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1 January 2003: Cardenas to Colon (60 km) - The ride to Colon was absolutely gorgeous. Beautiful sugar cane fields. In Maximo Gomez, an agricultural town named for one of the early revolutionaries, I attempted to assist a Cuban changing a flat tire not realizing how stiff the tire was. I smashed my thumb a bit and it took 3 Cubans to finish changing the tire with my tire levers. People can not afford expensive tires, so the cheap ones are really stiff and do not fit the rim properly. Here we also bought a nice fresh huge papaya which we all shared directly from a man selling it on a cart from the farm. Getting fresh tropical fruit is so special. Also because of the embargo and the lack of money for fertilizer almost all the food grown in Cuba now is organic. The cows, goats and chickens are all free ranging. We saw no factory farms our entire time there. The papaya was our lunch. An hour later on the outskirts of Colon, I got a flat and discovered that my Michelin tire was almost as stiff as a Cuban tire. It took Bruce and Rays help to get it on and off. Colon is a beautiful city dating from 1512. Architectually it is stunning. It looks like a little Santa Clara, a city we will visit later. It is a wealthy town. People have gorgeous bikes and motorcycles. We stayed in a hotel the exact opposite of the one we stayed in , in Cardenas. Ray and I shared a huge room with four beds, color television, cold shower and private bathroom for 15 dollars per night total. It was on the top floor 6 flights up, overlooking the whole city. It felt a little like being in Paris and seeing out over the whole town. Later after a wonderful dinner at the hotel restaurant we walked around to a well lit beautifully maintained city park. There were nice benches and trees and flowers. It felt like a park you might see in a city in the Netherlands such as Delft or like Vienna in Austria. A really slick band with a 20 speaker sound system was warming up. No one hassled us in this beautiful place Colon. The hotel proprietor said the people in Cardenas are 'muy malo' and we should have never stayed there overnight.
