Spent a few days roaming the town....a super cute, rambling town with colourful houses, cobbly streets and beautiful old spanish churches, then headed to the nearby Playa Ancon beach which was great and so different from the dodgy beach in Cienfuegos. Tanned to the max, we were ready to hit the hut for New Year's celebrations!

Had a traditional feast of pork, with real crackling!, yucca with garlic and beans..of course!Then headed off to complete a bar crawl of all of Trindad's salsa bars. Ended up drinking in one bar until just before midnight, watching all the local bands do their stuff and all the tourists trying to salsa including an excellent kind of dance salsa troupe who must have been on a salsa holiday. They were really good actually including the Phil Spencer lookie-likie who really knew his moves!

Many mojitos down plus a traditional Trinidad medicine tasting concoction of rum, lemon and honey, and we were flying into 2008! Moved to the famous Casa Musica - an outdoor stage with massive stone steps - to watch some more salsa, this time professionals, and a really great afro-Cuban band.

No real count down, but a couple of minutes past the hour after realising there would be no Auld Lang Syne, all the gringos starting spontaneously hugging and kissing each other and random strangers at will.

Tim cracked open his specially purchased cigar which we all puffed on in total amateur fashion before we all moved onto the disco patio for some serious hot and heavy Cuban dirty dancing...!

The next day we went souvenir hunting for the must-have obligatory Che memorabilia and then failing in our attempts to find a restaurant serving anything other than meat, rice and beans, we splashed out on a lush meal in the only 4 star hotel in town!

We didn't mean to, we were just really fed up with eating constant bad food listening to the same cheesy salsa groups that rotate the bars and food establishments....and so when we stumbled past the windows looking into the hotel dining room....we were vulnerable.....and the next thing we knew we were frantically changing our emergency Euros at the hotel front desk and being seated next to the cheese table!

Suffice to say, it was a treat of treats, with a starter and dessert buffet, even if there still was a cheesy salsa duet!!

We had planned on spending a couple more days chilling out on Playa Ancon and doing some snorkelling trips out to the reef but when we woke up it was freezing cold and really windy and our hosts informed us it was a classic Cuban cold front that would last three days.....tears....so decided to cut our loses and hot foot it back to the very west of the island....