Gallivanting the globe 2019 - RTW and then some

[JohnM]

The next morning was spent strolling around central Cienfuegos. A very neat and tidy town with some beautiful colonial buildings. WH-listed.

 

[Major]

The streets and public areas look really clean

 

[JohnM]

Late morning and back in the bus for a two-hour drive to Trinidad, a well-preserved colonial town further E on the S coast. WH-listed.

A couple of pics inside the bus. All these Yutong coaches have the fridge as a fixture in the front near the steps. The padded piece on the frame to the left of the fridge is a fold-out backrest for the leader to lean against when giving a spiel to everyone. These buses are good – much better than a much more spartan Toyota Coaster, for example.

 

[JohnM]

And some lobster scraps for dinner that night at a resto out near the harbour, before heading back to the centre of town for the usual entertainment.



Next day was a free day, so I took a boat trip out to an island.

 

[JohnM]

In the hinterland from Trinidad is the Valle de los Ingenios, a fertile valley that in colonial times made this region very rich from sugar-growing. There are the ruins of dozens of 19th century sugar mills, and the owners’ palatial haciendas (some restored) across the valley. Again, WH-listed.



The next town was Santa Clara, in central Cuba N of Trinidad and on our route back to Havana. It’s a university town and its main claim to fame is that it is the resting place of Che Guevara, with a large monument and mausoleum dedicated to him and others. He led the successful revolutionary attack that liberated Santa Clara in December 1958 and which effectively ended the Batista regime.

Our tour leader grew up in Santa Clara and was a Santa-Clara University-educated lawyer by training. She was a student at the time Che Guevara’s body was eventually and relatively recently recovered from a secret mass grave in Bolivia, where he had been assassinated while injured, and reburied in this memorial. She was able to give a first-hand account of the events of that day, which was momentous in recent Cuban history.

No photographs are permitted inside the mausoleum or museum. The inscription on the memorial column means ‘Ever onward to victory’.



Then it was a run into Havana and back to the Hotel Nacional. It was a Saturday and things were again rockin’ in the square below the hotel, so we kicked on there after dinner in a nearby resto.

And that’s it for fabulous Cuba!

 

[Bundy Bear]

Nice report so far, saw this thread get a new lease of life, and thought the trip must be over and then read you aren’t even half way through it. Happy writing.
I don’t have the patience or time to write trip reports any more, although I don’t go to interesting places like you, Melbourne Sydney Adelaide Perth everyone has been there.

 

[Antoallison]

Thanks, I have especially enjoyed reading about Cuba, wonderful photos with the colourful houses.

Now for my homework - Leading on from your TR, I was curious enough to read up on the sugar industry in Cuba, and about the African slaves that helped make it so prosperous.

Where to next ?

 

[JohnM]

Where to next ?

Sheesh - I'm only four weeks into a 17 week trip . Patience, petal, patience - this will keep going for a looong while yet . I can wear you lot down before you can wear me down - try as some of you might .

Refer post #1: Gallivanting the globe 2019 - RTW and then some

Just wait until you see what I saw in the far east Russian Arctic Ocean - phwoar, just [multiple expletives deleted] PHWOAR! Hint: how does 52 polar bears, scores of walrus, hundreds of whales, dozens of muskox, amazing bird life, mammoth tusks, beautiful botany, crunching through ice in an icebreaker in two weeks grab you? .

Stay tuned .

I even go to Finland, the 5 Stans - and beyond - after that.... And do a bit of motoring in QSuites and JL J in the process....

Ho hum...

 

[JohnM]

Nice report so far, saw this thread get a new lease of life, and thought the trip must be over and then read you aren’t even half way through it. Happy writing.
I don’t have the patience or time to write trip reports any more, although I don’t go to interesting places like you, Melbourne Sydney Adelaide Perth everyone has been there.

Thanks, @Bundy Bear!

My TRs meet two needs: my own and AFF. I have mentioned before that the way I do TRs is to write them up in Word documents (photos embedded). That is my 'personal TR' that I file. It's my way of filtering and distilling my pics.

I then take Snips of the pics (in pairs because that's the way they fit automatically on a page in Word) - which makes very small files for fast upload to AFF - a big advantage for folks who are logging in from places overseas (or in the air) with slow WiFi (I say that from oftentimes frustrating experience). I just copy the text I've written (minimal) and the snips into my TR.

I meet my needs, and if I contribute something useful and enjoyable to others on AFF in the process, then I'm more than happy .

 

[Antoallison]

Sheesh - I'm only four weeks into a 17 week trip . Patience, petal, patience - this will keep going for a looong while yet . I can wear you lot down before you can wear me down - try as some of you might .

Refer post #1: Gallivanting the globe 2019 - RTW and then some

Just wait until you see what I saw in the far east Russian Arctic Ocean - phwoar, just [multiple expletives deleted] PHWOAR! Hint: how does 52 polar bears, scores of walrus, hundreds of whales, dozens of muskox, amazing bird life, mammoth tusks, beautiful botany, crunching through ice in an icebreaker in two weeks grab you? .

Stay tuned .

I even go to Finland, the 5 Stans - and beyond - after that.... And do a bit of motoring in QSuites and JL J in the process....

Ho hum...

Wait !! ....Just ordering some thermal wear online. ️

 

[Milboo]

I am loving the trip down memory lane! I loved Vinales - it was beautiful. And those drinks too! We had a free morning there so a German girl and I organised a driver and went up to Cayo Jutias - arriving before the crowds (not there were many!). A gorgeous beach.

I also fell in love with Trinidad.

 

[JohnM]

I also fell in love with Trinidad.

Who couldn't fall in love with the whole of Cuba and its people? Just a fabulous place!

 

[Drakecula]

Who couldn't fall in love with the whole of Cuba and its people? Just a fabulous place!

Especially a certain tour guide?
Your report has been so much fun, I look forward to hearing about the other places in due course.

 

[OZDUCK]

I have really enjoyed you photos of Cuba. However, I do have one question. A few years ago there were quite a few documentaries/travelogues showing lots crumbling older buildings in Havana and other major cities. Is there a noticeable drop off in building standards away from the major city areas?

 

[craven morehead]

Who couldn't fall in love with the whole of Cuba and its people? Just a fabulous place!

You've got me sold on it

 

[JohnM]

Moving along. I spent the next few days making my way back to MIA via CUN to re-connect with my DONE4 and on to ANC xDFW, then a separate AS flight to Nome (OME). Although AA flies direct HAV-MIA, it is not possible to travel directly to LOTFAP if you have been in Cuba for tourism.

I arrived in Nome a few days ahead of the start of my Arctic Ocean voyage that began with a charter flight from OME to Anadyr (DYR) in Russia. I wanted to check out this very isolated and famous gold-rush town and surrounding area. While the weather was not brutally unkind, it was characterised by low and heavy cloud most of the time.

HAV gets an eclectic mix of birds, and hauling out.



Coming into ANC.



Hauling out of ANC to OME.



Coming into OME. That’s an old mining dredge (more on those later) on the left, and the very spartan and small AS terminal.



Nome (Nome, Alaska - Wikipedia) is very much a frontier town. It’s very isolated and there are no roads connecting Nome with the rest of Alaska. There are only three roads, radiating little more than 120 km each E, N and NW from Nome.

On 18 July, there was still no official night, just a few hours of civil twilight.

It’s famous for the annual Iditarod dog-sled race (Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race - Wikipedia) from Anchorage, a distance of more than 1500 km, and taking about nine days.



The Nome gold deposits are alluvial and the initial discovery was made on the beach. The rush that followed had sluice-boxers densely packed on the beach and even today some fossickers still run little sluice-boxes on the beach.

Then followed the era of large land-based dredges that crawled along in artificial ponds, digging out the soil on bucket-lines, sluicing it for the gold and then back-filling behind them the spoil. There are many of these abandoned throughout the region.

All, or most, of the mining today is carried out by ocean-going dredges that work in the large shallow bay.

 

[JohnM]

The road N leads into a tundra wilderness.



The road E goes along the coast and through the Safety Sound wetland before passing the Safety Roadhouse (it was closed) which is the last checkpoint on the Iditarod before Nome.

Carrying on, the road reaches Bonanza Crossing, on the far side of which is the Last Train to Nowhere, a series of locomotives abandoned in the tundra in 1907 after a storm destroyed the bridge over the river and leaving them stranded forever. The locos were first used on the elevated lines of New York in the 1880s and transported to Alaska 1903 for a rail freight line servicing mines, but that company went broke in 1903.



The road NW leads to Teller, a subsistence Inupiat village that lies at the western end of the westernmost road in N America.

 

[tgh]

Super interesting stuff… more …...

 

[JohnM]

OK – the time had finally come for the highly-anticipated charter flight over the Bering Strait (Bering Strait - Wikipedia) to Anadyr, Russia for the start of my voyage to Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean. Anadyr is the main town in the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug (Chukotka Autonomous Okrug - Wikipedia) – a sort of territory. It is extremely remote and inaccessible by road from the rest of Russia.

The flight was in a Bering Air Beechcraft 1900D (Bering Air Plane Charters for Western Alaska). They have two in their fleet. The group that was joining the voyage by this route (other pax were coming in from Moscow to Anadyr) exceeded the number of seats in the two aircraft. Late morning both aircraft left OME 30 mins apart for the 2 h flight to DYR. After unloading, both flew back to OME and one then turned around to bring the remaining pax. I was in the first bird out (TKWIA ).



The ground transport to the ship. They take what they can get up there.

 

[JohnM]

When I booked the voyage last year, the vessel was to be a 50 pax ice-strengthened Russian ship that Heritage Expeditions has been using for some time – to the point they have given the vessel their own name (Heritage Expeditions | Spirit of Enderby).

Subsequently, they secured and alternative larger (110 pax) icebreaker for the three 2019 voyages to Wrangel Island. I don’t know the background to that – availability at the right time I guess and they clearly had the demand as we had a full complement of pax.

What all this meant was that the smaller vessel was in port (small, with limited berthing) at Anadyr. The larger vessel (the Kapitan Khlebnikov) was standing offshore, so the Enderby was effectively going to be used as a ferry to get us out to the KK.

They had completed the first Wrangel Island voyage that morning, so some of those pax passed us in DYR to take the charter flights back to OME. We boarded the Enderby and needed to wait for the Moscow pax to come in, followed later by the last of the OME pax. We eventually set sail out to the KK in the evening.

The time in harbour, which is a river mouth with fast-flowing current, was far from wasted. There was a massive salmon run happening. Three types of locals were taking huge advantage – beluga whales (Beluga whale - Wikipedia), sea lions and humans. A massive feeding frenzy – and a great start!



The black strip on this beluga is a sea lamprey.



The ship’s crew joined in with a simple net.



Size doesn’t matter, does it – DOES IT?