Category: End to Ends

On my bike tours, I take a day off roughly every week. I find it helps prevent build-up of niggling injuries, sore knees and so on. It also reminds me how much I dislike buses and footslogging round towns with a guidebook tick-list, so I’m keen to get back on the bike next day, enjoying…

A short day’s cycling on easy flat stuff, into a mild headwind, with the unusual sight of a separated cycle lane for the first 10km or so. (Though bear in mind that you’re more likely to find a car in a British separated cycle lane than on a Cuban road.) While I was never far…

Cuba gets hot in the afternoon, so I’m starting early. My 7am departure today meant no breakfast, and no proper goodbye to my casa’s host: I had to wake him up to retrieve the bike. I felt a bit guilty, because it had been an excellent stay with an entire first floor flat to myself…

The best day of the trip so far. But it was nearly the worst. And last. I enjoyed a morning dip and a dawn breakfast of fruit and coffee on the casa’s terrace overlooking Chivirico beach (pic), keen to get going. The sun splashed warm orange on the destination hills and mountains, roughly the same…

I was up and out at five, and I wasn’t alone. Mornings are warm and street life starts up early (pic), with plenty of peso kiosks open for takeaway breakfast snacks. They’re cheap, unimaginative and simple, but then so am I. I did the guidebook’s recommended Old Town Walk, on my bike, and left Santiago…

The old road out from the city west was all quiet rural stuff: Leicestershire with palm trees. I turned on to the autopista (‘motorway’): this being Cuba, bikes are allowed. In fact, it was so quiet, with just the occasional 1950s gas-guzzler lumbering by (pic)… …or indeed the odd man on a donkey (pic), that…

Having slipped J— (pic) a few pesos for BIKE REPAIRS and not accomm or breakfast, oh no, I headed west. It was easy riding, flat, windless… and shopless and cafeless. Still, there was some good oceanside riding, with the usual levels of traffic on Cuban main roads (pic). With 25km to go – and pleased…

After a 15-hour bus journey from Havana, during which the driver had entertainingly run the air conditioner settings through every climate type from tropics to permafrost, I enjoyed a couple of days in the laid-back port of Baracoa. It was a lovely sunny day when I arrived (pic), with locals and tourists out strolling the…

I arrived in Cuba yesterday after a long, tedious flight from Madrid. My bike almost didn’t make it on board with me, thanks to an officious and obstructive woman at Iberia’s check in, determined that it shouldn’t go on. The baggage man was fine with it though, and some friendly, smiley, but unyielding pressure on…