Mexico City to Cuba

Where I left yesterday was where we were planning to get some hours of sleep in real beds after a long day of travelling and sleeping in aeroplanes as the mood arose. Our hotel room had two beds which were clearly designed for little Mexicans to share and as it turned out both of us slept through until about 2 AM when it seemed the jetlag kicked in. As I rolled around try to sleep I became quite short of breath and a headache brewed. Given that I wasn’t sleeping and by this time South Africa had won the rugby, Doctor Google suggested that it is common for some people to suffer altitude sickness. Mexico City is at 2250 metres (about 7,300 feet above sea level. By the morning I felt quite ill, but thankfully came right later in the day when we got to Cuba.

The Mexico City airport is a big complex with lots of shops, restaurants and hotels. We found one of the restaurants for breakfast and then had a wander around the shops where there are many ways to be parted from the y our money. Mexican’s love colour and with the Dia de Los Muertos coming up there was no shortage of trinkets.

We checked out the hotel and into our next flight. We had pre-purchased our visas for Cuba and this appeared to be a good decision, getting us into a shorter queue, and apart from a Cuban ‘princess’ and her manservant’s demands on the airline staff we got through quite quickly. One think to know is that in Mexico all the boarding announcements are in Spanish, so one needs to take care not to board the plane in the wrong zone, like I did. They do prefer to fill the planes up from the back, presumably so they can help passengers stow carry-on luggage.

We were above the clouds most of the way but did catch some glimpses of the island on the way down . Lots of sugar cane and other food crops grown in rich red soil and little sign of a drought.

Upon arrival into Havana Airport, which is old, but in better condition than I’d expected. Immigration processing was efficient, except there was a bit of a lack of consistency in some of the advice around customs forms which resulted in Deb having to backtrack to sort that out.

We have certainly become aware that the pace in Central America is much different from our normal world. There are usually a lot of people to do a job, but it still takes time. Mexico City airport is probably the cleanest airport in the world judging from the number of people that perform discreet cleaning activities. There is even a guy whose job is to hand out paper towels in the toilets. Anyway, baggage claim in Cuba is another one of those things. Bags come onto the carousel one at a time, so we waited for our bags for around an hour.

By the time we met out tour organiser there was a torrential storm passing through, but we still went from the airport to the hotel in a 1950’s Chev (or similar. It’s been a long time since I’ve been in a car with no fitted seat belts with a driver that takes phone calls on his handset while driving. We made it to the hotel which is a magnificent historical property built in the 1930s. It has retained much of it’s charm and I’ll post more photos in the coming days.