Day 11 — Zeds, Zeal and Zen

Wak­ing up late I busied myself by pack­ing in read­i­ness to leave Trin­idad tomor­row as well as shav­ing. With the morn­ing slip­ping away and not know­ing when he had returned to the casa, I woke Matt up at half past nine for break­fast then we set about try­ing to organ­ise trans­port to Havana; some­thing Matt was reluct­ant to do given how good a time he was hav­ing. We found the bus sta­tion thanks to a perky, Eng­lish speak­ing tour oper­ator but after much debate, decided on a taxi from our Casa at three o’clock tomor­row after­noon giv­ing plenty of time to bid farewell at the beach. With no accom­mod­a­tion booked for Havana (the dom­in­eer­ing lady from Hol­guin had ceased her phone-calls at Sancti Spir­itus) we unsuc­cess­fully tried to con­vince the tour oper­ator to organ­ise us some, pro-bono of course.

Before head­ing towards the beach we stopped off at the super­mar­ket to grab our usual ration of water; on our way we spot­ted a west­ern look­ing tour­ist group film­ing a school classroom through a win­dow at arm’s length, it cer­tainly wasn’t some­thing I would have con­sidered a tour­ist attrac­tion and came across more as voyeur­istic than genu­inely inter­est­ing. Even before we had a chance to choose a taxi for our jour­ney to the beach, Matt was greeted by one of the drivers who recog­nised him from the night before when he had tried to find his lady friend in Cassilda. Pil­ing into the taxi, the driver first hurtled through the streets of Trin­idad with little regard for anybody’s safety, ourselves included, then took us the scenic route to the beach tak­ing us through La Boca which looked pleas­ant enough for a ten house ham­let. In the dis­tance we could see what looked like the dive boat which meant the dive hut was quiet and empty by the time we arrived.

The secur­ity guards were out in force today and it took pre­cise tim­ing to slip by them into the hotel swim­ming pool toi­let, ordin­ar­ily reserved for guests only. After which I settled down with a book only to be outed twenty minutes later to which I respon­ded by mov­ing fur­ther down the beach, evid­ently they were either intensely bored today or they had changed their routes. Being ous­ted again a couple of hours later annoyed me enough to sit against the palm-tree leaf para­sol in the sand, simply to spite the guards who were so pre­cious about the abund­ant sun loun­gers. Matt mean­while had gone with a small group on the after­noon dive at some far off location.

Break­ing from read­ing I wandered down the beach more out of interest than any­thing else, almost crest­ing the pen­in­sula but stop­ping when I felt the sun cook­ing my legs; this would be a short excur­sion I would regret for the rest of the hol­i­day. Snap­ping a few pho­tos I headed back and awaited the return of the dive boat which arrived with little fan­fare and duly depos­ited a very unwell Matt. I headed back to the Casa at around half past five, fol­lowed an hour later by a still queasy Matt. After a brief snooze tea was ready which con­sisted of a dubi­ous assort­ment of prawns as well as the usual gar­nishes of fruit and vegetables.

After food, Matt lurched around the room in the casa, still not 100% but intent on going to woo his lady friend in Cassilda, along the way he man­aged to con­vince Madeline, the Eng­lish speak­ing tour oper­ator who was the daugh­ter of the casa owner, to phone a recom­men­ded place in Havana ahead of us trav­el­ling there tomor­row. It was only after he had left that Madeline came and informed me that the place she had phoned was full but there was another place she knew of that was avail­able and she would give us the address the next day. Mean­while, I under­stood just what sun­burn was as my legs became hyper­sens­it­ive to everything, includ­ing the fan which was the only item keep­ing the room cool. Slath­er­ing layer after layer of after-sun on them my legs would now be sub­ject to all sorts of inter­est­ing ail­ments that would last over a week after I trav­elled back from Cuba.

With the taxi arriv­ing in the after­noon, I had to decide whether to indulge in one last dive before depart­ing, pos­sibly eras­ing the memory of my mis­haps on my last dive. While pon­der­ing this I man­aged to find a selec­tion of Eng­lish books in the casa that seemed to have been left there by guests or pos­sibly gif­ted to the owner; the only one I thought pos­sible to read in a single night was the nov­el­iz­a­tion of “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Bar­rels”. While I hadn’t seen the film, being able to churn through the book in a few hours was test­a­ment to its qual­ity (or lack thereof), espe­cially for someone who isn’t a vora­cious reader such as myself.

Matt cer­tainly seemed des­pond­ent leav­ing Trin­idad and the hedon­istic life­style but under­stood that it was prob­ably neces­sary; I did men­tion the option of stay­ing put while I went on to Havana which he declined after little thought. Truth­fully I’m glad he did but tried not to make that overtly obvi­ous. After a short spell Matt returned hav­ing no luck find­ing his girl hav­ing been fobbed off by her sis­ter or somesuch, for the first time in a while he would be get­ting a full night’s sleep. ¶