Day 9: Ron, where is my Daiquiri?

Wed. 22nd August 2012

Today was transfer day back to Havana and was a full day on the coach. Some of our group began to feel the going home blues. We began with another historical visit to Santa Cara where there is the mausoleum for Ernesto (Che) Guevara and museum detailing his life and his relationship with Fidel Castro, which was very interesting, especially with Freddie’s narration.

Lunch was back at the place we stopped for coffee on the first day. It was a rest stop with various animals (mini Millets Farm????). To provide funds to care for the animals there was a guinea pig roulette! Bets were put on the chosen houses, the guinea pig was spun in the centre and if it went into your house you won a bottle of rum. Needless to say even though we has most houses covered it still found one we had not bet on. We did feel sorry for the dizzy guinea pig doing his bit to help his fellow inmates.

For lunch we opted for sandwiches (ham and cheese, pork, or chicken !) . The senior member of our group opted for Coffee and as we were well accustomed to rum (ron in Spanish) he asked for this to be added. The drink came with pineapple juice and cinnamon too . This therefore became known as an “Eric Special” and almost everyone then had to have one. I expect it is one of those drinks that will not travel well back to the UK!

As ron is the national drink of Cuba this has been tried in many different cocktail concoctions. Mojitos, Ron Collins, Havana specials, (Eric specials!), Daiquiris – to name a few.

As this was the last night of the tour Freddie found us a lovely rooftop restaurant overlooking the harbour. The lobster was tasty but the consensus (both Brit and Aussie) was that the Cubans did tend to overcook it. As the night progressed and more people arrived new tables were squeezed in and as a consequence my Daiquiri took over half an hour to appear and arrived with the bill. I will never know if that restaurant did serve the best Daiquiri yet. However there is a new contender for the ‘Best Diaquiri in Havana’ award at the Floridita in Havana. We will get there before we leave Cuba which and I will report back!!