Tuesday 12 February 2008 We arrived in Madrid in the evening and navigated easily from the bus station to the city centre on the metro. We wound our way around the very busy Puerta del Sol and found our hostel nearby. We arrived to find Sant Jordi Hostel very newly refurbished and very clean and tidy. The staff were quite friendly and advised us where we could find food nearby to cook. We ducked out to the supermarket to hunt for some dinner, didn’t buy the strange bread that was available (photo), grabbed some simple pasta and vegetables and went back [View Full Entry]

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Spain - San Sebastian & Bilbao Sunday 10 February 2008 Between the train changes, a suspicious-looking character hanging around outside our compartment all night and a loud character down the hall who figured himself a train conductor constantly yelling at us for locking the door to our compartment due to the previously mentioned suspicious character, we didn’t get much sleep during the night. So when the train rocked into San Sebastian in the wee hours of the morning we were exhausted! We stumbled through the town for about 20 minutes until we found the hostel located on [View Full Entry]

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Friday 8 February 2008 Our bus arrived at Porto bus station early afternoon. The ‘bus station’ was basically a big shed which was half way through being renovated. There being no signs in sight to direct us anywhere, probably because of the renovation, so we enquired at the information desk. The instructions from our hostel advised catching a Metro to it. In Barbara’s best attempt at Portuguese she asked “Metro? Por favour”. To attempt Portuguese probably wasn’t a good idea because then the man proceeded to rattle off Portuguese instructions to us [View Full Entry]

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Tuesday 5 February 2008 Over the rolling hills of Portugal we drove, around the southern coastline, past the popular seaside town of Faro, and up the western coastline towards Lisbon. We stopped at a service station along the way for the driver’s rest break. We weren’t excited by buying dinner from a diner with such a name (photo). It was quite late when we arrived in Lisbon so we caught a train from the bus station to the city and went straight to our hostel. Gladly, our hostel was very well located in the city so we only had to walk [View Full Entry]

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Saturday 2 February 2008 Our bus arrived in Seville after 8pm and it was almost 8:30pm by the time we found our way to Seville Samay Hostel and checked in. Reception warned us that the next day most of the shops would be closed and would close at 9pm that night so we should hurry to get groceries before they shut. Accordingly we darted over to the supermarket to have them shut the door in our face at 8:45pm - GRUNT! We resorted to scavenging dinner from the minimart next door to the hostel and then off to bed. Samay Hostel [View Full Entry]

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Saturday 2 February 2008 It was an early start for Barbara who woke to plan our next move as we had to check out by 11am and we didn’t know where we were going yet. Michael was still exhausted and slept. We wanted to go to the carnival in Cadiz but could not find any accommodation available there so decided to go to Seville instead. Barbara booked accommodation in Seville and researched bus routes to get there. Barbara woke up Michael in just enough time for him to pack and check out of the hostal in time. Our bus would leave [View Full Entry]

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Thursday 31 January 2008 Exhausted after a 5:15am wakeup in Fes to catch the 6:50am train to Marrakech, and with disturbances during the night from rowdy locals outside our hotel, we were hoping to sleep for much of the journey. Unfortunately the locals had other ideas. Once again, the local women found it fascinating to be able to hold an intelligent conversation with a man, let alone a western one, so Michael ended up nattering with the women on the train for most of the journey. It was all very pleasant and entertaining but left us even more exhausted when we [View Full Entry]

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Tuesday 29 January 2008 Stepping onto the pier, it was now the first time either of us had set foot on African soil - well concrete anyway! The docks were chaos. There were people, trucks, boats, cars and MORE people going every which way. There wasn’t really any signage at all to speak of so we just followed the crowd who were in turn following people, who looked like they were official in some capacity, that were yelling at everyone. Once all the tour groups had disbursed to their buses we found ourselves alone in a scene of chaos, with no [View Full Entry]

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Monday 28 January 2008 After six hours of travel our train arrived in Algeciras (photo), a port town on the south coast of Spain. With no map to speak of, we wandered out of the station looking for anything that either looked like a bus station or looked like it pointed to one. We found the latter and soon after we found the bus station. All advice we had received had advised not to really bother much about Algeciras at all. Barbara felt this may be a little unfair on the small town and didn’t feel it right to just pass [View Full Entry]

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Saturday 26 January 2008 Today we were to experiment with our first European budget airline, ClickAir, based in Barcelona. Our flight was only quite short - thankfully so as there wasn’t much room to move (photo). Apart from that it was a very enjoyable fight, especially when we flew over the Sierra Nevada mountain range just before arriving in Granada (photo). The airport at Granada isn’t actually anywhere near Granada so a lengthy bus ride took us to town. The bus first drove through the ‘new town’ which was quite dull and commercial and full of new luxur [View Full Entry]

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