It's like yesterday never happened. Up at 6:30am, in queues at the bus station by 7:10am, then on the bus from 7:50-5:30pm. This isn’t the first time we have observed the bus drivers (there are always 2 on a bus) stopping at a home, going in and then 10 minutes later emerging, boarding the bus and driving off. Are they having a quickie with their mistress? Do they rent a spot to take their required break? What on earth are they doing? Sometimes they stop the bus to pick up buns or beans or other groceries. With this trip, by the time we reached our destination the dashboard was filled with bags of something or other. One time on this trip, both of the drivers got off leaving us on the bus with the door closed. After 10 minutes of us tourists watching the drivers go from one kiosk to another buying pastries and buns, the intrepid smoker with Russian writing on his t-shirt confidently marched to the front of the bus and discovered how to open the door. Off he got with a band of fellow smokers a few feet behind him. Soon most of the bus was buying pastries or taking a stretch.

Jim ventured out, choosing a jam pastry over the savoury one because the jam vendor used tongs to pass the pastry to him. Unlike the other guy who perched his white bucket under his armpit and dug in with his bare hands, sifting through the savoury pastries and then handed one over to his customer. The bus drivers eventually rallied their reluctant troops back onto the bus. We were already an hour late and if these bus drivers could do their shopping enroute, we could damn well take a break from sitting.

After 9.5 hours driving cross country from Trinidad to Holguin, we arrived knowing we had to hire a taxi yelling, 'taxi, taxi, room, room’. I followed a few minutes later with the same thing. Feeling overwhelmed I said nothing whereas Jim was feeling irritated by the barrage so wasn’t inclined to give the pushy ones our business. Much to our amazement, a fight broke out over who they thought should get our business and one man was knocked to the ground then kicked by a couple of guys. An older man saw the break in the onslaught so calmly walked over to us, asked us politely if we wanted a taxi, agreed on an amount and took us away from the bedlam. We approached a Lada that, I’m sure, was held together with glue and had to have been 25 years or more old. It rattled and creeked all 33 kilometers to Gibara, driven by an excellent middle-aged driver with a baseball cap and a co-pilot who seemed to have to push on the emergency brake the entire trip in order to stop the metal scraping of something on the road.

We arrived exhausted to our seaside bright blue and yellow hostel called Sol y Mar, greeted by Solandro who warmly brought us into our lovely second floor room – our home for six nights.

Gibara is a friendly and sleepy, so much so that you can walk down the middle of the road at any time of the day and maybe have to slide over to the side for the occasion horse-drawn carriage, car or truck. One of the two colonial hotels, the Ordono, is alternatively chock full of people (a tour of no more than??// people) or dead empty. The other one is plain empty most of the time. The road that hugs the coast has seen the rage of hurricane Ike?? In 2008 with most of its buildings completely shattered. Government funding is starting to come in to restore the old buildings