Andulusia ,here we come!-Part 1

We just touched down from gatwick on the eve on christmas. What a quiet london city. It wasn't too bad to travel on the eve of christmas. Everybody seemed to be pretty much into festive mood and couldn't care less about all the formalitiesand custom check.
Thank god for safe journey and great weather for our days in Spain. We had really great fun for the past seven days in Andulusia. It has been one of the most relaxing and hassle free holidays we had.

17th December 2006-Costal de Sol

We arrived in Malaga airport in the evening and got our hired rental car from Crowns. Abit of hiccups initially as Ron was not used to manual drive after being spoilt by his auto Mazda car in States. We took a bit of time to figure out how to reverse the car out of the carpark lot. The drive to the hotel was much smoother than what we expected. The highways were well lited and there were signs everyway . It took us about 15 minutes before we arrived at Vistarmar Aparthotel at Costal de Sol.I am totally pleased with the accomodation . It was one of the best so far in Europe. We had our own kitchen , living room and a bedroom. The bathrooms were clean and huge!!!We retired for the night early that day and got ourselves all ready for the big day tommorow.

18th December 2006-Ronda

I am greeted with a lovely sunny day with a fantastic view of the Mediterrean Sea. Ooohh...you could imagine how excited I am as I went and woke up poor ron who was still in bed to have a look at this beautiful sight.

We have a small bite and off we went to our first destination Ronda- a beautiful white village which is the last fortress on a towering plateau in the mountains. the drive was lovely though the mountains roads were winding and we had to be careful not to fall off the cliffs. We love the mountains , the oceans and the sea.Of course, Ronda itself was breathe-taking for our first stop in Spain. We walked around the old Jewish town separated by the plunging river gorge known as "El Tajo".I am so tempted to buy many lovely stuffs they had but i had to control myself as i had exceeded my baggage limit back to States already.Anyway, we practically just hiked through the whole place with a little map, got lost in the country afew times but got a taste of the way of life of an Andulusian in tiny narrow cobbled streets and white washed houses.

I also went to my first bullring which was one of the oldest and prettiest in Spain. Have a tour in the museum and couldn't believe how humans could regard the sacrificial of animals as a kind of entertainment in these modern days. But nevertheless, the chinese had their own cockfighting, the americans have their hunting...

One good thing about not following tour package and doing your own road trip is you never know what you will expect to see along the way and you get to stop as and when you like!


While driving down the mountain back home, we saw these whole rows of wind turbines on the mountains. Trust me , they looked more spectacular in reality than in this picture

And of course, we decided stop at one of the "mirador"to take a picture of ourselves with our trustworthy tripod and canon digital i60