From The Sunday Times Travel Magazine, October

All those salsa-dancing waiters and crumbling cigar factories don’t half make for a good photograph. I filled a 2GB memory card with them on my first trip to Havana.

But when I got back, my images looked just like my friend Jo’s (who’d been to the city on a day trip from Varadero Beach, her package resort), and like Alex’s (who’d stopped in Havana for the night while on a Caribbean cruise), and like Melissa’s (who’d flown to the capital for a hedonistic city break of salsa and fat cigars).

I wanted the shots nobody else had: empty sands; green palms as far as the eye can see; and not a cigar tour in sight.

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Yes, Havana is sensational. The architecture will move you; the live bolero music in every cafe will have you dancing at three in the afternoon; and the sheer buzz of Habana Vieja will still be ringing in your ears when you climb back on the plane home. But Havana is not the complete picture – it’s merely one lovely pixel.

Beyond the city are unknown beaches fit for the pages of holiday brochures (thankfully, you won’t find them in any), colonial cities every bit as handsome as Havana (but full of Cubans, not Gringos), and landscapes so deep (with layer upon layer of banana fields, villages, sugar cane and jungly mountains) that it’s like looking into an Escher painting.

I returned to Cuba with two friends to share the driving and took a week-long roadtrip starting in Havana, heading southwest to Cienfuegos, a Unesco World Heritage city, then to Trinidad, a living museum of Spanish colonial times, before relaxing in Ancón – for Mojitos and hammock time.

Within minutes of driving outside the city limits, we were lost. There are no road signs in Cuba – perhaps part of Fidel’s plan that all road-users be equal. Even though our expert travel agent (there aren’t many that tackle this part of Cuba) had described how to get onto the highway (‘left after the mango crop, then straight past the goat herder’), we were still baffled.

Hidalgo, a cyclist taking refuge beneath a bridge from the blistering heat, helped us out when we pulled over to ask him for directions. Maps scribbled, he held out his palm for some pesos. Fidel’s road users may all be equally lost, but clearly some know how to capitalise on the situation.

The A1 highway lay like a concrete table-runner before us. It was eight lanes wide, yet we saw only a smattering of cars (Ladas and the odd 1940s Buick, pumping out smoke from a garden hose acting as a makeshift exhaust pipe).

We forked off, after an hour, to a smaller road, curling through tiny tobacco towns on the way to Cienfuegos. Life here is serene, slow and self-sufficient, a cine movie of horses and carts, women fanning themselves in doorways, and fence posts in soil so fertile, they start sprouting papaya.

So it seemed odd when we passed gaudy billboards screaming ‘Patria O Muerte’ (Patriotism or Death) and ‘Bush, el Fachismo’ (you can work that one out for yourselves). These political messages didn’t seem to affect people’s lives in any way. It’s as if Fidel Castro is an embarrassing, rich old uncle who everybody has to humour (the type who snorts when he laughs and eats all the sausages at a party) until he totters off this mortal coil and everybody can finally enjoy their inheritance boon.

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