In Transit*

The flight was delayed (of course) by an hour and a half, some of it before and some of it after we had boarded. ‘It was the Ground Crew’s fault,’ says the pilot, somewhat smugly. And it was a nine hour flight as it was – I finished my copy of ‘The Great Gatsby’ and was well into ‘Stoner’ before I finally gave in and watched a dodgy movie; the second ‘Fantastic Beasts’ film, to be precise. So it was dark when we arrived in Cuba – very dark, in fact – and we still had the two-hour cab ride between Varadero and Havana to negotiate (having missed our bus by that point) in a low-slung old yellow cab with dodgy lights and no seatbelts. Our driver pulled into a layby just after the airport – various shadowy ne’er-do-wells were loitering about, naturally – got out and whacked the headlights a few times and then continued along the pitch-black autopista at breakneck speed, overtaking everything else in a slightly random manner. Welcome to Cuba! Luckily he got us right to the door of our casa, which was lovely, and actually charged us less than we’d thought he might…


*The only photo I took all day, by the way. And possibly only to show how the wings of our plane seemed to be held together by gaffa tape...