Photography
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Moroccan Roll Lifestyle
Mehdi’s brother’s friend with the rental car office is waiting for us, car clean if a little battle scarred, he even has paperwork and insurance documents ready – often when we’ve done this kind of “local” hire before, the only paperwork which changes hands is cash. “Gendarmerie” he explains, with a wave of his hand. Our destination for our only day on the road in the Rif Mountains is the tiny village of Akchour, gateway to a renowned spectacular waterfall hike. Actually, it’s not just the hike that’s spectacular, the drive from Chefchaouen to Akchour is pretty amazing too. The huge, sweeping mountain terrain is so scenic, so dramatic. Regularly…
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Chefchaouen, The Blue Pearl Of Morocco
It’s funny how habits change when alcohol is taken out of the equation. With no bars to explore or beers to imbibe, our evenings come to an earlier end, and, as a consequence of bedtime creeping forward, morning comes round more quickly too. I wake around 5:15 on our second morning in Chefchaouen, darkness still edging its battle with dawn. A distant call to prayer drifts up from the town below, within minutes joined by many others, muezzins at different tones, discordant yet haunting, mournful yet evocative, echoing off walls and off the mountains themselves, growing in number until it’s impossible to work out whether I am listening to five…
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A Few Days In Magical Seville
It feels like a significant point on this journey as we head into Seville, drop the rental car off at the airport and get a ride into town. Apart from a night at the ferry port, Seville will be our last stay in Europe before we swap continents and head for Africa, this is the last of our Spanish cities as well as the point where we hand back the last of our rental cars until Morocco. All in all, it feels like a bit of a watershed moment. Our long journey through Spain is nearly done, a journey which started in Catalunya, took us through Zaragoza and into the…
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Day Trip To Gibraltar & Other Stories
Sausage, bacon and egg in a bun, a little dash of brown sauce, a sweetened cappuccino: hangover cure par excellence. It’s needed, last night was a long night and today is going to be a long day. But we can’t be this close to Gibraltar without making a visit – the first visit to an overseas British territory for either of us. Our base now is the coastal town of San Luis de Sabinillas on the Costa del Sol, for our last taste of the Spanish Mediterranean on this long journey south. We’ve chosen this location not just for one last dip in the blue but for two other reasons…
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Unravelling Granada’s Complex Cultures
I don’t think we realised before we came here just what a melting pot of cultures exists in this fascinating, absorbing city, but we very quickly find ourselves being completely enthralled by the heady mix of history and evolution which has created the Granada of today. It really starts when we walk out of the cathedral, through a plaza or two and turn left into something which is the most stark of contrasts. For starters, the huge cathedral, Spain’s second largest after Seville, is a bastion of Catholicism absolutely filled with religious icons, glorious paintings and reliefs depicting many stories from the life of Jesus. Yet take just a few…
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Granada & The Alhambra
It’s on the Wednesday morning in Granada that it happens, proper confirmation that I am old. Here I am, fresh from walking the Caminito del Rey, sporting a T-shirt from my travels, boarding a shuttle bus from city centre to the Alhambra and feeling full of the joie de vivre which travelling the world brings, when some guy stands up to offer me his seat. This is the first time anywhere in the world that this has happened to me. I must look so old now that it’s obligatory for someone to offer me their seat. I am suddenly and undeniably an old git. Inside I’m cursing him and wanting…
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Nerja, Frigiliana & The Caminita del Rey
On January 12th 1959, five male students failed to report for lessons at a local school in Nerja, not in itself an earth shattering event – indeed the tutor, one Carlos Saura Garre, assumed they had either met some girls or had decided that a movie would be more entertaining than a lecture. Neither of these was the case: the boys had in fact plucked up courage to go through a small entrance to a sinkhole and head underground to see what they might discover. What they did discover must have blown their young minds. Beneath the waste land just behind the village of Maro, they walked into a gigantic…
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From Mojácar To Nerja Via The Wild West
With about three hours of the Mediterranean Highway ahead of us we take a detour away from the straight road, out through the sleepy towns of Sorbas and Tabernas and on into the rocky barren country inland. This is the closest thing in western Europe to a genuine desert, but this is spectacular and rugged mountain desert rather than the flat sands of the Sahara, for instance. It’s big country. As we mentioned in our last post, this is where the movie “A Fistful Of Dollars” was mostly filmed, together with a whole host of other so-called spaghetti Westerns, which just leads you to wonder why we don’t know them…
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On To Mojácar: Pink Lakes, Red Prawns & Silver Moonlight
More often than not, when you visit something with a name like “the blue forest” or “the purple mountains”, they’re not really blue or purple, are they. OK so there may be a hint of the colour which gives the place its moniker, but you would never call it vivid. Until, that is, you visit the Lugano Rosa, the “pink lake”, just outside the town of Torrevieja, which is properly, undeniably pink. It’s rental car time again as we look to fully explore the next section of Spanish coastline and head down into Andalucia, driving south from Alicante and taking a detour specifically to see whether this lake really is…
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Glimpses Of Life In Happy Town
Antonio is not having a good day, despite his smile. “Today is not a good day. Already I have a broken ankle, and now the printer doesn’t work”, he explains, as I try to work out what the connection between the two events might be. Despite these things, Antonio quickly warms to the task of telling us about his town, becoming even more animated when we ask about restaurants. He grabs his pen and starts to draw circles and arrows on our town map. “These restaurants in this road are very touristy”, he says, rather dismissively, “except this one” – he jots down the name – “and this one at…
