If I didn't mention it before, I put the date on these partially so I can remember what day it is... The days start to run together after awhile.
Today I was better, but still pretty rough. I was determined to power through it, and try not to whine along the way. The one thing I'll whine about is that I've coughed so much that now it hurts to cough. Really hurts. Like my ribs are broken.
We got up, had our breakfast, and were off to Viñales at 8a. Like Shari said in her post, there are just a lot of crazy things you see on the highway. I saw two different policemen hitchhiking to work. Entire families with suitcases hitchhiking somewhere. A group of wild horses ran in front of us and we had to stop. The billboards are all owned by the government, and had sayings like "Work Allot and Work Hard" and another with Fidel and Raul that said "Your Best Friends." I could probably devote an entire blog post to stuff you see driving on the freeway here.
We might have skipped Viñales, but alot of people told us how nice it was, and we already had a room for tonight. We only had one person say, meh, you can see it in a day. When we got here, pretty much every single house rented rooms. And it was jammed full all week. So I guess we had kinda high expectations.
Turns out, we were here a day and felt like we saw everything.
Our casa is nice enough, but we saw plenty that would have been an issue. And their listing made it sound like they were a ranch, but the reality was that he has 3 horses that he keeps in a field on the corner. The town was nice, and quaint, but they sell the same exact things in all the tourist shops. There is about a half mile of town, but it drops off pretty fast after that and you are in farm country. It was noon now and Shari was hungry, so the owners sent us to this little place up the street. Kinda expensive, but dang it was good. First, they brought us the vegetable buffet, which consisted of three different courses of vegetables. I'm sure grown down the street. Shari ordered lobster, which I thought was a bad idea, but omg she had a plate full of lobster. And not shells and claws and stuff, just straight up grilled lobster. I bet there was 5 or 6 pretty good size tails worth. For $12.
After lunch, the owner took us on a tour of the valley on his horses for a few hours. They grow a ton of tobacco here, so of course he took us to a tobacco farm, and of course we bought a box of cigars. And of course I'm sure he got a kick-back, that's the grease that keeps this communist machine running. They weren't the same quality as say, a Cohiba, but they had the same taste and at the end of the day that's what matters. We rode though several farms and saw some of the more rustic neighbourhoods, and once again it's kind of amazing how people live here. I saw an actual blacksmith today for the first time in my fifty-some years. I saw goats and chickens and bulls and turkeys and pretty much anything you can think of. There were two big farms that grew nothing but organic vegetables, both of which had restaurants in town. People get all their water from cisterns they have on their roofs Most people here still get around on horses. The downside is that you have to have a license and registration for your horse, pretty much like we do for cars. And a health card. If your horse or cow dies on your watch, good Lord you will have some explaining to do... Not to mention paperwork.
The upside is I think my Fitbit counted my horse's steps, so I had a new PR. Good to know, right?
When we got back, we walked to town and I loaded up with some more cough syrup. Shari did a little souvenir shopping, and they had a flea market in the center of town that we went to. It was a block long, and I kid you not, almost every table had the same stuff. We decided that they probably have to buy it from the government, and there is like a catalog somewhere of stupid crap for tourists. That's why it's all the same. We walked by a store that had a big old antique brass cash register, with the big ol' buttons that you push, that they refer to as a "cash register."
We went to one of the restaurants that had the organic farm for dinner, and once again it was fantastic. I think I can pretty much say all the food we've had here has been really good. The tomatoes tasted like those perfect Illinois tomatoes in the fall.
So that's it, we're back in the room at 8 and I actually wrote this on time. I feel like I've seen all of Viñales that I need to see. I think it's going to be a rough night sleeping, but I have the cough syrup, two Xanax, a Vicodin, and an inhaler lined up on my night stand. We're gonna get 'er done. One more day.
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