4/23/10

It is incredible how quickly things flew by as I approached my departure date, may 3rd. One culprit was another weekend program excursion. This trip brought me back to Vinales, which I did not mind one bit. Unfortunately, while we had planned to go to a cooperative, we were unable because ‘we needed to have been invited’. We have had to go through quite a few hurtles to arrange any of our visits as Americans. Our tour guide told us how he finds most Americans he guides (more people travel from the US to Cuba than one might think) want more than just tourist facts from his spiel. He was impressed and appreciative of this fact, but I pessimistically believe he just doesn’t see many Americans tourist- and that the americans he meets are there for non-tourist reasons. I meet a ton of american tourists when working at Becky's Diner and more often than not are content to just hear the same old spiel- and they don't desire variance from the standard guide book write up.


We also visited a town dedicated to eco-tourism (which I found a little strange to be honest) called Las Terrazas. The place is a small gorgeous town where they have tiered the landscape for urban environmental development, but there really is no difference in how the people of las Terrazas live or function as a community compared to the rest of Cuba besides the fact that they all depend on the eco-tourism industry. A highlight of Las terrazas included a vegetarian restaurant (an incredible score that we were very excited about). We invited our tour guide to join us, but he declined saying it would just make him want pork after. Las terrazas also had a swimming hole where we watched some locals dare eachother to dive from the ledges.