Spain

5 top ways to get hurt traveling

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People like reading lists, they say. The problem is they (the lists) tend to get a bit same-y after a while (people do, too, arguably), so the trick as a writer is to come up with something new and exciting. Here is one you likely never saw before: 5 top ways to get hurt traveling!

Traveling gives me a great deal of joy, it is true, but it’s fair to say that ain’t always the case. So in ascending order of pain and hurt and general discomfort, here are the five worst experiences connected with my travels over the years:

5. Went kayaking off the wild east coast of Sardinia, wearing lots of sunblock but no good sunglasses. Fierce sun, wind and reflections on the water combined with intense heat to create a witches’ brew of salt and chemicals that got into my eyes, rendering me effectively blind, as I was utterly unable to keep my baby blues open – something of a problem when one has to navigate dangerously bad mountain roads to get back to base. In the end I drove at a snail’s pace, stopping over and over to pry my peepers open enough to rinse them with water. It took a night in absolute darkness before I could see normally again.

4. Went diving in the Andaman Sea on a live-aboard boat. That’s a small ship that is out in tropical heat for a week, with everyone living in close quarters. Long story short, I caught something that developed into high fever right as we were disembarking; flying home from Thailand via London with 39+ degrees’ temperature in cattle class was literally a nightmare – I was hallucinating, and so weak they had to get me a wheelchair to go from one plane to the next. Once home I slept more or less straight for 48 hours before finally recovering.

3. First time paragliding in Spain. One of the first attempts to get airborne properly, running down a gentle hill, I managed to rip a muscle in my groin just as I was lifted into the air. The pain was excruciating, but the forward movement and physics kicked in and I continued upwards, which meant I had to fly and land for the very first time while trying not to black out from the agony. To this day I don’t know how I managed. It took months of grueling exercise to regain something like normal function in my leg.

2. Another diving excursion, this time to the Seychelles. Made the rookie mistake of having local food that was probably washed in local water. Within a few hours our stomachs were rumbling, and before long we were two people writhing in gut-wrenching pain, before embarking on a night of horrors, as our bodies went into overdrive trying to purge themselves of the foreign germs; trust me, there is no feeling quite like switching back and forth between projectile vomiting and having your intestines go full fecal Jackson Pollock on the one shared toilet, whilst your friend is knocking on the door to be let in to have their turn, NOW.

1. A romantic trip to Granada and Alhambra might not seem like an obvious winner of this list, but my companion on this sojourn was someone I was very much in love with, and she had agreed to go only as a way to end our relationship on a high note, as she felt we weren’t right for each other. So while it was a lovely experience, and the sights of Alhambra a wonder to behold, it was still with very mixed feelings I went on it. And at the end she did what she had said she would, and ended things between us. She broke my heart, and it took years to mend.

So there you are. A Top 5 List like no other. Honorable mentions go to Barcelona and Amsterdam, where I broke my PBs for marathons – painful experiences in and of themselves, but disqualified because they also gave me a lot of masochistic joy. Hope you enjoyed. If you think you have my travel horror stories beaten, let me know in the comments!

The pain of rain in Spain…

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For the second time in a row, my efforts to go paragliding in Spain have been twarted by unexpected rain storms.

Having returned to Algodonales where I first learnt about flying, I was hoping to be airborn every day for a week, and instead I found myself in a cold apartment staring out at a mountain ridge shrouded in unrelenting rain clouds. I don’t know if I should take heart from locals saying this is such a rare occurance as to be unheard of, or whether I should try to appease some local weather gods that I have somehow upset?

Luckily I had packed a bunch of books, so even if I was forced to stay grounded for the most part I still didn’t waste my time. And after a few days cooped up inside, my fellow would-be pilots and I did do some nice excursions in the area, enjoying the lushness of spring (at least the downpour helped with that!). First we ventured to the nearby mountaintop village of Zahara (It takes its name from the Arabic word for either crag or orange blossom – both highly applicable – but it has nothing to do with the desert), which looks like something out of Ferdinand the bull, and whose cobbled, winding streets have been hugging the hillside since times immemorial.

There is also a local nature reserve centered around a steep ravine that is favoured by large scavenger birds, so instead of following vultures in the air I sought them out in their lair. We saw at least three nesting pairs up close, their large dragon-like silhouettes sailing out of the mist in complete silence, sometimes as little as five meters away. I’m not easily impressed by birds, but these are as graceful as they are intimidating, forever sailing on thermals whilst watching every move in the world below. Thankfully they didn’t take after the Belgian blitz-buzzards, so we didn’t get attacked, but we all kept a mutually weary eye on one another.

The bottom of the gorge was sadly (and predictably) swollen with water, so we couldn’t traverse its entire length – possibly just as well, as my heart was racing like a hummingbird’s by the time I made it down. Instead we opted for an excursion in the opposite direction the next day, hiking up through an abandoned quarry to the summit of an isolated hillock, on top of which was an ancient Arabic watch tower. Even with a low cloudbase the surrounding landscape was visible for miles and miles, so it was not difficult to see why the Moors chose this site – any advancing army would have been spotted days away. Unfortunately, we could perceive equally clearly that the rain in Spain was not mainly on the plain, but everywhere, again and again, as far as the eye could see.

So with all hope of flying having been dashed I repaired to Seville for the last couple of days. It is a splendid town, epitomizing quintessential Spanishness, wearing its Moorish inheritance on its sleeve whilst showing off the incredible wealth that flowed into the kingdom with the discovery and exploitation of the New World. Everywhere you go the architecture displays both those influences, and nowhere more so than in Real Alcazar, the royal palace, and its splendid gardens. It is easy to see why Game of Thrones filmed many of the scenes from Sunspear here – the sensuous beauty of formal gardens filled with ubiquitous Seville orange trees and interlocking fountains, against the backdrop of a palace of Arabic ideals tempered by Iberian terracotta colours, with peacocks strutting like catwalk models through the landscape – it is quite difficult to surpass in elegance and sophistication.

Not that later generations haven’t tried. Right across the palace sits the vast creamy sandstone opulence that is Seville’s cathedral – large as a football field, cavernous on the inside and decorated like a wedding cake on the outside, its bell tower (once a muezzin’s prayer tower) unabashedly adorned in arabesque forms, even as its bells toll (loudly and repeatedly) to reawaken the Catholic faith.

The old town that surrounds the castle grounds is minute, but so maze-like that it is quite easy to get lost in its jumble of entangled alleyways, that occasionally spit you out onto unsuspected, intimate little plazas. Most of the old houses are built in the Medina style on the inside, with an open courtyard centered around a spring, whilst the outside is resoundingly Spanish – heavy gates, wrought-iron balconies and whimsical turrets with only the occasional tulip-bulb window hinting at the interior – and all of them have been painted in warm colours, so the overall impression is like a Spanish version of Chania, in Crete.

Also in the middle of town there is the Plaza de España, an enormous open space encircled on one side by an opulent bow-shaped castle structure – more theatrical backdrop than real building – and surrounded by a moat, whose arched bridges bring to mind Venice; it sits at one end of the immense Maria Luisa park, filled with temples and water features, formal fountains and informal paths, all hidden away in the lushness of palms, jaquarandas and the ever-present orange trees.

The last day of my week, wouldn’t you know it? The skies are blue, the sun is back, and Seville is awash with tourists even this early in the year, hinting at how busy it will get in high season; even now the horse-drawn carriages and tapas bars are doing brisk business. I take in the old bullfighting ring (now thankfully a museum), the weird mushroom structure (akin to Les Halles in Paris in its modernist madness), and the Golden Tower on the Guadalquivir river, below which is moored a full scale replica of the Nao Victoria, the first ship to circumnavigate the world. It looks ever so small and unimpressive, and yet on such flimsy foundations were built the first truly global empire, which in turn made all these riches possible.

All in all Seville is an interesting spectacle, quite splendid, and would have made for the perfect romantic weekend. But although I’m glad I’ve seen it all, much like was the case in Barcelona, I’d rather have been flying. The only flight for me this week will be the Ryanair one home. Third time will be the charm!

Barcelona revisited

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I was supposed to be flying. Paragliding in the foothills of the Pyrenees. But the weather isn’t cooperating, and so it is that I find myself in Barcelona, capital of Catalonia, with four days on my hands and no plans whatsoever. I’ve been here once before, but only to run the marathon, and I didn’t see much of the city – I must be one of the few people to have passed the Sagrada Família on foot without even noticing it was there! So now I will make up for my previous lack of attention. And there are worse places to be grounded…!

Like Rome, Barcelona is a city spanning millennia, but with the exception of the bullfighting ring (which is a direct descendant of the gladiatorial games of yore) Barna (not Barca – that’s the football club) doesn’t wear this fact on its sleeve. Instead there are hints everywhere; a colonnade incorporated in a building, supporting arches laid bare in basements, a stretch of aqueduct suddenly appearing like a ribcage of a long dead animal revealed by the ebb and flow of the desert sands. Some can be seen in archeological digs, others are felt rather than perceived by the naked eye – the rambling roads of the old town still snaking their way to the sea along buried waterways, place-names lingering where the features themselves are long gone.

And these are just the things you can perceive above ground level – there is a whole sub urban cityscape, too. I’m reading Underland at the moment, and I’m dying to find someone that can give me a more comprehensive tour of the hidden layers of the city’s past, but alas, I don’t find any such cicerone. Instead I wander the streets aimlessly, getting creatively lost and finding a seemingly endless array of interesting stores and quaint bars and restaurants. There’s the café that serves nothing but cereals, the street vendor that specializes in what must be diplomatically circumscribed as anatomically-looking plants, the store filled with nothing but huge sacks filled with all kinds of flour, nuts and seeds, one establishment that sells only glass jellyfish, another that’s full of leather masks (for carnival, or other special occasions), the list goes on and on.

It is a city ripe with contradictions: the second largest in the country, and a centre for the independence movement; a city thriving on tourism, with a strong opposition to that very phenomenon; a city that is clearly very well to do, yet possesses a large population of dispossessed people. These aren’t your ordinary homeless people, either; much like the independence movement, these poor people are organized; they live in tribe-like groups that squat in empty buildings and form an entire shadow economy, siphoning electricity from the grid illegally, much like their ancestors would have done to get water from the aqueducts without paying.

Due to all this and more, Barcelona has a unique quality to it. An American I meet that has previously lived in New York City and San Fransisco says it combines the best qualities of the two – and I see no reason to contradict her. The famous grid-shaped city planning of the newer parts of town combined with the labyrinth of the old town, the proximity of both sea and mountain, and of course the marvelous architecture (so much more than the Gaudi showcases – but yes, this time I do get to see his little church project!) all make for a wonderful cityscape. Add to that the many authentic restaurants and food markets, the international blend of people from all over and the likable nature of every inhabitant I encounter, and you have a pretty ideal mixture. If I had to live in a city, this would be high on my list.

Spanish Fly

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I’m about to throw myself off a mountain. 

It’s at times like this you question your life choices. It’s a beautiful day, and I’ve got everything to live for. Why would I do this?

Leonardo da Vinci knew. “Once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.” Astonishingly ahead of his time as always, he wrote that 300 years before man actually “tasted flight”. As for me personally, it was as recently as three months ago in a tandem flight in the alps of Bavaria, and so for my November challenge I have signed up for an Elementary Pilot paragliding course. 

There’s eight of us on the course: four firemen from Wales, two ex-army Englishmen, a somewhat elderly Scottish academic and myself under the tutelage of two laid-back but incredibly professional para-bums: Ross and Jack from FlySpain. 

We’re ferried from Malaga to a quaint mountain-side village in Andalusia. This is archetypical Spanish countryside: weatherworn men and women in black knitwear in front of whitewashed houses, rolling fields, olive groves and oak trees under which Ferdinand the bull and his friends still graze. Algodonales looks much the same as it probably has since the time of the Moors (the neighbouring village of Zahara still lies beneath the ruins of a Moorish castle), but the main draw here is the hilly landscape, clear blue skies and warm sun, which provides paragliders with ideal flying conditions.

Ross and Jack have us starting off learning to handle our equipment on a dried-out lake, as flat as can be, and then we move on to a little hill (60 metres or so) in the middle of plowed fields, where we progress to mini-flights, practicing take-off and landing under relatively safe conditions. 


​​I say relatively, because before you get the hang of it, the wing is an unruly thing, and almost every one of us fails to take off at some point, with either canopies collapsing on top of their pilots, or people being dragged off across the field by the force of the breeze, or tumbling over when landing. (I’m lucky in that all my take-offs and landings are successful, but on the other hand I tear a muscle in my butt during one launch, which just about incapacitated me…!) We make really good progress though, working as a team, so the basic course is finished after a mere two and a half days*.

Which brings us to this moment. 

We’ve driven up the mountain for the better part of an hour, and now I’m stood here, at the edge of a launch site a good 700 metres above Algodonales, looking down at a ravine full of craggy rocks and thorny shrubs. Time to nut up or shut up. Get the take-off wrong here and you’re in a world of pain, or worse. 

Ross lays the canopy out behind me, and I try to focus on the various stances: Gay Crucified Jesus (hands out to your sides in a relaxed manner, allowing you to hold the brakes and the A-lines, letting the latter slide out as you move on to) Funky Chicken (long strides forward doubled over with your arms straight back to allow the canopy to rise above you in order to achieve lift-off, when you can happily move to) French Shrug (hands up by your ears, holding the reigns lightly, ready to steer your wing.).

Radio check. “You’ll only hear me say ‘runrunrun’ or ‘stopstopstop'”, Ross says. Hardly reassuring. Legs shaking with adrenaline. Stomach a tight knot of fear and excitement. Last equipment check, glance at the wind sock, and I’m off! I go from starting position to striding forward as best I can with my tenderised rump, only to find my left hand entangled in the lines. Fuck! I pull it out and continue – too far gone now to stop. 

I’m up in the air before I know it, sitting back in the harness as the ground falls away underneath me. The village is far, far below, the air and the sun in my face, the landscape never ending.  I round the mountain, check my bearings and fly, fly, fly. 

It feels like an eternity, but it only lasts ten minutes before the radio crackles and Jack, who has already landed, comes over the airwaves to guide me. I descend, landing neatly next to a dilapidated farm house, but in my mind I’m still up there. The adrenaline wears off, but the endorphins remain. I have tasted flight. 


We do a couple of more flights like that, gaining confidence with each one (in spite of zero wind on the very last flight, which sees me botching my perfect track record with a treetop-mowing start and ignominiously toppled landing) and then the week is over. As we return to Algodonales for the last time, a solo paraglider is riding a thermal high in the sky above the village, circling it together with a lone vulture, both of them rising effortlessly through the air. The next level beckons. 

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* It’s hard work. We’re on a conveyor belt system, so once you’ve landed and bunched up your shute, you have to trundle back up the hill on foot, slipping in the furrows, making it back on top in time only for a quick drink before it’s time to suit up again. The heat, physical excercise and adrenaline all take their toll, so I’m stumbling to bed before ten most nights, after a quick trip to the local tapas bar. 

Marvellous Mallorca

imageI’ve come to Mallorca on holiday with my brother. It’s with some reluctance I admit this: The place has always been a byword for package holidays of the kind up with which I will not put. Back in the days of socialist Sweden this was where people escaped the state monopoly on booze and sunshine to pig out on an abundance of both – but there is more to the island than its bad reputation would have you believe.

For me, this marks my second visit to Spain in as many months. It’s a country I hadn’t hitherto considered as very interesting, but I’m very pleased to admit I was wrong.

I know of course that I should tread carefully here, in every sense of the word; only non-Spanish people talk of Spain as a unified country – to a Catalan their homeland is Catalonia, and a Basque or a Mallorquin are equally fiercely proud of their respective regions. Without commenting on the respective merits of various other separatist movements, I think it’s fair to say that the Mallorquins’ case has more merit than most; like all islanders, their history is the result of all manner of foreign influences. Long before the British invasion of binge-drinkers or the colonies of German nudists, indeed long before Spain was an entity, the Balears were part of the Califate. The name of the isle itself is a bastardisation of Al Malorq, which in turn is an approximation of the Latin Isola Major (the big island), and before the Romans there were the Phoenicians, and so on. But I digress.

We’ve come to hike the Tremontana region that spans the entire northwest coast of the island. We did a hiking holiday together a year and a half ago in Slovenia, and we’ve been looking to find something that could match that experience. This certainly fits the bill: the Tremontana is home to the GR221, Ruta de Pedra en sec, or drystone route, all 161km of it, and it traverses some of the most impressive landscapes I’ve seen in Europe.

It’s still a work in progress tho, with some landowners contesting the right of the hoi polloi to cross their lands, so I’ve reluctantly decided against using the refugios, for fear of having the itinerary thrown into disarray by some trigger-happy estancia-owner with a hatred of hikers*. Instead we found an agretourisme, Finca d’Olivar, near Estellencs, which became our base. Formerly the home of a hermit, it’s a cluster of little stone houses built into the cliff side, nestled above orange groves, hidden away from sight but still offering wide-reaching views; small wonder stray cats like it!

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Our finca is nothing out of the ordinary, however. The whole coast is littered with beautiful honey-coloured villages, houses huddled together on cliffs and outcrops like swallows’ nests, built one on top of another in a jumble with not a right angle in sight**. The dramatic road serpentines its way between them like a never ending snake, never straight, never horizontal, imbued with a steady stream of bikers swooping down the slopes or sweating their way up the mountain side.

The GR221 is a different proposition altogether: just as vertiginous, but almost completely devoid of people, we stroll for hours without meeting a single hiker. The first day sees us scale the heights of the nearest mountain, which we have all to ourselves with the exception of some wild goats, and from whence we can see the entire island. The second day we set out along the coast, and hike for seven hours straight through fishing villages and almond groves, past vineyards and poppy fields and watchtower ruins, before taking the bus back from Bayalbufar, a very bijoux bayou. The third day, we drive high into the mountains north of Sóller for a final excursion in the remotest part of the Tremontana. Everywhere we go the landscape is stunning, the sky and sea deepest azure blue, the air so crisp that individual leaves on trees hundreds of metres away are clearly visible, and the stillness such that the slightest sound carries for kilometres. Flowers are in bloom everywhere, birdsong and fluttering butterflies fill the air. It really is paradisiacal.

In fact, the term paradise is particularly apt here, since pairi daiza in Persian originally meant “walled garden”, and the most distinguishing feature of the island is the abundance of terraced walls. They are literally everywhere, even in the remotest areas, and I am reminded of a comment by a forester friend (who said apropos the Blue forest): “If you think the woods are beautiful, thank the foresters.” This is brought home to us again and again: all this is cultivated land, used for millennia. Olives were a source of wealth to the islanders even before Carthage lost it to the Romans, and the trees are still there today, their centuries-old trunks contorted like souls tormented in a Dante-esque inferno, impossibly alive in spite of looking like they should have died a dozen deaths. Intricate systems for water collection – aljab cisterns – help funnel the winter rains down to the fertile soil down in the valleys, often using canals built into roads and walls to get to the staircase gardens below. Even higher up, where nothing but pine and holly grow, there’s still evidence of charcoal burning sites, and as you reach the crest of a mountain, more often than not you will find a drystone wall, erected to avoid flocks of goats escaping.

It really is a walk through a pastoral idyll, and it’s easy to imagine fauns and nymphs cavorting in the valleys, where rosemary and sage grow wild in the dappled shade. In reality, any attempt at cavorting would result in sprained ankles or worse, as the ground is extremely unforgiving – think rock, rock, rock around the clock – but we manage to make it unscathed, which is more than can probably be said for the passengers of the helicopter wreck we come upon the last hour of our last day. There’s no telling how long it’s been there, but discovering it changes our mood. Even the skies begin to darken, and it seems right to end our adventures here.

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I spend one more day in Mallorca, getting lost in the labyrinth of Palma’s old town, dodging raindrops and dodgy tourist traps, meeting interesting people and finding hidden gems. The island still has more to offer though. There’s canyoning, rock climbing, diving, even biking – if I can overcome my dislike for spandex. I leave thinking I should come back for more – and what better way is there?
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*At one refugio we find ourselves seated next to a Swedish woman and her ten-year-old daughter, who have elected to do a through-hike of the kind I originally envisaged, – as a birthday gift for the girl. Food for thought, that.

**The result of hundreds of generations of husbands succumbing to their wives’ pleas for “just one more room”, perhaps?