9am at the plank – that was to become our meeting place, late enough for a good breakfast, early enough to miss the heat & the crowds.

So off I went with 2 new friends, Linda & Howard, also solo travellers.  Out of the port & turn left, then 10CUC, about £8 bought us a ride on the hop on hop off bus, I’ve a feeling it may have been cheaper if you don’t get on at the cruise terminal, MSC based a cruise ship in Havana this year so they are well used to cruise passengers!

£8 for a bus tour is nothing compared to other cities, but in no other City do you get a fabricated selection box of seats or the commentary, when you could hear it, only in Spanish 

I got a little over excited when one of the first sights for me, was a fiat 126, my first car!

We saw lots of green spaces & important buildings, though a guide book would have been a good idea as wifi is very hard to find & we couldn’t always hear the Spanish commentary

I loved the little tuc-tucs and the old cars, that were basically everywhere, while you do get cars of all ages, and there were some new cars, to my very untrained eye, most of the cars were 1950’s

You can see all the gorgeous old buildings in the background, taking photos in the rickety old bus wasn’t easy but some of the old buildings along the sea front already have for sale signs on them, waiting on the influx of American money I guess

We saw monuments & multi coloured sky scrapers

And of course we visited Revoloution Square with the iconic Che Guevara wall – the square is massive, a huge space in the middle of the city

Che pops up everywhere throughout the city, I loved the little shops people had at the front of their houses and we saw his image on a few of these

If you’d lots of time to explore Havana, the monumental cemetery is probably worth a trip, one passenger on board had only visited here & was determined to share her pictures with as many people as possible!

We passed by the Copa Cobana Hotel plus a modern hotel where the American flag had joined other world flags outside

Getting hot & being well shook up on the bus, we hopped off at the top of one of the main streets, bought some sweet, fried tortillas from a street vendor and stopped at a local bar for some refreshment, for my friends a local beer, for me, a Cuba Libra of course!  Then a little lizard slithered down the tree & joined us

I’d an afternoon tour & one of my friends legs were hurting so we left Linda to explore and took a little bicycle taxi back to the boat, thankfully I’ve no photo evidence of this!  We negotiated a 5CUC fee as we were told it wasn’t too far, but the guy earned his keep pedalling the pair of us, and we enjoyed the ride along the seafront even if the passing cars were a bit scary, so we paid 5CUC each, only later did we discover all he had to do was go to the bottom of the street & turn right, so we’d been enjoyably swizzed – as I said, it’s not taking them long to get used to the tourists!