Back online and in Italy

Map & Pin: Aguilas; Bolnuevo; Los Alcazares; Santa Pola; Benidorm; Altea; Gandia; Pinedo (Valencia); Benicassim; Benicarlo; Tarragona; El Masnou (Barcelona); GENOA

So, if you’re reading this, it probably means iB is back in action, though still effectively broken. Despite pathetic miscommunication on both sides, I managed to get the Mac agent in Barcelona to take a look at it – something on the mother board is broken and would cost around €250 to fix. But they did sell me a wireless USB adaptor that I can just plug in and use. When I get back to London I’ll go to the Mac store and see about a longterm solution, but for now it is definitely better than nothing.

I'm in an internet cafe in the fine city of Genoa, using my iBook with his super new wireless USB thingy. It appears to work a treat as long as the signal is good and strong and completely above board (don't ask me how, but I think it knows when you're trying to piggyback on some other person's unsecured network). I do seriously hope things will be slightly better now in terms of regular updates even if I have to stick my hand in my pocket occasionally to pay for it.

Below are two recent, posts (although the most recent one isn't complete). I've just separated them by the date they were last added to, which bears little or no resemblance to when events took place. We arrived in Genoa on the ferry from Barcelona yesterday - it's a wonderful place, but more on that when I've had time to write it. I've put some new pictures up on Flickr but they are in a very bizarre order and not up to date either. I promise to attempt to clean things up very soon and get all up to date. We're heading out of Genoa tomorrow and off towards Milan, which should be 2-3 days cycle depending on the availability of campsites. We should be in Venice in a couple of weeks and into Croatia shortly afterwards. The weather here is still outrageously good but I'm also pleased to hear things have improved in the UK.

More shortly (hopefully slightly less of a lie than usual).

10 July 2007

Aaaaaaaand it’s goodbye Spain and hello Italy. I’m writing this on a ferry about halfway between Barcelona and Genoa. The first challenge of each country transition is to work out which language you should be mangling. I sometimes think this is actually made more difficult by too much similarity – although with the added bonus that you are vastly more likely to be understood as you gibbering at the café counter. Like the budget travellers we are, our bags were packed with food for the ferry but we did partake of a very disappointing but expensive breakfast this morning. They served us INSTANT COFFEE. On a ferry between SPAIN and ITALY we were served instant coffee. I shall be following this blog entry with a stern letter to the management of this allegedly Italian ferry company ensuring we’re all clear on what’s gone wrong here and how it can be put right.

Which brings me to my post-departure review of Spain. Thinking about the country overall, I’ve found it difficult but necessary to try to pin down what my expectations were and how they relate to what I’ve actually seen. As I think I’ve mentioned before, standard Spain-visiting practice seems to be the clockwise tour – the reverse of what we’ve done and not on bikes if you’ve got an ounce of sense. I don’t really know why – maybe the preponderance of heavily (read over) developed south and east coast resorts have the reputation that makes them the highlight, maybe the ‘interruption’ of Portugal puts people off the anti-clockwise coastal path, maybe the ‘traditional’ travellers’ route was to draw a straight line down from France to Barcelona. Whatever the reason this is the way the majority of travel books will order their routes and itineraries and it is the direction most of the travellers we’ve encountered have been going. And I think it is the wrong order to do things.

My favourite bits of Spain, that have really blown me away, have been the north coast, particularly towards the north east corner, and certain sections of the south coast and the cities just inland of it. My least favourite bits of Spain have been almost the entire east coast from Mojacar to just south of Barcelona. It’s hideous. It’s soul destroyingly depressing. For example, I challenge the brave traveller – perhaps the kind that routinely goes on those holidays where they make you eat live animals and locally aborted foetuses and whatnot for the challenge of it all – to visit a little spot called Santa Pola, just south (and in many ways practice for Benidorm). We arrived after a hot but largely uneventful day’s cycling: clear blue skies and heavy traffic; views of crane after crane, development after development, occasionally interrupted by the surreal colours of the salt pans stretching away on either side of low roads like images imported from imagined martian landscapes.

On the map, Santa Pola is roughly a grade 2 dot. On the road you soon develop a complex system of map dot grading, getting a feel for how to interpret each and every mark so as to accurately anticipate aspects of what each speck truly represents. A grade 2 would * normally* indicate a town/village (rather than a city) with a healthy but not large town centre, possibly up to two supermarkets, one of which would be part of a chain, at least three bakeries, several bars and restaurants, a medium-sized church/cathedral, at least two centrally located and utterly inexplicable statues (with at least one located on a roundabout that is comically too large/small depending on context), etc. There will be one tourist information office that will be closed when you arrive, no matter what time that is, but will probably open later.

Santa Pola was not a grade 2 dot town – even its dot was deceptive. It sprawled massively, for a start. We arrived during siesta (which can be an inauspicious start in all but the most picturesque and friendly of places) and spent around 15 minutes riding through … well… hell, really. Imagine some kind of evil mastermind, a super villain with some unfathomable but clearly sick and devastating agenda for world destruction, had erected a metropolis here-to-for only imagined by the most unprincipled, uncaring, unscrupulous and unimaginative architects considered unemployable by all but the type of vile, greedy, selfish developers whose existence heralds not just the end of all built-landscape beauty but possibly of the very world itself and you will be one millipede’s step closer to picturing Santa Pola: possibly the ‘greatest’ mecca of soulless, merit-free, excessively saccharine, inappropriate, uninspiring, ill-conceived, undifferentiated, teeth-grindingly butt-fucking-ugly non-architecturally, non-designed non-development ever. Until you get to Benidorm.

On the upside, there’s the following, written while I was in Benidorm so that it would not be forgotten:
I’m recording this now so that all my bad impressions of the Costa Blanca have some context at least. Tonight we spent the evening in a bar with ‘rock n roll’ entertainment. The first guy, an asian Elvis impersonator, was good, but the second guy was awesome. This was a short, balding Spanish man so utterly confident of his own sexiness that it became a fact instantly beyond question. The man worked a crowd like you wouldn’t believe. It WAS Wembley. All the time.


05 July 2007

I know this kind of graphic detail can be disturbing, so some of you may want to look away now. We're holed up in Barcelona at present and could be for a few more days at least – well just outside Barcelona really, at a campsite in El Masnou, a beachside resort about 16kms to the north. It is a very groovy place, in fact, with a refreshing number of campers under the age of 50 from all over the place. There’s even a huge group of what are probably schoolkids who are surprisingly not that irritating – certainly nowhere nears as irritating as the group of Germans camping near us who have clearly purchased the ‘Worst German Camp Songs, Ever’ album, the golden sounds of which include traditional German drinking music, several chipmunk tracks and a highly emotional rendition of Kumbaya (sp). The repeated loud playing of this album led to entirely reasonably and much appreciated guerrilla music attacks by a bunch of Spanish lads with a decent car stereo and some far more palatable tunes, but give the Germans their due – they were drowned out but they were never broken.

It took a few days to get the Mac looked at but today we’re off to sort out the ferry to Genoa and should hopefully be heading to Italy by the weekend. I can’t even remember the last time I updated the blog, so I’m not going to give a blow by blow description of the last couple of weeks. Valencia was excellent. A beautiful green city with the old river bed that runs through it converted into walking and cycling paths, football pitches and all manner of other useful shared public space and parks. The cathedral was a bit average inside, while imposing and impressive outside, but the old silk market is a spectacular building; a massive hall with, high vaulted ceilings supported by huge twisting stone columns. Opposite is the city’s largest and currently used market, which presents a different but still beautiful mercantile space. Given that everybody’s so bloody in to capitalism these days, why is it that contemporary shrines to consumption are such fucking awful, joyless, ugly pits. If shopping centres must be built, (which, of course, they needn’t) couldn’t somebody put some effort in to at least making them a pleasure to look at if not to visit? Another old market building in the city has been converted into a space for swanky bars and restaurants, providing the perfect shady, breezy venue for a cold drink on a very hot Valencian day – and showing us all the way forward: let’s build some architecturally stunning shopping centres and then turn them into bars. Be clear, people: shopping is not a leisure pursuit, drinking is.

And in another of those remarkable water sports coincidences, our arrival in the city was greeted by a bunch of outrageously rich people with boats. That’s right, sailing fans, we were in town for the start of the 32nd America’s Cup. Unfortunately, as we have neither masses of money nor a very big boat, we didn’t really fit in but we dutifully had a poke around the America’s Cup port before being overwhelmed by American smugness in the race descriptions accompanying the model display and fleeing back to our campsite… which was unfortunately jam packed with Kiwis in town to watch the America’s cup. In the unlikely event that anyone doesn’t know, (I mean come on, it’s the * America’s Cup*) this year’s race is between holders Switzerland and challengers NZ. Given that Switzerland is a landlocked country, I think this marks a pretty spectacular achievement, but everyone else seemed to be going for NZ. I also find myself forced to reassess my previously very favourable opinion of Kiwis, and the movement is all downhill. The ones staying at the campsite, including a retired NZ Airlines engineer who was also a fellow cycle tourist, were unfailingly boastful, patronising and made no attempt at any point to speak any Spanish whatsoever but were no doubt clearly understood by the Spanish people they were yelling at all the time. Hearing them repeatedly bragging about how all the sailors on both boats were kiwis and how if they didn’t win it would only be because they didn’t have as much money as the other team (all of which is no doubt true, but that’s hardly the point) had the effect of greatly increasing my admiration of the landlocked, pocket knife-wielding Swiss who I hope, by now, have won.