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Published: December 11th 2012
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As my father and I hadn’t taken a holiday abroad together since 1989 it was long overdue. His two preferences were Ireland or Spain. No offence to Ireland but as I live in England I am already sick of being rained on, so I chose Andalucia – in Spain’s heavily Moorish influenced south.
I was conscious that as my father is 75 years old, quite deaf and even more absent-minded than I am, that I would have to step up and take responsibility for the holiday. I made it clear to him that we needed to keep "H.S.C." to an absolute minimum (that is, “Hornblow-style chaos”). We did very well, despite our very nature… for the most part.
The first successfully-avoided chaotic incident was the flight to Seville. The last time the two of us started a holiday together I was nine years old. One of our fellow passengers on the jumbo jet had second thoughts about taking the journey and tried to get off the plane. Unfortunately we were at that stage already two-thirds of the way from Auckland to Honolulu 30,000 feet above the Pacific Ocean! Crew members had to pin him down and tie him up
in the cockpit, the Hawaiian authorities didn’t want to have to cope with a madman so the pilot was obliged to turn around mid-air and fly us back to Auckland – the story made the news and everything! By contrast the flight from London to Seville was mercifully incident free.
Our route was around Andalucia diamond shaped: heading from Seville airport east to Cordoba, further on to Granada and then swinging south and west to Malaga, Ronda and finally back to Seville. Our first stop was a spontaneous choice: Carmona. We decided to go there as it had looked nice from above when we had flown in earlier in the day. It was good to be there with my dad who still finds a particular excitement in seeing old towns, churches and castles – this is of course very satisfying for New Zealanders - coming as we do from a country that's only a paltry 172 years old!
I don’t like my father’s driving (despite the fact that he gave me my first driving lesson) and so I chose to be the sole driver of our hire car. The choice of car was a success: a Ford Fiesta
with a surprisingly powerful sound system, so we drove along listening to cheesy radio pop and Eurotrash dance music with bone-shreaddingly powerful base notes.
After driving through countless orchards of oranges, and olive plantations stretching up hills and to the horizon, we arrived at our first major stop - Cordoba. My father was not only on holiday away from work, but also away from reading maps or applying orientation skills of any kind – so I was driver
and navigator. I was still adjusting to this role, and the place to perfect this difficult task was most certainly
not the streets of old town Cordoba. Spain loves one way roads – really,
loves them. I made a couple of errors of map-reading we ended driving down the narrowest, most winding street ever only to discover that it was a dead-end and that I would have to do the whole thing again, and this time
backwards! By the time we finally found a parking space and our hotel my nerves were extremely frayed.
Fortunately for my mental state, we were staying with one of the world’s most garrulous and pleasant hostel managers, José, at the Cordoba Bed and Be.
He is virtually always at the hostel – or no more than 15 minutes away at least. I instantly realised that it was beyond my power to stay in a bad mood when José was around. He galvanised an eclectic bunch of guests into an evening cycle tour of the town: a young Basque football player, a Taiwanese woman called Irene (the best snap-shot self-portraitist I have ever come across), myself and my father – who apparently took the prize for the oldest person José had ever taken on the bicycle tour! José showed us not only the sights but also a highly personalised array of bars and eateries. A highlight was the local gazpacho (cold tomato soup) which was washed down with calimocho (a mixture of red wine and lemon-flavoured Fanta). Who knew that's a thing!!
The next morning we visited the Mezquita (Mosque) which is so outrageous it must be Spanish. This Mosque was built by the Moors by the 13th Century as a wide low mosque with network of exquisite arches that stretch off in every direction. When the Christians took back control of Cordoba they didn't destroy the mosque but plonked a huge church smack
in the middle. This could be an architectural act of barbarism, but in the south of Spain... it works!
The worst of the holiday’s chaos was that morning when I discovered that our hire car had disappeared. Panic ensued, followed by reflection, reason and finally redemption: it had been towed away, it was not too far or expensive to retrieve… keep calm and carry on...
Andalucia is apparently the spiritual home of tapas, to the extent that in Granada you don't even need to pay for them! This system suited us extremely well: one rainy evening at "Los Diamantes" I fought my way through the crush of people to the bar; each glass of Rioja or Ribera del Duero would be accompanied by a different plate of goodies: mushrooms, prawns, calamari, cockles. So good.
My father had further designs for our evening. As I am a seasoned traveller I tend to shun most organised tours as being cheesy and contrived. However I wasn't there to impress the Teva-wearing Lonely Planet hardcore, but to show my dad a good time. So, along with a group of 30 generally fairly old people, we went on an evening tour of
the old Gypsy and Muslim parts of town, culminating in a flamenco show in a cellar bar. Mood lighting, passionate guitars, preening dancers and sangrias flowing - a drink I was very pleased to introduce to my father!
This part of the world sees 300 fine days out of 365 per year, so I felt fairly hard-done-by when we had a day of constant rain in Granada. It was so bleak I instigated a day trip to Malaga in a desperate (and partly successful) attempt to find better weather. As we left our hire car in the outskirts of Malaga to find a place to eat, we had roughly sixty seconds of full sun before the clouds drew in once more. Fortunately our plans didn't revolve around the beach but the Picasso Museum - the home-town hero.
The next day the weather in Granda had mercifully improved for our visit to Spains most popular tourist destination: the Alhambra. It is a magnificent sprawling network of palaces, churches and various other buildings that formed the hilltop paradise of the Moorish ruling classes who were masters of parts of Andalucia for more than half a millennium. The elaborate workmanship, the
design and the architecture are astounding and sublime.
Our route back west towards Seville saw us visit Ronda, a village perched on either side of a gigantic ravine with an improbable bridge. For anyone who had read "For Whom the Bell Tolls" by Ernest Hemingway, it was an true incident in this town that inspired the incredible anecdote of when during the Spanish civil war in the 1930s the townspeople persecuted the fascists within their population in the main town square before throwing them one by one over the cliff. We stood on that cliff - it is not a comfortable place at the best of times!
Back in Seville we had the third of our epic Moorish wonders (after the Mesquita and the Alhambra) was the Alcazar - but perhaps more importantly it was our last opportunity to immerse ourselves in as many tapas bars as we could manage! They manage to be both cosy and intense - crowded, a lot of shouting and of course magnificent tit-bit sized dishes of culinary goodness. We both had our fill, but Seville is a big place and we could only do so much... so I'll be back again! Most
importantly, my dad and I had an amazing (
almost chaos-free) holiday that was worth the 23 year wait!
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