A press trip in the jungle is a dirty job but someone’s got to do it. Today, we left Cayo Santa María, leaving behind hotel chains, drunken Canadian tourists at our hotel bar, and the travel fair FIT Cuba all together without having swum in the ocean one single time. That’s life. It does not matter, as today was the day of exploring the heart of Cuban’s mainland – the area of the Topes de Collantesnatural park. We reached an altitude of 1,000 meters, crossed a mountain lake on a boat from another millennium, still with a large group of international journalists from all over. China, Argentina, Lithuania, just to name a few countries. This is probably the craziest press trip in the world, if we take into consideration that press trips as such are already a pretty insane thing. But here, it’s 100 people or so being bussed around and escorted by police on US style motorbikes (from Japan) and in blue Ladas. That’s Cuba; it’s a show of great hospitality, but also a display of things last seen when the Berlin wall was still up.
Regardless of all this, we were told during lunch that our trip would continue on “Russian trucks”. What does that mean? International journalist faces turned pale. Others rejoiced in nostalgia though, and you guessed it, especially the Russian delegation and their linguistic and cultural associates (=Kazakhstan) started to teach the Westerners about the assets of these machines. Unfortunately I cannot do the accent now in written form, but for this you’ll have the video. Once again, we do not really find the time for this at the moment, as our program is from 7 in the morning to 10 in the evening and once you arrive you feel like you’ve marched through the desert – even if you were basically just driven around, had to resist extreme heat and humidity, and had to eat loads of food while listening to Guantanmera and the likes. Who said Despacito? Yes, Despacito also and this a lot.
Back to the trucks: they were painted in some combat colours mixed with a Caribbean flavour. And they looked old, like from a James Bond film. You know, when the villains have some kind of army of unpredictable terror-spreaders with mean tricks and extreme cruelty - until James saves the girl. Here, we’re in friendly Cuba though and the trucks just have two purposes: to create authenticity and to steer us through the jungle down to the classy city of Trinidad, Cuba’s colonial pearl. So, the Russians were quick to explain that these trucks are “great” because they are solid and “easy to fix”. Now that’s reassuring. They also offered non-bureaucratic help should the trucks break down, which one would not expect on a press trip anyway. Still, when we visited a sugar factory yesterday and took an old-school steam train out of there, the locomotive disconnected from the rest of the carriages and that was not a show moment but rather real.
But with these Russian experts on board the trip would start in complete safety. We were in best hands of people explaining us that those trucks are from Lenin’s birthplace. That can only go down well with the Cubans. As soon as we hit the road, the rain set in, the temperature had already dropped closer to Moscow-levels because of the altitude. Pure bliss for our Russian friends, while our Cuban hosts complained about terrible cold (we are talking about something around 20 degrees). The Germans, as always in situations like this, braced stoically for the worst – which never came. It was a fun trip in the end with great views over tropical forests, stopovers at unexpected hotels such as the Kurhotel Escambray (which was built by former dictator Batista before the communist rule started and, yes, it is called that way) and, eventually, we were invited to do some zip lining. I had never done that before, but as I hung on a rope 48 meters off the ground I felt like singing “Welcome to the jungle” but then I accidentally turned around and arrived with my back first on the other side in the arms of some instructor. Not sure if I will win the zip line World Cup anytime soon. Still, the wooden stairs leading up to where we started were probably much more dangerous than the actual dangling in the air.
It was a dignified ending to this Russian road trip before we were first received with tons of food on the road leading down to Trinidad. The city’s is next, tomorrow, when I will come back with impressions in and around town. Buenas noches, everybody around me here (at least those still awake) in the hotel lobby of Hotel Las Cuevas is kind of zombified after this trip today but it was well worth it.