Friday, November 05, 2004

Part 5 - Gibara - On the Water at Last

At last, a new car pulled into Antilla. It had been my turn venturing out from the hotel reception where we had encamped ourselves. I watched the brand new red VW Golf anxiously as one of the men I’d approached about a ride earlier walked up to its window. I was hopeful that they were discussing the problem of the two foolish foreigners, but acutely aware that sometimes not everyone and everything on earth revolves around my life. I was already making excuses for him: why would someone who could afford such a car want to drive us around? There are precious few new cars in Cuba.

But hey, they might want to drive us around in order to afford that car, and profit all the more by the gas efficiency of those beautiful babies.

He did a fast U-turn and pulled up to talk business with me. Ten bucks to go to Banes. Oh, the scoundrel! For a 15 kilometre drive! But he knew he had us by the gnarbles. We attempted to be sly: okay, ten to Banes, but what about thirty to go to Gibara?

Gibara was a town name pulled out of a few vague recollections. I remembered reading in the guidebook a few days before that there were casas to stay at there. I hadn’t thought much more about it. Now it was dawning on us how invaluable this information was. Clearly, one could not just show up in any town one chose and expect to be housed. Quite the opposite! The Antilla experience had taught us that we either have to know in advance that there are licenced casas to stay at, or else we have to be mas discreto about our presence, to give potential hosts a chance to not get fined by local authorities. It’s the kind of thing that one could only reasonably expect to get away with in a large town (where there are licenced casas anyway). In a small place, one would have to find someone who knows all the town cops well enough that they could get away with it.

The last possibility would be to find someone who would shelter us for free, in which case they wouldn’t be breaking any laws… The problem with this latter case, I think, is that there is still a chance if the police did find out that they wouldn’t believe that no money had changed hands. So, you see, it’s a gamble whose only gain is the dubious honour of hanging out with us.

There was always the option of just camping out somewhere, with our mosquito nets and sleeping bags. It would have to be well out of sight, though, since we later discovered that any camping outside of campgrounds is illegal in Cuba (for foreigners, anyway.)

So, we’d come all the way out to el Oriente, crocs to the west of us, reportedly huge surf and open sea to the south, and boring and inhospitable coast to the east. Up north there was a resort region, which at least meant a few beaches, but we didn’t want to end up suffering through staying and hanging around resorts.

It looked as if Gibara might have some interesting bits of coast to the east, towards the resorts of Guardalavaca. We reasoned that whereas it might be annoying and depressing to start in a resort area, it might be a good end point. We’d arrive at the supposedly beautiful beaches over there, after two or three days of paddling, relax a little, and get the hell away from there.

Or else to the west of Gibara there was a stretch of coast with a few playas shown on the map, and a highway following the shore. With a road close at hand one could always bail on a failing trip, pack up the boats, and get the hell away from there.

These stories were just rationalizations we clung to so that we didn’t feel we were going someplace in complete blindness, again, which we were.

So, we loaded up our packs in the VW and set off from Antilla at Mach speed. Before long we realized he was taking us up on driving all the way to Gibara. Sweetness. We were falling in love with using private cars to cart us and our boats around. In fact, it turned out this guy’s way of life was to be an unlicenced driver. The term he used was that he worked a la izquierda, meaning, literally, “on the left.” He was certainly an expert helmsman, driving very fast with exquisite control navigating the pot-holed thoroughfares, and he only killed one chicken. (Why was it crossing, anyway?) I wasn’t sure how he got all his fares, given that he lived in Deadendsville, but it seemed as if at least sometimes it had something to do with his brother. His brother was, and perhaps still is, the captain of a big cargo freighter and so, I guess, really got around. I gathered that when people who know his brother visit Cuba, they have our new friend the Professional to chauffeur.

The landscape of el Oriente didn’t fail to impress me again, as it had earlier with our previous ride from Bayamo. It seemed as if everywhere in el Oriente, except around Antilla of course, was extremely beautiful. As we approached the north coast of Cuba, we began to see dramatically protuberant cliffs and pillars jutting out from the earth. They seemed to be milestones on our journey of hope. Now there might be something to inspire us with awe and encourage us to continue as we paddled – this kind of motivational landscape.

We crossed a couple of beautiful rivers and then all of a sudden we were in town and stopping in front of a large colonial building. It seemed random, like our driver had just noticed the licenced casa symbol as he drove by and pulled over instantly.

I walked through the twelve foot high doors, into a long parlour filled with antique furniture, to try and find el dueño. She introduced herself as Nancy, and at first it seemed as if she was going to send us elsewhere, jabbering on about how her only two rooms were reserved. She was already on the phone to call another casa. I’d figured as much: her place was far, far too swank to just fall into our laps like that, so easily. The handsome and airy building went on and on, so that I couldn’t even see its end. The long common rooms were limited above by either thirty foot ceilings or simply open to the sky.

Before she’d finished placing her call, I told her we’d only stay for one night, and then it all seemed okay. She quoted $20, I returned the serve with a smooth $15, and that was okay, too.

Really, I don’t know what she’d been talking about: We ended up staying for days and there was never a problem with some “reservation” showing up.

A few minutes later we found ourselves in our room, gaping up at the towering ceiling. The dimension of height outscaled all others: the room itself wasn’t that big… but the roof was tall! A single window was all the way at the top, but the light that came through it reflected off all the faded-white walls of the room to keep it bright from dawn on. A long, long string with a ping pong ball attached to its end hung down from the window’s shutter, but given that we were already habitually up with the sun, and continued to be for our entire stay in Cuba, there was never any reason to shut out the light.

A long, eventful, and moderately stressful day such as that one called for one or three Bucaneros. We couldn’t be bothered to seek out a restaurant, so we consented to the seven dollar cost of a fish dinner. Nancy’s casa had its own chef, which seemed interesting. His name was Alberto.

And ooooh, Alberto! He helped us to see the light about eating at casas. We should have clued in after the illegal place we were lured into off the street in Havana. But Alberto really went beyond what one might expect: he may have been trained by the Cordon Bleu School. That seven bucks got us a multi-course meal prepared with astonishing attention to detail. You know: the vegetables were sculpted to look like flowers. There was a delicious reduction sauce trickled along the edge of the plate. A crème brulée and espresso finished us off.

As it turns out, he’s not Cordon Bleu, but trained in Holguin for the purpose of preparing fine food for tourists in Guardalavaca. The man should’ve been running a restaurant, but instead he served food for the handful of people that pass through Nancy’s two rooms. She was lucky enough to get him because his wife and family were in Gibara and he didn’t want to work so far away from them. (Commuters, eat your hearts out.) Anyway, I’m thinking that he might even do better at Nancy’s, financially as well as familialy, than he would in the kitchen of a resort: he gets to interact directly with guests and develop the relationship just enough so that they become acutely aware of the “tragedy” of someone such as he being “stuck” making so little money. Ah yes, a smart man! We tipped him ten dollars when we finally left, as I believe did the Dutch girls that were staying in the other room when we arrived. So, in a few days, in low season, he’d already taken in more money in tips than his monthly salary. Go Al!

After that life-altering meal we hardly ever ate in a restaurant again.

Over dinner we’d examined our map and discussed all the various possibilities as to how to proceed. Again we had no hard information, and again our decisions felt almost completely random. For inspiration, we walked ourselves and our full bellies down to Gibara’s harbour, just a couple hundred metres away. We wanted to see where we could set up and launch. Also, in case the calmness of the bay was misleading, we were going to head over to the other side of town, where the seawall was, to observe the Atlantic itself. We’d already heard, with great dismay, rumours of colossal and crushing surf.

Near the harbour we ran into a few loitering youths and we all began acquainting ourselves with one another. There was one guy I remember in particular who had a very calm demeanour, and whose Spanish was somehow almost completely understandable to me.

It was one of the first times in my life that I’d had a proper conversation with someone whose first language was Spanish. Most of the time, I have to have every other word repeated or dumbed down to my level, but somehow with this guy there was little or no problem.

It is perhaps ironic, but the only thing coming out of his mouth I never could understand was his name. I asked him to repeat it a few times, but then it was just becoming embarrassing that I couldn’t repeat it back to him, so henceforth, unfortunately, I’ll just have to refer to him as Fisherman Buddy.

It turned out that kayaking had been one of his favourite sports. He never had had one of his own, but he used to take one out every day and train on the rivers off the bay there. Great! A fisherman who knows kayaks from experience! I began to tell him our idea and try to extract from him an expert opinion about it.

Where to begin describing all the numerous problems with our plan? First of all, he said, there was the harbour authorities. Anyone who wanted to leave the bay to go to sea had to have a permit allowing it. This wasn’t just something for foreigners: it was a fact of life for Cubans, too. Though, he added, was not unsurmountable: you just had to evade their notice. To accomplish this, you needed to cut across to the other side of the bay and leave it by the other side of the mouth. They would then probably only see you if they were specifically looking for you with high-powered binoculars.

If caught, you would be turned around and warned. If caught again, you would turned around and fined. After that they’d fine you again, take your boat, and perhaps throw your ass in jail.

This was all fine. Sneaking out of the bay would be fun, but the problem is not left safely behind with Gibara. He said that the north coast of Cuba in that region is replete with stations that monitor the seas for unauthorized boats.

That was not good news. Why on earth are they looking so earnestly? A good question, and there are many hypothetical answers. In this case it is clear they are not there just to watch for folding kayakers. Fisherman Buddy seemed to think that they are looking for freighters straying off the major corridor that goes between Cuba and the States. If a boat enters Cuban waters, then a patrol is sent out to intercept it and search it for illegal cargo. The theory is that Cuba is absolutely against having their territory involved in any of the substantial illicit trade that passes through the area.

Another reason for their vigilance is to prevent Cubans from setting off for America, as they so often do. It is said that there was one tragedy of death in those famously rough waters too many, and so Castro decided to try and curtail these attempted flights. No doubt it was internationally embarrassing to have so many citizens trying to leave. However, apparently, as recently as a decade ago Cuba didn’t pay much attention at all to this, and so previously all concern over these activities had been left to the Americans.

Possibly they were also trying to ensure that no illegal fishing was occurring. Absolutely everything is strictly controlled by the state in Cuba.

Well, all this was possible, but what did that have to do with us? We were not coming out of international waters, we were not Cubans fleeing to the States, and we were not fishing. We were just tourists going for a little paddle. And that, said Fisherman Buddy, was precisely the problem with us: Cuba is paranoid of anything happening to their tourists, and have forever gone to great lengths to limit their movements. The obvious primary reason for this attempted control is to ensure the proper chanelling of tourist dollars to the state, but the important secondary reason is so that they can concentrate their policing and thereby significantly reduce danger to their precious tourists.

So they were just looking out for us. Great. What was there to worry about, anyway? Plenty, it seemed. Fisherman Buddy went on to tell me that to leave the bay that time of year would be absolutely foolhardy. Around there it was el mar abierto, the open sea, and the winds, even if they were calm, would usually be raging by noon. It was the winter, and the cold fronts from the north would be coming it at full force. Even he, who’d been fishing that area his whole life, hardly ever managed to make it out in November. It was a time to take it easy and wait.

I remember Jay came over to say he was going to retire for the night, and I excitedly told him all the bad news. He just looked at me and asked what I was so happy about. It occurred to me that I must have been smiling and generally exuberating while telling him that we may have just made another lengthy trip in vain. I know why I was thrilled: it was from the simple pleasure of having successfully communicated in Spanish. Not just that, but also to have obtained invaluably pertinent information from someone so very qualified to give it.

I went on to ask Fisherman Buddy more about the rivers. He said they were beautiful, and navigable at least as far as the bridge, after which the water level may be too low and there may be problems with rocks. In any case they sounded great because it sounded as if we could actually paddle them.

I told him that if he’d like to, and if he could get access to that kayak, maybe he could come with us up the river the next day. I at least wanted to show him how the kayaks were put together. We agreed to meet in the morning.

The next day we got out to the water as early as we could, which is to say not early at all. We were getting up early, in general, but then, well, you know, breakfast is a meal best taken in leisurely fashion. In spite of getting up at dawn nearly every day, we somehow rarely made it out the door before eleven.

We walked the quarter mile to the entrance of town, our bulging Pro Packs on our backs. It felt fantastic to be so subterfugal. Up until then, no one in Cuba had seen our boats. Not that anyone cared, now I’m sure, but right then it was certain that no authorities knew we were carrying ultrasecret folding sea crafts. Remember that we hadn’t been searched at Customs. And we were about to launch right under the noses of everyone. This commando kick never really faded for me: later we even had cause to fear and avoid the authorities.

I had gone and found Fisherman Buddy earlier that morning. He was going to try and get the keys to the storage place where his friend had a canoe and paddle to where we were setting up to join us.

We unslung our heavy loads, and washed up there on the beach amongst other junk I found an interesting photograph I feel obligated to share:

Meanwhile, it was only the second or third time either of us had ever assembled the boats, and in the heat of noon-day it took some time. The wind was high and the bay was choppy. We didn’t want to think what the Atlantic looked like outside the bay. We found out later that the local ferries had been cancelled: far too windy and dangerous.

Indeed, Fisherman Buddy only turned up just when we were ready to launch, and he arrived by road and on foot, no canoe. He said that he’d had problems getting it out because of the wind and waves in the harbour.

It was a bit of trick getting into the kayaks with the waves lashing against the beach. We risked serious embarrassment, even ignominy, and certainly inauspiciousness, if there was a spill. Fisherman Buddy was there, as well as two or three others who’d happened upon us and stayed to watch.

I must say that thanks to the wonder that is the folding kayak, it was no problem. They are just so damned stable! Within a minute we were out in the thick of it, waves washing over the bow. It was a bit hairy, and I remember at no point while paddling along the bay towards the entrance of the river was I actually able to pull the skirt over the gunwale of the cockpit. To stop paddling was to be pulled or pushed far off course. We didn’t know if it was the wind or some current, but it was a genuine fight.

It wasn’t long, however, before we reached the mouth of our river. We bade our cheery salutations to a few scattered fisherman standing waist-deep in the water, to mixed response. They were busy placing their nets. We entered the river.

At first it was fairly wide, the wind pushed us along, and the riversides were mangrove-ridden. To tell the truth, after the thrill of the first launch and the first taste of salt water, it was a bit boring and altogether anticlimactic. At least there were a few interesting birds keeping us company.

And as we progressed, the birds became our most significant interaction with the river life. There were fish jumping and big eels disturbing the surface of the water, and a few fishermen, but little else. You had to wonder about some of these birds, though. As you approached them, they’d tense up and soon fly away, but they always flew in the same direction you were going. Then they’d land a little further on. This meant they had to get startled and tense, and fly away a bit further, over and over and over again. If they’d just once fly “away” towards us and land behind us, they could continue their peaceful existence. As it was, they never learned. Stupid birds. But beautiful.

Fortunately, as we distanced ourselves from the bay, the mangroves started to thin out and be replaced by more interesting trees, and then a few habitations. That river was not in use by boats: there were nets everywhere, and in some places there were rocks built up to channel the water through the nets. Every fisherman told us they were trying to catch fish as well as anguilas, which we later figured out meant eels.

One would think they were mainly fishing for the fat, long eels, but in other nets (not pictured) they were it trying to catch them very young, when they were just an inch long. They’d catch them by the hundreds and fry ‘em all up at once. This sounds pretty disgusting to me, but we never did get to try it to find out for sure.

Soon before the bridge we started having to really watch out for the sparse but threatening rocks just under the surface of the water. The closer to the bay we were, the more affected by the tide the river would be, and we were concerned that on the way back the tide might make those rocks even more unavoidable.

After the bridge the river was very, very shallow. This didn’t seem to have anything to do with the tide, but more with the lack of rain we kept hearing about. Fisherman Buddy and others had all told us we’d never be able to paddle past the bridge. Of course we did anyway: we only needed to draught a few inches, and we still hadn’t learned to fear the rocks.

The skin on the Folbot Coopers seemed thinner than that on the Yukon I’d bought a few months before and which I’d already used in all sorts of crazy conditions. That yak had always seemed very tough, and no rock hits ever took significant chunks out of its hide. With the Cooper, though, I had some doubts.

In any case, we kept advancing up the river, moving slow in case we hit rocks. Both of us scraped many times, but always at low speeds, and we’d have time to lift our butts, lean, or stop before significant damage was done. This was until later in the afternoon, when the tide had brought the water level down even more, and Jay was paddling fast back and forth along one stretch he thought was safe. He was trying to expel his pent-up energy while I loitered taking pictures. Distracted for a moment, he hit a barely submerged rock dead on and at almost full speed. This accompanied by much wincing.

Now, while it may be true that the Cooper was clearly never intended for that kind of river kayaking – the kind with rocks - there is simply no way to keep a paddler from exploring such enticing waterways. It was with much frustration that we worried about the thin skins of these boats. Worrying takes a significant bite out of the fun of an activity.

We’d seen a lot that day. The river had not failed to amaze us. The further up we’d gone, the narrower and rockier and more interesting it had become. It had been absolutely glorious. The sun was getting low, and although we’d been mostly protected from it, the wind had clearly never died down. So we decided not to bother with going all the way back down the river and recrossing the bit of bay. We had folding kayaks! We’d return to Gibara by road. We pulled just down from the bridge, out on a little piece of flat land, hidden from the road. We lay our boats out to dry. We flipped them over to inspect for any rock damage.

We both had a few small scratches, mostly only on the surface, but a couple had disconcertingly exposed some of the fibrous fabric beneath the rubbery coating. But there was worse on Jay’s: where he’d rammed it there were major scratches and even a few miniscule holes you could see right through. These would certainly leak, albeit very slowly.

The thinness of the skin would not be a huge problem if it weren’t for the fact that you also need to have a frame and, well, weight in the boat! With a hit against the skin where there is nothing pressing against it from the inside of the boat (such as the frame), the skin just gives a little, then bounces back, and no damage is done. This is the ideal scenario and the reason why folding kayaks can mostly get away with using a thin hull.

The Cooper, however, has a single “keel longeron” running along the bottom of the boat (the Yukon sort of has two side by side). The negative effects of this are twofold.

First off, sitting for a few hours on the seat that comes with the boat, the tube starts to dig right into your tailbone, making you wish you had some more padding down there.

Secondly, and pertinent to this discussion, the keel of the boat is the most likely strip of hull to hit scuffy stuff underwater. The fact that there is an aluminium tube taking all sorts of weight means that when it does get hit, the fabric doesn’t have nearly as much give, and in resisting some damage is almost certain to occur.

I’ll cut to the conclusions we came to about this “problem” right here and now, because I feel it is very important to the workability of the fantasy of being able to literally backpack with a kayak anywhere on earth.

My Yukon had engendered a deep love for folding kayaking, and for Folbot for making it affordable, but there are a number of things about the Cooper which initially disappointed me. One of these things was the seemingly thinner skin, but I can only assume that this was done consciously by its ingenius designer, and with considerably more wisdom than I can ever aspire to. It must have been part of the continuing effort to shave pounds of its weight, and ultimately make it all fit into one bag. And since this is what makes it all possible, one must simply learn to cope with the consequences of it being as light as it is. To this end, the next day Jay dug out the little repair kit and applied a patch to the most affected area. It was incredibly easy, only took a few minutes, and the result looked permanent and tough. Over the course of the trip we each applied a number of patches (which were always just where the longerons were), and by the end of it all we felt reasonably comfortable in the knowledge of this as a necessary maintenance which is a necessary effect of having such an eminently portable and useful boat. Applying these patches is just a fact of life if we want to be able to explore extremely shallow and rocky rivers.

That said, next time I will try to remember to get a bunch of the hull material and pre-patch the hull at least along the entire “keel”, and perhaps even along where the other two bottom longerons are. I will also consider the pros and cons of doing it on the inside of the hull, too, rather than on the outside where it might cause a little drag, or get where the edges might get caught on submarine matter. This would be a highly sensible preventative measure, as it seems obvious that eventually patches would end up on all those areas anyway.

We reasoned out all these things over the course of the trip, but that day by the side of the river in Gibara it was fairly depressing to consider that we had decided to undertake such an expedition with such fragile apparatus. That night, though, we had Alberto’s delectable shrimp in sauce for dinner, and we recollected the joys of the day with satisfaction.

It had been a success, yes, but we still had coastal sea paddling as our main goal, so all this just postponed our ambitions. The positive side was that we were finally getting our boats wet, and we were beginning to think we’d have to grab any and all possible opportunities to do this.

We resolved to do the same the next day, on the second river. I went out and found Fisherman Buddy, told him about our adventures, and invited him to try and come with us the next day.

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