Colin asked for some thoughts on Cuba and I have been thinking a lot about our trip – just not writing much about it! I’m not sure where to begin really. It was hot and smelly (!) and sometimes very noisy. There was music at every turn and people always wanting to find out where you are from. It was, in it’s own way, very beautiful and certainly very happy, but at the same time tinged with a sadness. Buildings which clearly once had been stunningly beautiful are now wrecked and falling to bits – but they still have people living in them. Home-grown squalor brushes hard up against foreign wealth. I would say Fidel’s revolution has done little to enhance what is a fascinating country – yet, it is the stagnation created by his dictatorship that makes the country so fascinating. Tourism is crudely developed and most of the ‘must see’ things are fabricated specifically for tourists (we avoided them best we could), but if you take the plunge and brave the terrible maps and roads there are some amazing gems to be seen – coffee and sugar plantations, birds galore, tobacco drying in the fields, pigs being carried on the back of mopeds and oxen being driven down the motorway. I don’t know that I have anything more profound to say really. It was a great experience – but one that is hard to verbalise!