It’s hard to believe that lying only two and a half hours outside of the hustle of Havana is the countryside oasis of the Viñales Valley. The heart of Cuba’s tobacco industry, the green plantations and winding roads of the Viñales appear like an agricultural mirage at the end of the sprawling pothole-ridden motorway. Usually, it’s fecundity will be announced by an outpouring from one of its habitual tropical rainstorms, which will catch you completely unawares, but will be a refreshing shower from the hot and dusty drive all the same.

When you do reach the focal point of the valley, the main town of the Vinales, you’ll be surprised at how quickly the farmlands fade away, replaced instead by a wall of colours in the form of Casa Particularas, the Cuban equivalent of the B&B. Comparable perhaps to the coloured cottages that characterise a seaside town such as Brighton, the pinks, reds and yellows in the Viñales however are like many things in Cuba, brilliant and full-bodied; not a muted pastel in sight.

The pace of life in the Viñales is suffused with this warmth and ease, as we first learnt on being introduced to Migneles and Junito, the hosts of the Casa Particular we were to be staying in for the next two nights. Humble but comfortable, we were treated to delicious home-cooked dinners, served hot from the adjoining family kitchen. The secret ingredient to their success? The use of fresh, local produce. Avocados were not smashed, stuffed or guacamoled but simply cut up and served; their elusive green and perfectly ripe state easier to appreciate. Likewise, the coffee, a test of quality with international standards, passed literally with flying colours, opaque and the correct shade of chestnut brown, completely dissimilar to the grey-tinged (and grey-tasting) water that we had become accustomed to for the past week. The result were meals simpler and better than any we had eaten in Havana, sidestepping the trap of attempting to imitate western food, but utilising the asset that is real Cuban cuisine.

Activities in the Viñales are for everyone, with horse riding, trekking and cycling all viable means of exploring the area. Although part of us may have wished they were less inclusive, as every novice horse-rider would vouch for in terms of certain pain levels the next day, this didn’t deter us from embracing these opportunities. Pitching up to the stable in the morning we were greeted by a mottled horse going by the name of ‘Mojito’. This entertained us for a good few minutes, that is before we overheard the farmer introduce another Mojito to the group next to us, and their spiel of bad drunken horse jokes that closely rivalled our own. Interesting also was how our Mojito turned out to be the most frequent offender in stopping to eat vegetation from the side of the tracks, a sign that perhaps there may be a name-responsiveness discord of some sort…

Cynical or serendipitous, whichever way you look at it, it doesn’t detract from the experience of riding horseback through a tobacco field for 3 hours to a small tobacco farm. When else can you say that you’ve hand-rolled cigars with a tobacco farmer, who zealously plays mambo music while working from his Samsung Galaxy, but who is still conservative enough to refuse to bind his cigars with anything but the most natural honey (and to take off his signature Panama hat). Whether the wisdom he imparted on us, consecrating the three pillars of Cuban life as ‘rum, cigars and salsa’, can still be taken as the Cuban raison d’etre, or if like our elusive friend Mojito, it is perhaps just another tourist selling point, in that particular moment it was hard to argue that he had not discovered the sanctity of his life.

Although it is all too easy to soak up and suck in the happy haze of the Viñales, much like a cigar, it is probably not the best idea to inhale too deeply. Three days is the perfect amount of time to cover the town’s core sites while still getting a feel for the place. By our last day the hop-on-hop-off bus seemed ever so slightly tedious as it pulled up to reconstructed prehistoric caves, which although were interesting, definitely didn’t require the entirety of the 90 minute stop dedicated to exploring them. With this said however, sitting on a rocking chair on Migneles porch one evening, it struck us how idyllic a long stay in the Viñales would be for the purpose of convalescence or recovery from some major life event, or merely with the excuse of reading those books collecting dust at the back of your collection. But with only 10 days in the country and a tight schedule to follow the books would have to wait, as the bright lights of Varadero beckoned us for the final instalment of our trip.