the Carretera Central

methinks he doth protest too much

The flat ride to Las Tunas in the centre of the island is uneventful.  Well, apart from that fabulous pork butty.  We passed a kiosk beside a farm and noticed two or three trucks pulled over.  The drivers were all stood under the awning.  We had to stop just to see what was on offer - pork sandwiches as thick as your hand.  Salivating, we ordered two.  I think we lived off the memory of those sandwiches for some days after.  Las Tunas, it is noted in the Lonely Planet guide, is popular with Italian sex tourists.  That would explain the middle-aged and older paunchy men hanging out in the plazas.  Some were walking dogs.  The town does not feel worth more than a night, or is it just that we wish to distance ourselves from them.  The largest number of tourists to Cuba come from Canada.  This is possibly because Canada, especially during Pierre Trudeau's time, was supportive.  They stay mostly at the all-inclusive resorts on the north coast.  The second largest group of tourists is from Italy.  Presumably mostly male.

We have joined the Carretera Central once again.  The main highway through the country is quite busy here.  There's a mixture of traffic, plenty of rumbling trucks, and smoking buses, and not much width.  The landscape here is almost all farmland.  We break the journey in a small town where we find a casa mentioned in our guidebook.  It does not have a sign hanging up, and the woman who greets us doesn't bother with taking our passports to register with the local police, which is a normal procedure here.  We think she maybe lost her licence for breaching the rules.

an unusual avenue

barbed wire laundry

The casa we find in Camaguey the next day might be our favourite.  Purely by chance we knock on a door and the owner tells us she is full - and takes us to her brother's house two streets away.  We are admitted into a typical courtyard house that has been recently restored and repainted.  It's fabulous.  We stay three nights.  The lovely owner runs the place with his male partner.  They are 'chaperoned' by his eldery mum.  Camaguey is full of tight narrow streets full of these houses - it feels Moorish - like an Andalucian city transplanted here.

On the long boring road to Ciego de Avila we meet another cyclist, an Aussie called Manuel, going in our direction.  There's headwind and it's a drag, so we stop for breaks and chat a little.  But when we stop for lunch he is ahead of us and we lose him. We wander around the town centre after finding a room for the night in search of food.  We are finding the same foodstuffs in most places and our evening meal is often a variation of pasta with fresh tomatoes, onions and cheese.  Not much room for variation is there?  Penne rigatoni or spaghetti?  Funnily enough Las Tunas was the only place where we could not find any pasta - how we cursed the Italian sex tourists.  In the main plaza are groups of kids and teenagers all wearing rollerblades.  They race and play tag in the cool of the late afternoon.  It's a rare occasion to see a group of kids out playing like this.

Our hosts speak some English.  It turns out that they both worked at the big hotels just north of here on the Cays - an archipelago of islands developed for upmarket tourism.  After many years they gave up the long commute in the workers buses because they had a young family.  We decide to go north, but not to the Cays.