Oct 06

Arrived within 35 minutes by Spanair from Barcelona. Picked up our Avis hire car, a little VW Polo diesel, very nice, I like the button at the back for the boot. Kev quickly realised it was a manual, oops, opposite side of the road, opposite side of the car, and changing gears..nope, we had to upgrade to an automatic which ended up costing us a motsa. The signage on Majorca is fantastic, plenty of signs at every turn so we picked a town to stay in for our first night through seeing a pretty photograph in my guidebook and drove straight to Colonia de Sant Jordi and scored a hotel on the ocean inclusive of breakfast.

This place is little Germany, we have been told there are actually more Germans in Majorca than Spanish. We can see why, there was no English translation on any tour/excursion sign or menu, the Spanish staff only spoke German, every single conversation we heard was German, without a word of a lie. Very bizarre.

Majorca has approximately 80 coves/inlets, that are calm, turquioise, clear water, with pure white sand. Some are a fair way in from the coast and often there are yachts moored. It is such a heavenly place. We took our map and explored several of these coves on our first day, I think Kev was pleasantly suprised at the freedom the Germans seem to have with their bare bodies today!! We got some supplies at the Supermercado and were entertained from our balcony by the Spanish singing duo by the pool who sang continuous old English songs, such as 'Tie a Yellow Ribbon around the old oak tree'..get the idea?? But it all sounded very bad, to try and explain, if you heard a song in another language and tried to copy it, that's how it sounded. Anyway, we laughed at their expense for some time.

Day 2: Checked out of the 'Guten Morgen' hotel and drove north. Majorca changed into a busy, Surfers Paradise in the north, we really didn't like it, and was very different from the south. So we found accommodation and the next morning set off south again.

Day 3: Visited some more coves on the way down and had a bit of rain, but at the last cove was getting sick of driving and just wanted to find a place to stay. I was keen on going back to Colonia but Kev said, let's have a look over this hill...great decision!! Paradise unfolded, and before us lay a magnificent place for lunch, which happened to have accommodation!! We were upgraded to the suite and for heaps cheaper than we've paid for crappy accommodation we got the best room in the house, with 180 degree views of 2 coves and the ocean with breakfast and dinner included! We've always been of the opinion that the accomm. doesn't matter, its only a place to wash and sleep..until today, it did matter.

Day 4: Spent our last day laying in the sun. This was actually our first full day of doing nothing in 5 weeks, so we really enjoyed it. Tomorrow we set off on a never ending journey home to Australia.

Typical cove, Southern Majorca

The best Paella!

Houses

View from our hotel - last 2 nights

Last photo of our trip - Majorca

Took local bus to Roses, another seaside village, not as nice as Cadeques but wanted to see it, as also recommended by a friend to have a look at. Big marina, with lots of huge boats moored here, and have actually been spoken to a bit of French here today, shows how close we are to the border. Another 6 euro lunch with our baquettes and bottle of wine. Not much else to say about Roses, other than Siesta, even Burger King is closed!

Have been looking forward to seeing Cadaques since planning the trip and was well worth the wait. Its another white washed village with terracotta rooves and blue or green window shutters, located in calm bay with a hill behind covered in olive trees. Also a bit of a Brit hang out, and image summer here would be pretty full on, but it was lovely today. We decided to hire a motorcycle scooter, and set off exploring all the little bays and coves around Cadaques up to Port Lligat. This is definately the best way to see this area, as there´s not many cars and the narrow windy hilly streets are so much full on a scooter!! A couple of times I had to close my eyes as Kev had it wound up to about 50 and was a little scary but the freedom of having the scooter was so much better than on foot. Anyway, bought some baguettes, cheese and chorizo and found a bay to enjoy lunch. Then decided to go to Port Lligat to see Salvador Dali´s house. This was magnificent, especially because it was guided and only let 8 people in at a time. It was built on a hill and was full of some wacky stuff, he was clearly obsessed with his wife Gala, and I reckon they may have had some pretty wierd parties from the photos we´ve seen, but it was really great, and we loved this day.

Booked tickets on the internet to go to Majorca Monday for 5 days until we fly out. Thinking about hiring a motorhome and staying in that, but will figure it out later.

Beautiful Cadaques

Our hire scooter, Cadaques

After checking into our accom. set off to see the Salvador Dali museum. We have been recommended by two people to take the trip to Figueres, near the French border to see this museum, and it was well worth the trip.

Salvador Dali is much more than just a surrealist painter. To see his early work, his ink drawings, water colours, portraits, all before he got really adventurous, you can see how much artistist talent he has to begin with. Then he just gets wacky, a little overuse of the male & female genitalia in some of his sketches, and the man with female genitalia and vise versa, is also strange. But that is only a portion of his work. There is a room where he set up a couch the shape of lips, huge nose and enlarged paintings of Paris for the eyes, a floor to ceiling hollow hair style, then you walk up a tall ladder and look through a large magnifying glass to see what is a Mae West. Very clever! I got a photo and will put it on here when I can. There´s plenty of this kind of thing in the museum. We really enjoyed it and if it wasn´t for the large tour groups following the guide holding a ping pong bat with their tour group name on it, then it would have been even better. Its hard in museums and galleries with tour groups because normally a couple or small group will looking a painting and move on but when there´s a group of 30 and the whole story is told about the painting, then there´s no chance of seeing it. We´ve started to dislike tour groups in Europe, and have vowed never to be on one.

Anyway, Figures itself is quite lovely but have completely cashed in on Dali, the museum is actually quite cool from the outside too. Its a dark pink colour with gold emblems on it and the roof is lined with massive white eggs. Another photo I will get on here too.

Outside Salvador Dali gallery - Figueres

Favourite tapas bar

Massive painting by Salvador Dali

Drawing - Rock woman, Salvador Dali

Famous Dali painting

Looking out at the sea from Montjuic mountain overlooking the cable car ride

Using the zoom to focus in on La Sagrada Familia (Gaudi building) from the Montjuic mountain

Day One:- Took our cheap Spainair flight via Scandanavia Air carrier and spent the first day on Las Ramblas watching all the street performers, gripping my handbag for sheer life, and taking in all the sights..continued down to the beach, to Barceloneta, lighter coloured sand for a change, lots of art structures and pieces on the boardwalk. Had to catch the Metro back as the old feet were screaming. Tomorrow we have a list on an A4 sheet of paper of things to do. We have 2 days to get them all done before we catch a train up to Figures to see the Salavador Dali gallery and continue onto Cadaques a small fishing village for a little rest before flying home.

Day Two:- Our pensiona was beautiful to look at but had no sleep due to the free internet computer just outside our room that was in constant use all night, backed up by the 24 hour reception of constant, filing, hole punching, phone calls, behind that, and the communal area that was in use. The lack of sleep put us in the mood to ask for a portion of refund for our accommodation which was equivalent to about $150/night Aussie dollars, they agreed on giving us back 10 euros, so we checked out, and found a much quieter place around the corner run by a lovely lady with no English but a really cute dog. We´ve put up with unclean, tiny rooms before but being sleepless on an expensive holiday is not on. Last night had absolutely beautiful Italian meal, served by a lad from Naples, even finished with a couple of Limoncello drinks from Positano, nice to have different food for a change. Something I haven´t mentioned before is there is not much multi culturalism in Spain, it wasn´t until we were in Malaga that we saw the first Asian person and a handful of Muslims with the head dress. There are no Thai, Chinese, Indian restaurants around, and it wasn´t until Barcelona that we saw a Kebab shop. Its strange, and weird considering we saw it all in Australia.

Anyway, set off to see some Gaudi buildings at the La Sagrada Familia, Cathedral, La Pedrera, and the Casa Batllo. We were totally Gaudied out, and I personally dislike it, but its different I guess. Finished the afternoon off at the Picasso Musuem. This was so much better than the one in Malaga, a huge amount of work from every stage of his life, and we started to appreciate his art alot more after this.

We are started to feel a little exhausted from the travelling and the buildings are all so beautiful but start to look the same after a while, we are looking forward to getting back out of the city soon.

Day Three: Set off to see some parks today and miscalculated our metro stop slightly and had to attack the park from the back which turned out to be a cliff face, climbed up part of it and ended up in some peoples back yard, to had to go all the way around. The park we visited was called Parc Guell, which was purchased by a Mr Guell who commissioned Gaudi to decorate it. It was lots of strange structures covered in mosaics, was quite different.

Set off to see the church with the large rose window in the world but were closed for siesta. Sometimes the 4 hour siesta can get a little annoying!! Anyway decided to head up the mountain which is called Montjuic, it housed the Olympics and Expo, and you could really spent a day wandering around it. We had planned to take the train straight up the hill to where you could get a cable car to the top to the castle, but misjudged the stop again (not having the best day) and had to walk to the stop (about 1 hour uphill), then realised that the cable car is being pulled down to put a brand new one in..(more cranes), and walked to the top to the castle where we enjoyed an icy cold beer and the view. Richard and Kevin from Madrid I´m sure will appreciate the climb we put it, its quite a way. Barcelona is huge especially viewing from a mountain, it is set in perfect squares .. my photo doesn´t show it, but have bought post cards showing all the squares.

Day Four: Spent last night at our favourite tapas bar, Navarra, said goodbye to our lovely lady and dog at the pensiona, and set off with our 25kg each suitcases to tackle the Metro without lifts. It was the most physically difficult experience I have ever had and Kev had to agree it was the most stressfull. The Metro is way underground, and there is no way you could live here in a wheelchair. We only needed to go one stop, but 3 hugh flights of stairs down across a platform, back up 2 flights across another platform, down 2 more flights, I´m not kidding there were more. Got the train 1 stop, up 2 flights of steps across a platform, up another flight, across and down and out to go back down to the Renfe station and buy a ticket to Figueures..a backpack would have been easier!

Decided to have a rest day today, but before that we needed to squeeze in the Picasso Museum and the Alcazabar.

Malaga is the birth place of Pablo Picasso, and his daughter in law and grandson have donated 150 paintings to Malaga, where the local government has built a magnificent museum to house them.

I liked some of his earlier work, early meaning when he was a teenager, he actually did some really beautiful detailed portraits back then, and was interesting to see the progression into what he was doing in his final years. I also didn´t realise he did sculptures as well. Also some of his work was influenced by different women, ie. his first wife, then his next lover Marie, and another lover Dora. The bookshop is jam packed with just Picasso books, and lots of those books are just his work from those ´lover eras´. Anyhow, his later stuff looked as if he´d just got a big head and thought well i can just put any stroke down on paper and it will be fabulous, that, or he was getting lazy.

The building itself was built on top of an old Phoenician house. When I say old, I mean early 6th century. You take the stairs underneath the museum and they have preserved it all.

After that visited the Alcazabar, an old Moorish palace and fortress on the hill behind Malaga, the gardens, architecture, and water features, were lovely, very similar to the Alcazar in Seville, but I think better.

Alcazabar

We spent the rest of the afternoon laying on the beach, our first real day of relaxing our style. But beach, is more of dark brown gritty sand, dirt colour, the Mediterrenian Sea is extremely cold and flat, but very blue. I think Kev got up to his knees. The beach isn´t too busy but hearing plenty of Pommy accents, and some lobster coloured Brits.

We went out to a bar close to us at Malagetta, to watch the Soccer on TV, Real Madrid was playing the other Madrid team, and the score was 1-1. Interesting, considering Real Madrid has some of the best soccer players in the world. We finally got some free tapas, the first time since being in Andalucia. It seemed that the free tapas went out the window after leaving Madrid. But this time, it was laid on!! Armed with my trusty phrase book with a special culinary section, we figured out what we were eating. Old mate serving us was having a great time trying to figure out what I was asking him, but we figured out that one of the dishes was a seafood in a large snail like shell..we figured it out after he brought the actual shell out!!! He told me to keep it, so that´s a lovely souvenir of that night. Later, we took a bottle of wine to the roof top and watched the big ships pass into the harbour.

Hotel California - our pensiona is in the green building

Anyway onto Ronda, a fabulous white washed village on top of a gorge. We travelled for 2 hours from Malaga on the coast, on the local bus passing rows and rows of olive trees, cork trees and strangely lemon trees, white washed villages just sort of in the middle of nowhere. Its a very dry landscape and also very rocky, lots of hills and people harvesting the olives. We have enjoyed the constant changing of landscapes here in Spain. Finally arrived in Ronda to view an amazing landscape. Decided not to tour the bullring which is the oldest in Spain, as our tour in Madrid gave us plenty of info, also decided not to go to a bull fight. Firstly, its very expensive for the good seats which aren´t in the sun it can cost around 100 euros, but we have seen it on TV and we can appreciate the history and tradition of it, but its just so cruel. However, if the judge decides that the bull is doing very well, he will decide to let it win and therefore it gets put to stud and never has to go into the ring again. So sometimes there´s a happy ending. Anyway, back to Ronda..

After viewing walking over the massive bridge and taking in all the views from every angle, we saw a restaurant on the gorge. So Kev ordered the local specialty, Oxtail Stew, which wasn´t too bad, but we just enjoyed the view from the restaurant.

Ronda - photo 1

Ronda - photo 2

Ronda - photo 3

Got back and went out for a tapas tour, the bars here in Malaga, being on the beach, have displays of all different small cuts of seafood for frying up tapas style. Met 2 guys from Holland and Switzerland at a tapas bar, they were just here for some sun and a 2 week Spanish course. We were mentioning how lucky they were living in Europe, where they could ski, visit any country in no time at all and come to Spain for a tan, and asked if they´d ever visit Australia. The Swiss guy answered, ´why would I travel for 1 day to visit Australia, its only 220 years old´. We excused ourselves and left after that. We mightn´t have over 1000 year old buildings, fantastic art and culture, but we´ve got beauty and wide open spaces, and culture all of our own. They don´t know what they´re missing!