Havana, Hotel Telegrafo

We stayed at the Hotel Telegrafo in Havana Cuba from 24 May to 6 June 2004. The hotel is great. Located at Parque Centro, it sits right between new and central Havana. The best of two worlds.

The hotel is of the Art Deco variety. Very stylish. You first walk in to the hotel into a cosy lobby, with high celings and marble floors. To the left is the restaurant, to the right the reception desk, shop and tourism desk. As you walk to the lift which is straight ahead you pass the bar on the left also. We stayed on the third (top) floor .

To go downstairs, you can always take the lift but I would recommend the gorgeous black marble staircase, which takes you directly into the bar area. Here you can e-mail your friends back home, (you have to buy a ticket from Reception though). It's best to do that quite early or late as the bar has a glass roof and the direct sunlght can make it difficult to read the computer screen. The internet was not as slow as I expected.

We ate out for the first week we were there but had a wonderful suprise when we decided to try the chicken sandwich in the0 bar one lazy day, it was so nice, we decided to go for the burger the next day. We were very unsure (Visions of the Mcdonalds flat hamburger came to mind, but when they came the burgers were amazing. A definite must, if you stay here.

There is a terrace bar, which overlooks the park. Its quite small with only about six tables. the great thing about here is that there are security guards on the entrance so you don't get hassled too much by people trying to sell dodgy banana cigars, and you get the music from the Inghilterra, a couple of doors down. The inghilterra may be slightly cheaper for drinks, but the service you get at the Telegrafo more than makes up for the 50 cents more! We went to the inghilterra terrace bar and waited for 20 minutes with no service so we went back to our own hotel. 15-20 minutes is about right for most of the hotels. We went on a bit of a pub crawl around the different hotels and by far the best was the Telegrafo, and they didn't skimp on the Rum like some of the more expensive hotels!

One word of warning though. I would recommend the Telegrafo to everyone but I would also warn anyone staying there to check the seals of the bottled water in the minibars in your room. We didn't notice for a couple of days, but some of the bottled water tasted a bit suphury. We checked the seals and some of the bottles ahd been filled with tap water! Not all of them, so when we realised we made sure to only drink the sealed ones. I did have a bit of a dodgy stomach, but didn't have the heart to complain because the Maid would have probably lost her job, and she worked so hard on keeping the room cleaned!

All in all, we had drink at the National, Seville, Inghilterra, NH Parque Centro and a few others. The Telegrafo is the BEST!!