Day 11 Tijuana – Havana

The hotel room might have looked good, but serious issues with the beds. I tossed and turned all night and eventually gave up at 5 and processed the last few day’s blogs. Heather woke up and had a similar night to me. Got our bags ready when the alarm went at 6, then down to breakfast. Buffet style, so I had a mix of fruit and eggs. Quick trip back to our room to gather our bags then handed in pass keys before catching a taxi. Cost of taxi $10 US plus tip. 

Arrived at the airport, which is right next to the border. You could see the bridge across the top of the road. We discovered that we had to pay a departure tax = $25US, but only once, ie not at Mexico City. Our bags were checked though to Havana, so we are hoping they will be there. Passed through security. My bag got x-rayed 3 times and Heather got the wand.

View from our hotel window

Great plane. Lots of leg space and we were the second last row. However it turned out I was on the window and Heather was in the middle. A man sat on the aisle, but the hostess moved him to a spare seat. We ended up with a spare seat in the middle. I got a great view of both Tijuana and Mexico City. Both very sprawling and lots of pollution over MC. Tj Has a population of 3 million, most of which appeared to be very poor.

Good flight with some minor turbulence towards the end. I watched a movie on a temperamental screen that kept turning off every five minutes and took half an hour to be convinced to increase the sound volume. Landed and had to put forward our watches by two hours. We followed the connections notices and discovered that although they are currently upgrading the airport, there were very few cafes. Poor choice for the GF but Heather found me a salad (old and tired) and sat to wait for our plane. No free WiFi at Mexico City airport that I could find, so we just chatted and watched people.

Eventually our plane came on the board and we discovered that we had in fact sat opposite the boarding gate. Heather went over to find out about a message that they were broadcasting. We had to take our visas to be checked. This time we had a real bonus. We were the official safety door keepers. Lots of extra leg space and thankfully no emergencies! Delayed boarding and then sat for 45 minutes on the tarmac before finally taking off. Diner consisted of yoghurt and croissant- I ate both our packets of peanuts and had a cup of tea.

We landed in Havana late, but then sat on their tarmac for another 20 minutes. It was 37C. Eventually disembarking at 11:30. Went thought immigration in 5 minutes! Then waited for 20 minutes for our bags to come onto the carousel. They had signalled it was to be on no 3- it came on the one next door! But joy of joys our bags were there. Locals had a much tougher time than our 1 minute to get through customs, possibly because they were bringing back wide screen TV’s and huge bags.

We had to ask directions to the company office at the airport. It may have been a small airport but was busy even at 12:00am. The company rep went and got the lady we needed, we handed over our documentation, she gave us what we needed, and got us a taxi.

We were both exhausted by the time we reached our hotel, which appeared to be quite a distance from the airport. The night manager gave us our keys and told us our dinner was waiting for us. The salad and cold meat was just what I needed after all that airline "food".