Varadero & Cueva d'Ambrosio

Our first excursion in Cuba was to take the Varadero Beach Tour bus (5 CUC, hop on, hop off any number of times) down the peninsula to see the Cueva d'Ambrosio.

The Beach Tour isn't really a tour of the beach, it just runs a circuit up and down the Avenida Playa, where the hotels are, and loops around in Varadero proper.  Note: fair-skinned people should not sit on the open top floor of the bus for too long, and if your sunscreen says reapply every 2 hours, believe it.

Cueva d'Ambrosio 

The Cueva d'Ambrosio is a cave with pre-Columbian drawings done in red pigment (made from the iron in the soil) and charcoal. The drawings are on the walls and ceilings; anything on the floor is covered in ancient bat guano.

Here you can see the iron-rich rock that the red pigment came from.

Bats also live there.  There is a count or study (sometimes it's hard to understand a Spanish accent) every May of the bats.  Some of them are banded. I tried to get shots of them flying (we disturbed them) but it's hard to get shots of small creatures moving fast in the dark with a crappy camera.

Another neat thing about the cave is the holes in the roof, where trees have dropped roots to access the dampness.  Cuba is pretty dry in the dry season and most of the moisture is in the air, not the ground,

This is the tree trunk going up through a hole.

This is the root, looking like a coiled rope.

It's blurry, but it gives you a better idea of the colours in the cave.

 Then we hopped back on the bus and headed into Varadero proper.

Varadero

Panoramic view from the west end of our hotel that I stitched together. That's is looking landward, along the peninsula, which is very narrow

Varadero is a tourist town. You see the same arts-and-craftsy goods repeated, store after store, and you realize these are mass-produced goods for the tourist market. The market in Havana is just a larger version of the market in Varadero.

You don't go to Cuba to shop.  Prices are about the same as in USD.  The only things worth buying are rum, cigars and coffee. Prices are no cheaper in town than at the hotel gift shop,

The reason you go to Varadero is the beach, and the resorts.

The photo doesn't do justice to the colours of the sky and the ocean here.  Those colours you see on travel posters, where the ocean is a deep aquamarine, those are not photoshopped.