CYCLING THROUGH CUBA, Guest Post by Gretchen Woelfle at The Intrepid Tourist

Street in the town of Trinidad, Cuba

Week 6: 52 Places to Go

My friend and fellow children's book writer Gretchen Woelfle went on an exciting two week cycling trip in Cuba in the spring of 2015 and has graciously contributed this report. Gretchen has also done cycling trips in England, Spain, Vietnam, South India and Sri Lanka. You can find her reports on those trips by using the search function below.

Quick!  Go to Cuba now, before it changes too much! And if you want a real adventure, go cycling in Cuba with Cycleactive.com, a British group. 

Gretchen with the limestone karsts of the Vinales Valley

I thought Cuba would be flat. I was dead wrong. How could I forget that Fidel and his compadres hid out for years in the mountains? Our English guide kindly called our routes “undulating.” I went careening downhill as fast as I dared, to get as much momentum as I could for the uphill climb. It was exhilarating! The roads weren’t flat, but they were free of motorized traffic. We cycled past many horse carts, men on horseback, and a few bicyclists.

  

Horse carts were common

Cycling is a great way to see the country. You’re at ground level, hearing the sounds, smelling the smells, feeling the wind and the sun….. For eleven days we cycled through villages and towns, stopping for mid-morning Cuban coffee and lunches in lovely old haciendas. We browsed in village markets where the crafts were made by the very women minding the stalls. 

Waterfall and swimming hole

We went into the Escambray Mountains, a national park, and hiked down a canyon to an exquisite swimming hole, fed by a lush waterfall. We cycled down the mountains on back roads, through farming valleys, to Santa Clara and the vast memorial (and burial place) of Che Guavara. (His saintly status is guaranteed, for he died young, serving the Revolutión.) We spent a day at a beautiful Caribbean beach and a night at a horse-breeding ranch. We visited a tobacco plantation and clambered through vast cave networks that would never pass US safety regulations.

Street scene

Along the way we stayed at government-run tourist hotels outside of the towns, beautifully landscaped with inviting swimming pools. Some were brand-new, all were comfortable. Best of all, in Viñales, we stayed for three nights in casas particulars, private homes operating as B & Bs. We sat in rocking chairs on the front porch and watched neighbors nip in and out of each other’s homes, and bicycle vendors with braids of garlic draped over their handlebars. Our hostess, Lioska (who scowled when she admitted her name was Russian,) complained about the taxes she had to pay for her private enterprise, but was expanding her business from two to three bedrooms.

Dinner at Lioska's House

A few memorable moments:

Dinner in a palador, or private restaurant, with a local band, who had us singing, playing percussion, and snaking through the dining rooms in a conga line.  Even the kitchen staff joined the fun…cycling past a farmhouse where women laughed and shouted “Abuela!” (Grandmother) to me….drinking a cold Cuban Tukola after a hot ride….music everywhere: friends making music on a beach, with others dancing….two old men singing in a plaza in Trinidad…chatting with a market woman who wanted to trade my cycling shoes for a papier maché 1950s car that her father made. (I bought one instead.)….visiting one family’s small botanic garden and home, and learning from our Cuban guide, Jaime, all about their three Santaria altars with Catholic/Santaria saints…. people-watching in the Viñales town plaza: small children racing around, teenagers flirting, everyone enjoying music from a nearby club…. shouting “Hola!” to folks in the horse carts….making friends with the eight English, three Irish, and five Americans in our most congenial group.

"Everything depends on our own efforts." Fidel's words painted on walls and houses all over Cuba.

I got a splendid look at Cuban landscapes from pine forests to tropical beaches, glimpsed rural and town life on the ground, and felt the unquenchable Cuban spirit in people’s smiles and greetings.  

Beach

Our daily cycling ranged from 25-40 miles. An easy cycling speed is about 10 miles per hour, so this left plenty of time for leisurely meals and other activities. And there was always the support bus if you wanted to climb aboard. (Full disclosure: I cycled about 90% of time, opting out of a few steep climbs.)

Produce stall

Traveling to Cuba: We flew from Los Angeles to Cancun, Mexico. Flights from Cancun to Havana via Cubana Airlines were purchased from a UK travel agent. You get your $25 tourist visa for Cuba at the Cancun airport. Cubans are happy to see us, and don’t stamp US passports. 

Good book: The Other Side of Paradise: Life in the New Cuba by Julia Cooke, published in 2014, is a close look at young Cubans today, by a journalist who spent the last five years living or visiting Cuba for long periods. I read it before I went, and after I returned.

More info: http://www.cuba-junky.com has tons of good information about many things Cuban.

Part II of Gretchen's Trip: Five days in Havana.

 

All text and photos copyright Caroline Arnold  

DUBLIN CELEBRATES THE IRISH, Guest Post by Gretchen Woelfle

The Irish Influence: Display at EPIC, the Irish Emigration Museum in Dublin, Ireland

My friend and fellow children's book writer Gretchen Woelfle loves to travel and recently visited Ireland, where she spent a week in Dublin and went to both the Irish Emigration Museum and the Icon Factory. Here is her report:

 

Two very different sites in Dublin celebrate the Irish--those who left and those who stayed behind. 

Neville Isdell, former CEO of Coca Cola and founder of EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum, declared, “My own experience of being an emigrant has always stayed with me. And as they say, I left Ireland but Ireland never left me….My career took me all over the world, to 151 countries. I’ve always believed that the story of Irish people around the world was one worth telling, and so, I founded EPIC in 2016.”

How they left Ireland.

And epic it is: a vast gallery of cutting edge technology -- video, audio, interactive exhibits, and artworks – that tell a 400-year old story of Irish diasporas all over the world.  

Transportation to Australia.

When, how, and why they left Ireland; where they ended up; and what they and their descendants accomplished are revealed as visitors wend their way through the lower floor of a 200-year old warehouse on the banks of the River Liffey. (Twenty-two U.S. presidents claim Irish heritage, from Andrew Jackson to Barack Obama.)

The first rooms dramatize events that forced millions to leave.

Swiping right for Irish writers.

The Irish in Tin Pan Alley.

Later rooms focus on famous Irish and Irish-heritage musicians, actors, artists, writers, athletes, scientists, politicians, and outlaws who made their names all over the world. The Irish Family Heritage Center helps visitors discover their Irish roots.

The Icon Factory.

Not all the talent sailed to Boston, Liverpool, or Melbourne. The Icon Factory and Icon Walk offer low-tech, up-close experiences of home-grown celebrities. The Factory, an artist cooperative with a studio and a shop displays paintings, posters, and sculptures of Irish artists working today.

Seamus Heaney

Some of those same artists transformed the nearby dingy alleys into a brilliant mural gallery that celebrate Irish achievements in art, entertainment, sport, and the long struggle for independence.

The writers are known world-wide, including four Nobel prizewinners*. (Answer below.) Other figures filling the walls – comedians, athletes, musicians, and “oddballs, crackpots, and assorted genius” – were new to me.

Irish rock stars.

A caption under a mural of The Play Writers: The Pen Versus The Sword” offers a brilliant example of Irish wit.

Around 1610 Shakespeare wrote The Tempest and retired to Stratford on Avon where he died in 1616. Queen Elizabeth I, having completed the conquest of Ireland, was dead. The last of the Irish leaders, O’Neill and O’Donnell were gone to Spain, and Ulster planted with Crown subjects. Between 1616 and the War of Independence in 1922 which won back selfrule for most of Ireland, no play of any real merit was written in the English language by anyone other than by an Irish-born writer. Now riddle me this, who conquered who?

For more information:

https://epicchq.com The Irish Emigration Museum

https://www.iconfactorydublin.com The Icon Factory and Icon Walk

* William Butler Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett, and Seamus Heaney

MOUNTSFIELD PARK: One of London's Many Green Spaces, Guest Post by Gretchen Woelfle

Autumn colors, London style. Mountsfield Park, Hither Green (South London)

My friend and fellow children's book writer Gretchen Woelfle loves to travel and frequently goes to London, living in local neighborhoods. Here is a post about one of her recent visits.

London has some magnificent famous parks: Regents Park, Hyde Park, Hampstead Heath among others. But I especially love London neighborhood parks. Many of them are the sites of homes (long gone) of landowning squires, or transformed farmers’ fields. A few include land reclaimed from World War II bombsites. 

Dragonfly gates at entrance to Mountsfield Park

I spent a month in Hither Green (south London) right across from Mountsfield Park, not famous but lovely just the same.  

A path with light and shade under green, leafy arches

I took a daily stroll (along with locals and their dogs) across large expanses of guilt-free (for a SoCal resident) lawns where people of all genders and ages play soccer, under tall stately trees, across wild places where the grass isn't mown and shrubbery isn't trimmed, with winding paths through it all. 

Girl power!

Lots of coffee at the tea shop.

I lingered at a tea shop, a rose garden, a wildflower meadow, a community vegetable garden, tennis courts, and a playground.

Hidden sculpture tucked in the trees.

There are carved wooden sculptures hidden here and there and heaps of logs placed to provide habitat for an endangered English beetle.

Berries ripe for autumn harvest.

The autumn colors were out – subtle but stunning. I love the wild foxes that roam the parks and gardens all over London.  Residents call them vermin, but they are exotic to me, with their long bushy tails. I see them crossing the street into the park at dusk.  And one morning as I was retrieving my bike from the back garden shed, I startled one out of the next-door overgrown garden.

Community garden.

Google tells me that 47% of London is “green”. The website below lists 111 parks and Mountsfield isn’t even one of them. Wherever you happen to land in London, there’s probably a park – or a garden or a common or a heath – nearby where you can enjoy the pleasures of the English countryside in the heart of the city.

https://secretldn.com/london-parks-gardens-list/: Here’s the list of 111 parks

https://www.timeout.com/london/things-to-do/londons-hidden-gardens-and-green-spaces Small gardens and pocket parks

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountsfield_Park tells the history of Mountsfield park.

Scarlet highlights.