Feb 2nd: into Morocco

The fast ferry from Tarifa to Tangier really is fast, as you can see from its wake. It covers the 20 miles in 45 minutes. By contrast, the customs control at Tangier port proceeded at snails pace. It took about an hour and a half to process 20 vehicles, none of which were lorries. So what took all the time, considering all our group’s documents were in order? Simple inefficiency: one official in a splendid uniform vetting all the papers, surrounded by countless sub-officials and non-officials doing very little. But this is why we’re here- to look through a window into another culture.

First overnight stop is at Moulay Busselham, only 80 miles from Tangier. This pleasant town is just off the motorway and has a convenient campsite, with an unexpected visitor appearing on the doorstep. We fed it, of course. It would be fair to say that the magnificent cockerel looked in much better condition than the average Moroccan male.

Moulay is named after a 10th century Egyptian holy man whose shrine is nearby. His speciality miracle is to cure psychological problems by the sufferer being locked in his shrine for 48 hours. Statistics are not available for the proportion of those who are cured as opposed to those who emerge stark, raving bonkers.

Sat 29th to Tue 1st Feb: At the Gates of Africa

We have joined up with the two sets of friends who are travelling with us to Morocco, Paul & Trish, and Derick and Helen. The meet-up campsitesite is at Conil, 40miles from Tarifa from where our ferry will depart tomorrow for Tangiers. We went to the port yesterday to book the crossing and have a day out.

Apart from being our port of departure, Tarifa is an historic and interesting place where the main architectural influence is Moorish, as this entrance gate to the old town shows. Some of the streets are so narrow that you could shake hands with the neighbours opposite from the balcony.

The buildings are mainly white and cube shaped, very much like old Moroccan towns, and the faded, peeling paint in this square adds to the impression of being in North Africa. Notice the balcony on the left is held up by two yellow jacks. Do we need to go to all the way to Morocco?

The square was so full of character, our group decided to have lunch at the café in the far corner. We’d got the ferry tickets at a much better price than expected, had a fascinating walk around Tarifa, and it was sunny and warm. So we were in excellent spirits. And this is a good example of where the camera does lie. Just look at the expressions on our party’s faces- we could have all just had our wallets pinched!

Here’s the top of the old town walls- but what do you see: a forest of TV aerials, about a dozen in that one apartment block. A fair guess would be one for each dwelling in poorer areas or even whole countries.

So, here's a thought. To carry out a quick and cheap population census:
1.establish the average family size
2.total population = average family size times number of TV aerials (or sat. dishes).

A final piece of folklore information. The town of Tarifa gave us the word tariff because it was the first town in history to charge a levy on goods landed through its port.

Sunday Jan 23: Beating the Barcelona Bandits.

Last autumn, friends of ours were towing their caravan on the motorway skirting Barcelona when they heard a loud bang appearing to come from their caravan front/ car rear area. A car then pulled alongside them, one of the passengers leaning out of the window and pointing to the caravan tyre. Instinctive reaction: pull in and deal with an obvious emergency.

If you did stop, you would find that the car containing the helpful, gesticulating passenger would also stop, you would presume, to offer further assistance. However, the occupants of the car would rob you. It might be a straightforward hold-up or a distraction theft, that is, one of them would take you to point out the damage while the others rifled through the car. Afterwards, you would also notice a dent in your caravan or car where the thieves had thrown an object to create the bang you heard that was meant to authenticate the fictitious crisis.

That’s the background. So, it’s 11.00 am on a sunny Sunday morning and here we are going around Barcelona on the motorway. Bang, there’s a thump from low down on the rear of our car. A car pulls past us with passenger pointing animatedly to the car wheel, as if to indicate a deflating tyre. The car signals us to pull over: they clearly aim to help us. There’s a moment of indecision on our part before the penny drops. Our vehicle is handling fine, no evidence of a flat type or any other problem.

The advice is: keep driving- fairly obvious really- and that is what we did. The Good Samaritan bandits shot off at the next exit. We pulled in to the next services, i.e. plenty of folks around, to see what damage their missile had caused. Thankfully, none we could detect: it must have hit the tough plastic skirt running round the bottom sill of the car. Our friends also carried on driving, but did discover some damage to the tailgate of their car.

Shame we didn’t get any pictures: they didn’t stay around long enough. On the other hand, if we had stopped, they would have pinched the camera, so no pix either way!

2011 The Blog Stops Here

Jan 19th to 22nd : Alconbury to The Pyrenees

We left home on 19th Jan, grateful for the return of reasonable weather. A good run of 430 miles through France took us to an overnighter at motorway services 40 miles beyond Troyes. Our thoughts of heading towards ever improving weather were somewhat shattered on looking out next morning….

Keep travelling south, it’s bound to improve! And it did: we ran out of the snow in about an hour. So now let’s stop for coffee & croissants: even on motorways, we said, in France you still get freshly made coffee.
But times move on, and the motorway services presented us with banks of drinks machines. I counted them: there were an amazing 18 machines scattered around in groups, not all the same, most able to dispense a huge variety of drinks. We had an acceptable chocolate drink each, but I wondered how the economics of this high-tech set-up compares with a couple of café girls. We needed the services of a person anyway as the machine delivered only one drink instead of the two we’d paid for!

That evening we arrive at a pleasant site on the banks of the river Rhone. There’s a biting wind making it feel very cold, but wrapping up warm we take an evening walk into the pleasant town of Tournon-sur-Rhone. There are a number of huge barges plying the river and it’s a shame we don’t have navigable rivers of this size in the UK to slightly ease our road congestion.

Pyrenees next stop, just into Spain. We’ve stayed at this site before and it’s beautifully located in pine and cork oak hills. Still cold and even windier but sunny, so we togged up as on the day before and had a splendid hour’s brisk walk. It’s a wonder the site is open in winter as we were the only touring folks there, but there is a residential section so it presumably takes no more manpower to run the whole lot.

Monday 18th October: Milano

We caught the train to Milan from Arona, a local station. The trains in Italy run on time and are cheap: the hour’s ride to Milan was the equivalent of £8.50 return each. A similar UK journey, London to Huntingdon cheap day return costs £22.00.

However, you can’t expect a perfect service for these prices- so what’s lacking? Well, the carriage windows are usually grubby so you don’t get a good view out. This is perhaps a minor point, except if you don’t know the line. On the return journey, with completely opaque windows in the whole carriage, we couldn’t see the station names to identify when we would arrive at our little station. We plumped for dead reckoning, and got off the train when it stopped at 18:23, its scheduled time for our station. Sigh of relief, it is Arona!

Milan has a fabulous cathedral, faced in white marble, dating from 1386 but only finished in 1805 to 1809 by order of Napoleon. Josephine was keen on marble.

The interior is equally sumptuous with marble patterned floors and rich stained glass windows. San Carlo Borromeo’s tomb is here also, he of big statue fame described in a previous blog. The space inside is enormous and exceeds St Paul’s in London. Our camera isn’t really happy in low light, but the photo will give an idea of the lovely stained glass

The external carvings are of exceptional quality. This one is instantly recognisable as David and Goliath. Ambitious lad, David, always looking to get a head.

This is the Galleria, between the cathedral and La Scala, all exclusive shops and restaurants, and excellent for poser-watching. We bought two overpriced but enormous gelati (ice creams) around the corner from the Galleria. The vendor kept piling the ice cream on top of the small cones. I’d eaten half of mine when the head of the cone fell off, obviously not structurally up to the mega weight of the ice cream and vigourous licking, and Jane simply couldn’t finish hers, so half the quantity at half the price would have suited us much better.

With ice cream remains in the bin, we visited La Scala, the most famous opera house in the world. La Scala itself isn’t open apart from for performances, but the museum is. It is full of memorabilia of operas and opera performers going back to the opening in 1778. Visitors are also allowed to look into the auditorium from several of the theatre boxes that connect with the museum. This was the undoubted highlight, looking in on that famous theatre with its’ 3,000 seats, especially so because a rehearsal for Carmen was taking place. We stayed much longer than permitted and a curator did ask us to move on eventually on the very reasonable basis that you should be paying around €100 to watch an opera and not €4 museum entrance charge. However, no photography allowed, so it’s only a snap of an outside poster as a memento of our visit.

Friday 15th Oct: Como and Lugano

The day dawned bright and sunny, but hazy. It will burn off, we thought. But it didn’t, it got hazier, so no big views although the lakes were beautiful, atmospherically beautiful in the mist. We stopped for lunch at Menaggio on lake Como where we sat out at a café in the old square.

We left lake Como at Menaggio and cut across to Lake Lugano, the northern shore of which we followed until we crossed into Switzerland, and thence to the upmarket town of Lugano, The guidebook said that parking is difficult here: it was right, but we did eventually find a multi-storey at a price in keeping with the prices on the high street. The town is very chic, full of designer shops and exclusive restaurants, a sort of Harrods-on-the-lake. The photo is of the town’s lake frontage, but doesn’t convey the posh image of the town centre.

In a way, more our scene: a bunch of crows, opportunists as always for food. These are hooded crows quite common in Italy but only found in the North-East and Scotland in the UK.

We encountered huge traffic jams leaving Lugano and then all the way back to the Italian border. We also experienced traffic congestion having crossed back into Italy, but it kept moving. We were pleased to get back to the ‘van, late, after a long day out, and glad we hadn’t chosen a campsite on one of the more famous lakes because Lake Orta, where we are, is much less congested, and every bit as beautiful.

Wednesday 13th Oct: A Small Village

The guidebook’s starred locations don’t always yield the most interesting visits. Armena, which isn’t mentioned anywhere, stands in the hills behind Lake Orta, a fairly ordinary sort of place, with a nice church. Rounding a corner, we came across the communal wash-house, dated 1929. It was in a functioning state of repair, but presumably now made redundant by washing machines. Hand-washing drudgery it may have been, but they’ve lost the communal gathering and all that chatting and gossip.

A statue of a Saint by the church, quite usual, and as we approached it appeared that there were Coke cans and bottles by his feet. Was this indeed St Eco, the Patron Saint of re-cycling? Disappointingly, the cans and bottles turned out to be devotional candles.

Back to the site, and there’s a lady swimming in the lake who convinces Jane that the water’s quite warm. “Gets to be 24, 25 degrees in Aug, early Sept.”, she says. "Yes, but it’s now mid-October", I’m thinking. But Jane is convinced: I’m not, and here’s the picture to prove it! Jane was in for about 15 minutes and said it was invigoratingggg....