CheapSkites

Vienna Roll

2010-02-12T22:59:00.005+01:00

In all fairness to Vienna I shouldn’t be posting my online graffiti about it here. I spent a long afternoon in the place, most of that in a museum. It wasn’t so much a skite as a chip off a skite to Bratislava. They make it so easy. The shuttle train goes over and back all day between the two cities for about 8 Euro return. They are only 65 kms apart and the trip takes about an hour. In fact Bratislava airport is the RyanAir airport for Vienna.

The day I went, during Christmas week, the train was boarded by boisterous, clear-skinned gangs of twenty something Austrians in expensive sports casuals who may have been on an adventure, or just doing some budget Christmas shopping. Whatever it was, it was done and they were on their way back home early enough on a Sunday to be in time for church. There was also a more subdued scattering of non-Austrians. Bratislava is something of a late Saturday night to Vienna’s Sunday morning, a little more dishevelled in spots. But then Titania’s palace would look rough and ready next to any plain public building – never mind an opera house or palace – in downtown Vienna, all cream stone and painted railings. As for the Christmas decorations! The city was dolled up like Liberace on concert night - not a burnt out bulb in the rows and wreaths of sparkling lights.

At the Christmas market in Rathausplatz the same ornaments displayed in every Central European city at Christmas – decorations, candles and wooden puzzles, as well as gingerbread and toasted almonds and sausages - were on sale for a premium. And the mulled wine was twice the price of Bratislava (same quality too), plus you had to lay down a mortgage deposit on the ceramic mug. None of your plastic beakers in this here green postcard metropolis.

I happened to have a book with me on this trip, a volume of Arthur Koestler’s earliest memoirs that I had bought at a car boot sale a few days before in Spain – the only English language book I could find. It wouldn’t be your average airport fare, but it had a kind of musty relevance on this trip, since he had lived in Budapest and Vienna, and Vienna is an up-river sandblasted version of Budapest. Almost a hundred years later, the contrast between the two cityscapes and cultures probably hasn’t changed much.

Koestler writes of venturing inside Gerstner’s luxurious tearoom, aged around 15, in 1920, when the “misery of the post-war inflation years in Vienna was at its peak”

“The air inside Gerstner’s was hot, perfumed, and sweet; the sounds were muffled to a low murmur by the thick, soft carpets on the floor, the silk tapestry covering the walls, and the velvet curtains on the doors; it was like the padded interior of a chocolate box. The people who sat chatting and smiling at the small, polished tea-tables all looked wealthy and well-groomed and happy. They were mostly nouveaux riches, speculators and profiteers, for the old bourgeoisie of Vienna had been destroyed by the inflation as finally and completely as if it had been buried by a landslide; nevertheless, this new clientele of Gerstner’s looked perfectly civilised and did not even try to assume blasé manners. The people of Vienna had never learned that an air of boredom is an essential part of savoir faire; and so warmly saturated with tradition was the atmosphere of their city, that the parvenus had already acquired the unique Viennese art of being not only rich but actually enjoying it. They had that courteous gaiety and amused self-mockery and warm malice and flickering erotic spark, which had prevailed at Gerstner’s in the past Imperial days.”

I didn’t get anywhere near the inside of the padded chocolate box. I stayed outside on the cream vellum exterior. But I thought that commentary from an insider-outsider more than compensated for the poor rap the Austrians get today in the soundbite media. I had my bag lifted down from a train for me (not this trip) by a man in full business garb, and it wasn’t because he wanted a date. Three people got involved to help me get a ticket from a machine in the tram when I didn’t have change. The driver had shrugged when I sat down anyway to fiddle with my fiver. One of the three told me there were padded cells in Austrian jails for the likes of me and had a good laugh with his girlfriend. All in English, by the way. At the museum two men stepped aside and held the door.

The Kunsthistorisches Museum had so many Egyptian artefacts, including mummies, giant sarcophagi and even a full height granite pillar, that I couldn’t help but think it is time every country gave everything back. This museum is only in the halfpenny place on that score by comparison with the Louvre, the British Museum, the Metropolitan et al. I just hadn’t been in a major museum for a long while and had forgotten. There were so many Old Masters upstairs – Rubenses and Reynoldses and Rembrandts and Dutch Elders and Youngers and lighter French and Italian fare – that I left bog-eyed. In the end what I can bring to mind easiest are the ghastly – sorry! - fruithead and fishhead paintings of Giuseppe Archimboldo and Jan Steen’s Beware of living the Good Life, a louche scene of vice and disorder. There was a wonderful portrait of Paul the Apostle by Rembrandt and a beautiful portrait of Mary Magdalene by Titian or Tinoretto. But too, too many paintings to see in one day.

All these paintings and artefacts were acquired and assembled by the Hapsburgs, whose origins and achievements were celebrated in a separate exhibit of paraphernalia and thick-crusted brocade capes which could have stood up without help. Most outstanding exhibit of all was the massive shelf on the nose of Maximillian I, which either gave him the martian energies to carve out an empire and found a dynasty or the complex that needed all the trappings of empire to enable him to find a wife.

The Kunsthistorisches is a bang for your buck museum, but far, far better if you live in or around and use one of those season tickets. Having said that, I don’t know if I would be running back every Sunday to see hall after hall of massive, dark religious scenes – crucifixions and transfixions and sermons and sacraments. I was relieved ten minutes walk from the front door to be looking at bling up town in the Rathausplatz, at trees festooned with red heart balloons and falling icicles. I felt like the bespectacled secretary character who throws off her glasses and shakes out her hair at the office party and hits the dance floor.

Vienna seemed to be a happy place at Christmas, where people were looked after well by their city and kids kept innocent and warm.

CheapSkite Day Breaks

2010-02-09T18:08:00.005+01:00

DAY BREAKS FOR PEOPLE WHOSE PENSIONS GOT EATEN BY THE SUITS

You don’t have to fly off somewhere to have a bargain break. And the sun doesn’t have to be shining either.

Cheap skite for a wet day

I was googling different types of travel breaks to see what could be reinvented less expensively here and came across ‘mosaic holidays’. In fact I knew an academic couple who did a one week, 8-hour a day mosaic holiday in Verona a decade ago and the wife said it was furnace hot and altogether the most gruelling experience of her life - and she had a row of kids and a bombastic, ever-restless husband (the holiday was his idea of switching off).

Well this is absolutely not that kind of break. In the blissful liberation of being in a hiatus between jobs for the first time in years I browsed a dozen beaches this week, gathering bits of seaworn pottery. There was no one around, just a few strays like myself doing the same thing. Or similar anyway. Several were gathering glass. A Frenchwoman was poring over the stones looking for orange and cream sea-hardened periwinkles that had come loose from their shells and been washed up. She collected these extremely rare finds to put in a transparent glass vase and she told me her back was broken and her eyes were strained but she was happy (though probably not as happy as I was). This day-holiday, by the way, cost €4. I had a flask of coffee with me. On another posting I will describe the super tuna sandwich that everyone should have with them when they set out on a day's ramble.

I read somewhere about some famous Warren Buffett type who was burnt out after years on Wall St and took a sabbatical on a deserted Caribbean island. He took long beach walks every day gathering bits and one day when his heart leapt at the glint of a spectacular piece of seaworn beach pottery he said he knew that he had experienced greater euphoria than a killer trade would ever give him again.

This is the kind of thing I imagine he saw:

When you get home you can put all the bits together in a design that pleases you and get even more value from the day.

And here are one or two I made earlier:

Art, Health and Gourmet Eating for Refined Cheapskates

Freeform Art Workshop at the (beach below the) Atelier of Salvador Dali in Portlligat, followed by a handsome 5 hour walk on smugglers’ coastal paths and lunch - without a reservation! – at El Bulli (beach)

The middle section here (Portlligat, through Cadaques, over the mountain and south along the coast to Montjoi bay) is not for the faint-hearted. It is a 4-5 hour walk and there is no bus or taxi rank at the end of it to take you back to where you started. So you have to have cooperative friends, or forget the walk and settle for the creative endorphins let loose by the elevated company you have not quite spent time with today.

I’d like to say the material for the following portraits all came from Portlligat beach, but to be honest only about half of it did, the rest being from Cadaques. But technically Portlligat is only a suburb of Cadaques and Dali was a man who liked to go into town on his night off with the best of them.

On the left here we have an unusually subdued Mae Worst and on the right an understated self-portrait of the great master himself Servidor Doily after a night on the town.

El Bulli is rated the world’s best restaurant and you have to book three years in advance if you want a table in August (but not August 2011 or 2012, when the great chef is taking a break). You don’t have to take a break, though. You can dine al fresco beneath the modest walls of the place, like the two Dutchmen I met feasting on twigs and berries after descending from a 10-day trek in the Pyrenees. I like my food, but if you think this photo shot isn’t staged, you are very wrong. You don’t want to be drinking wine before driving back the twisty mountain road to town. I brought the accoutrements from home on a boring, bad old day just for something to do and to take this hasty photo.

That’s El Bulli above the cork in the wine bottle.

You can see what a lousy day it is, which is how come I managed to lay it all out for this compelling shot, and then pack it back into my rucksack to eat at home, all without being spotted by beach strollers.

A Taste of the Camino de Santiago

2010-01-21T03:39:00.002+01:00

Oh my poor feet!

Don’t know what to call this one. Is it a bargain break? (Sure is). Is it a pilgrimage? (Yes, of course. That’s what it’s supposed to be). But couldn't you call it a green trek? A sunshine holiday abroad? A life-changing experience? A sign of the times? Start of an obsession?

When I joined my two friends, they had already clocked up enough miles to get a certificate if ever they made it to Santiago. They had pilgrim passports with colourful stamps, and they had warm, painful and life-enhancing stories to recall. I knew they weren’t going to give up at that point, but I wasn’t so sure about myself. I had arrived by aeroplane, coach, taxi and bus to a town around 40 km east of Santiago. They had been on the road since just after dawn and were in full stride. I was utterly unfit from a prolonged sedentary job and immediately set a mileage clock in my head and started an obsessive countdown. A long-legged friend who had gone at the camino multiple ways over the years had told me with derision of seeing a bus dropping awl wans (old ones if you are not Irish) a few miles out of Santiago to stagger the last bit into town. Quelle horreur!, I didn’t say.

I love walking, though I am no longer any good at it. Tommy Tiernan, the thinking man’s comedian, calls it a great cure for madness. Next to my slimbo friends I was Gulliver in Lilliput. I can truly say I passed no one in a poorer condition of fitness than myself (though it's not like I passed anyone anyway). But no matter. I am only saying this to encourage the hesitant.

In less than an hour after meeting we were so deep in the country, green country – in burnt out heat-desiccated SPAIN! - that the bliss of that offset the developing blisters. It was tough going sometimes. Still hot in September, hilly - and of course it was unknown terrain. But just when it seemed like you might want to stab a pilgrim for a shot of coffee, in the middle of nowhere you would round a bend and there, sitting under a canopy of trees, was the thing you had dreamed of on every hike you ever did – an aromatic little café with snacks, bottled water, shade and chairs! Something else was noticeable too. Very reasonable prices, sympathetic mutual wincing between strangers in the queue and at the tables outside. Camaraderie! And tangible efforts by the woman behind the counter to understand and accommodate. I hadn’t experienced that for a while on my travels.

Left to my own devices I might have sat under one of those trees for the afternoon, but the arrival and departure of pilgrims helps maintain a pace, lends a mild sense of urgency to get to the next milestone, or nearest albergue for the night.

We continued on through forests of eucalyptus, past decorated horreos (grainstores) and fields of corn and cabbage that reminded me of Ireland, but an Ireland that had pole-shifted down to summer holiday land, so that alongside the cabbages were peaches and vines, though not vineyards (this was the French Way). I did 15 kms that day. My companions added 24 to their awesome, mounting tally. We passed a fellow who had walked from northern France in a series of seasons. When someone strode past at a clip or swept by on a bicycle there was always an acknowledgement, or a Poco pocito! if they were Spanish and you looked knackered.

When we got to the albergue, there was a cheerful masochist from Northern Ireland with a 40 kg rucksack who had prepared for the trek across the Pyrenees by running up hills in Donegal in several coats with the bag on his back. He was planning to do another route as soon as he got to Santiago. I should say the goal of the pilgrimage is to get to the Cathedral of St James in Santiago from wherever you start out, along waymarked routes, at whatever pace is comfortable for you, or uncomfortable enough for you if you want to make a Lough Derg of it. You can cycle, and a great many French and Spaniards flew past us on wheels. Purists can be scornful of the cyclists, but St James probably doesn’t object and neither do the owners of small hostelries and cafes who were saved from emigration and indigence by the Camino de Santiago and the happy mix of pilgrims and hikers and cheapskate holidaymakers who walk the landscape of Galicia from spring to autumn every year.

St James

St James, or St Iago, son of Zebedee and Salome, was one of Jesus’ earliest apostles, along with his brother John. Executed by the sword of King Herod Agrippa I in person, James’ remains are said to be held in Santiago de Compostela in western Galicia, regarded as the third holiest city in Roman Catholicism. He is the patron saint of Spain and his feast day is 25 July. This year, ie 2010, is a Jubilee year, when the feast day falls on a Sunday and record numbers of pilgrims are expected, with up to 200,000 qualifying for a certificate, or Compostela. You get a Compostela (with your name spelt in Latin) if you show that you have completed 100 kms (200 kms for cyclists).

Here is a little more about the beloved saint from Wikipedia:

“According to ancient local tradition, on 2 January of the year AD 40, the Virgin Mary appeared to James on the bank of the Ebro River at Caesaraugusta, while he was preaching the Gospel in Iberia. She appeared upon a pillar, Nuestra Señora del Pilar, and that pillar is conserved and venerated within the present Basilica of Our Lady of the Pillar, in Zaragoza, Spain. Following that apparition, St James returned to Judea, where he was beheaded by King Herod Agrippa I in the year 44.[5][6]

“The translation of his relics from Judea to Galicia in the northwest of Iberia was effected, in legend, by a series of miraculous happenings: decapitated in Jerusalem with a sword by Herod Agrippa himself, his body was taken up by angels, and sailed in a rudderless, unattended boat to Iria Flavia in Iberia, where a massive rock closed around his relics, which were later removed to Compostela. An even later tradition states that he miraculously appeared to fight for the Christian army during the battle of Clavijo, and was henceforth called Matamoros (Moor-slayer). Santiago y cierra España ("St James and strike for Spain") has been the traditional battle cry of Spanish armies.”

“St James the Moorslayer, one of the most valiant saints and knights the world ever had ... has been given by God to Spain for its patron and protection.” Cervantes, Don Quixote

It wouldn’t be religion unless all this was disputed by scholars, sceptics, rivals and barflies, so there is a lot more on the subject here.

One thing about the Irish – they love a good pilgrimage. They love all the blisters and sprains, the frozen ankles (the Pyrenees) and the hunger. Another thing is they don’t mind having a good laugh and sharing the memory of the pain over a good meal and a few drinks in a warm hostel. We met a disproportionate number of Irish – or that was my recollection anyway on my 2-day sample of the camino, for which I got no Compostela (30 km at a stretch) but lost a small toenail from tight boots. We spent one night in an albergue and the other sharing a triple hotel room. The albergue served up crisp sheets, hot showers, Galician soup and ruby rich wine from the Ribeira Sacra. The next morning we got lost, found our way again and rambled and then trudged (I did anyway) through more fragrant eucalyptus woods, past farms and orchards to a smart looking hotel just 10 kms from Santiago where we fell into another reasonably priced pilgrim meal, followed by the sleep of the dead. My two friends left at dawn. I got the bus at 10.00 am in my flip flops and we reached the Cathedral in Santiago around the same time.

Twelve o’clock Mass is where those who have made it in to the city that morning gather and the Cathedral was packed on a September Friday. Two young lads a couple of seats ahead were carrying a tall gold-fringed banner and one of them had a T-shirt with a cedar and map of Lebanon on the back. Both of them had the profiles of early Christian apostles, so they had probably come a long way. The priest called out the nationalities of the pilgrims who had received Compostelas that morning and the group from St Martin got resounding applause. Could that have been St Martin of Canigou in the Eastern Pyrenees? I don’t know, but if it was, then they had walked almost a thousand kilometres.

Santiago is a lovely compact city with cosmopolitan shops and a prosperous appearance, which must feel quite strange to someone who has just walked several hundred kilometres due west through country landscape and many people spoke of the sense of not wanting to arrive, or striving to get there but not wanting it to be over.

I stayed in a sparkling little 3rd floor pension where the sweet elderly couple who ran it had looked after my bag while I was away. It was bang in the middle of town and cost €25 a night. We missed the morning bus due south the following day and so took another out to the coast at Noia, where we had a picnic on the grass looking out to sea. Noia looked just as prosperous and cosmopolitan as Santiago and put paid to my images of wild and remote Galicia. But it is altogether lovely, and I can fully understand how this camino can draw you back and back.

Getting there and costs

Well you can walk! Or you can get a taxi like I did. But RyanAir will bring you to Santiago from almost anywhere in Europe, or to Santander or Pau or Porto or any other starting point you might choose. So will the very reasonable Spanish train system. I got a RyanAir family ticket, whatever that is, from Reus airport south of Barcelona to Santiago and it cost €3.98, all in. Yes. I flew back to Girona from Porto for €5. All in. The various buses and taxis all cost around €5 each. The albergue cost €12 for the night and around the same for the three course meal with a large jug of wine. The hotel was €48 for a triple room. We paid €25 for the coach from Santiago to Porto, about €8 to get to Noia on the coast for our picnic. There are luggage lockers in the bus station and railway station where you can leave anything you don’t want to carry with you, but probably not enough to go round in high season, so that is a consideration. But there are services that will collect your bag from the albergue in the morning and deposit it at your projected lodging, if you are organised enough to know where that is going to be.

La Sanch Procession in Collioure

2010-01-20T19:35:00.005+01:00

Good Friday

Collioure is very close to the Spanish border and I travelled up from Roses. The La Sanch procession is at 9.00 pm in Collioure (11.00 am the same morning in Perpignan) so it suited me very well, if I could find a way of not having to drive in France and if I could get back the same night for work the following morning. The trains don’t cross the Spanish-French border after 7.00 or 8.00 pm at night. So I drove the desolate coastal road just over the border to Cerbère and took a 10 minute train ride. I got there a couple of hours early, had a coffee, bought a bottle of Languedoc wine to bring home, wandered the streets and pottered around on the beach, then parked myself under a doorway in possibly the worst viewing spot in town, just to stay out of the rain.

I was chatting in bad French to a Frenchwoman and her grandchild and she told me the procession changed route every year and no one knew until it appeared which way it was going. We were close to the church on the pier and there were two walls of people bordering the obvious seafront route, more at the other side of the church door in case they bolted out the back. They weren’t coming our way anyway. But after a chat with a tradesman up the road she said they were, and they did, and I was so shocked to have an uninterrupted frontline view I pressed all the wrong buttons on the camera. The photos are terrible, one so bad it is almost good. Here it is:

Blood Brothers

The brotherhood of La Sanch (the Blood) dates to the early 15th century, when it was founded in Perpignan by the influential preacher Vincent Ferrer, a friend and supporter of anti-Pope Benedict XIII, who was residing in Perpignan, the new 'Vatican', after being driven out of Avignon. The early purpose of the brotherhood was to assist and accompany condemned prisoners to their execution. Vincent had had an epiphany after an illness in 1398 and saw himself as a messenger of penance, sent to prepare mankind for imminent judgment. He subsequently travelled around Europe for 20 years, attracting thousands of followers, many from the criminal classes, and the pointed red and black hoods worn by the intinerant sinners were intended to protect them from being recognised and lynched.

The procession today commemorates the Passion and Agony of Christ and marks the start of the Holy Week ceremonies. The lead penitent, le regidor, is dressed in scarlet and rings a bell to warn of the approach of the black-robed penitents on their way to the gallows. Behind him the penitents carry statues, crucifixes and banners representing the scenes of the passion. In Collioure a pious narrative was relayed by low-volume loudspeakers mounted at second-storey level on every street, but the procession itself is silent, except for the bell. Once it has passed, what many people seemed to be doing, and moi aussi, was cutting across town to a new viewing spot to get a second look. Alas, my photos never got any better, most being of the back of the head of the person in front of me. In my frenetic need to come out of it with something I missed much of the spiritual reward and I vowed to go back again with my hands in my pockets.

Having expected something between a Hallowe’en performance and a Ku Klux Klan outing (sorry, but I couldn’t dismiss the images in my head, all the more having read of the infamous and ubiquitous Abbé Saunière’s supposed links with the brotherhood), I was surprised at the simple piety of the commentary overhead and the respectful, intimate and non-threatening atmosphere of the event. There was no background racket, no sniggers from the crowd, no pushing to get a better view. Being from Ireland, I had been surprised to see so many shops open on Good Friday, including craft shops, eateries and cafes. But they all had pretty displays with flowers, candles and statues, and everything closed just before 9.00 pm. For the record, the procession is not organised by the Church, although it includes members of the clergy, but by the “brotherhood of the very precious blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ, La Sanch.”

Cost

I was the only person at the station and wondered what I would do if the train didn’t come. There wasn’t a room or a bed to be had anywhere. When it did arrive it showed no signs of stopping and I ran and ran and ran uselessly as it glided by until I ran out of breath and platform. But the platform hadn’t run out of train yet and eventually it stopped. It must have been a mile long. There were about 3 passengers aboard as well as myself but the train was merely going to bed down in Cerbère in preparation for a busy weekend. I was home by midnight. The total cost of this stimulating and should-have-been spiritual outing was around €12, including petrol, return trainfare and coffee (didn’t count the wine).

Camargue Gypsy Festival

2010-01-20T02:56:00.005+01:00

Who are the three Marys?

The first thing you have to know here is who the three St Marys are. You may already be confused, as I was, by all the conspiracy theories and tales of the Holy Family in the South of France. This is how Wikipedia puts it:

"The three saints, Mary Magdalene, Mary Salomé and Mary Jacobé, whose relics are the focus of the devotions of pilgrims, are believed to be the women who were the first witnesses to the empty tomb at the resurrection of Jesus. After the Crucifixion of Jesus, Mary Salomé, Mary Jacobé and Mary Magdalene set sail from Alexandria, Egypt with their uncle Joseph of Arimathea. According to a longstanding French legend, they either sailed to or were cast adrift - either way they arrived off the coast of what is now France, at "a sort of fortress named Oppidum-Râ". The location was known as Notre-Dame-de-Ratis (Râ becoming Ratis, or boat) (Droit, 1961, 19); the name was later changed to Notre-Dame-de-la-Mer, and then in 1838 to Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer.

"The town is a pilgrimage destination for Roma (Gypsies), who gather yearly in the town for a religious festival in honor of Saint Sarah. The French believed she was Mary Magdalene's daughter, and she was also known as Sara-la-Kali (Sara the black). Dark-skinned Saint Sara is said to have possibly been the Egyptian servant of the three Marys. The famous flamenco guitarist Manitas de Plata first played here."

So there you have it. The bones of the two Marys (Salomé and Jacobé) were ‘found’ in the 15th century and their 500th anniversary was celebrated by Pope John Paul XXIII. When I started this paragraph I thought the above all sounded like heresy, but now you have the Pope endorsing it, so all is well, if you are a God-fearing Catholic anyway.

Or is it? Here is the view of Walter Weyrauch (2001):

"The ceremony in Saintes-Maries closely parallels the annual processions in India, the country in which the Romani originated, when statues of the Indian goddess Durga, also named Kali, are immersed into water. Durga, the consort of Shiva, usually represented with a black face, is the goddess of creation, sickness and death.[7]"

Nothing is ever simple is it?

The road to Roma

The gypsies love St Sara with an abiding devotion. In the days leading up to 24 and 25 May each year they come from all over Europe, dressed for celebration, to meet in the little seaside town at the mouth of the Rhone. It is about 24 km from the interesting city of Arles, where Van Gogh and Picasso painted, and where the 20,000-seat Roman amphitheatre today hosts cultural events and bullfights. Bulls are big in the Camargue and bull steaks are served in most of the busy restaurants in Saintes Marie during the festival. If you don’t have transport, there is an infrequent bus from Arles to St Marie, so no reason you can’t get a RyanAir flight to Carcassonne, or Nimes or some nearby airport and get the train to Arles. You can get more information about how to get there and where to stay, as well as photos and videos, at the Gypsy Music website.

Arles is also home to the Gypsy Kings, whose intermediate roots are in Catalan Spain and whose blend of flamenco and Latin rhythms took their music out of the circuit of weddings and traditional festivals to the top of the pop charts and world stages.

The warm-up

Roma are arriving for days from all over Europe. The hotels in town are booked up months in advance and the closer the time gets the further afield you will have to go, thus limiting your experience, unless you are prepared to join traffic queues down the narrow main road from Arles. Remember the Camargue is marshland with few roads. But commuting is not impossible, and we stayed just outside Arles and went to and fro by car.

There is great camaraderie among the gypsies, who ignore tourists and gawkers with magnificent disdain. They are not being rude, just focused. This is only a tourist event by default. The Roma have business to conduct and people to meet and prayers and celebrations to get on with. There is a fair bit of strutting too. My gypsy-mad friend and I followed a band of about 12 young men dressed in white trousers, turquoise shirts and bright yellow square-cut gold chains through the streets as they scouted for a suitable restaurant for their leader. They were Arlesians, and they were practically levitating with high frequency energy and good health, with strong white teeth and glossy, stand-up black hair. And before anyone starts yelling about stereotypes, that is just a description. Maybe they were all on multivitamins. What is more we had left the leader singing with that same raw energy in the square late the previous night, where a handler passed him a whiskey bottle at intervals to protect the crucial rasp in his throat.

Throughout the day the church, where the statues and relics of the two Marys and St Sara are kept high in the wall above the altar and below in the crypt respectively, is packed with the faithful praying for a precious healing gesture from the saints.

Right outside the door is where much of the celebration is going on. There are flamboyant Romanian musicians in spats and sharp haircuts, young dancing girls in spotted dresses and stout and sexily-clad women. The music and hilarity extends beyond the church surrounds to the little town square nearby and to some of the outdoor eateries. There is plenty of drink going down, and God knows what else, but we didn’t see any fights. It is the music that gets more intense as the night wears on and the best performances are surrounded by solid crowds in a heightened state. One such involved two singers (one of them the turquoise hero) engaged in a passionate a capella musical challenge backed by fast, syncopated hand clapping. I could not fathom the subject matter – it could have been love, war, poetic prowess – but each contribution fell and rose and twirled and then was flung to the ground like a lord’s gauntlet to be taken up by his opponent. We watched for an hour until my infatuated friend, who had worked her way up to the front row, managed to get herself into a standoff with three substantial Spanish gitanas claiming right of place, so we backed off and left quietly to go find a bull steak. That clapping was out of this world.

St Sara is brought to the sea

On the afternoon of the 24th St Sara is brought up from the crypt and a procession of Camargue horsemen and pilgrims lead her down the two hundred yards to the sea, where they enter the waves, carrying her aloft. Half the visiting male population is by this time on the roof of the church, from where they have a fine view of the entire proceedings and probably the entire province. The rest are hurrying behind the fast-moving statue, reaching out to touch the saint’s voluminous seven-layered gown. It is a brisk procession and after hours of advance traffic control, the whole thing is quickly over, to be repeated tomorrow when the two Marys are brought down to re-enact their arrival from the sea. The fiddlers are back in the church square. There are some amazing musicians from Romania, a family led by the father, who has clearly had his hands full rearing sons so bored and brilliantly gifted they can play riveting music on automatic pilot long after their active thoughts have departed to ladyland. One of them is wearing a pair of fierce black winklepickers. A brother on guitar is in spats and a black fedora and is a cool dude. The third and youngest is playing keyboards with consummate ease and hasn’t yet developed the vacant look. The father is watchful, and a task master. In a suit he could be a Mediterranean businessman. The mother, who has trailing infants, is circulating in the crowd trying to sell CDs to the tourists. She isn’t doing too well and when I offer a donation without taking the CD she gives me a hangdog look and takes it without thanks. Clearly she too has the task master to contend with.

Up one end of the promenade, a row of thick-haired French intellectuals and languid young women are dining al fresco at a long table outside some picturesque painted wagons that must equate to the plush yurts at Glastonbury. Many other gypsy families are doing the same, strung out along the prom beside their trailers and inland in a parking area. This is where you might see a lot more Roma lifestyle if you could loiter. But you can’t, because marriages and mergers are being arranged and this not reality TV. We met an American preacher couple who specialised in gypsies and said they had special access through religion. They had met a TV woman who was a world expert on gypsies and she was dressed up like Carmelita but hadn’t been able to get into some of the camps the preachers had, or so they said. There were probably people there who had broken into gypsy folklore and conquered the gypsy language and assaulted its grammar and climbed over the tribal divide. For whatever reason, we would seem to be far more fascinated by them than they are by us.

While the flat seashore and marshy hinterland wouldn’t be my favourite landscape, the Camargue has a diverse menu to offer the curious, including swimming, horse-riding with cowboys in the saltmarsh, photographing flamingoes and rice paddies and buying souvenir bags of salt. And of course there is Arles and its many attractions.

Definitely worth a look, as the real estate agent said. I have just seen that RyanAir fly also to Beziers, Montpellier, Marseilles. Any of these is in striking distance of Arles.

A Stroll in Rennes le Chateau

2010-01-19T15:56:00.020+01:00

This little outing came by way of an acquaintance, a book or two, a day off and a mellow lady, Ani Williams who plays the harp and can tell you which missing note in your make-up causes you repeating spirals of trouble. Ani will then show you how to reintroduce the missing note into the symphony of your inner life. At the time (summer 2009) she was renting a house ten paces from the Rev. Saunière’s wicked-wonderful church in Rennes le Chateau. My acquaintance had booked a consultation and I had the afternoon to wander around. If you haven’t heard of Rennes le Chateau by this point, you deserve to have conspiracy theorists make jokes about you.

Two decades before the Da Vinci Code came out I had read Holy Blood, Holy Grail, which provided something of the historical background (and fiction, if that is how you are inclined) for Dan Brown’s novel. But more recently an intriguing book by Patrice Chaplin, Girona – City of Secrets, had tied all of this in with a little-known side of Girona in Spain and her own bohemian and sometimes hair-raising life and love story. Ani, who also conducts an annual ‘pilgrimage in celebration of men and women’ in Cathar country and Provence, knew Patrice, along with a coterie of other iconoclasts in the region – and as we languish jobless in the wreckage brought on by the iconics, why wouldn’t we pass some of our time usefully giving the iconoclasts a hearing? Ani’s pilgrimage, Song of the Goddess, Grail and Gypsy, in search of Isis, Mary Magdalene and St Sarah (admit it - how intriguing is that!), is principally for American recession survivors and she is accompanied for part of it by Henry Lincoln, one of the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, who made riveting discoveries of his own in the region. I am not going to go into them. That is what his website is for, so use the link above. But for the record, this is what he thinks of Dan Brown and his book.

“Both novel and not-very-successful film were entertaining rubbish, but I found it slightly irritating that Mr Brown seemed to be implying that he has based his story upon accurate facts. I can’t comment on his ideas about Leonardo, or Opus Dei ... but, for Pierre Plantard - the Priory of Sion - Jesus - Mary Magdalene - and so on, I can only say: “Facts?!!? I’d love to see your sources, Honeybunch.”

The Church of St Mary Magdalene is a pretty stone and mortar building with yellow painted eave decorations. The devilish Asmodeus, weighed down by the baptismal font on his back, greets you in the doorway, wearing a new and apparently less terrifying head since the original was lopped by a treasure hunter in 1996. Lest we get carried away here, a statue of Jesus being baptised by St John eyes Asmodeus from the opposite wall across the chessboard tiled floor and to a conspiracy ingénue the place is neither spooky nor remarkable, if we leave Asmodeus out of it. But every detail of the decoration of this church has been parsed and analysed in an intense quest for clues and codes and symbols and there are more than enough hints and allusions to satisfy the cravings of scholars and nitpickers both. The little museum next door, which also gives you access to the controversial Tour Magdala, fills in the dates around the theories and has a collection of curious items, including invoices for Abbe Saunière’s extravagant purchases for the refurbishment of the old church. Anything you could possibly need to know about the layout, history, geography, geometry, speculations, mysteries, spiritual connections, ritual lunacy and heresies associated with this place can be found at Corjan de Raaf's meticulous website, RLC (Rennes le Chateau) Research: There may be dozens of other similar websites - I don't know - but the above should keep you going for a few months.

In a very brief conversation with Ani after my solo tour, I mentioned the fact that I felt no goose pimples inside the church or tower. (Patrice Chaplin writes of a spine-chilling encounter with the evil character at the door in, I think, the late 1950s that she can summon to the back of her neck still). Ani’s reasonable reply was that a great deal of work had been done since then to clear the spiritual energy of the area through meditation and music and that she herself played the harp with this intent every morning when she was in residence.

The Tour Magdala is at the heart of the whole Saunière story, and it lines up with an older and since torn down twin in Girona through the peak of Mt Canigou, the sacred mountain of the Catalans. And there lies a whole nother story, incorporating amongst other things the unorthodox priest’s apparent regular, secret and extra-curricular visits to the Spanish city, for details on which you will have to read the Chaplin book (check out this interview on Andrew Gough's Arcadia website). The Tour was built at the corner of the garden behind the Villa Bethanie, an elaborate guest mansion also built by the priest, which has served lifetimes since as a hotel and now a museum. The Tour was where he housed his vast collection of books, journals and manuscripts. All I can usefully say about it here is that it is an utterly charming structure, rich in carvings, mirrors and coloured tiles with a view of the plain and mountains beyond that would make your heart sing.

There are probably as many truths as there are myths about this little mountain-top village. Saunière’s life was nothing if not interesting and his parties were legendary, with Hapsburgs, opera singers, French widows and cult figures dropping in to be lavishly entertained. Then there were the nightly diggings, the anti-Republican diatribes, squabbles with the Catholic Church, rumoured affairs. One theme runs through all narratives and that is the long-running and deep-rooted contests between the Catholic Church, Judaism, Gnosticism and material cultish forces that were focused in this area of France and northern Spain.

We left Rennes after a forage in the little bookshop, where I bought a slim Lulu-published volume on the secret elite who rule the world by knowing the cycle of astronomical events and hiding them from us. My newly tuned companion bought one on Jesus’ life in France after the Crucifixion. I am not going to find fault with either. The latter is a thoroughly readable history of the area from early times and the former is more believable than anything Dan Brown ever dug up. Both authors spent considerable time living in the area. Can you imagine the dinner party conversations they must have around here?

I have to add this, a propos of the ‘evolution’ of religions, stolen from Henry Lincoln’s site. He quotes Kipling.

THE DISCIPLE
by

RUDYARD KIPLING

He that hath a Gospel

To loose upon mankind,

Though he serve it utterly -

Body, soul and mind -

Though he go to Calvary

Daily for its gain –

It is his Disciple

Shall make his labour vain.

It is his disciple

(Ere those bones are dust)

Who shall change the charter,

Who shall split the trust -

Amplify distinctions, Rationalise the Claim,

Preaching that the Master

Would have done the same.

He that hath a Gospel,

For all earth to own

Though he etch it on the steel,

Or carve it on the stone -

Not to be misdoubted

Through the after-days -

It is his disciple

Shall read it many ways.

It is his disciple

Who shall tell us how

Much the Master would have scrapped

Had he lived to now -

What he would have modified

Of what he said before -

It is his disciple

Shall do this and more.

He that hath a Gospel

Whereby Heaven is won -

(Carpenter or Cameleer,

Or Maya’s dreaming son) -

Many swords shall pierce him,

Mingling blood with gall;

But His Own Disciple

Shall wound him worst of all.

Getting there

Obviously you can drive, to Quillan, then Couiza and up the mountain from there. But if you have the time and legs for it you can take a little train journey out from, say, Carcassonne and walk up the mountain road, an easy enough stroll of less than 2 hours. The surrounding land is rather flat, so this will be a nice change. At any rate here is the train timetable There are buses too, from Carcassonne and Perpignan. There is no reason the green and carbon free should be excluded from the treasure hunt. There is a small entrance fee for the museum and grounds but it is well worth it. I think it was about 4 Euro. RyanAir will get you to Carcassonne and if RyanAir will get you to even a nearby country, I never look up another airline.

Oh Porto!

2010-01-13T23:00:00.015+01:00

Porto is straight out of a Shakespearean play. In strictly visual terms the Merchant of Venice comes to mind, because of the gondolas and barges and the colourful trafficking on and in and around the banks of the River Douro. Especially if the bard’s mobile character, Falstaff, were to drop in on the drama. The city is piled steep on both sides, rickety buildings on the Ribeira side - with lines of washing on the front balconies – sitting above and just behind one another so that everyone has a view, like a well designed theatre. Excuse me, I have to take that right back, because Porto and the Ribeira are just one side of the river, the north side. The opposite bank, hardly more than an arm’s reach across the waterway, is not Porto but rather Gaia, another city altogether and the home of the great port lodges. Linking the two are a couple of very dramatic rail and road bridges.

Getting there

Michael (RyanAir) will get you there for as little as a fiver if you have your prepaid Mastercard and cabin luggage. I came in by coach from Santiago de Compostella in Spain with a couple of friends, after walking the walk of the demented through some lovely countryside in a pilgrimage of shared pain. We went out the first night looking for something to eat. We weren’t fussy, just starving, but we were prepared to dine in elegance. Nothing stood out. Nothing much seemed open, or bright, so we ended up in a sloping alley off the main square where a cheerful Brazilian band was playing outdoors to three adjacent eateries, as well as an assortment of uninhibited passersby who just put down their handbags and briefcases and plunged into the samba. One or two of the men were dressed like accountants and a very large lady had some powerful moves. It was more intense than jolly, a little strange, like the reception we got on arrival, when the bus dumped us on a corner with no sign of a bus station, taxi rank or tourist booth lighting up the melancholic urban landscape. In the alley, we asked for burgers and they came with fried eggs and easy singles and lettuce and a scatter of other niblet items and the glass of red wine was sweet port. So we had another and then went down the steep hill to what turned out to be the penny stalls in the theatre of the Ribeira Douro.

My oh my. What a place! I could not imagine any demi-monde deal that might not be going on down there. True, it was the eve of the Red Bull Air Race, or of the finals of the Air Race, so the dishevelled appearance of the place could have been because of that. But it was colourful in a Moll Flanders kind of way and you could sit there all day and half the night without seeing the same thing happen twice.

The following day, a Sunday, planes were swooping up and down the river and crowds converged on the banks and hung over the bridge railings, high pavements and roof perches to get a look. It reminded me of the air shows and spring shows and horse fairs that would sometimes come to town when we were kids and all the townspeople would turn up out of gratitude that someone had put something on for us. It didn’t matter what. Could have been the mayor’s funeral. Grown up and abroad I was even less interested in this event, but the crowds were impressive. They had hats and sunglasses and little folding chairs and things to hawk and they were buying and selling and sharing and eating for Portugal. You could see the tide coming in and going out on the river. The Atlantic was just a couple of miles out west and the Portuguese used to think this was the end of the world, before brave men set out to test that old conviction. The riverside in Porto has the look of the last hurray, like Vasco de Gama was leaving again tomorrow.

The Port Houses

Someone said that someone said that Taylor’s was the place to go to, where the port-tasting was free. Unfortunately Taylor’s was closed on Sunday and I would have to come back (my foot-weary friends were gone on to Lisbon and home), but the Taylor’s people were nice enough to tell me Croft’s was open and the port-tasting was free there too and probably is everywhere else as well. After you have exhausted their generosity you can buy another shot for something less than a Euro and sit outside and look down at the river from your sunny perch. They had just launched a novelty in the form of port on ice, which they were very excited about, and that innocent claim reminded me of the stories about explorers who discovered the Amazon or the Gobi Desert. I got to Taylor’s the next day and by then I had tried the sweet and the tawny and the ice version and knew everything about the English families who took over the industry here and the shale and the terraces and the mixing and blending. There is a big frisson about drink-tasting in a holiday or recreational setting. The staff of the port lodges were gracious and pleasant and did not seem at all put upon by the crowds who trailed in hour after hour to test their port and their patience.

Sights

All my photos disappeared into the internal memory of the camera, which didn’t seem to have much on it but would accept no more (wrong size setting I found out later). That was an awful pity, because the place is massively photogenic. Gondolas, painted balconies, narrow alleys, splendid blue and white tile clad churches, the sumptuous tiled interior of the Sao Bento railway station. When I fixed the problem later I thought they would re-emerge, but they were gone from memory, just like the name of the hotel I stayed in had gone from mine, of the square it was in, of the fantastic internet café, of the bridges, the number of the bus I took out to the Atlantic. No matter. I can google them, and I have to come back here anyway, maybe with company for a boat trip up the Douro.

The bus goes west along the northern river bank out to the Atlantic shore, but when I went, a heavy mist was rolling in, giving the place a silently spooky appearance. These wouldn’t be the finest beaches of Portugal by any means, but a short train ride on the opposite bank accesses fine sandy beaches in less than half an hour.

Internet

I don’t mind emailing or googling or skyping from internet cafes, but I don’t like doing my day’s work in the full public glare. The internet café almost directly across the public square from the downtown Residencial Chique where I stayed, was absolutely terrific. It was huge and every station had an executive desk, comfortable chair and a whole private corner of the room to settle in to. It was cheap, and they served coffee and didn’t mind you having it at the desk.

Accommodation

Two nights in the Residencial Chique, which is bookable via Hostelbookers, a 2nd floor pension overlooking the av. dos Aliados, the city’s dominant central square, cost €70 and that included breakfast. I think I had a double bed, which is always a plus if you are paying a bit more for single accommodation anyway, and the reception staff greeted me like the prodigal guest, even though the place appeared to be full. Breakfast was unremarkably fine. I can’t remember what I ate exactly but I don’t recall complaining. The receptionists/ management looked worried and asked me to tell people about the place and so there you go. I should probably send them a link.

Bratislava and the Hotel Kijev

2010-01-13T19:18:00.023+01:00

Enjoy the Value

I'm going to do this back to front. Accommodation isn’t the heart of a holiday, but the Hotel Kijev is a special case. A bit of an architectural bastard, a blighted teenager in the old master’s town belying denials that he ever touched the Soviet housemaid. Like most such intrusions, it has many benign and striking features of the kind that shock and ultimately perk up the family. The Kijev was built 36 years ago and must have housed a few vodka-soaked trysts in its day. It is phenomenally huge, especially given the handy size of Bratislava. If you laid the rooms end to end, you could probably put the whole of the old town inside.

From the 14th floor you can eyeball Bratislava Castle on the hill that dominates the town. And if you venture up to the castle (closed like a lot else for renovations that look like they are going to take time), what you see winking back at you is the scarlet 'Hotel Kijev - Enjoy the Value' banner wrapped around the penthouse level of your citybreak accommodation. I can’t think of any reason you wouldn’t be staying at the Kijev, unless you had more money than was good for you. There are over a thousand reviews of the place on Tripadvisor, half of them wailing about the thin walls/ racket/ unstylishness/ grubbiness of it and nearly as many salivating over its ‘retro style.’ Part of its retro style is the yellow Trabant with a blue police light on the roof parked in the lobby. At Christmas this was wrapped, parcel-style, in red ribbon with a bow on the roof.

Smartalecry aside, I found the Kijev to be clean (a few elderly stains on the yellow lino-ish bathroom tiles do not equate to dirt). It was toasty warm in minus 7 to minus 12C daytime temperatures. I paid for a single but got a twin bedded room, which was genuinely retro, with comfortable, low-lying beds, carpet crawling 8 inches up the wall, plain wood panelling and roundy bevelled mirrors. I was able to wash socks at night and toast them dry on a big old-fashioned metal radiator in the bathroom.

The staff were polite, the wifi in the lobby worked a dream and was free, and they had three or four computer terminals as well. There was a dedicated luggage room with an official guarding it, 24-hour reception, slow but working lifts, maps of the town on the wall. There were twin posters advertising stag party deals and the programme at the State Opera Theatre but there were no stag parties in sight and the receptionist was at the opera the same night I was. I told a staff member in a red and gold usher’s uniform that I thought the hotel was terrific and his eyes popped in disbelief. I don’t think he was flattered, but he should have been.

One thing all reviewers agreed on - the Hotel Kijev breakfast is spectacular, and spectacular would be one word for it. Here's what I had for breakfast every day: hardboiled, scrambled and fried eggs, spicy rashers, bacon fat bits, ham slices, spicy sausages, pork slabs, beef goulash, chicken legs in gravy, pasta, pickled and green salad, crumbles, cringles, crispies and chocolate balls, apples and oranges, orange, blackcurrant and multivitamin juice, yoghourt, cake, strudel, cream cheese wrapped in easy singles, brown, white, loaf, rye bread, rolls and baps, 10 kinds of black, green and herbal tea, coffee with hot and cold milk, chocolate sprinkler, butter, jam, blueberry, peach, honey, tinned fruit. Well no, but I could have had. William and the Outlaws would have been climbing the walls to get in.

Mulled wine at the bar or restaurant, open all day until 9.00 pm, was 59 cents, fresh grilled trout 6.50, Greek salad 2.99, Slovakian cabbage soup 1.59, beer 1 euro.

If you needed any more reason to stay here, the Kijev is a couple of hundred yards from the edge of the old town. They have instructions on their website on how to get there from the airport/ train station and they worked seamlessly for me.

My four nights, including breakfast, cost €98. God knows what kind of a multiple special offer deal it was – I booked through a Czech online company One Big Europe just a couple of days before the trip. Normal rates are rather higher, but Bratislava accommodation tends to be expensive for what you get, so this was formidable value, and I sure enjoyed it.

Bratislava Old Town

This is lovely. Not always as impeccably gorgeous as its big sister, Prague, more of a Scarlett Johanssen with tattoos, especially around the edges inhabited by the Hotel Kijev and the Tesco block. But the very heart of it is intimate and beautiful. The little town square had a Christmas Market that, unlike the ones I have seen in Prague, Vienna and Budapest, was more focused on food and drink than on selling ornaments. Around teatime, in 4 inches of snow and with the temperature at around minus 10, a band of half-shepherd/ half-sheep fiddle players in skin waistcoats with the fur outside and embroidered leggings were battering away at a tuneful drinking song and a solid crowd was tapping and singing enthusiastically. There was plenty of drinking and eating going on. All of the huts facing the centre of the square sold food and drink only. Strudel and sausages and roasted peppers and big baps with pork chops and big tangles of fried onion in them.

You could get ornaments too, round the back. And I managed to get the Sunday singing mass for children in the little old church on the square and that was mellow.

There were things about Bratislava that reminded me of Dublin, remarkably the chewing gum on the pavements, a pride in modern urban trivia such as Rubberneck (a bronze street sculpture of a man emerging from a manhole featured in all the official tourist brochures), but also something of the happy underdog good cheer and the sociability.

Opera

I was steeped. I hadn’t ever seen La Boheme on stage, and I wanted to see it, and guess what was on in the opera house when I was there! What is more, the opera-loving receptionist at the Kijev told me that I didn’t in fact know how lucky I was if I didn’t know that the cast on the night I had booked were a rare and special assembly of the best voices in Bratislava. And they were. I spent some time dressing up for this event – found a shiny green scarf for a knock-down price – and I tanked up with gluwein (watching the shepherd-sheep men) for the slide across town on the ice down to the new opera house on the river (Danube). It was a bit further than I thought so I queued for another mug of gluwein at a booth near the riverbank. What I got was some kind of herbal tea funded by a politician as a public service and they refused my donation and had a good laugh at me, so I moved along quickly.

The performance was in the new opera house on the river bank and it was yet another memorable night in an East European opera house listening to voices trained and music revered by the same system that built the Hotel Kijev. It was utterly wonderful. The ticket cost €16 online (printed out on a sheet of paper) and I was in the centre seat of the front row of the stalls. I could have patted the bald head of the conductor in the orchestra pit if I had reached out. I had a coffee before I went in and it cost about a Euro. The posh lady next to me was in trainers, but I was still glad I had dressed up for the occasion.

Sights

The Castle was closed for renovations. The town hall was closed for renovations. I visited the Primate’s Palace, which had Gobelin tapestries and a hall of mirrors and two ladies checking one ticket who were friendly and proud of the house, which they said, apologetically, was small but lovely. I told them the house was gorgeous and Bratislava was gorgeous, and it is. I’d love to go back with company in the summer and go hiking in the Carpathians and drink Slovakian wine.

Cost

I think it cost around €80 to get to Bratislava from Girona and €50 to get from there to Dublin the day before Christmas Eve. That was travelling last minute, so there’s room to do a good bit better than that but I never begrudge RyanAir a few extra bob. I ate evening meals most days at the hotel and picked up some souvenirs. Bratislava is one cheap and cheerful destination.

Oslo

2010-01-12T22:44:00.004+01:00

Douze Points
I got stood up on this one by a contrary sometime travel acquaintance and it gave me a moment’s pause, given how tight the schedule was and how expensive things would be if I got things crooked. There was an early morning flight to Oslo (or 150 kms from Oslo) on 21 August and an early morning flight home from Skavsta airport almost as far from Stockholm on the 25^th. I had to spend half a night at Girona airport, find wifi every step of the way for a nightly news related job I was doing. The Norway-Sweden train link didn’t work out, so I’d be travelling by bus overnight between the two. And to be honest I wasn’t doing this out of desperation to see Scandinavia, more desperation to get away from a summer long Spanish heatwave. A big concern was how to travel with cabin luggage only including the laptop (too much hassle dragging two bags on a trip like this) without roasting/freezing at either end.

Oslo

If you are not aware of Norway’s pricy reputation then you have way too much money. I am not going to pretend here to be broke – I sold my house – but I was broke for decades and wouldn’t have been able to avail of a free ticket to Oslo for fear of being attacked by the price of a burger once I got there. The first thing you will get attacked by if you fly RyanAir to Torp is the price of the bus to Oslo. Given the distance it isn’t exorbitant and I read on a blog that it was cheaper if you use your credit card (alternative is to pay in Norwegian Krone), which I did. So now I don’t know how much it cost! Here is the Torp Express bus company website anyway and the buses meet RyanAir and Wizzair flights.

I won’t say the scenery was jaw dropping. That honour goes to the up country fjords. But it was nice and green, with rowan trees in full berry in anticipation of the big freeze coming in January (2010). The driver was Eurovision polite, told us to strap up and organise our rubbish in the plastic bags provided and drove at an even pace. There are glimpses before you get to the city of the Norwegians’ weekend life – boats moored wherever there was water and cosy looking log houses. The second nice thing that happened was a girl in a costume was handing out free bottles of drinking water just out of the bus stop, so that probably saved me a small mortgage.

Accommodation

The room at the youth hostel, the Sentrum Pensjonat cost €55 and I had one of the best nights’ sleep of my life on some kind of a feather mattress, especially after the half night in Girona airport. This was the first of 3 hostels I booked in summer 2009 and I only felt ancient in one (Stockholm). There was no evidence of the old fascist rules or Nurse Ratchett attitude. They let me hang out in the lounge to work before check-in and after check-out. You can leave your luggage. They minded my laptop when I was out, gave me a token for the coffee machine when I hadn’t been to the bank. I had checked out hundreds of hotels, studios etc and all were impossibly dear and universally cramped. My room at the Sentrum was spacious and clean in a well worn kind of way. I care more about the bedding than the carpet and that was crispy clean. I reserved the Sentrum via HostelBookers, who offer a good range of accommodation in most cities, not just in hostels, and you can book directly with them and print out a docket to take with you. Very reliable and efficient.

Oslo Pass

Oslo isn’t huge, but the Oslo Pass, which you can read all about here, is a genuine asset, because it covers the museums and ferryboats as well as public transport and you want to see the museums and you need to get the ferry to the island where the principal ones are based. It costs from 230 NOK to 430 NOK for 24 to 72 hours, but best to update the price on the site. (and see currency converter just above the sudoku on this page).

Museums
I think it was five museums I saw in one day – the Kon-Tiki Museum, the Viking Museum, the Folk Park, the Maritime Museum and the Polar Exploration Museum (all free with the card). At least three of them were in tepee like buildings with enough artefacts and information to intrigue without exhausting your head and legs.

The Viking ships were gorgeous, intricately carved and displayed to spectacular effect. You could feel that raw Viking energy tuned but not tamed in the stories of the polar explorers and pioneering voyages of Thor Heyerdahl. The biography of Fridtjov Nansen, as stoic and fearless a humanitarian as he was an explorer and scientist, seemed to me to draw together disparate strands of the Norwegian character. And it is clear that the citizens of Oslo today are still in love with boats. The bay was busy with ferries, sailboats, small fishing punts and massive cruise liners and the low-lying wharfside apartments that curved round the ferry points had a smart nautical cast to them. After all the traipsing up and down the decks of the Fram, through halls of boats and maidenheads and rafts and viewing points, not to mention through the park full of log homes, bread ovens and reconstructed interiors, I paddled at the edge of a navy blue beach covered in mussel shells, and the water was the same temperature as the Mediterranean in the roasting Costa Brava. No worse anyway. I don’t know how that works.

Opera House

I didn’t even enquire about the price of an opera ticket here, but you can walk up and down the roof of this spectacular white building which slopes down to the lapping water on one side and rises to a viewing height where the city and bay are visible. People were making very good use of it too, as they were of the grounds of the Akershus Castle, where you could picnic and look down at the berthing liners and the bay, and many people were doing just that.

Vigeland Sculpture Park

I was going to be happy enough with this little flit through Oslo if I got to see the sculpture park, and I did. I think I took the T-bane (underground) to a suburb within walking distance of the park. It was quite late in the day, so whatever you might buy a ticket for was closed, but the park was open and full of strollers and it was nice to just wander in a green place after months looking at the red baked earth of Spain.

The hundreds of sculptures of men, women and children giving exuberant rein to their joy and misery are masterful and meaningful and intended for contemplation by regulars more than whizz-ins. There is just so much, and they are so authentic and funny and sad and sometimes quirky, all naked except for the statue of Vigeland himself, which I didn’t see, but which is apparently fully clothed.

Weather etc

The end of August weather was balmy - T-shirt weather without goose bumps. I was very pleasantly surprised by this and it was just right for getting around. I didn’t do any eating out because of the price paranoia, but also because on my own I wouldn’t get the same kick out of restaurant eating. I’m happy enough with deli food.

To Stockholm

I reserved all this online before leaving home and had to collect the ticket from a machine in the train station using a confirmation number. All that went well, a bit too well, and I set out a little early to catch the 11.30 pm overnight coach to Stockholm. I was still strolling, having gone three wrong sides of the train station, when I found the departure time to be 11.00pm. All I can say is the teeny Little Infant of Prague statue I carry with me clocked up another notch. I have never, ever had a closer shave. It would have thrown the entire programme, budget, bookings, everything. The journey took nine hours and I thought I would expire, wedged with my rucksack in two thirds of my coach seat up against the knee of the seething passenger next to me who had thought he had the seats to himself. At some point I must have slept, because it was around 6.00 am when I woke up not too far from Stockholm. The bus company is Swebus and you can buy the ticket online here.

Cost

I can’t remember what my RyanAir ticket cost, but it was cheap, and it was August, so you can probably get to Oslo from somewhere in Europe for €20 or €30 and see the city the way I did, ie staying in a hostel, using the Oslo Pass and eating sandwiches. The ticket to Stockholm cost around €32. I think the bus to town cost around €20 or a bit more. But that’s it.

Wild Flowers of the Costa Brava

2010-01-12T22:18:00.000+01:00

I love wild flowers. I would be happy if I saw nothing else on a holiday but a set of new (to me) wild flowers on a walk Here is a small collection to start with from the Cap de Creus. I will post more later and name them when I find out how to position captions beneath without disturbing the images!

Rome

2010-01-12T17:02:00.010+01:00

Ah the cobbles, the cobbles! I don’t know how much a course of reflexol

-ogy costs, but the cobbles of Rome will do the job for you for free. I went to Rome from Girona and back for two Euros (thank you Michael) and the night before I was to go my biggest concern was the tedium of dragging my lazy ass to the airport. It is far too easy to pass up on a two Euro experience. The plane was in fact coming down with tiny teenage Spaniards with tiny rucksacks (and just as full on the way back with tiny Italians) all expanding their horizons thanks to RyanAir.

My ignorance of Rome would fill a library, and while that’s nothing to be proud of, it can be liberating. And there was nothing going on in February. But the city was crawling with tourists. Terravision bring you into the main railway station from Ciampino airport for around 8 Euro and I was installed in my little pension a few blocks away hardly more than an hour after landing. Since this blog is for the aimless, witless and half broke who don’t want to wait any longer for someone to come along, I can’t emphasise enough that EVERYTHING IS EASY NOW, EVERYWHERE IS SAFE, EVERYWHERE IS INTERESTING. YOU WON’T BE LONELY IF YOU ARE ON YOUR OWN. It is nearly impossible to go wrong. There is nothing you cannot find, price, compare, refine, book and print out from the internet before you go anywhere. If like me you have to work on the road, bring a laptop – even one of those tiny weightless things with keyboards designed for wading birds - and always book wifi accommodation. It is much, much easier than you think.

Accommodation
I stayed in the 4th floor Nazional Rooms just round the corner from Termini railway station for six nights and though I can’t remember what I paid (something like 240-250 Euro including breakfast round the corner), it was very reasonable, clean, toasty warm, had a selection of videos, city maps and a helpful manager, good strong wifi and a comfortable desk and chair in the room. It was a block from the department of defence (safe as your grandma’s kitchen), two doors from a café bar, one block from a mini-market, hardly a mile from the furthest of Rome’s fabled sites and sights – the Via Veneto, the Trevi Fountain, the Vatican, Spanish Steps, the Colosseum, the Pantheon, the massive baroque place and the ruin and the big wall. There were 70% off recession-trauma sales right outside the door of the pension on the Via Nazionale.

Transport
You really don’t need to bother with public transport in Rome, which is much more compact than I thought anyway. It was flogging rain all the time, but you could buy an umbrella from an Indian in a doorway for a Euro. And speaking of a Euro, I found a whizzy busy pizza parlour that had freshly baked pizza for a Euro just off the Piazza Navona and I tried it out just to see if it was possible to eat near the grand attractions if you were broke - and it was fine and filling. There was another place near the Vatican that sold the juiciest pizza I have ever eaten. I had found a tenner on the steps of the Vatican and gave a few Euros of it to a sackcloth monk with a tonsure begging on the street outside the walls. I followed him in to the pizzeria when he dropped in for a coffee at the counter and I spent the rest of the tenner on the pizza and coffee, and then went back there and spent it again the next day and the next, and then again on the trousers I had to buy to replace the ones I came in and again on the taxi I had to get from one side of Termini station to the other when I got lost on the last day.

Sights and sounds for the uninformed
The thing that struck me most about Rome was the colossal size of the ornamentation. Even if a building wasn’t enormously high, the statuary adorning it was gigantic. In-your-face muscles and curls and testicles everywhere. Even despite all that I had ever heard of the Vatican’s art and wealth, the Vatican Museum floored me. The miles of painted barrel ceilings are simply awesome. The Sistine Chapel, when finally it emerged at the end of one of these corridors, seemed a tad gloomy by comparison (see ignoramus reference above). I have hundreds of photos of plaster busts of senators and warriors and grinning lads and maidens. Most of the rest of my Rome photo collection are of cobbles, some of them as large as a small province.

There would be no point in the likes of me waxing on about specific monuments, given the little I knew about any of them and given that I fell over most of them as I wandered around. I’ll just mention the Pantheon, because I came upon it on a Saturday and saw there would be mass there on Sunday. When I got there, tourists were hanging about in the rain for mass to be over so that they could visit. I asked to go in to mass and was ushered inside to join the spare congregation for what turned out to be a resounding and truly moving musical experience, provided by a choir of just four men backed by an organ in full throttle. The acoustics were phenomenal. I may be stating the obvious here, but I did the same thing with an irreligious but spiritually minded friend at the great mosque/ cathedral in Cordoba, where the guards at the door seemed happy to welcome anyone prepared to sit through the mass. Surely it can’t be inappropriate to take in the majesty of these great houses of worship in the ambient embrace of a spiritual ritual, without cameras and sitting quietly?

Six days was for me just the right amount of time to spend in Rome, allowing for mistakes (three attempts to get to the Vatican Museum – too late one day, closed Sunday), work, the weather. I worked nights at the little desk in the Nazional, saw several movies I had missed, including Gangs of New York, and selected one event to track down from the brochures at the tourist office, a classical concert in a church. I was googling the location of the Church of St Paul’s Within the Walls at the desk in my room and looked over the screen of my laptop. And guess what was looking at me from right across the street? I swear to you. That’s how easy Rome is. On the last day I thought I should see the Spanish Steps if they weren’t too hard to find. They weren’t, but I was hungry, so I clipped up one side, across the top and down the other side, then up the road without looking back and was home in ten minutes.

Cost
I think that holiday cost around €400, including pizzas, museum tickets, umbrellas, the €2 I paid RyanAir.

Prague

2010-01-10T22:51:00.006+01:00

Travelling: Solo/ with company

My first visit to Prague was launched in tears. The Christmas spirit had departed my world, or that’s how I saw it anyway, and I wanted to look busy and be somewhere else in the run up to Christmas. I had big swollen eyes when the plane landed and I was hoping to find the little mini-bus service to town without having to ask too many questions. At least it was dark.

The hostel room I had booked was in what had once been the Imperial Hotel (just checked this out now four years later and it has become a 5-star hotel!) and it had a jazz café with a ceramic ceiling on the ground floor that was listed in the Rough Guide as one of the 10 things to see in Prague. As I checked in, the café was heaving with beer and smoke and Dixie jazz reverberating off the stained glaze of the magnificent ceiling. I was still pop-eyed from the plaque I had just seen almost across the street marking the building as the former home of the insurance company where Franz Kafka had worked for 14 years. It was such an unexpected, left field encounter it knocked the whole stuffing out of my misery and I laughed out loud. Nearly everything I saw in Prague over the next week had the same effect on me, and part of that came from the realisation that you can take a cheap flight out of whatever mire you are in, with or without company, and walk into a novel, a history book, a festival of music and new food and postcard scenes and casual conversations, and you never come back to quite the same place. I love Prague for this reason, but I love it too because it is a gorgeous city.

I have been back to Prague many times - alone, with a friend, with family - and I would go again tomorrow and next week. Christmas does it for me, for the outdoor indoors of the old town streets, the choco-rum and steaming sweetmeats and trinkets, golden churches and lit up trees, but mostly for the music that pours from every baroque hall, church, teahouse, river barge and public square. I had the best steak I have ever eaten in a Brazilian restaurant one Christmas Day. On a different year Christmas dinner was a burger and fries at MacDonalds between one opera house – the one where Mozart premiered Don Giovanni and which was used as the setting for much of the movie Amadeus – to another. I had Figaro for a mid-afternoon starter at the Estates Theatre and Traviata for dessert at the State Opera House near the end of Wenceslas Square. That was my Christmas feast. I was on my own that time, but it certainly didn't feel like it.

Music
Prague before Christmas is ideal in many respects. All of the churches have concerts, usually running for around an hour at various times of the day from lunchtime onwards, so it is possible to fit several in. Tickets cost from around €8 to €12 and can be bought on the street outside the venue - organ recitals, string quartets, sometimes a soprano. Some of the church interiors are sumptuous beyond description, others outwardly spectacular and inwardly bare, like the Tin Church in Old Town Square. The most moving musical experience I had in a church came by happenstance, when I looked in the door of the Church of St Francis of Assissi at Charles Bridge as a French horn played from the gallery at midday Mass on St Stephen’s Day. And then there was the thunder of the organ at midnight Mass on Christmas Eve in St Nicholas Church on Old Town Square.

I have seen a dozen operas in Prague over the years, most of them booked in advance online through Bohemia Ticket. I have never paid more than €20, and often as little as €10 or €12 for a centre front row seat in the second circle. And I have paid that and more – and happily - to hear a fiddler in the corner of the local bar at home (Ireland). The difference between the fiddler and the opera is that opera is expensive to stage, and opera houses are expensive to maintain, and the fact that you can see three different operas on three consecutive nights of the week in the State Opera House in Prague, featuring the best voices in Europe, and some, such as Aida, having a cast of 90 or 100 including dancers, and all for the price of a round of drinks, must be reason enough to make the journey.

Solo Getaway

I don’t suppose this is a valid reason for most people, but it is for some, and there are places where you will feel that you have a neon sign on your forehead if you are on your own, and equally times when you will feel you have no reason to live if you are stuck in the wrong company, especially at times like Christmas (maybe not – maybe it is just me!). At any rate, you can walk away from the burlesque at home, alone or in company, and be in this place all the way through the season into the New Year if necessary (though year end is harder to book and more expensive than Christmas) and come back laden with gifts (cds, more cds, Czech rum to make chocorum from at home, shoes for everyone from the fabled house of Bata). The city doesn’t shut down for Christmas Day. La Traviata plays traditionally on this day at the State Opera, and there will be an afternoon Mozart opera at the Estates Theatre also, and street markets and restaurants are open. You will not be lonely. You will not be bored. You can chat to strangers or mind your own business and peer in windows. I came back from my first solo voyage revitalised, with a head ringing with music, and I repeated the experience in various forms for four years in a row.

Culture

There are places where culture can be a chore, a foot weary yawn through corridors and halls of artefacts and plaques. Prague has major museums and one of the few exhausting afternoons I spent there was in the National Museum. Of course it was awesome, but huge, and so full, full, full, of pinned insects and rock specimens and beautiful bronze busts of heroes unknown to me. But the architectural heritage of Prague is best experienced just walking down the street, and then back up the other side of the street, and round cobbled corners and over the bridge and back. My sometime partner, Eric, a vicarious traveller if left to his own devices, dragged me into the 400 year old Jesuit library, where he was so overcome by the overwhelming history of the tomes assembled there that he talked of nothing else for three days. The guide was hugely well informed, with the subversive delivery of a post-communist intellectual caught in communist aspic. He spoke of how the Jesuits had found and lost favour in the city, of the manuscripts of Mozart and Tycho Brahe that the library held and of the merchants and freemasons who had frequented the place.

This segment could have been called history instead of culture, but the city is so visually striking that you can settle for looking and adding in bits of history as they make an impression. So the Castle, and St Vitus’s Church, and the gorgeous Art Nouveau Municipal Hall and Towers and the State Opera House and National Theatre and Railway Station are all handsome buildings, some of them in awesome settings, and they can be enjoyed from many aspects before you find out how they came about: over tea and cakes and piano music in the Municipal Hall (Ubecni Dum), amusement on the hour watching the antics at the astrological clock in Town Square, looking down at the river below from the jousting hall in the Castle.

Mozart’s footprints are everywhere. Kafka’s footprints everywhere. Mucha’s artistic legacy is everywhere. The money that was poured into this city was well spent, and the results were well looked after. Two unimposing side street museums left a lasting impression on me: the light fantastic Alphonse Mucha collection and the little museum of the Czech cubists, where you can buy replica vases and bowls. Oh, and a third. The Church of the Infant of Prague, where I counted 23 lit up Christmas trees, has a small museum to one side, of rows and rows of miniature embroidered outfits donated in honour of the saintly child.

Accommodation
When I chose to stay in the Imperial Hostel, it was because I was captivated by the fin de siècle nostalgia of it and the notion of that ceramic café. The ceilings in the rooms were impossibly high and the central heating was not turned up high enough on the first trip. What is more, because it is a listed building, the toilets and showers were down the corridor. (All changed now. See above). It's a much better idea to rent a studio/ apartment if you are travelling with company and I've done that a few times too, always staying as close to the centre as possible – Stare Mesto or Nove Mesto. There is no reason why anyone visiting Prague should ever need to set foot on public transport of any kind, apart from the trip to and from the airport (€3 by minibus). There are so many accommodation sites online now, you just google away until you find what you want. For an overall view of how to navigate around the city, the Prague Events site is very helpful to start with, and come back to.

Deal of the trip
Probably the scores of tiny Little Infant of Prague statuettes, attached to miniature rosary beads, encased in glass lockets or felt pouches, that I brought back and spread around the family and neighbourhood again and again. The Little Infant was a mainstay of every Catholic household in Ireland when I was growing up and carries a peculiar fascination even still. The opera tickets of course, the bottles of Bozkov to introduce choco-rum to the neighbourhood.

Roses and Cap de Creus

2010-01-08T16:57:00.016+01:00

I have a disclosure to make here. I more or less live in Roses. That is to say, I sold my house in Ireland and bought an apartment here and that is as far as the plan goes. My dream is a plot of brown earth in West Cork sprouting floury potatoes, but as I can’t afford that now without selling this place I spend most of my time here. Girona is the local airport and Michael O’Leary is king of Girona airport and so this little place I had never heard of feels like the hub of the airborne universe. I only hope to God that when Michael bows out to look after his Angus bulls that the whole thing doesn’t fall apart. But the world is falling apart anyway and 2010 may be your last chance to see Europe for Luas fares. If all we are facing is a reversion to healthier living, then you will want to get to know this place.

Walking, Gastronomy, Roses Blues, Jazz and Gospel Festival

Roses Blues, Jazz and Gospel Festival

I am going to start with this, because it fixes the holiday in time. This festival is held in July, and July is the month the 23 km bonnet to boot line of French traffic crawls over the border to take over this part of the Northern Costa Brava. It is held inside the walls of the massive 16th century Citadel or the town theatre and you are not going to have to run a gauntlet of 40 bouncers and handlers to get in. For about €25 (in 2008 - ALL CONCERTS FREE IN 2009!!) you can pick two out of three days to attend the main evening concerts, as well as dropping in on free sessions around town. The evening concerts will run end to end from 7.00pm to 1.00 or 2.00 am or longer and the ambience is pure, old fashioned, spell-bindingly good music presented without too much, or indeed any, stage froth. I saw two of the best gospel choirs I ever heard, one American-style and the other African-style, a Malian supergroup, a Mississippi blues singer, Catalan jazz combo and the product of a 2-day harmonica workshop on two successive balmy nights, where you could move your chair to any place you liked on the packed earth and sip a €2 beer served from a string of kitchen tables. It was pure magic. This is heavily subsidised by the Municipality as a service to tourism, but as with many cultural events in Catalonia, you suspect that they would do it for themselves anyway and the audience is probably about half and half. If I was anywhere outside of a hospital bed, I would try and get to Roses for this event.

Walking

It is possible to do this holiday without a car, but having a car is better. Car hire is so cheap in Spain, as compared with France for example, and petrol is very reasonable too. A small car (which is all you want for the kind of travelling you’ll be doing here) will cost less than a €100 inclusive of collision damage, insurance (unless you are planning to cross into France, for which there is an extra premium) for a week.

Roses sits on the southern edge of the square peninsula that defines the 25,000 acre Cap de Creus National Park. The park extends a further 7,500 acres offshore, and the absence of fishing and of any major water flows off land into the sea along this coast contribute to the crystal purity of the waters. The narrow ribbon of old smugglers’ coastal path rarely leaves the cliff edge all the way to France if you are hardy. In May the park is awash with rock roses, baby irises, hyacinths and bright rock flowers. In winter blue flowering rosemary and thyme take over and lean brown cows wander the hills. This is also mushroom picking season and I have collected king boletes on the side of unfrequented roads near pine trees, although serious mushroom territory would be further inland. There are literally scores of well marked walks that take in hills, coastal path, Neolithic remains (dolmens and standing stones mostly).

Gastronomy
I was somewhat surprised to discover this aspect of the northern Costa Brava area. But then I didn't know that Costa Brava means 'wild coast' (some of the maddest weather I have seen anywhere) or even that it was where it was. I didn't know Girona was the richest province in Spain (And Michael O'Leary is king of Girona airport). I didn't know the lip couch was designed by Salvador Dali. Hadn't ever heard of Roses. Hadn't ever heard of El Bulli ('probably the best restaurant in the world'). In fact the Emporda/ Costa Brava has a something of a gastronomic reputation and Catalans are conscious and proud of it. Figueres onions, bacon, all the squid and squidgy things from the sea, mushrooms, all have rituals associated with the finding and picking and cooking and eating of them. Catalans are mushroom mad. They eat course after course of sea dishes on Christmas Day. The array of bacon products is spectacular.

El Bulli serves 26 dishes of a fixed menu (for a fixed price) conceived, created, lyophilised and manifested by Ferran Adria and his team of chefs during a six month creative fest every winter and served up the following summer at his unvarnished white vanilla sea shore restaurant just a few miles north of Roses in the Cap de Creus National Park. Out of a million reservation requests made at a fixed date in spring, seven thousand bookings are accepted for the year. For August you must wait three years and the helicopters going overhead in summer are not, as a friend thought, on sea rescue duty, but ferrying diners to and fro from El Bulli. But for all that, you can go down to the door of the place and read or photograph the menu and peer in the kitchen window if you have a mind to, or have a tuna sandwich on the beach in front of it, or walk right past the low sea wall of it on the coastal path on your way towards Cadaques, or France.

The wines of Northern Catalonia benefit from the dry tempest that is the Tramontana wind that comes down a bottleneck from the mountains below the eastern Pyrenees. I am going to quote a piece here from 'Chris' at PJ Wine, about a wine from Marti Fabra's vineyards in St Climent de Sescebes a little inland, without permission from anyone concerned, only because I don't have the vocabulary - I just like what I like - but clearly the vocabulary is out there.

Also I spent a morning tasting wine there with two friends after one of them said Robert Parker had listed one of the Fabra wines among the best 100 in Spain. We had a great time and Marti Fabra wasted a morning explaining everything to us without seeming concern for the small purchases we might make and he gave a free bottle of wine to the one who could speak Spanish. Anyway here is what Chris says on the PJ Wine website:

Formerly known for rosés (rosados), Empordà-Costa Brava is quickly building a reputation for its modern-styled reds and whites, which feature bold, bright, full-bodied fruit. One such red is the outstanding 2001 “Masia Carreras” from Celler Martí Fabra... The 2001 “Masia Carreras” is made from 50% Garnacha, 35% Cariñena, 5% Cabernet Sauvignon, 5% Tempranillo and 5% Syrah...The wine features an expansive, complex nose of black currants, crushed red and black cherries, cured ham, and herbs. The attack and mid-palate show explosive, ripe fruit with layers of blackberry and wild cherry flavors, enhanced by rosemary and mineral notes.

So you see: ham, herbs, rosemary. See how it is coming together.

Perelada, a little further inland and just 7 kms from Figueres, was once the home of French Carolingian counts and is today the home of the famous Perelada Cava, of which I raided this from the K&L Wine Merchants website (Thanks!):

Castillo de Perelada Cava is the Cava of kings. No, it literally is. This is what "El Rey"serves at all official state functions. After tasting it, I could see why. The winery owns most of their vineyards and uses all three of the traditional, indigenous Cava grape varieties: Macabeo, Parellada, and Xarel-Lo, all grown in the region's chalky soil. Bright citrus aromas, in particular a lovely tangerine note, all stand out on the nose. Similarly zippy and fresh flavors on the palate cut a lively impression and would make for a wonderful toasting cava or a delicious sparkler to have on hand for all seasons.

Lots and lots more that I haven't said. I should mention though that Perelada has much more to offer than wine, notably a summer festival of opera, jazz, flamenco concerts at the mid-town medieval castle, which also houses a casino, glass museum, wine museum and library of 80,000 books, including 1,000 multilingual editions of Don Quixote. It is all open to the public.

Haven't even mentioned Cadaques, the Dali Triangle, inland, upland...

Travel Tips

2010-01-03T22:52:00.010+01:00

In no particular order of importance

Getting started

1. PREPAID MASTERCARD
If you are travelling RyanAir, you will want to have a PREPAID MASTERCARD so that you don’t pay credit card charges. RyanAir make some money on the charges to offset the fact that they don’t apply a fuel charge and often give you the flight for nothing, so it’s a bit churlish maybe to be going on about the credit card charges, but people do, and getting the card will save you a lot. In his own way, Michael would probably approve. Once you set it up, it works a dream. From now on, if a RyanAir flight costs one Euro and you are travelling light, then one Euro is what you will pay. So make sure to have a hot chocolate on board (€3) and maybe buy a scratch card or a plastic RyanAir keyring which mimics the sound of takeoff - with flashing red lights - when you press the nose button. As the electron Visa no longer works for this purpose the reference to http://bargainsireland.wordpress.com, where the instructions for getting an electron Visa were so well laid out, isn't relevant any longer, but I am leaving the link because there is nothing irrelevant about the site. I booked Girona-Rome-Girona in February 2009 for €2, all in. Yes, all in.

2. Getting to the airport
Leave the car at home. What on earth is the point of driving a mile or 50 miles to the airport and leaving a car there at €9 a day while you gallivant around another country, or continent. Sure, it makes sense if you have three kids and 6 check-in cases with you. But for a solo traveller or two it starts making real sense to travel with the local bus company, from wherever you are. In Ireland if you travel with Bus Eireann and book the whole return trip including transfers online, you will get double discounts. For example, from Goleen in West Cork, to Cork City, to Limerick, to Shannon (3 connections) return, is around €30. By road it is 4 hours drive each way, ie €20 odd for petrol and around €60 for one week’s parking. The bus is comfortable, warm and can be very entertaining.

3. Check in online
This way not only do you not pay airport check-in charges, but you can walk straight in with your boarding card in your hand 40 minutes before the flight. Make sure you have a good clean printout.

4. Travel insurance
About six years ago, a well travelled friend of mine told me she had never paid travel insurance in her life. I haven’t since. That’s all I’m saying.

5. Online Ticket/ Hotel reservations
A lot of hotels farm out rooms to online agencies and keep some for walk-ins or direct bookings. Not all agencies sell out their quota at the same time, and not all of them have the same Google priority search status. So if you get a ‘no availability’ response, keep Googling, and you may find another agency has the room you want in the hotel you want, and maybe even at a better price. I have just got a ‘no availability’ for a hotel in Granada from 7 online agencies, a direct booking price of €48 a night, and then, on just one last Google run, got the room for €35. I have also bought more expensive airline and concert tickets online for want of a trip to town, because the online quota was used up, but tickets were still available in the office. Just be aware of this.

6. Car hire
If you are going to be in South West France, with or without a cross-border incursion into Spain, it may pay to hire the car in Spain (why not fly to Girona, while you are at it?) and also fill your tank on the Spanish side of the border. There is an add-on for crossing into France if you hire the car in Spain, but it may well be worth it. There can be a sizeable price difference for both the hire and the petrol. This may also apply to other border region travels.

7. Collision damage
One thing that most Spanish car hire companies include in the price is collision damage. It can be an optional add-on in France, but if so, get it. Don’t do what we did. Saved on the collision charge and wrote off an Algerian’s car on the outskirts of Marseilles at the height of the French riots, then held him up for an hour refusing to accept liability on the spot (as we were brought up to do at home) while the assembled crowd tried to explain to us that that is how it is done in France. I never saw so many police turn up for traffic accident. I had always wanted to see Marseilles, but not out the back window of a €75 taxi across town to pick up a replacement car. And then the excess added €500 to the price of that little getaway break. Don’t bother with the blown tire insurance. The roads are fine.

8. Packing
Travel light. You don’t need all that stuff.

7. Pardon?
Bring a tiny dictionary, just for courtesy’s sake.

8. Dining out and other dress emergencies
A scarf or a string of beads is really all you need for a night out if your basic daywear is anything more upmarket than a tracksuit and anorak. This one is for women. I don’t really know what to say to men. A cravat maybe? A nice watch? A pince nez?

9. Tuna sandwich

This one is really for ramblers and hillwalkers, because unless you are on a pilgrimage route you are not going to pass a cafe, let alone a restaurant. There are sandwiches and sandwiches and for me the king of sandwiches is the tuna in ciabatta bread. The ingredients are: ciabatta bread, a small tin of tuna in olive oil (which you drain off), third of a red bell pepper diced, small onion or shallot, jalapenos or pickled green chilli - as much as you can stand - dessert spoon of mayonnaise, pepper. You can add a chopped cherry tomato or two (or that amount anyway) if you like. Mix and mash. By lunchtime in the hills you have a nicely soaked sandwich, with the outside still crisp. I have eaten these on the beach, in the hills, at the airport, in the car. I have had it at home, with a flask of coffee, after a failed or curtailed outing and the coffee from the flask takes me back to the only thing I liked about school, which was lunch.

10. Sudoku

If you are on a short break, or an action-packed one, or one where you are going to be reading all the local literature, you could leave the book at home. You can get a little pocket-sized sudoku set that has hundreds of games on it, from beginners up to the level that has only three or four digits in the grid. It is a bit bigger than a mobile phone and weighs about the same and the best thing about it is you can erase and delete, or give up on a game and call up another, and you can fiddle with it in a ticket queue or anywhere at all. I have it in my rucksack when out walking in case the landscape isn't up to par during rest breaks. Anyone can play sudoku - there is a level for everyone. That is what I discovered anyway.

Carcassonne to Girona

2010-01-03T22:33:00.003+01:00

OK – here’s a little gem!

RyanAir starts up its flights to Carcassonne from Cork now at the end of March, so if you are flying from Ireland, this one is for summer, but that’s a better time to do it anyway. Mostly it depends on whether you want to include the dip in the sea, and what flight deals are on offer. See if you can set this up with a 1 Euro one way ticket, flying back from Girona. It’s a two or three-nighter, depending on how low you want to limbo-dance the costs. You won’t need a car – you’ll be travelling mostly by train, and to get into the spirit if it, you will be leaving your car at home if possible and booking a return Bus Eireann ticket to the airport (all connections, even if it is 3 different buses) online, ie you get discount for booking the whole thing together and you get the discount for booking online. It is just so much easier – and cheaper – than airport driving and parking. But however you plan it, the flight is going to be the cheapest part of it – thank you thank you thank you Michael.

Carcassonne
Look it up, if you haven’t heard all about it. This is the ultimate postcard medieval town, sitting high, high above the surrounding plain. It is all cobbles and high artsy renovations and the north east polar wind will freeze the ankles off you if you get it on a bad day. But you are not going to fly into this town and not visit it, so click on this link for all the public transport information you will need for getting around: airport to town, to medieval town to railway station etc. Go to Practical Information, then Transport.
When you are done, down you go to the railway station and get a ticket for Narbonne and/ or to any further train stop down in the direction of Barcelona, depending on how long you have got and how deep your pockets.

Narbonne

After all the traipsing around on cobbled stones you might want to spend the night in Narbonne, and have a look at its gigantic cream stone pile of a Cathedral or settle into a bottle or two of Narbo 118 (Narbonne was founded in 118 BC), the wine grown by the local agricultural organization and aged for 17 months in the town’s Roman cellars, where you can sample it. The municipality gives 100% of the profits to water projects in Burkina Faso. There is something warm and embracing, as opposed to damp and gloomy, about this ancient sidelined metropolis, with its tree-lined canal. And it is at the centre of three classified wine areas, so you can move on from the Narbo 118 to sample a few more and maybe put a bottle or two in your bag, now that you are off the flight and no longer weight restricted.

I haven’t stayed at this place, and don’t know the first thing about it, but I like the review for Bruno’s place, which you can read below. This is just to get you started looking, remembering that, since you are on foot, you will need to stay in town:
Perpignan, Argèles-sur-Mer, Collioure, Cerbère

Perpignan could be your next train stop (or indeed your starting point if you fly in there instead of Carcassonne). Or you could pass on to the tiny but perfectly formed Collioure. In fact Collioure might be better, because it is right on the sea and you may already be thinking of jumping in. Personally I wouldn’t, because it is the Mediterranean, not a thermal bath, but I wouldn’t deprive you of the suggestion. This is where you pick an overpriced little café for your mocca, so you can watch the tiny but perfectly formed French riches et chics d’un certain age stroll by with their little yapping dogs. It is a buzzing place, and you can snap snap away with your digital camera (and then blog blog away when you get home). Or you could hop out at Argèles-sur-Mer, a big wide sweep of a sandy place, for the swim. The thing is never to get too far from your home on the train.

Spain
The train journey is getting cheaper (only about €20 so far, or maybe even less, and that is the French part). If you set out early enough from Narbonne, you could have dealt with the hangover in Collioure and be in Spain by lunchtime, with or without the swim. When the cold wind blows down the Languedoc, Spain is nearly always warmer. This train journey is chug-along easy and hugs the very pretty coast a lot of the time. The distances covered aren’t huge, so you get a lot of variety – and without a car!

Llanca

This is a typical Costa Brava seaside town and this is going to be your last chance for the swim on this journey, so jump in, and then jump back on the train. On the other hand, if you are going to spend the night here, then check in and go straight down the promenade past the little fisherman’s port to the very far right hand side of the town and head out the coastal path with your ciabatta roll and cheese and olives and bottle of Narbonne red, and find any one of scores of scenic spots in coves or cliffs to settle down with the view. There is a similar walk from the other end of the beach, but this has higher cliffs, and a pirate’s cave.

Figueres

You mightn’t be back here for a full holiday, because it is 18 kms inland from the coast, but spend the 12 Euros you saved on the picnic and take the opportunity to have a good hearty laugh in a museum. For this is the Dali Museum, just 10 minutes walk from the train station. This is where you will find the Lip Couch, in the Mae West Room, along with the rest of the accoutrements that make up her features, the massive Car-naval installation with the monster fat lady bearing down the bonnet of a vintage Chevrolet, and the nude of his wife Gala that turns into a portrait of Abraham Lincoln if you stand back far enough. This museum is a fun palace, inside and out, sitting all red and green with its geodesic dome and rooftop trim of cream eggs and gold Oscar-like figures, in the very heart of Figueres, a fine, stolid, old fashioned looking market town, a Skibbereen of the Costa Brava (never mind).

Run now, because you are nearly done, unless you are going to take in Barcelona. The train journey to Girona from Figueres is around 50 kms and costs €2.90, yes €2.90, and there are trains throughout the day.

Girona

I think you should stop here, because I am exhausted. Just get yourself up to the Cathedral on foot – about 10 minutes walk – and you will have crossed the river and covered a good part of the territory of the old town. Leave your bag in the station, because you will be coming back here to get the airport bus just outside the door. The Cathedral is ginormous. The Museum is next door and on the feast of St Narcis (Narcissus) the patron saint of the city, entrance is free (but you don’t have to do a complete Michael. Pay the fee. It is worth it). And when you have snapped all the bits and corners of the vast interior trying to get a shot that would capture the size of it, go past the altar to the right and have a look at the Last Supper painting that shows Mary Magdalene with her head in Jesus’ lap. Yes, it is true. Go see for yourself. And then get yourself a big slap-up meal and go home and get someone to buy you the book City of Secrets by Patrice Chaplin and read all about Girona’s connection with that whole Rennes le Chateau thing. Or better again, get it before the trip.

How’s that!
You could probably do this for about €150. And don’t forget to clap when the flight lands early.

Budapest

2010-01-02T19:53:00.013+01:00

A 3-in-one holiday in Budapest

It is time to get serious. The days of flying 1,500 miles to get a beach tan are retreating quicker than my dream of retirement. What appears to be needed is a little more creativity in the holiday selection process. Like short-haul, vaaaaaalue for money, three birds with one stone type breaks to take our minds off the misery, while not breaking the bank. Not to say that breaking the bank, or breaking into the bank, mightn’t be a good idea all round. That wasn’t a suggestion.

So here is one…

3-in-one factor: Dentistry, Christmas market, opera

This one hit me in the middle of what was then the credit crunch and what is now the global meltdown. My 13 year old front crown fell into my dinner on a Friday night. I wasn't planning for this to happen in Spain, where I didn't speak the language. The next bit I am going to condense – superglue, Spanish dentist, Irish dentist, greying temporary replacement turning the colour of a breeze block. Then an unexpected 10-day work project earned me around €600 to work with.

Travelling solo can be the same price as paired travelling, or it can be half the price. It all depends on how it is done, and where you are going. When I travel alone, I usually trade down, ie book a room rather than self-catering, which I would prefer. I set this up online and here’s what I got, choosing strictly from gut instinct, price, or something that appealed in the website presentation:

Dental Treatment

Prime Dental: Here I got a perfect match front crown for €255 and major root canal filling and repair of a back tooth for an additional €160. This was definitely one of the best dentists I have seen over a lifetime of cheap chocolates. They do major work - an English woman had already clocked up €8,000 worth of implants and a Croatian woman with dentist phobia was taking comfort from the English woman before starting €13,000-worth of the same. But they never tried to sell me anything extra, took just as much care over my small order and didn’t fawn over the big clients. You can see the Danube out the window if you have a mind to look. I could have cut my visit by a day or two, as they have their own lab and mould-to-crown only took Friday morning to Monday afternoon.

Opera

The opera house, and the opera, were my payoff for the nine-hour wait in Linz railway station, the standing only Linz to Vienna, the ‘open wide’ and the slush, and I was lucky to get a last minute box seat – nothing else left - for around €30. (Tickets are available online for a fraction of that if you book far enough ahead). There was a post-Soviet earnestness about many of the older audience members in their heirloom outfits. Some were in full folklore regalia, and the usherettes wore a strange but striking outfit of thick tights, yellow leather boots and red satin hot pants. That gave me some comfort in my charity shop top, which in turn protected me from too many smart alec thoughts about others. There were fine fur coats too, but not as many as you would see in a Prague audience, and it was nice to see them all on the metro platform after the performance. The opera was Verdi's La Forza del Destino, commissioned by the Imperial Theatre in St Petersburg in case anyone wants to know, and much enjoyed by the emperor. It was heart-rending and awesome (so no dispute with the emperor there). I wept, and not for the first time at an opera performed in the former Soviet bloc by angel sopranos and caramel tenors. I had to spend the first half in the roof after arriving late and only saw my fancy box for the much shorter second half. I told the expensive clients at the dentist's waiting room and they yawned.

Christmas market

This was not as varied or impressive as Prague (the only other one I have been to). But the slush didn’t help and the root canal had knocked out my budget, so I made do with some of those Mozart chocolates to spread around the neighbourhood when I got home. Apart from the dentist’s waiting room, this was where I heard most English speakers, and I was thinking how nice it would have been to have someone with me and to go and have chestnuts and sticky cakes at an elegant café, or hang out in a wine bar. I browsed around the market twice, as it was just down the road from the studio. My first visit was cut short by having to get back to the Rothschild 24 hour supermarket, where I had seen chickens roasting on a spit in the window. I have to say I couldn’t resist the urge to buy a chicken from a Rothschild in the current climate. In the end it was the chicken that left me running up and down back street ‘short cuts’ and made me late for the opera, but I kept the receipt. I should post it here.

Deal of the trip

I got a 3 day travel pass from a booth in the metro station for all city transport. It cost around €12 from a booth in the metro station (exchange rate running around all over the place so I don’t know). The transport system was so absolutely easy and well run, and efficient and frequent, it was a joy to use. Having spent most of one day traipsing around a mall with a shopaholic fellow patient I met at the dentist’s before falling in to a wine bar, I took to the tramways the following day in the snow and circled and looped and backtracked around and across the city for hours. I had a ball (I’m easily amused). Budapest is big and beautiful, and must be gorgeous in summer. There are tired corners and swank malls and prettified medieval quarters and multiple lanes of whizzing traffic.

Shock horror - missed the baths!

To be honest, I didn’t feel like going there on my own. I am saving these for the four in one trip, to be shared with company in, say, spring or summer.

Accommodation:

Six nights at the Elite Apartments: €180 (special three nights for the price of 2 deal)

This was terrific! Central, warm, hassle-free, all new appliances and a powerful shower. It had a hob, microwave, fridge, freezer, wifi, TV with one English language news channel. 15 minute walk from the opera house on safe streets. I trawled the internet for nights and couldn’t find anything to match this for a single traveller, not even a room in a budget hotel. It was a special rate, but even without that it would be a steal for two people.

Getting there and back

The RyanAir flight cost €20 round trip all in, credit card fees included. The round trip by train from Linz, because RyanAir don’t fly to Budapest in the winter, was six times that. So there’s room for better manoeuvres there.

Verdict as a 3-in-1

Even without the opera, without the butt-freezing, heart-warming sight of the gorgeous parliament building through a snow shower across the fabulous, fabled Danube, even without the chicken and the skewed budget, the dental treatment would have cost over €800 in Ireland, or indeed Spain. So it’s a no contest.