Wednesday 7 March - London Gatwick to Cuba

An early start and a smooth taxi ride, made exciting by our taxi chap taking the ‘back’ way to the airport and kick-starting early concerns about people not understanding you or, indeed, kidnapping. The Motorway avoidance has been programmed into old cabbies and new sat-navs. Check-in brought the first (but not the last) sighting of track suit bottoms. Indeed so frequent did spottings of track suit bottoms become thereafter that I have re-christened the place ‘Chavwick Airport’.

Landside Gatwick and, say what you like about terrorist threats, it certainly does make check-in easier. Around a mile from the check-in gate they have people telling you to have your passport ready, have your jacket over your arm, that sort of thing. This means that by the time you actually arrive at the security gates (which are all open, as opposed to one or two and a long queue of bearded bombers), you just fly through, even with the half tonne of metal we all carry these days, iPods, mobile phones, laptops and so on.

Airside of Gitwack is like Bluewater. Complete with Chavs. I had assumed that they were all flitting out for a hot hot hot blue WKD fuelled break in the sun, which made me wonder a bit about their clothing choice. When I knew I was heading for the tropics I decide on a wardrobe of cotton, linen and wool, all good fibres for soaking up lots of European sweat in the Caribbean. Breathable fabrics, in short. It appears our chav friends decided between nike or reebok but, either way, nylon was much in evidence.

Still, for those last minute purchases there was always French Connection, where the sales assistant appeared to be managing to tuck her micro-skirt into her knickers, without actually wearing knickers. This left me wondering just a bit what she had tucked her skirt into.

I sat in a café guzzling tea like a man who knew this was his last chance for a decent cuppa for many thousands of miles. As strong as my addiction was, it was as nothing compared to the smokers. The smokers were corralled in a sort of ghetto in the centre of the mini-mall upstairs at airside Gatwick. It was, I first thought, an opaque cube, but I eventually realised it was clear glass! There they pollute and serve as a warning to others. Awaiting their call to long-haul and ten hours without a fag they truly looked like the damned.

Should have just guzzled beer, like a few others were doing, at 7:30am. Top.

Chavs on a plane

The departure lounge/gate/whatever was awash with Chavs…and kids! Young kids! Surely this shell-suited lot couldn’t be going to the Caribbean with babes in arms, or, more likely, on laps? Surely we were sharing a departure lounge with some sort of connecting flight to Butlins in Skegness! But no, apparently the kid is no barrier to international travel these days.

It was not always thus. Once upon a time when you had a kid that was it, you spent your next sixteen years having a damp holiday in a caravan in Rill. You hated the early years but that was okay, because your kid really, really hated the later years and before long the resentment sort of evened out - and then you started taking long haul holidays again and this time your kid hated you because you were pissing their inheritance away. Now though, kids fly with their parents.

And with their extended families. I had a bit of a wake up when I noticed one particularly rough-looking mother playing with a toddler and then say ‘come to nana’. Nana? The woman was about my age! I felt like advising her to stop dressing like a teenager, get a decent haircut, lose weight, get elocution lessons, and a time machine…and sterilised.

The flight was actually one of the best I’ve ever been on. Thomas Cook treat you like bloody royalty if you don’t moan. This instantly singles you out from the rest of the passengers. Bulkhead seats to stretttttttttttttch out my legs – tripping up those who, seconds after the ‘seatbelts’ light flicked off, decided to treat this area as the
town square and do ridiculous anti-DVT exercises.

It was heaven. The tee vee folded up out of the arm of the chair, as did the food tray, then this lovely lady came along and asked you if you wanted a drink. Okay, this was charter so you had to pay for your drink, but…thank Christ…the sound on the telly was buggered. This meant that a) we were comped our drinks the whole flight and b) we got to make up out own soundtracks to movies. Believe me, I saw ‘Night at the museum’ with sound on the way back and my version was MUCH funnier. For instance, I called the dinosaur ‘Barney’ and made Dick van Dyke say ‘M******f****r’ a lot. A lot.

Hell, I did not come on holiday to watch television.

The food was actually pretty good on the flight, especially when they wheeled out the cream tea in a box at 35,000 feet. This is surely the peak of civilization, having a telly that folds out of the arm of your chair and a cream tea delivered to you. I suspect that people don’t get DVTs on aeroplanes because of the quality of the air, it’s because they don’t really have to move! And why would you?

I’d bought a book in Waterstone’s in Gatwick all about wargaming, airfix kits, modelling, commando comics and so on. This brought on a fit of nostalgia. I remember Dad coming home on a Friday night from some foreign trip and giving me the plastic cutlery and condiment set that he had saved me from his in-flight meal. I thought that this was the height of sophistication, to sit on a Friday night, shovelling my dinner down my throat with my plastic cutlery after seasoning it from my collection of sachets. They should package that sort of kit with flight simulators. Who knows, when air travel becomes too expensive, maybe there will be a new genre of video game, the passenger simulator.

The food all came wrapped, the crackers, the cheese and so on. The cabin air pressure must have been lower than the pressure on the ground, because the packaging had blown up like balloons.

Top marks to the cabin staff though. Turns out the airline used to be British Caledonian, which explains the Scottish accents. There’s not much to do on a long haul flight. Finished book in one sitting (been a while since I had time to do that), ate, drank, went to loo, ate, went to loo again and so on. Managed to down a bottle of champagne at some point.

Arrival

Ten hours later - Cuba. Wet and hot, more tepid than tropical. Into the airport and see the familiar labs and spaniels attached to uniformed staff. The Cubans actually run you through a security check on arrival, which was quite interesting. Then it got very interesting as the immigration guy asked for my profession.

I told him - and it was all downhill from there really. I don’t know if he pushed a button or something but admitting I worked for the Government - and them then finding my laptop - got me pulled to the side of the queue. Oh oh.

Standing across a desk from me was a young lady with a ‘tash that Magnum PI would be proud of, in a uniform that included, I shit you not, the shortest mini-skirt I have ever seen. All the women had them. You could actually see their stocking tops when they walked. The last time I saw a woman in uniform with a skirt that short he was a stripper. I strongly suspected that trying to stuff a fiver into her cleavage would have been a bad move, so while I couldn’t get the image of her and her colleagues chasing me around the building to the tune of ‘the Benny Hill show’ out of my head, she asked me to explain what I did for the Government. I had just about managed basic greetings and counting to ten in Spanish after listening to language learning podcasts for months, so fell back on my English foreign language skill of speaking loudly and slowly. Three or four different English speakers were called before she realised that the problem was not language, but that the description of my job is dull and impenetrable. Christ, normally when I describe what I do I’m speaking to a bunch of nerds and have a powerpoint presentation to help. This lot had no chance.

I then had to find the laptop serial number. This involved open-laptop surgery on the table-top (removing battery to see innards). She started to write out what looked like a receipt for it and, seeing the blood drain from my face, assured me the laptop would stay with me but I’d need the receipt to get it out of the country.

I suspect that, in a crowd of football shirt wearing chavs, a bloke in a panama hat, linen shirt and jacket and decent shoes must have looked like the type to bring in laptops to hand to insurgents keen on destabilising the country. Or a journalist. I later learned from our guide that the Cuban authorities are not keen on journalists.

Then I had to tell her how much the thing cost. She did a double-take when I wrote down the figure (lesson one, be honest) and I bit back an explanation of having to save for months to afford it. By this time I was starting to wonder if it would not have been simpler just to buy those extra memory cards for the camera but sod it, the reason I bought a laptop was to use it when travelling.

In truth, it was all rather exciting. These days when you travel in Europe you just get waved through passport control. This was like some sort of spy thriller and, now I knew the laptop was not going to be confiscated and that I probably wouldn’t be spending my holiday in a Cuban detention centre (‘get the orange overalls out, we’ve got another one’), I was enjoying myself. My wife, I later found out, was not, but sat watching the whole thing in various states of worry that never dropped below ‘very’ and peaked when I apparently pushed away the immigration officer’s hand when she went to touch the laptop. Don’t remember that bit but I suppose I may have done as I’m a bit precious about these things. (i.e. stupid).

Beside me other passengers were mostly all leaving. One chap had to unpack his fishing rods but that was about it. The fact that they’d never heard of the ‘apple’ brand, surely the single most recognisable computer marque in the world, got me thinking about what the country might be like, but by then it was time to skip through the barrier and join the tour.

I was, to be honest, disappointed not to get a big, fat stamp on my passport. You don’t get anything in Europe any more and I was hoping for something official and bold. What you get is a visa. This, apparently, is because the US don’t allow you into the States for 6 months after a Cuba visit and if you’re American they take an even dimmer view of visiting Cuba. So US citizens travel to Canada, get a flight to Cuba after getting a Canadian stamp, get their visa but not their passport stamped and so, on return to the US, get asked ‘where have you been?’ - ‘Canada’. ‘I see, in March? Nice tan! Welcome home.’ Hence the lack of stamps.

Sprinted from the building, changed money (paso pegged to same rate as US dollar, so in return for reasonable amount of Stirling got a huge wad of cash - hoorah!), boarded coach and endured stares of those who had had to wait for me and were now wondering why I had been detained. (Apparently the Cuban authorities would have confiscated anything with GPS on it…good job they missed my ‘phone!). I explained that they took exception to my hat.

If being interrogated by the Federalies was scary, it was nothing compared to the way the coach dodged trucks, motocycles, pedestrians, motorcycle-sidecar combinations and everything else on the road. One thing it didn’t dodge was a huge black cock that played chicken with the coach…and won. The bloody thing wouldn’t move so coach stopped and guide got off, picked up cock and placed him on the side of the road. Cuban lesson number two - food is rationed here for the locals, you don’t go around killing their livestock.

Over causeway onto mainland. Past flamingos - a line of pink on the lagoon waters. A change of hotels means a longer drive, so stop for coffee or beer at a local bar, mixing with the locals who sit around drinking rum and smoking. Then on into the gathering darkness, past sugar cane fields that are having their stubble burned off; whole fields on fire, the low clouds ruby with the reflected glow.

Predominant form of public transport appeared to be trucks, with the passengers standing up in the back, like a tightly packed crop, swaying with the movement of the lorry.

Arrive at Sancti Spiritus and have a refreshing cuba libre (the first of many, many, many) which was more rum than cola. Hotel amazing, an open courtyard in the middle, ideal for sitting under the stars drinking rum. In the hotel room we could hear the familiar fart of scooters outside. Dinner brought the first experience of Cuban food. My chicken was, I suspect, one that had lost a battle of wills with a bus. The cut was unfamiliar but could be produced by a tyre running over the bird in question. Wondered if I would sleep at all with sound of scooters and hoots and shouts but, knackered, did, and dreamed of incomprehensible immigration forms.