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Published: August 22nd 2007
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Tapas, Sevilla
Getting ready to tuck into some tasty tapas in Sevilla... yumm! I don´t think we are going to want to drive anywhere when we get home. We had a hell of a driving day today to get from Sergovia down to Seville and now we are heading across to the east coast via Ronda and Granada. We get huge miles out of the van (generally around 800km per tank which costs about $90 or so to fill) but we are travelling huge miles too so we´re spending a bit on fuel.
After getting more photos of the aquaduct in Sergovia we headed to just outside of Avilla for the night. After a quick stop in Avilla to look at it's complete medievil walls and old town. The next day we headed south all day and camped just outside of Sevilla. We´re running out of gas for our little camp stove so we are quickly working out how much we love one pot meals like pasta with stir through sauce or 2 minute noodles or sandwiches. Before now we´ve been making bolognaise sauces with mince or chicken curries with rice so we´re looking forward to finding more gas.
We parked the car outside Seville, in a town called Santiponce and caught
Sevilla Flemenco
From the awesome flemenco show we saw in Sevilla (the main home of Flemenco) a bus into town as we were staying in Hostel Van Gough right in the centre of Seville (too hard to park a car in there). The place was just around the corner from the huge cathedral and all the winding streets with tapas bars. Apparently the cathedral was built after demolishing most of the mosque that was there before and saying "let´s build something that future generations will look at and say 'they must have been lunatics´" (well that´s what it says in the Lonely Planet). The first night in Seville we wandered the streets thinking about going into some tapas bars but it just seemed to difficult. They really are daunting places! There´s standing room only and people eat their tapas at the bar so you have to edge between the crowds to even order a drink. Next problem is the tapas menu is in Spanish and we have no idea what anything is. So we went to a sit down place - one of the few with a tapas menu - in English - and had an assortment of hot and cold tapas for dinner, YUM!
Day two we took ourselves on a walking tour of
Gibraltar Mosque
An interesting looking Mosque in Gibraltar with 'the rock' visable in the background... the city and saw most of the sites to see. Most impressive was the bull ring. It was apparently one of the original 2 in Spain where the modern day sport (bull fighting on foot) was introduced. The 5 euro entry included a guided tour which was excellent. We went through the seating area overlooking the ring and then through the museum and then to the chapel and stables. It´s a pretty gruesome sport and we´ve now seen enough that we won´t be going to a bull fight like we vaguely thought we might while we were in Spain. That night we saw a flamenco show which was incredible. It wasn´t one of the jazzed up ones for the tourists where they offer you a meal with the show, just a small room with amazing acoustics for the musicians. For each performance there was one guitarist, 2 singers/clappers and one dancer, either male or female. Each performer would dance about 3 or 4 songs and at the end all the dancers and musicians came on for a grand finale. Really excellent!
After our 2 nights paid accommodation it was time to get back to our van and head to
City of Ronda
Perched precariously near a 100m gorge... Gibraltar. A tiny little province/country of the United Kingdom at a southern tip of Spain. So weird to park the car in Spain and cross the border on foot and be in an English speaking country with signs and pubs and menus and all the things that we are missing more and more the longer we´re away from home. We were so tempted to have fish and chips for dinner but decided to have an English breakfast the next day instead. We also did some grocery shopping for products we haven´t been able to find in France and Spain. We weren´t able to find any more gas though so things will shortly get exciting. We also visited a museum and caught a bus to Europa point to look across the Mediterranean to Africa. It´s really that close. Only about 20km or so!
After a tasty breakfast in Gibraltar and a air-coned Maccas lunch in Spain, we headed north to Ronda. In the tiny town of Ronda we wandered around the lookouts over the 100m cliffs and gorge and stumbled upon the finish of a mountain bike race. The final stretch was up a stepped path that wound it´s way
Avila's Medieval Wall
Had the most complete Medieval Wall we have seen on our trip so far. It also had quite a pretty little old town with the walls... up those 100m from bottom to top. We keep seeming to stumble upon these extra events that just make our trip that more exciting.
Ronda was just a quick pit stop on our way to Granada but the unreliability of our Europe Atlas meant we didn´t quite make it to Granada that night. We had a dinner of salad sandwiches and Lew drove on into the night to camp just outside of town. With an early start, we managed to join the queues for tickets to Alhambra at about 8:15am but after about 2 hours in line, only afternoon tickets were left, hence our free time to spend in this internet cafe in Granada, Spain.
From here we head up to Barcelona where we have 3 nights accomodation booked. We then head back up the coast into France then finally into Italy.
Cheers,
Lew and Holly
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