Portugal seems custom made for double pluggers. Apart from the thong tan-line on my feet, this is a very, very good thing. How I managed to avoid that in the Territory for two years and yet instantly get it in Portugal is beyond me.
I caught a bus from Salamanca in Spain to Porto, or Oporto, depending on which sign you read. It's the second largest city in Portugal, and, unknown to me when I arrived, the place where port wine was invented! I can't say I had spent a lot of time theorising about where this nectar of the gods originated, but I wouldn't have said Portugal. So I was able to do a tour of one of the massive cellar in the town. There are quite a few companies, most of them British, which have been exporting port for hundreds of years from the town.
This is the view from the major bridge crossing the river which runs next to Porto. The wine cellars are on the left hand side, which is technically another city. As you can see, the weather wasn't half bad.
I only had a few days to spend in Porto, but it's a beautiful city and I'm so glad I went there. I spent my time with some other travellers eating tapas, drinking port and just walking around the city. The old part of the city dates back centuries, and it's a fascinating labyrinth of tiny little alleys. It's also bloody hilly! Lugging my pack up the main hill in town to get to my hostel was a bit of a challenge, especially when it was so warm. But the city is great, the food is great (Portuguese chicken is just called chicken) and the port cheap.
After Porto I caught a train south to Lisbon. It's also a seriously beautiful city with lots of hills! It is covered in a network of old style rattling trams and funiculars (I forgot to take a photo, so this is pillaged from another blog).
It has beautiful old streets which are titled and cobblestoned, lovely squares and an amazing old fort on a hill which was built by the Moors before being captured by the Christians in the Second Crusade. It's kind of amazing to visit a place that was part of a campaign in the Crusades! The Christian conquerers, with their customary tolerance, built a church on the mosque in the middle of the fortress. Not much remains of the palace now, and the fortress has been majorly added to and 'restored' by Salazar in the 30s, so it doesn't look too much like what it once might have.
I had been trying Portuguese tarts in Porto and Lisbon, but someone told me about this one place about twenty minutes by tram from the middle of the city. It's apparently well known for having the best Portuguese tarts in the world. I found it, and the line was out the door! I originally was just going to order one, but as the line was so long I ordered two - purely in the name of efficiency. Oh my goodness, I can't describe how delicious they are. The pastry is amazing, it's sort of crunchy but flexible in the middle and the custardy bit is creamy but not too sweet. I actually made a complete pig of myself and went back later in the day to line up for more. I had those two for afternoon tea with some other local produce.
Again, I could have spent longer in Lisbon, but at that stage I was moderately pressed for time, so I had to move on after a few days. I went to Lagos, which is right on the south Atlantic coast. My mate Damo from Katherine has a mate Lars who lives there. I just kind of showed up and he took me in for a few nights! He had a house overlooking the Atlantic ocean, a few dogs to play with, and he makes a pretty sweet lasagne. Happy days. He also took me to play some touch footy with his mates on the beach, which embarrassingly revealed that three months of doing exercise no more strenuous than walking up a Portuguese hill with a backpack does horrible things to one's cardio fitness. Ho hum.
Lagos is a beautiful little seaside town, and the water is amazing. It was quite a hot sunny day, and I did stick my toe in but man, that water was bloody cold! I wanted to take a dip but I was too much of a wuss, so I just admired the view.
One of the weird things about Lisbon and Lagos was how often I was asked if I wanted to buy drugs! I dunno, maybe I look particularly dodgy, but in Lisbon in particular, it seemed like every street corner I walked past there was some seedy character trying to flog me something. I'm not sure what the law is in Portugal, but they weren't being at all subtle about it!
After Lagos I headed back into Spain to check out Seville, Cordoba and Granada. All three were again conquered by the Moors, then taken back by the Christians in the Second Crusade. The cathedrals in Seville and Granada are kind of fascinating in that they're so obviously mosques. They're big, square buildings with a bit of a cathedral stuck in the middle. This is the tower in Seville, which used to be the minaret for the mosque.
This is one of the main plazas in Seville, which is very impressive and pretty, and also apparently used as a location shoot for the last Star Wars trilogy!
I also went to a flamenco bar in Seville, which was very interesting. It was packed to the rafters, and not a touristy show, just a kind of full bar where these guys were singing, and then after a while this lady started dancing. No mics, no PA, you had to be quiet to listen to them. The music itself is kind of repetitive after a while, but the dancing is fascinating to watch. The sangria was also very strong.
Here's the courtyard of Cordoba's cathedral, which has a beautiful orange grove in it with this nifty irrigation system. To my mind, very Moorish.
The inside is kind of fascinating. There are big long rows of columns, and again, only a kind of 'cathedraly' bit in the middle. Looks very mosquesque to me.
The streets of Cordoba are all whitewashed, with colourful splashes on doorways and architraves, or maybe a plant on a wall somewhere. It's sort of beautiful, in a white kind of way.
After Cordoba it was on to Granada and its amazing Alhambra. It's kind of hard to describe, but it's a series of palaces and other, built within walls and with a massive fortress at the top of a hill looking over Granada. Again, it was built by the Moors and conquered by the Christians. Here's an outside view, I'd recommend clicking on it to see it full size - note the snow capped mountains in the background. Not sure how that works in 35 degree heat!
One of the main buildings is the Nasrid Palace, which was where the Moorish rulers lived. It's an amazing assortment of courtyards and ornate rooms.
The use of water in particular is very interesting. In the first photo of the courtyard, it's supposed to mirror the tower above, to create an even more imposing impression.
This photo is taken in the grounds of another building outside the walls. It was where the court went to relax, and the gardens are beautiful.
And then of course when the Christians conquered it they had to build their own palace too. It's interesting, but nowhere near as pretty!
The other thing about Granada is that it's one of the last places in Spain which does free tapas with drinks. I'm not just talking a bowl of olives here. You can have bagels, stews, paella, hamburgers, salads... the list goes on. For the price of two beers you can basically have a full meal for free. Plus two beers. It's amazing.
My last stop on the Iberian Peninsula was Gibraltar. This is a UK territory, and it's really, really weird. You cross the border and the first thing you see is a bright red British phone box. The bobbies wear their funny hats and you have to pay for things in Gibraltar pounds.
Basically it's a super strategic location because it's right on the Gibraltar Straight (unsurprisingly) which is where the Mediterranean meets the Atlantic. The British won in in a war in the 1700s and have held onto it ever since. It became even more important to them when the Suez Canal opened, and during World War II.
After the red phone box, the next thing you come across is the runway! The territory is so small that I guess the only place they could squeeze in a runway was running across the only access road! So you're stopped at a gate while British Airways does its thing. You can see in the background the rock of Gibraltar, which helps explain why the place is so strategic, and also why it might be hard to find a spot to put in an airport. It's an amazing rock, I think about 400 metres high, with forts dating from Moorish times to British WWII pill boxes.
This is the view up on the rock looking back towards Spain. The Mediterranean is to the right and the Atlantic to the left.
And this is the view looking to the south. Yep, that's Africa. Freaking Africa. When I stop and think about it, to be able to look out across a body of water and see an entirely different continent amazes me.
The rock is also well known for its colony of Apes, apparently the only colony in Europe. They're everywhere, obviously very used to people, and kind of stink.
I had planned to explore the different parts of the rock, but I was a little bit sick on this day. I've been travelling for three months now, eaten at places across France, Switzerland, Andorra, Spain and Portugal, but they bloody English pub food in Gibraltar made me very sick. Not quite sick enough to stay in my room all day, but sick enough to make doing anything further than 50 metres from the nearest toilet hard. So I had to make do with a few snaps of the view and then retreat back down the hill.
While I was in Gibraltar I saw an ad for an exhibition of Julian Lennon's memorabilia about his father. I went along and am so glad I did! Here are some highlights...
The Beatles' grammy for Hard Days Night.
John's cape from Help!
Paul McCartney's hand written recording notes for Hey Jude.
John's Afghan jacket from the Seargent Peppers era.
The four track tape recorder John used at home to prepare for recording Sergeant Peppers.
So that's the Iberian Peninsula! I've loved Spain and Portugal, and the sun and warmth have been divine. I have to say that I have developed and inkling as to why the Spanish and Portuguese economies are buggered. I'm no economist, but, as an example, having two people working on a ticket sales counter at the main train station in Madrid while the line is about a hundred metres long probably has a few knock on effects. There's definitely no urgency in these parts in any sort of transaction you make, which is kind of nice as a lifestyle, but kind of frustrating too.
So right now I'm in Morocco! I didn't catch a ferry straight from Gibraltar, but it was only a short bus ride to a little town called Tarifa. I've spent a few nights in Tangier, which is beautiful but crazy. I like it but it is very, very different! But as always, that's a story for another day.
I’ve been taking less photos lately. I think part of the reason is that I’ve been looking back at the copious photos I took in the early part of my trip and thought well, I’m probably never going to look at that image of a Parisian street lamp again. I’ve also been trying to savour the moment more, rather than worry about getting the perfect photo. And beautiful, narrow, windy, cobblestone alleys are less of a novelty now.
So I apologise for the lack of photos in this post.
Since my last post I’ve travelled through Andorra, a little bit of Spain and I’m now in Portugal.
I caught a bus from Toulouse to Andorra la Vella, the capital of the tiny country in the Pyrenees Mountains. Unfortunately the bus left Toulouse at seven in the evening, so the view of the Pyrenees wasn’t very good. But as we climbed higher and higher, I could see snow on the ground; patchy at first and then quite thick. The bus had a thermometer which showed the outside temperature. It was about 16 degrees when I left Toulouse. The temperature kept dropping as we got higher, it eventually got down to zero! I was in jeans and a t-shirt which was fine for Toulouse, but I had no idea how cold it would be! Luckily Andorra la Vella is in a valley, so it warmed up to a balmy seven degrees by the time we went descended.
Andorra la Vella is a weird, weird city. From what I can gather it makes a living from skiing and flogging duty free crap. The city kind of feels like Thredbo, and there’s just not a lot going on. I wanted to head up the Pyrenees to try to do a day hike, but the day I had to do it was a Sunday and the buses out of the city were very infrequent, so I spent the day wandering around the city and catching up on sleep. I wish I had gotten out of the city to see the mountains by daylight. It may have made me feel warmer about the place.
Oh yeh, and it turns out Andorra is not where the blue guys with antennae from Star Trek come from. Who knew.
From there I went to Barcelona. Now, pretty much everyone I’ve talked to about travelling Europe has said two cities, Barcelona and Berlin, are amazing and won’t disappoint me. So that’s putting a lot of pressure on. I did like Barcelona, but I didn’t love it. Maybe people set expectations that were too high? I was also staying in a ‘party hostel’, which is fine; I’m not old enough to take exception to those young rascals yet, but one or two big nights out is enough for me in a city. I’ve never really loved night clubs, and to be honest, they play the same music as clubs in Australia, which I don’t like, and the drinks are super expensive. So not so much my thing.
But Barcelona is an undeniably pretty city. Of course the famous site is La Sagrada Familia, which was designed by Antoni Gaudi. Construction started 150 years ago, and is expected to finish in maybe another 30. It’s a crazy, beautiful, bizarre building. I’m not sure what Gaudi was smoking when he came up with the idea for it. And he was able to work out how to build it so the structure could take the load of the towers using a completely new modelling method – building the thing upside down out of chains and weighed down the highest points, which were the lowest point in the upside down model. That was the same as putting weight on model standing the right way up, and allowed Gaudi to work out how to support the weight of the building. Clever bloke.
Other than that, Barcelona has a very nice city centre, pretty beaches and a great food market, where you can get fresh seafood cooked right in front of you. I also went to the city’s Picasso museum, which was very interesting. It had works from his entire life, from learning to paint traditionally, to the Blue Period, to full on Cubism.
From Barcelona I caught a cheap and slow train to Valencia. I loved this city! I was staying in a hostel right in the middle of town, and I just met some interesting people, went out to celebrate a birthday and had fun ‘partying’ (they thought it was funny that I hate to use the word party as a verb). One of the people I met was a hairdresser, so I was able to get a trim for €5 – bargain! Valencia a beautiful city with lovely old buildings and just amazing to walk around. On my way to the bus station I found this group of people dancing old time swing in a little square. They plugged a speaker in at a café on the square, would drink beer between songs and just dance and have a good time. You’ve got to love a city where people are quite literally dancing in the streets.
I was, however, disappointed to learn via Wikipedia that the Valencia orange was in fact developed in a lab in California and has never been grown in Spain. This does lead to the question of what sort of oranges are actually grown near Valencia, because there’s certainly plenty of orchards around.
After pondering that question for a while I headed to Madrid. It’s an amazing city, with a great street culture, bustling squares, beautiful buildings and monuments. Even the roundabouts have amazing sculptures in the middle of them. For example, from what I could work out, this is the headquarters of Spain’s main telecommunications company. It’s amazing. Take that Telstra.
Many hostels I’ve been staying in have offered walking tours around whatever city I’ve been in. I’ve tended to avoid them, but for whatever reason I did one in Madrid, and now I can see that they’re actually not a bad idea. You get a bit of a feel for where everything is, learn about some of the history of the city, and sometimes find things you probably wouldn’t by yourself.
This is the square where about 2,500 people were killed during the Spanish Inquisition. There’s some artwork at the base of the light posts in the square to commemorate this. It’s kind of eerie to think about that while standing there. I had a similar experience standing in the Place de la Concorde in Paris, where the French Revolution killed the King and Queen, amongst many others.
The walking tour also meant we could go inside what is claimed to be the oldest continuously run restaurant in the world. They have a Guinness Book of World Records certificate to prove it too! Apparently they’re famous for suckling pig, but at €40 per person it was a splurge too far for me. Still, it was interesting to see the oven they’ve been using for almost 300 years.
Against the advice of my father (because I’m a rebel) I went along to a bullfight. The arena is kind of amazing to look at from the outside and the inside.
I was unsure about whether I would go to a bullfight. I was curious, but had read that it is very cruel to the animals. Now, I’ve been living in the Northern Territory for the last two years, so, you know, those tofu-eating-Greens-voting-hairy-armpitted-wankers can go to whatever Richard Dawkins inspired atheist version of hell they choose (Catholic mass?).
It was interesting to watch the bull fight, and the atmosphere is amazing. It’s a 25,000 seat bull ring which was full to capacity. It started raining and was cold, but no one left until it was over.
But is it cruel? Undoubtedly. It starts off with about six guys waving pink rags at the beast as it runs all around the arena trying to gore them. These guys run away behind the fence a lot of the time, and then another one attracts it to the other side of the ring. I’m guessing this is done to tire him out. Then a dude on a horse with a lance comes in and spears the bull kind of right between the shoulders twice. I don’t know a lot about bull anatomy, but I’m willing to bet this is a crucial area to hit. The bull starts bleeding heavily. Then they run him around a bit to get the blood flowing, which weakens him. After that two guys stick these weird kind of colourful things into his back. I’ve been told they aim for tendons, which further saps his strength. Then the last matador takes his red rag and a sword and runs him around even more until it’s obvious the bull is absolutely exhausted. He barely charges by the time the guy finally puts him out of his misery with a sword stroke to the neck. That’s if it goes well, which it didn’t in at least three fight that night, which required another couple of goes.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not a pansy nor necessarily philosophically opposed to blood sports. I think my main objection is that it’s not actually a bullfight, it’s a bull massacre. I could be more into it if it was like one guy with a knife and no rag to distract the bull. That seems sporting. I mean, I guess it takes some balls (which I mean in a universal and non-gender specific way) to wave the rag and let the thing charge at you. But the bull never even seems interested in going for the guy; the matadors know they can keep him away from them easily. So I don’t go in for the bravery or nobility of the matadors.
But still, overall I’ll claim it as a cultural experience. And it was as good a place to drink beer and eat pistachios as any.
After Madrid I went to Salamanca on my way to Porto in Portugal. I only stayed for a night, and arrived late in the day, but it is a beautiful old sandstone university town, with an amazing Cathedral. But there are just amazing old buildings everywhere.
So right now I’m in Portugal, but I will save more about that for a later post.
I’ve been travelling a bit faster lately for a couple of reason. Firstly, while I have a 12 month German working holiday visa, I haven’t actually had it stamped yet. At Charles de Gaulle airport I got the standard 90 day Schengen zone stay stamp in my passport. My plan is to head back into Spain then catch a ferry to Morroco, which is out of the EU, then fly to Berlin to get my 12 month visa stamped. I have no idea whether I actually need to do that, but I don’t want to push my luck. So I have to leave the EU on June the 16th at the lastest.
The second reason I’ve been going a bit faster is because I’ve been here for three months already, which is hard to believe! The limiting factors on my stay are visas and money, and I sort of realised that if I travel through everywhere at the pace I went through France I won’t get to see everything I want to. So it’s become a quality v quantity debate. I’ve never been attracted to whistle stop tours, and loved the time I spent in France. But I think there is room to move around a little bit faster than I did without compromising too much on the quality side. It’s a shame though, as already there are things that I had to decide not to do which I would have liked to. But I guess it’s about prioritising things that I absolutely want to do over things that are kind of interesting.
Anyway, I loved the parts of Spain I’ve seen so far and am looking forward to heading back after I explore Portugal for a while.
