Trinidad is a beautiful city on the south coast of Cuba. Its like stepping back in time wandering through the cobbled streets surrounded by horse drawn carts and colonial buildings and its a very different feeling city to the rest of Cuba. Trinidad was once a very important city for Cubas economy mainly due to the plantations located nearby in the Valle de los Ingenios where thousands of slaves worked in sugar plantations. The valley is very beautiful with mist sitting just on top of the mountains and sugar cane fields all around. We took a trip out to an old plantation house where the plantation owner freed all of his slaves during the war for independence with the Spanish and asked them to fight with him to win independence for themselves and the rest of Cuba (of course at the end of that particular war the US stepped in and "won" against the Spanish but that's another story). The old plantation house and the slaves houses are still there and the obvious wealth in the plantation house is amazing. Plus we climbed up a huge bell tower which was once used by the plantation managers to signal the start and end of the work day and to monitor the work of the slaves in the surrounding valley.

There is also a "Anti Revolutionary" museum which we visited expecting to get a view on why people opposed the revolution, who they were and so on. How wrong could we be! Unfortunately in Cuba there is only one point of view now and that is Castros point of view so what we got instead was a museum about how the rebel army wiped out anyone who opposed the revolution!

On our final day in Trinidad we headed out to Playa Ancon and spent a day doing absolutely nothing, lying on white sand under huge royal palm trees with the Caribbean ocean lapping at our feet! Its a hard life!