The itinerary that we agreed to when we booked this trip was to leave Toronto Sunday evening, overnight in Havana, fly to the Isle of Youth on Monday morning, and still dive that day. This is how that plan turned out.
Our Cubana flight scheduled for 1855 hrs actually left at 1930 hrs. We had an in-flight movie, but they started it about two hours into the flight so we did not get to see the whole thing. We landed in Havana at about 2300 hrs, but by the time we got our luggage and the ground transport got us to our hotel, it was 0145 when we finally hit the sack.
Reveille was at 0330 hrs in order to catch a ride back to the airport at 0400. Our first stop was the parking lot of the International Terminal where a guy was waiting for us, and we traded in our vouchers for our tickets to and from Gerona. Then we went to the National Terminal for an 0600 flight. The flight was 30 minutes and the ride to the hotel was 40. We checked in at 0730. Patti laid down and I went for breakfast. Then we went diving.
The Hotel El Colony is quite nice. It has a pool and a nice beach. The food was tasty and plentiful. They also have a restaurant at the end of a pier at the National Marine Park where we had our lunch on diving days. Something that I considered to be a very nice touch took place as we left. Breakfast normally started at 0700 hrs, but Patti, a German guy, and I were leaving for the airport at 0515, so they put on a special breakfast for us at 0500 hrs.
The land portion of the park consisted of another nice beach with two piers. One pier was owned by the hotel, and the restaurant was at the end of it. It was ~300 yards long. At first the other one was just sort of their. Between the two piers were beach chairs, kayaks, and sailboats, and virtually no people. On the first couple of days, we saw a couple of guys raking up the eel grass that the surf brought in. Then they took it up our pier about 50 yards or so and dumped it back into the ocean. The scene changed on Thursday. There was a cruise ship off shore and suddenly we had a crowded beach.
If we walked along the beach in the opposite direction from the beach toys, we could see small fish, crabs, and three small stingrays in the water, sometimes less than a foot from shore.
The washrooms at the restaurant were a bit amusing. There was a porcelain bowl but no seat. Flushing was accomplished by pouring a bucket of ocean water into the bowl. The fun part was re-filling the bucket, because we were about 20 feet above the water. Some of us mastered the art of getting a full bucket, but some people suffered from floating bucket syndrome.
The daily routine started at 0900 hrs with a 3 km bus ride from the hotel to the marina/dive shop. Then we boarded the boat and cruised out to the restaurant in the National Park. One of the divemasters told me that the boat would take a maximum of 12 divers. Our actual numbers ranged from 10 to 16. The boat was quite suitable for 12 divers, but we were really mooing the day there was 16.
The boat would stop at the restaurant for ~ 5 minutes, long enough for us to suit up on a stable platform. Then it was a short ride for our morning dive. On Day One, we did or checkout dive, which simply meant we did not go deep, and on the other four days we did a hundred and something feet for forty something minutes. The route to the wall involved swimming through a tunnel. Now I consider tunnels and deep dives to be rather boring, but I did these ones anyway. They did not exactly turn my crank but it was better than staying up top and diving in bubbles. I actually set a personal depth record on this trip - 180 ft.
Afterwards we would go to the restaurant for lunch and the rest of our 3 hour surface interval. Then we would do the afternoon dive, which would normally be about 45 ft for about an hour. Then, back to the marina where we were able to secure and dry our gear, and back to the hotel. Happy Hour started at 1700 hrs, which is about when we got back.
All the dives were guided dives, but they were high quality guided dives. First, the dive duration was longer than I have experienced elsewhere in the Caribbean. Also, I have heard people report dive ops where the entire group had to surface when one person ran out of air. We had a guy get low on air, after about 40 minutes one afternoon, so he shared the divemaster's air and we all kept going for a 55 minute dive. Also, instead of having young athletic divemasters who zoom along the reef, we had middle-aged pot-bellied ones who actually know how to swim slowly.
The diving was as good as I have seen anywhere in the Caribbean - and I have been to a lot of places. The corals and sponges were in good shape and there was a good collection of both large and small fish. There were also some huge lobsters. On Monday, there was a very slight current, but on the other four days there was none whatsoever.
Our itinerary called for us to fly from Gerona to Havana at 0700 hrs on Sunday morning and then fly back to Toronto at 1410 hrs. When we checked into the hotel on Monday morning, the clerk told us that our ride to the airport would leave at ~ 1330 hrs on Sunday afternoon. That didn't seem right, but she showed us our tickets that called for us to catch the afternoon flight to Havana, which, of course, would cause us to miss our flight to Toronto. She mentioned that on Tuesday, one of the customer service staff could take our tickets to Cubana and, for a small fee, get our flights changed.
The small fee was an annoyance, but the important thing was to get the flight changed. On Tuesday morning, we gave our tickets and money to the lady and went diving. When we got back, she told us that the Sunday morning flight was full. She also said that Cubana still had our tickets, and that they would switch us if someone cancelled. She would go back on Friday to see how it turned out. The matter was now out of our hands. The full morning flight explained why we were on the afternoon flight, but for the next three days I kept wondering:
Well, Friday arrived and when we got back from diving, we got our tickets and we were on the morning flight. We flew to Havana and took a taxi to the International Terminal (our ground transport did not show up). There, we got some free entertainment. A group of twentysomethings dressed in Ché t-shirts were jumping up and down, waving their arms, and singing and chanting. They sounded quite patriotic.
The rest of the trip home was uneventful until we got to Toronto. As a precaution against Foot and Mouth Disease, all passengers arriving on international flights had to walk over a carpet soaked in some sort of soap. This made the floor on the other side of the carpet very slippery, and I almost wiped out.
Despite the lack of sleep on the way out and the extra drama for the trip home, this was a super dive trip.
| Trip Dates2001-04-01 to 2001-04-07 | Trip Report Index |