Malaga and Granada

When a flight for an hour or so across the country is cheaper than a 24 hour bus ride it’s hard to say no. I arrived in Malaga a little after midnight to find that I’d just missed the last bus and train to the city.

A taxi was going to cost me $35 and no one was interested in sharing one with me, or even talking to me for that matter. I didn’t actually have a reservation for the night, just the name of a hostel and a cheap hotel, maybe they’d be open, maybe they’d have space. I suddenly realised that there was a much cheaper and simpler option… I headed straight for the departures wing and joined everyone with early morning flights. This was one of my best moves to date. It was the best night’s sleep I have ever had at an airport, firstly because I had two sleeping bags, giving me comfort and warmth, and secondly because I didn’t have that nagging feeling of having to wake up early to make sure I didn’t miss my flight. By the time I actually did decide to wake/get up it was about 9, thousands of people had walked past me. It then cost me $1.50 to get to the city on the local bus. My expectations of Malaga was beautiful beaches, palm trees and somewhat of a paradise, but this is not how I would describe it. The beaches were not particularly sandy, more of a grey dusty/dirty type of soil than anything.

The old town was fun trying to navigate around all of the curving streets and alleys, but again nothing spectacular. There’s a couple of typical touristy things to tick off your list – some churches, a castle, a main shopping street – didn’t really bother too much with that. I stayed at a pretty cheap hostel, Babia, located above a bar. The manager was very relaxed and it had a good lounge as well as roof top terrace if you didn’t want to pay bar prices. I made friends with an Italian dude, David, who was a travelling clown. Unfortunately I didn’t get to see his show. He was funny for me purely because he reminded me of Bodsy, physically and personality. All you need is some big red shoes and you’ll be right Bodsy! He had spent some time there already and showed me some of his favourite bars, quieter ones away from the pop crap that’s everywhere. One of them seemed to be serving up home made drinks as well as take away substances. It is a very relaxed and tolerant culture in that respect. I heard stories about people growing marijuana plants on their roof tops right in the middle of the city. I met an Aussie who was running walking tours by day and pub tours by night. Due to a lack of numbers he wasn’t doing an official tour this night, so I effectively scored a free one, including a few free shots and beers along the way. The last bar we went to, ZZ pub, was my favourite, with live music every night (if you’re early enough, ie before 3 or so) and good rock and roll the rest of the night through. I was lucky to find my way home that morning and had some flash backs to the friends we made when looking at my photos the next day. Along with sampling the free tapas that came with every beer, that was pretty much the excitement for a few days. When I got to the bus station, already sweating from running with my backpacks in the Southern Spain heat, I realised there was no chance I was catching my bus. You had to by a ticket before boarding, it was Friday 5pm of a long weekend and the queues were incredible. Not only that, you had to figure out which queue to stand in, depending on your desired destination and therefore which bus company operates that route. I was lucky enough to find a ticket machine which made the process relatively quick and straight forward, not sure why almost no one else had figured that out, and was on the very next bus to Granada. Why was I going to Granada? Because Dasha was there! A lovely dinner, some wandering between a couple of bars and 3 weeks worth of chatting made it pretty late before finding our way home to our hotel. The next few days we stayed with Nastya and Sergei, the friends whose wedding we went to in Latvia a few months earlier. Was good to see them and to have a home. We spent one day wandering around some suburbs a little away from the main tourist route, which was really nice. The weather that day was especially nice, as we had to duck in and out of bars to avoid the rain.

We also went to visit Alhambra. This is actually the most visited site in Spain. It was built by the Muslims during Arabic rule in the area and has a history as a military area, citadel and royal residences. Most of the current buildings are over 650 years old. The detail in some of the stone carvings was incredible. To see beautiful rooms, walls, made up of thousands of tiny delicately carved pieces of stone was super impressive. Some of the carvings are purely decorative, while others are an ornate form of Arabic writings, difficult for even the experts to distinguish. Most of the writings are either poetry or readings from the Koran. It’s so touristy that it is highly recommended to purchase your ticket a day in advance. Even then we still had to get up and walk there in darkness to be allowed to enter at the time printed on our tickets. The large groups of Asian tourists were annoying yet hilarious at the same instant. Overall the place was good, but not great, and certainly a surprise at number 1 in the tourist department.

Our extended Summer was going well, stretching it as fas as possible in Southern Spain, so we went for a drive up to Sierra Nevada, the tallest mountain in mainland Spain. The night before they had their first dump of snow for the season, which in combination with half clouds and half blue sky made it extremely picturesque and of course fun. We didn’t do any snowboarding or anything, but instead tried to make the worlds largest snowball and destroy a civilisation below… relatively unsuccessfully.

With the mountains conquered it was back to the paradise beaches of Malaga, this time with Dasha. We tried the cheapest hostel in town, which really was poor, where you had to duck your head to enter the dorm in the attic, but at least it came with free bed bugs. We celebrated our 6 months on the road at a locals restaurant recommended by our hostel manager (the good one, back at the first hostel) – everything was deep fried. It was horrible. Even the prawns, shell and all. We upgraded to a much nicer restaurant for wine and dessert, then finished the evening with some good rock music at ever faithful ZZ pub.