downhill stretch for the last mile was fantastic, and it felt great to pass the finish line in 57th place at 1:48:11, considering my estimate, based on the long run to Asdee, had been around 2 hours.  Plenty of room for improvement there I think.

I limped around looking for a first aid person to dress my aching left foot, afraid to remove my shoe until I did, for fear of what I would find.  When I finally did, the foot was significantly less impressive than I had imagined - the sorest parts being neither bloody or even showing any evidence to the casual observer (or, apparently, trained medic) of being blistered at all.  Disappointing.

I got him to dress it anyway, before gingerly sitting into the car, driving back to Listowel, showering, changing, wolfing down as much fried rice as I could, drinking a mug of coffee, sitting out and sleeping in the sun for fifteen minutes, and tearing off to work for a 10 hour shift at the counter (nipping home on my break for the rest of the rice).  Phew.

Most active day thus far, I think.

Ireland - Dumping and cleaning up.

Realise I've slipped a bit on my daily blogging.  Nine days in and only on my sixth blog entry.  I must try harder.  This one is only going to be a short one as I should really be in bed.

Anne-Sophie and I lent a hand to Listowel Tidy Towns today in their 7pm meet-up and clean-up of the town.  To be honest there didn't actually seem to be an enormous amount of litter to pick up, much less than other years, we were told, which is encouraging.

However, something that I've noticed generally is that illegal dumping still seems to be pretty common particularly in the countryside, which is unfortunate, as it utterly devastates the environment and detracts from people's (particularly mine) enjoyment of the idyllic surroundings.  I noticed on one of my runs a few weeks ago that someone had dumped two bags of rubbish into a drain beside the side road I was on.  On a random excursion to (and through, accidentally) the wind farm outside Tralee we found that somebody seemed to be using a little recess in the hill as their own personal landfill, and loose plastic bags and bottles had spread from there to a radius of several hundred metres.  Not nice.

I have heard people saying that it is "the Polish" that are responsible for the dumping - a conclusion that has been reached upon finding substantial quantities of Eastern European food packaging in bags of waste, although I'm pretty certain that the Irish aren't squeaky clean either.  I might add, however, that when we forgot to take our bins in from the street one day (in fact they had been forgotten about by our bin collection service so we were hoping that they'd come back for them - they didn't), we found two black sacks were very kindly deposited in our bin by a passing opportunist.  An examination of the contents of the bags revealed that they were not stupid enough to leave an address in there, although did confirm the presence of products that looked (to me) to be Polish in origin.  I also discovered they have a child of about two, judging from the nappy packaging, that they have at least one dog, they smoke, drink a certain brand of beer and they were complete douchebags.  The last conclusion was reached not solely from the crime of firing their rubbish in our bin (although I am glad they disposed of it there rather than chucking it into a field), but the worst of it was the fact that the greater part of the items in the bags were recyclable.  For free.  In the car park around the corner from my house.  Meaning that it couldn't be a question of price or of distance, merely a question of abject laziness and pure ignorance.  I'm getting angry just thinking about it.

I have noticed in my travels, particularly around Europe that waste disposal seems to be a service which appears to be free, although I imagine it comes out of the counties' taxes.  Skips for both recyclables and rubbish are left at strategic locations in cities and on roadsides in the country and the public can fire their unwanted items in and they are collected on a fairly regular basis.  One person's waste may even be of value, and some bits and pieces do end up being saved from the landfill - in Greece I rescued four patio chairs, two rugs and a pair of brightly coloured cushions from various skips on the streets surrounding my house.

I don't see why a similar system isn't adopted here.  It could help to save our environment and keep our tourist attractions pretty.

Cuba - Postcards

Just a short one this time to catch up (I know I've said that before but I do mean it).

Postcards - I did send them, but as usual I left it to the very last minute.  In all I think I got about six or seven out, hastily written to family and friends in a post office on my last day.  I had one postcard which displayed a close up of Fidel Castro that I had bought with a book earlier in the week but other than that I had nothing.  So after getting my rickshaw driver to carry me to several shops where we hoped we would find decent postcards, none of which I found to be much good, he carried me to the post office, where the lady at the desk showed me the postcards she had, which were sadly not very representative of the scenery or culture of the country. In fact they were crap, but they were the only options available to me at that stage, so I went for it.

It is two months since our return from Cuba, and none of my family here have received the cards that I posted.  No sign of the one I sent to work either.  Interestingly only one card made it, the one of Fidel, which arrived at my friend's house a few weeks ago.

Coincidence?  Or conspiracy.  Maybe they just looked at the rest of the cards and were afraid that the recipients would take one look at them and think the place was a complete kip.  They were really, really poor postcards.

The postcard that made it

Cuba - Money Money Money

We had learned from various source (online and in guidebooks) that it would be a good idea to change our money on our arrival at the airport in Havana in order to get the best rates.  We were also aware of the fact that there are two currencies in use in Cuba - the convertible peso (CUC$ - informally called the cuc) for tourists, and the peso (CUP - also called moneda nacional) for everyone else.  There are 25 CUP to the CUC$ and it makes it easier to charge tourists that little bit more for pretty much everything.

While it is very possible to get by with only the tourist money, we had heard that it wasn't a bad idea to carry a bit of the local currency around for buses and bits and pieces, so when I went to the currency exchange desk, I first converted the bulk of what I wanted changed into CUC$, and then handed in a €50 note and asked for that in CUP.  The lady looked at me with raised eyebrows and asked warily, "All of it?"  I nodded, somewhat nervously as I was worried that tourists weren't supposed to get the moneda nacional (technically I don't think they are) and had visions of her pressing a red button under her desk and of being taken away by security for questioning.  But she pulled an enormous stack of 20 CUP notes out of a drawer and counted them, all of them, before handing them over to me.

"Gosh, that's a lot!" I thought.

She then took an even bigger stack of 10 CUP notes out of the drawer and fed them through the counting machine and I realised that I'd be getting all of them as well.  I made a conscious effort to wind up my jaw which had dropped at this stage.  To finish she then counted out the change and it was as she was sliding this over to me that I heard Anne-Sophie at the next window asking for 50€ converted to CUP as well.  Luckily the lady serving her refused.  My girl must have been new.

I had to try and discreetly wedge this gigantic wad of notes into my pocket before waddling over to our taxi, where I sat quite uncomfortably for the journey to our Casa.  It was only after we had checked in and I offered to divide the CUP I had bought between us.  It was Anne-Sophie's jaw's turn to drop.  I can't remember exactly how much I received from the exchange, but €50 converts directly to 1,815.48 CUP, or in simpler terms 1 CUP = €0.03.  Which meant that we were going to have a difficult job getting through it, particularly as for the first day we were slow enough to spend it.  Eventually necessity made us bolder, and on day two we decided that instead of eating in a very obviously tourist place where we would be charged in CUC and usually around the €8-€10 mark, we would try a small place on a corner that seemed to have only Cuban customers.  We got a salad and a sort of scrambled egg sandwich for 7 CUP.  About €0.21!!!  Only another 1,812 to go.

It turned out to be a tremendous incentive to try new things during the trip that we probably wouldn't have even considered otherwise.  It seemed nearly every street had some small business operating out of a window, where you could buy sandwiches or pizzas for less than €0.50, and once I'd had my steroid injection after my allergies flared up I felt I could get away with a bit more food wise, so we made the best of it.  When we'd arrived for the train in Pinar del Rio we decided it would be a good idea to get some water, so on my search for that I came across a woman selling little shots of something from a flask at her front door, so I approached her and bought one for 1 CUP.  I did ask what it was first, which is a sign that I'm getting more cagey- but ever since somebody translated "shirako" sushi while my mouth was full of it I've been cautious.  The stuff in the flask turned out to be hot, sweet and strong coffee.  So good.  We also grabbed what we could from passing street vendors, sampling sweets, nuts and a kind of pop corn that were all very good, and rarely more than 1 CUP.

On our first day in Havana we had included La Coppelia an ice cream parlour in the middle of a park that our guidebook had recommended highly.  As we made our way towards the building that we assumed to be the place, a smiling man in a grey security uniform directed us under a big sign saying 'La Coppelia', and towards a covered seating area beside a stall run by a lone man in a yellow shirt.  We were relieved to find we seemed to have avoided the queues that the guidebook had warned of, but were surprised to find only two flavours of ice cream - vanilla and chocolate vanilla, with an option of a sugar syrup over it.  They cost about €3 each for a decent sized glass containing three or four scoops of ice cream which we felt was reasonable enough, although we weren't exactly blown away by it.  While Anne-Sophie went to find the loos I read the paragraph on La Coppelia again, and looked from the description of a large concrete and glass building to the small wooden hut that we had been served from and began to suspect that we'd been done.  Anne-Sophie confirmed my fears upon her return she had discovered the queues for the actual place described in the guidebook.

On our return to Havana on the morning of our flight home we left we made a point of going back and joining the queues to see what the fuss was about.  Our friend in the grey uniform once again met us and tried to direct us towards the small shack, but we politely declined.  He said it was for people paying in CUC$, but we smiled and said that we had CUP and he shrugged and let us go.  After about fifteen minutes in a queue made up of predominantly Cubans, we took two empty seats at the counter where we ordered our ice cream and paid €0.15 each for a plastic dish with five or six good scoops of ice cream (the same flavours as before) and given a bowl of sprinkles and a bottle of sugar syrup to help ourselves from before passing it to others along the counter.  We tried not to stare at the slim young lady sitting to my left who lined three of these plates in front of her and tore through them all.

The ice cream was exactly the same as the stuff we had got in the small stall, but we got so much more of it for a fraction of the price!  Furthermore we got to take part in what appeared to be a cultural activity judging from the volume of locals passing through the place constantly.  It seems that tourists are invited to skip the queue and pay
twenty times the price of the locals.  Fair deal, I guess.

In the end I got through most of my remaining CUP by paying a rickshaw driver to carry me round most of the old quarter of Havana on my last day in search of a chemist and a way of sending postcards.  I was left with about €10 worth of notes that they refused to change in the currency exchange desk in the airport, so in the end I used it to buy a small box of cigarillos as a gift.  I also kept a 3 peso note as memoir.

Cuba - Taking the Train and Hitching

Started writing this yesterday, but didn't make the deadline.  So I'm going to post it today, and it's pretty long, so I'll count it as two.  Who knows I might post two short ones another day!

On our second last day in the country we had decided that we'd take the train from Pinar del Rio back to Havana, purely for the experience and because Anne-Sophie likes trains.  We had been warned to that the trains were very unreliable and often didn't run, so we were prepared to be disappointed, so we weren't very surprised when, after waiting for twenty minutes or so in a fairly busy waiting area, someone came to announce that the train was running late.  We had been expecting to hear it had been cancelled, so this was good news.

The train eventually arrived and we walked all the way to the carriages near the front, only to discover that we had assigned seating and that these seats were three cars from the back.  This didn't matter to us as it gave us the opportunity to wander through the train and have a look around at the holes in the floor, missing windows and broken doors, many of which were left open so you could hang out of them while the train was moving.  We seemed to be the only non-Cubans on board, which was refreshing as we had felt up to then that we'd just been keeping to the tourist trail.  We arrived at our first-class (the only option we were given) seats to find that they were more or less identical in every way to the other seats on the train.  Oh, except one of them had been covered in a faux leather.  But apart from that they were the same.  We found ourselves sitting across from two ladies who we chatted to a little bit during the journey, and one of whom, unbidden, bought us a toasted sandwich from the vendor who made regular passes up and down the train with various goodies.  I was still benefiting from the cortisone injections earlier in the holiday and felt I could eat whatever came my way, so I could do the polite thing and accept.  I bought them a bun later but they refused it, so we had to have it.

The view from the rear carriage.

The train was not sound proofed in any way, the steel floor had holes in it here and there and so the noise of that filled the carriages as we made our way over the tracks was a roar that required us to shout to hear each other.  I spent some time looking out the door standing on the second step as we hurtled along, until somebody told me that the seemingly sturdy door I was using to steady myself wasn't locked in position and could open.  Eek.  Not my brightest moment.  What we noticed later was the dirt.  Anne-Sophie's white top that had been left on the seat became grey with the fumes and dust that were present in the carriage, and my beige trousers were worse again.

We disposed of our rubbish in one of the few bins to be found on the train, beside the toilet.  We couldn't bring ourselves to following everyone else's example and chucking cans and wrappers out the window.  Awfully messy.  

A few hours into the journey, having taken note of the various stops that the train had been making in tiny villages and farms, I decided that I was going to jump out at one of them once we got a bit closer to Havana.  We were due to arrive at 15:00 originally, but given the delay I figured that we would be about an hour late.  So I decided that I would disembark at 14:00 from whatever platform we happened to arrive at.  Anne-Sophie would stay on the train in order to meet the driver that was supposed to meet us at the station in Havana and drive us to the Casa Particular that our host in our last Casa had organised for us.

Dodgy Butcher

So at 13:55 I hopped out in a relatively large village (in comparison to others we'd stopped at) with dirt roads spreading in all directions.  I asked a vendor pushing a small wagon of soft drinks the direction to Havana and he gave me a description that I kind of got the gist of - one kilometre that way, junction, left, main road, five kilometres, highway.  So off I went, passing a butcher's, basically a house with various lumps of uncovered meat sitting outside in the shade, with a fan blowing over them, and bottles of some interesting looking liquid on the table beside it.

Cuban missile

Further along the road, still on foot, I passed what seemed to be an abandoned military facility, complete with abandoned missile.  I didn't want to stand around taking photos for too long, so I kept on moving.

If not THE truck I was in, something very similar...

I tried hitching for a few kilometres along the road, to no avail, until I eventually found a guy who was just finishing work and was also hitching in my direction just to get home.  He flagged down a passing truck - one of the old style American trucks, I don't know what you call them, but it was vintage - and we both got in.  Our driver was turning off in two kilometres, but it was a help.  We thanked him and jumped out and walked the rest of the way into the next town and to 'junction, left, main road'.  My new friend left me there at a bus stop telling me to wait for a taxi or a bus.  I tried to explain my intention to hitchhike, but he just shook his head, before heading on his way.

I tried hitching for a while, but in the end a taxi pulled in, and although I initially refused several of the people at the bus stop urged me to go for it, so I did, along with two others.  The system seemed to be that the taxi driver, accompanied by what appeared to be two of his friends in the front, would as far the person going the furthest, if that makes sense, and then pick other people up and drop them off along the way.  I originally asked to go to the bus station in the next town, as he was going there anyway, but when he learned that I was planning on going to Havana he said that would be no problem and that he could do it for about 1€, I decided to go with it.  I was accompanied by various passengers in the back seat during the 45 minute journey, including a girl in her late teens/early twenties, who I'm pretty sure was offering to have sex with me - so the simplified Spanish, sign-language and reactions from her friend and the guys in front would suggest.  I played the clueless non-Spanish speaker. When she got out the driver turned to ask if I would go with her, but I said no.  The guys all shrugged and we went on.

I arrived at the Casa at about 16:00.  No sign of Anne-Sophie, although at the rate the train was going I imagined that she was probably just arriving at the station. I confused the hell out of our host who had been expecting two of us, so I had to try explain in very poor Spanish and mime why I had left my girlfriend on a train, while I jumped off in the middle of nowhere and hitched my way back alone.  A very hard thing to do without sounding weird.  I don't think I managed it.

17:00 rolled on, with still no sign of Anne-Sophie.  We had made a long list of possible scenarios for meeting up again - as my phone didn't work, with meet up points at various parts of Havana at different times - at the hotel at 17:00, and if I'm not there, at the Malecon (the sea walk) at 18:00 for the sunset, and if not there somewhere else later again, even going so far as if I don't make it back by tomorrow morning, I'll meet you at the airport!  But these had all been for if I was late, so that Anne-Sophie wouldn't feel like she had to wait for me at the hotel for the evening.  We had, at no stage, considered the possibility that she'd be delayed.  But she was.

She finally showed up at 17:30 after an adventure of her own. The train had started going very slowly not long after I had jumped off, before stopping in the middle of nowhere.   An attendant came from carriage to carriage, announced something and people started getting off, so poor Anne-Sophie had to ask a policeman what the hell was happening.  He very kindly explained that the train had broken down and that people would have to get a bus to Havana.  He also cornered two rail staff who were heading the same way and told them that they were responsible for getting her back to Havana, and they did, bringing her with them to the bus stop by the airport and giving her money for the bus (about €0.10, but still).  While she was waiting for the bus, who did she see whizzing by in a taxi only yours truly!  What are the odds.  She spent a long time waiting, and then made her way to the station in order to meet the guy that was sent to wait for us, but he had obviously heard the train was out of action, because he wasn't there.  She went to a shop to ask for change for the payphone, but they couldn't exchange the tourist currency for the national currency (I'll explain more about that in another post), but the guy at the counter very nicely gave her the change she needed out of his own pocket (about €0.05, but still).  She called the Casa to explain that she was on her way, and about the train, but for some reason that message wasn't passed on to me.

We were finally reunited and went out to watch the sunset on the Malecon.

Paranoid Car Ride

Ok, very short one now as I have to get ready for work in an hour - and I'm hungry too.

Back to Cuba.

The people who ran our Casa Particular in Havana very kindly sorted out our transport to Trinidad (the Cuban town, not the island), as well as our accommodation for our stay.  Our driver, Angel, was very friendly and the trip was supposed to take about three or four hours.  

Just as we were pulling away from in front of our hostel in Havana an English couple saw Angel, came over to the car and thanked him profusely for helping them out.  Which was odd, but never mind.  

As we were leaving Havana we pulled into a petrol station, and Angel got out and waited around for a while - it seemed there was too much of a cue for the pumps, so he got back in and we drove on to another, rather more rural petrol station.  It didn't seem they had any petrol there.  So on we went.

About an hour or so into the journey we pulled into another petrol station with an El Rapido restaurant (the only fast food chain in Cuba, as far as I know).  A very well kept Chevy, with three young men pulled up beside us.  Anne-Sophie noticed it because it had an Apple logo on one of the windows, which we though was fairly unusual at the time (turns out to be quite a popular decoration).  The driver of the car got out and he and Angel greeted each other warmly and stood around chatting for a while waiting for the restrooms.

We asked if we could grab something quick to eat before taking off again, and were told it wouldn't be a problem, although it turned out it was as all they had was sandwiches, which I couldn't eat on account of the wheat, so I ended up having two very nutritious Cuban variations of Mars Bars.  Which probably had gluten in them anyway, but hey.  We bought lunch for Angel as well, and tried to make conversation.  When we made to get up to leave, he told us to relax and wait a minute, left for a minute, and then came back with sweets for us.

Once we were back on the road again, I was happily gawping out the window at the landscape, when Anne-Sophie directed my attention towards the car in front of us, and passed me her notebook on which she had written, "That's the car from before".  It did seem to be the same car, and for some reason Angel wasn't passing him out, although there was room and he had been overtaking other cars on the road.

The book and pen were hastily passed back and forth, developing into a conversation in which several theories were discussed including Angel's intention to drive us into a rural area where we would be mugged and left for dead in the Cuban countryside.  The conclusion we reached eventually was that while we were at lunch, Angel had unlocked the car allowing the men in the car to get at our backpacks in the boot.  Although our valuables were in smaller bags that we kept with us all the time, my fear was that these guys might have planted something inside our bags.  When he had stopped us from leaving the table he had gone over to the counter by the window where he had a good view of the van while he was buying the sweets, and could make sure that the coast was clear before bringing us out to the car.  We surmised that further down the road we might be subjected to a 'random' police search during which they'd find we had a big bag of heroine or something, and we'd have to bribe them to let us off.  For the duration of this discussion, the Apple car was either in front of us, or trailing behind us.

I asked Angel if he could stop the car because I was feeling sick (much miming of upset stomach), and said that I had tablets in my bag that I forgot to take (again, mostly through the art of charades) that would help.  He pulled in and opened the boot so that I could have a rummage around both the bags (including all the pockets) talking with Anne-Sophie the entire time asking her if she'd packed it etc, until, satisfied that nothing was there that shouldn't be, I pulled out my bottle of tumeric tablets the nutritionist gave me and downed one, thanking Angel for stopping and getting back into the car.  

One theory put to bed, now there only remained the possibility of being murdered in the woods, which was reassuring to a point.

Eventually, Angel pointed towards the Apple car and said, simply, "My friend", which was reassuring.  We all eventually pulled off the main road down a dirt track beside a farmhouse.  Angel got out and met the lads and one of them ran off, returning with a big drum of fuel, which they proceeded to use to fill up the tank of the van.  He explained that it was very hard to get it in petrol stations sometimes, so it was good to know someone who stocked up.

We made it the rest of the way to Trinidad without incident and without any further conspiracy theories.  We slept well that night.  Paranoia is exhausting! 

Back. Again. Cuba - the not so good bits.

I've decided to try and get back to blogging again if I can (although I can't claim to have been much good at it up to now.  My aim for this month is to try to get a blog post a day for all of April, although if I fail tomorrow I can always just say that it was all a poor April Fool.  I have a good feeling about this time, though.

I will keep today's short.

My girlfriend (oh yeah, I have a girlfriend now just so you know) and I headed off to Cuba for ten days at the end of April, and really enjoyed it, although we did seem to get caught in a chain of unfortunate circumstances.  The first day we walked around most of Havana, covering about 20K trying to see as much as we could and Anne-Sophie's (my girlfriend) feet got covered in blister's from her sandals.  My skin had been giving me trouble before I left and we had hoped that the sun and the sea would clear it up while we were away, but on the fourth day, the morning after we'd spent an afternoon at the beach in Trinidad, I woke up with swollen eyelids and cracked and weeping skin on my neck.  It was not nice.  So we had to go to the hospital where they gave me two steroid injections in the bum and another two syringes of who knows what into the arm.  They seemed to do the job, but I really don't like using steroids.  During the last two days Anne-Sophie's back went out, probably as a result of our five hours pony trekking through the vineyards of Viñales.  So she spent the very last day in agony waiting in the Casa Particular we were staying in while I dashed around Havana looking for painkillers, postcards and a post office (in that order) on the back of a rickshaw driven by a poor guy who hadn't realised what he was getting himself into when he agreed to take me.  The flight home was a bit rough, but we made it (I actually slept very well during it).

I will write more on the experience in Cuba in the coming days, including my experience with hitchhiking and also how our taxi ride in paranoia.

If in the meantime you'd like to check out Anne-Sophie's Photos (she's a photographer, did I mention).

Thanks for reading!