Cuba

We started with an afternoon by the sea, east of the city, and that same evening we were already walking the Malecón, the long seawall where all of Havana seems to come out when the heat breaks. A parade of floats was rolling along it, and the music went on late into the night.

Then two days on foot through Habana Vieja: the restored squares of Plaza de Armas, with its second-hand book stalls under the trees, and Plaza Vieja; an old pharmacy with its walls of porcelain jars; the white dome of the Capitolio and the Paseo del Prado, with polished 1950s convertibles lined up for tourists. In the late afternoon we crossed the bay to the El Morro fortress, its cannons pointing at the sea, and looked back at the city skyline.

From Havana we drove west to the Viñales valley: red earth, palm trees, tobacco fields and the mogotes, steep limestone hills with flat, jungle-covered tops rising straight out of the plain.

We spent three days here, walking the paths between farms, past pigs in the grass, oxen and thatched drying barns hung with tobacco leaves, and down into a cave. One day we went into Pinar del Río, the provincial capital, where we watched bottles being filled and labelled by hand. Most afternoons ended in a downpour; one of them we rode out on a horse cart.

A boat from the north coast took us out to Cayo Levisa, a small island of mangroves and white sand with almost nothing on it except a few thatched umbrellas, sun loungers and the clearest water of the trip.

The way to Trinidad was a long day across almost the whole island: a shared taxi in an old American car with a temperamental engine, a change of cars on the way, and then hours of motorway in a tropical storm.

Trinidad was worth it. It’s a small colonial town that made its fortune from sugar, with cobbled streets, pastel houses with iron window grilles, and the church on Plaza Mayor watching over the palms. The rain kept coming back, and the streets turned into streams between showers. On our last full day we walked out to the edge of town, where the cobbles end in a red dirt road and the hills of the Escambray begin.

The last drive took us north past Cienfuegos to Varadero, a long, narrow peninsula with twenty kilometres of white beach on the Atlantic side.

The final days were for doing nothing: the sea, the sunsets, lizards and crabs on the rocks, late evenings outside with a drink, and our names written in the sand before going home.