Escaping Havana for some rural relaxation. Part 1.

Getting out of Havana isn’t as easy as just hopping straight on a bus.

First you have to find a taxi to take you out to the bus station to book a bus ticket for the following day.

Or the day after if things are a bit busy… Looks like we’re spending another day in Havana.

Luckily, getting a taxi ride there is easy.

Taxi? Taxi? Taxi? “Yes.” We’re surprising ourselves here, but “Yes please”.

Actually, we specifically sought this one out because the chap gave us a good deal on a return trip to the bus station as well as having a funky old car that we completely forgot to get a photo of the outside of…

Conveniently, this taxi also had a pretty neat, retro interior.

An extra day in Havana gave us time to revisit the incredibly overpriced but nonetheless interesting knick-knack and book markets in the Plaza de Armas.

If we weren’t on a tight budget, this stuff wasn’t so overpriced, we weren’t flying back with tiny daypacks to live in a small 4Runner, we would have absolutely bought all of this. All of it. Maybe not the horse and cart, we think that was a taxi, but the rest, absolutely.

We also had time to look at a couple more forts over the other side of the harbour.

Out the back of the Fortaleza de San Carlos de la Cabaña (luckily just known as ‘La Cabaña‘ for short) was an enticing little roadside museum. One dedicated to that time mankind almost managed to trigger a non-climate-change induced apocalypse.

Here are housed relics of the time when the world was poised on the edge of nuclear armageddon and little old Cuba was positioned clearly at the centre of the mess. The actual missiles from the Cuban Missile Crisis (or Crisis de Octubre as it is known in Cuba) were sent back to the Soviet Union. But full scale replicas and an assortment of other less dramatic missiles are on display. Including the remnants of the US spy plane that was shot down over Cuba during the crisis. The whole display tells the story of the events that led to the closest the world has come to a potential nuclear apocalypse.

Now these relics from a bygone era sit in the sunshine just outside La Cabaña waiting for tourists to pop by and take a look.

The following morning we were finally on our way out of Havana.