Part 6 - Glorious Gibara Rivers

That river, the first one round the bay from the colonial town of Gibara, had left an enticing flavour in our mouths. Except for the new concern for our boats’ hides, kayaking in Cuba had been a clamouring success. We hadn’t really known what to expect, anyway, so everything after the mangroves had filled us with joy. I can heartily recommend the rivers in that particular bay for great kayaking. What we didn’t know (because we hadn’t really checked) was that Cuba was undergoing “the worst drought Cuba has known in the last 75 years” and so, well, the rivers were a bit lower than they should be, to say the least. I’m sure that after a few months of healthy droughtlessness these and many other rivers would be eminently explorable, and for a good deal further than we managed.

Photo by Jay Field

We waited a day before we went out again. My intense throat infection had passed, but it was Jay’s turn to feel ill. We whiled away our time taking pictures around town and visiting Gibara’s interesting and bizarre Natural History museum.

This museum was founded on a particularly passionate scientist/taxidermist’s extensive collection of specimens. Included in these was a sub-collection called Deformación . This exhibit was over in a small, dimly lit corner, and it seemed deliberately avoided by the otherwise talkative and generally charming guide who attached herself to us. There was one display there containing the foetuses of animals too deformido to live. Twin pigs sharing a single head, a pig with a dog’s head, and other gruesome peculiarities. I daren’t show these on the internet (but I can send them to you as prints for only five Pesos Convertibles plus shipping. Just kidding.) These are some of the non-deformed creatures he had pickled:

The day after that we were intent on the second river, but Fisherman Buddy couldn’t get the keys to the shed where his friend’s canoe was stored. Something about visiting a sick cousin in Holguin. In the end, she didn’t even die or anything, so it was really quite a shame he couldn’t come with us. At least we got to show him how the boats were constructed, and I let him take mine for a little spin.

Photo by Jay Field

It was a bit further of a paddle to the second river, but it was not nearly as windy as when we’d gone to the first. It felt fantastic to be able to let it all hang out and paddle like madly mad mariners out on the bay, able for a little while to forget the threat of rocks.

We reached the wide mouth of the river all too soon. The banks were lined, like at the beginning of the other, with mangroves. It was very different, though, for its width: this river began wide and straight and long, so you could really see just how far you were going to have to paddle before it might start to get interesting.

Happily, it turned out to be just as rewarding as the first, missing only that big advantage that the first had which was, of course, that it was the first.

Photo by Jay Field

The kayaks performed beautifully. However, we were more aware of the rocks, which slightly degraded our overall pleasure level. And in spite of this awareness, we still got some scratches and tiny gashes, much to our irritation. We had yet to learn to accept these and the subsequent patchings as all part of the package.

It was getting easier to deal with the Coopers. We became better at assembling them, and better still at disassembling. (It’s all in the packing technique.) The one thing that turns out to be the slowest step in dealing with the boats is drying. I’d already started to discover the hardship of this with the Folbot Yukon I’d used so much in August.

The problem is that you shouldn’t pack the boat wet if it might stay packed for more than a day or so, especially in hot climate. If you do, you are reprimanded by having a boat inhabited by the mouldy smells of decay. Kayuk.

Most of the time, with direct, warm sunlight and a light breeze, you can dry the boat satisfactorily in around an hour. You’ll want to take a few of the parts out later to stand and dry out, like the longerons that have on them somewhere little bits of the softer part of the velcro strips. Also the seat and the life jacket. But the key is to get the skin dry, because it’s not always easy to find a place to stretch it out later.

I think that a really absorbant rag, or a big old chamois, is one of the most important items that ought to be brought on a folding kayak voyage. It speeds up drying tremendously, which usually ends up needing to be done during those precious sunlight hours.

High humidity slows down the drying process to a snail’s pace. Even in direct sunlight, it can take two hours or more to dry a skin out. You need a nice, dry wind to help you out, and sometimes this isn’t available.

It ended up being reasonably fast drying our boats that day. We’d gone as far as we could up both branches of the second river - even past the road on the southwesterly branch. We turned around, and could have stopped at the road, dried up, packed up, and hitched a ride with one of the many horse and carriages that were going by, but instead we decided to wind our way back to the bay.

It was a hard paddle: the closer we got to the open water, the stronger the headwind. When we finally arrived at the bay, the wind was raging in noisily from the north, causing whitecaps and kicking up sand from the beach at the delta- like mouth.

We sagely decided to not try and paddle all the way back to the town beach we’d started out at in the morning, and we disassembled and dried in the high winds on the beach at the river mouth. We were exhausted, especially from the paddle back, and we still had about two miles to walk to Gibara, along the path we hoped we’d find along the shore, with our boats on our backs.

We set out on foot as the sun was setting, picking our way over all the driftwood along the narrow strip of beach. It felt good to use different muscles, and the exhiliration of the day made the weight of the Pro Packs seem less.

Photo by Jay Field

We finally arrived at the edge of the first river. To cross it we would either have to wade, or paddle - but there was no chance we were going to assemble, disassemble, and dry again! - or use the old and rickety suspension bridge. Of course we opted for the latter.

The pieces of wood were rotted, some broken, some missing, and we wondered if the extra weight of our boats would be just a little more than some of them could handle. Good thing there were two solid-looking cables running under them: I kept my feet right above the cables, and my eyes glued downwards. I thought about food.

For that night, Fisherman Buddy had hooked us up with another casa for dinner. It’s not clear whether the place was purely for dining or what, but I didn’t see the “state approved for foreigners” sign anywhere outside. Clearly they specialized in dining, as there was a large-ish gathering of Cubans being served when we arrived, in a room roofed by traditional thatching. We opted for another room, which was just off the kitchen.

We had wanted to go there ostensibly to distribute our patronage a little, but a big draw was that Fisherman Buddy had promised us that they regularly have turtle on the menu. An entire all-you-can-eat feast, including the coffee, was five bucks.

It’s getting almost tiresome to note that the family that ran the place was outlandishly friendly and warm, and that we just wanted to be adopted by the mother so she could feed us the rest of our lives. On the other hand, the turtle, although marinated, was sliced thin and slightly overcooked. It was a bit tough. It tasted like rich beef, which was nice, but it wasn’t as good as other strangely beef-like meats like, say, ostrich.

Turtle meat is illegal in Cuba. Yeah, I know you’re not supposed to eat endangered animals and all that, but are all turtle species on the brink? Anyway, hell, you have to try these things, I say. I’d like to try turtle one more time someday, but in the form of the soup that folks are always prattling on about. I’ll bet it’s incredible.

We stuffed ourselves, and we even had a desert, possibly one of my favourite deserts on earth, of sweetened guava sauce on mild cheese.

We had treated Fisherman Buddy to dining with us for being such a cool guy, and over dinner we tried to extract information from him about where we should go from there to find some real coastal kayaking. The fact was, though, that while he was intimately familiar with the region we were in, he knew next to nothing about anywhere else.

As usual, the only way to find out any real information was to guess and then just go.

To this day, we still don’t know how good the multitude of cayos along the north coast of Cuba would be for kayaking. As far as we can tell, they are uninhabited except for a few that have resorts on them. Casas particulares are not permitted anywhere along them. Veradero, according to our guidebook, seems to have some cheap hotels, but we reckoned that area would be depressingly devoid of real Cuban flavour. Also, virtually all of the cayos were marked on our maps as “mangrove/swamp”, and there didn’t seem to be much chance of doing any multi-day trips without camping most nights on these islands that may be mangrove or may be swamp. Neither sounded too good for the kind of camping we were “prepared” for: we each had a light sleeping bag and a small mosquito net.

There may be potential up there for some great kayaking – I’d love to know what it’s like - but I think one would need to have different equipment, like fishing rods, cooking gear, tents, and gosh, maybe even a two-way VHF marine radio.

It seemed to us, then, looking out over the Atlantic by Gibara, that much of the north coast was off limits simply because of the North Wind so pronouncedly featured by the Cuban winter.

So we pored, pondered, postulated, and eventually proposed that the area on the Caribbean coast between the cities of Cienfuegos and Trinidad looked quite promising. We found a sentence in our guide book that implied that there might be a coral reef all along that stretch. We hoped that this might mean that it was sheltered from any big waves coming in off the Caribbean. We also reasoned that by being on that coast, we should also be sheltered from the North Wind. Lastly, it seemed as if there may be a few beaches and two or three potential legal places to stay along that route.

That evening we began the process of trying to secure un coche particular - an illegal car and driver - to get us to Cienfuegos, half-way across Cuba. This would prove to be impossible in as small a place as Gibara. So we had to start looking into bus transport: our host Nancy checked the Viazul (tourist bus) schedules from Holguin, but (of course) there were no buses going to Cienfuegos. It seemed as if the best bet was the daily bus bound for Havana, and we would get off in Santa Clara and make our way to Cienfuegos from there. There didn’t seem to be any buses to Holguin from Gibara, leaving tourist taxis as the only legal method, which was completely out of the question – they are very expensive. Therefore, we only needed to get a coche as far as Holguin.

This is all to say that transport in Cuba is one of the many very challenging aspects of visiting the country outside the resort spheres. It would take all of one day and more than half the next to go less than six hundred kilometres, and this is heading for a popular tourist destination. Cool!

A rental car would help on a trip like this, I guess, but we were aiming to fulfill the fantasy of moving from place to place without having to loop back. We wanted to get somewhere where we could paddle off with all our gear in our ‘yaks, and never look back. We hoped that starting in Cienfuegos we would achieve this. And besides, relying on private cars was much more interesting: when you’re too independent, you have that much less interaction with your surroundings, and our rides there were some of our best memories. We got to hang out with folks who usually had very little to do with foreigners, and we had them all to ourselves for the duration of the ride. To top it off, averaged out it is more or as economical compared to almost any other form of transport.

So, the next morning we were leaving el Oriente and off towards the Caribbean. We were unsure how far we would make it, but we had our boats and we had a mission.

Little did we know what trouble there was in store for us from the Cuba’s “dreaded” Ministerio del Interior...