Cuba: Trinidad

Trinidad, the last stop on our trip, feels like a colonial snapshot back in time with cobbled streets and tiled rooftops. Like I have described many times, it is another completely different city to the places we had visited on our journey here. Exhausted from our jeep excursion through the mountains (and of course our engagement!) we had a rest in our new casa before heading out for dinner at La Cubita, with a celebratory rum cocktail or two. Over our time in Trindad was had delicious home dinners at our casa and enjoyed another ropa vieja in Restaurante El Dorado.

We had four nights in Trinidad and spent the first of our full days exploring the streets. Perhaps for the first time on our trip, we noticed the number of tourists that were arriving into the city on tour buses from Havana, but no wonder when you have a well-preserved historic town. There are souvenir shops a-plenty but if you sought them out there are beautiful artisans selling their hand-thrown pottery as well as contemporary painters. For architecture or urbanism geeks, there is a scale model of the city, Maqueta de Trinidad, where the guide gave us a great description of the development of Trinidad, and I translated from Spanish into English for Dan! For some beach time, Playa Ancon is a short drive or 40 minute cycle from the centre of Trinidad, so we spent a relaxed day down there too.

A highlight of our time in Trinidad was taking salsa dance classes, that our host organised with a colleague of her husband (as is the case in Cuba, everyone know someone). He came to the casa over two nights and up on the balcony taught us the basics of the dance. I've danced salsa before, but Dan was a complete newbie and realised soon in how the man is really in control of the dance, and has to work pretty hard! In the evening we headed up to the central square, where up the sweeping steps in the open air, the Casa de la Musica has live music and everyone is either sitting enjoying a drink, watching the performances or joining in the dancing… and with our new dancing skills, we had a go too! Music and dancing are integral to life in Cuba, and after some Dutch courage, I'm glad we joined in too.