We caught a series of buses to arrive in Granada, which made it a total of 23 hours in transit. Granada was beautiful, and probably my favourite Spanish city. A small city centre, surrounded by snow capped mountains and the Alhambra sitting above the city skyline. We’d heard good things about it from a number of travellers, and I was more than sold when I was told they gave away free tapas. Yes, free. Every time you buy a drink, you are given a free plate of tapas. Still no idea how they make any money out of it. Whilst in Granada we did the free walking tour, visited and toured the Alhambra, and did a tapas tour. After the tour, Al decided she’d had enough and retired to bed, but I was keen to kick on. So a bunch from the tour went to a shot bar – 150 different shots, all 1€. After a messy number of shots, we continued to a club just below the Alhambra next to the university. It was 2am when we arrived and it was dead. At about 3:30am there was an influx of about 400 people, I have no idea why because it was a Wednesday night, don’t people have jobs in Spain? I got home, around 6:30 and woke Alison and started telling her stories, which at 6:30am apparently she wasn’t interested in. Check out was 10am. There was no way that was happening, so Al made me get up and go downstairs to sort it out with the hostel people. So we had one extra day in Granada, which was great. We had a chilled day, did some shopping and watched the world cup games.
Next stop Madrid. I’m not going to waste much time writing about it though. It wasn’t terribly exciting. We walked around for a few days, mailed some things home, was far too hot, and counted down the days till we arrived in Pamplona.
We left the hostel in Madrid and headed to the bus station. Because I like to arrive early for things, we got there 45mins prior – and just as well, apparently there’s more than one bus depot in Madrid, and we were at the wrong one. So we rushed to the bus, hopped aboard and made our way to Pamplona. We arrived in the afternoon of July 6th (opening ceremony), and tried to arrange to meet John, Tom, Tim, Phoebe and co. We called when we were at the bus station, and they said they were at the fountain. So we walked from one fountain to the next, looking for familiar faces. There must have been 20,000 drunk people and 19,900 of them were Australian. All covered in sangria. We tried to negotiate our way through the streets with our backpacks on, trying desperately to not get covered in Sangria. We couldn’t find anyone, so we called and called and called, finally Tom answered the phone and said that they had moved on, and everyone had passed out on the grass. He came and collected us, and walked us to meet everyone – passed out on the grass. When they all awoke we made our way to the campsite a few km’s outside of Pamplona and we set up camp in the dog kennel. That evening most people decided to take it easy, rest up, and make sure they were fine and dandy for the following days run. Not us though. John made the executive decision at about 11pm that we should catch a cab into town and stay out all night, drinking. So we did. We drank till about 4am, which is when we found a park to sleep in for an hour or so. We awoke with the sun, and made our way to a good starting point for the run, barely any sleep, still drunk – dangerous combination.
We crammed in like sardines at the starting line, and waited patiently for the gun to go off. It went off at 8am sharp which signalled the release of 6 smaller bulls (by smaller I mean only 600kgs), half the crowd stared to run, the other half stayed put. I stayed and waited for a while. As the bulls started to get close, that’s when we started to run, we stuck to the sides and watched as the bulls trotted past minding their own business. We chased them up the street and soon realised that another batch was yet to come past. Another 3 or 4 ox’s came charging along and cleared the path behind. Again we moved to the sides and let them pass, before again chasing up the street. We ran at full pace and missed out on getting into the stadium by 5 seconds or so, very disappointing. I lost everyone somewhere along the way, and didn’t think I’d find them again, so I headed back to the tent. Alison, Phoebe and Tom went into the stadium to watch it all unfold, and said it was horrific – and I would have loved to have been there. Words can’t explain it, only videos. By the time I returned to the tent it was too hot to sleep, so we spent the day trying to find the coolest spots to rest.
In the afternoon after a few hours of rest, we decided to head back into town to watch Spain take on Germany in the world cup semi-final . Beers in hand we made the journey in. We wandered about, and the soccer took somewhat of a back seat to the amount of drinking and partying taking place on the streets. We each bought bottles of Sangria and partied outside of bars and clubs (much cheaper this way – and the music was still plenty loud enough). It was a messy evening, and all ended up with Sangria soaked clothes by the nights end.
The following day we all packed up and made our way out of the campsite. Al and I made our way to the bus depot and tried to arrange transport to Valencia. The only bus was an overnight bus that left at 11pm that evening. It had been a heavy few days, so we rolled out our mats, inflated our pillows and crashed out on the floor of the train station all day. We arrived in Valencia at 5:30am feeling pretty shitty, but we were able to get into our room and we slept till some ridiculous hour in the afternoon.
Our time in Valencia was marred for 2 reasons. The sickness I was feeling, and resulting lack of energy I had; and the theft of our camera and the 2 weeks of photos that disappeared with it. This more or less summed up the time we had in Valencia. We had no real interest in the sites at that point. We could see it had a lot to offer, but one full day was spent trying to get a new camera and fix the computer (oh, that was broken also), and at the same time I was feeling pretty awful. We were glad to leave Valencia – not because we didn’t enjoy the city, it was just good to turnover a new leaf.
What better place to put all your worries behind you, than Ibiza. We met up with the Pamplona crew and relaxed in our rooftop pool. We spent the days on the beach and soaking up the rays, and the nights were spent drinking and partying down. Watching the World Cup final in Ibiza – was great, but I think there’s only a dozen or so Spaniards that live there, but still an experience. We spent our second night drinking in the room till all hours then heading to Privilege night club to see Tiesto play. The club was like nothing else I’ve seen. It was the size of the superdome; 15,000 people inside, pond in the middle, acrobats flying high above, the light show was incredible. Almost equally incredible was the cost of everything – you’d have to be seriously rich if this place was your local watering hole.
It took a while to recover from that night, and the following night we took it pretty easy and wandered around the area John was staying, which was close to Cafe Del Mar and similar. Great spot down near the water.
We left Ibiza and flew to Barcelona. We had a great time in Barcelona, detoxing for a few days. We were based just off Las Ramblas, nice and close to the action. We mailed home our tent (what a relief) among other things, which was actually very exciting. We spent our days, walking about, sightseeing; the Gothic Quarter, some of Gaudi’s architecture, we went and saw a water fountain show one night which was great, I went to the Picasso museum, we laid on the beach, ate amazing food and absorbed everything Barcelona had to offer. We decided to splurge a little and bought a grilled seafood platter for 40€ and were overwhelmed by the mountain of prawns, oysters, mussels, scampi, calamari and various fish that were given to us, it was more like a seafood platter for 4.
On our final night in Barcelona, we tried to meet up with Dom and Belinda (brother and sister duo from Sydney) that we met the night of the water show, but the phones weren’t connecting for some reason. So we decided to go for a drink somewhere anyway. Walking through Las Ramblas and passed the crowds of thousands, we bumped into Dom and Belinda and their cousin Byron. Bizarre. They were on their way to another shot bar. So we tagged along for ‘a drink’. We decided to do a round each – 5 drinks per person. Not enough. 2 rounds – 10 drinks per person. 45 mins down and we were pretty wasted. Before we knew it, it was time to go as we had to wake early for our 7am train out of Spain.
It was hard work, but we got up. Bid farewell to Barcelona. Bid farewell to Spain. But it was cya l8a Spain, not goodbye forever.
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