And so the journey begins....

Back to spain and this time lugging an extra 15kgs of gear. Doing a couple of girls a favour to get them out of a bind. Ended up arriving into the port of Tarifa instead of Algercias. Tarifa is a fantastic little place, it has great beaches and the town has a real surfie feel about it. I got a ride from a couple of guys I met on the train ride from Marrakesh to Algrecias as it has the nearest train station. Well I had completely forgotten about the 2 hour time difference between Morocco and Spain. So the one and half hours I thought I had up by sleeve to catch to train ended up being 30 mins too late. The next train didn't leave till later that afternoon, which meant arriving into Seville late at night. Lucky for me Spain is a late nighters paradise. I spent a couple of nights here. Seville is a nice place to visit it sort has a bit of a madrid feel about it, but with more to see. From Seville I headed to Pampalona. I was going to make my way over to Portugal but a friend I had met in Morocco was going to Pampalona and it all sounded too exciting to miss. Pampalona during the festival is quite frankly INSANE!!! The opening ceromony lasts for about 10 minuted, but everyone is gathered in the town square for about 2 or more hours before hand dancing, chanting, food fighting with eggs, flour, tomato sauce and mustard. And then they start spraying sangria and champagne around. After that the party starts! And it doesn't stop at all. Every street and every bar has people in it drinking, dancing, eating, and eventually for the ones that can't handle the way Spainards party are passed out in parks, on benches, and on footpaths across the city. There is tonnes of rubbish every morning that the poor city cleaners clean up every day and then the next day it is all back again. For the running of the bulls I had scored myself a balcony. I had a great view of the main straight and where they turn to go into the arena. One bull fell down just near us and didn't get up for ages. The runners were jeering at it to get up. And when it did, there was a great surge of people trying in vain to back up. The bull had gotten up and was now facing the runners, there was one guy that was hanging on to its tail to try and turn it around. Lucky for the runners it did and the race was back on. A couple of people got injured in the run, a kiwi and an american. Just when you think that is all over. There is more. In the arena they keep all the runners locked in and then they let one bull out at a time to have a go at the trapped like rats runners. And when they think it can't get any more dangerous they let out a steer as well. So now 2 beasts are running around trying to gore some poor soul. This goes on for about 20 minutes. After that guess what everyone goes back to bar from where they crawled from for the run. That night I stayed to watch the fire works. Well I thought I had seen fireworks before, but this was like nothing I had ever seen before. It went on for about 25 minutes or more, and it was like they had just thrown a match into a bulk storage shed of fire works. There were so many and all types, even ones that I hadn't ever seen before. You could feel the procusional boom from some of the fireworks as they went off. It was amazing and they had a show like that every night for the whole feastival, 9 nights. After a couple of days of madness I had had enough. I headed to Bilbao for a couple of days before heading to France. Well Bilbao was almost deserted, there was barely anyone around, especially after the thousands upon thousands of people that were in Pampalona anything else felt like a ghost town. From here I am heading back to France to see my cousins.

Second attempt in Spain. Started off in Barcelona. I have to say I love this place. It reminds me of South America minus the high rates of poverty and with better hygine The vibe of the place is just intoxicating. It has made it on my list of places that I could live in. So I hit all the major tourist sites with one of those hop on hop off buses. I would have normally walked but I was feeling particulary lazy and the sites are so far apart from each other... a good excuse as any to take a bus :P From Bacelona I headed south to Valancia. This place is pretty cool. It has a very different feel about compared with other cities in Spain. It is sort of a cross between Madrid and Rio. Very interesting all the same. While I was here I checked out the so called Holy Grail, a gold and amber cup. I could so see Jesus hauling that thing around with him :/ Anyway it is sort of but not really sanctioned by the Vatican. Valencia has some really cool park lands in an old creek/river bed! Some pretty funky play equipment for the kids. Next stop on my route south was Granada. After a midnight train ride there via Madrid (a touch out of the way) I arrived. Decided to walk to the hostel, bad choice! It was so hot and so far to walk and it all ended with a decent climb up a hill, I was also packing an extra 4kgs of photos that I hadn't sent off yet. Granada is a cool place to check out. The Alhambra was amazing I wandered around in there for about 4 hours. From Granada I headed down to Algeciras to catch a ferry over to Morocco for my next adventure.
Algeciras is horrible, well around the port and the train station is. I got my ticket and then they cancelled the fast ferry due to bad weather. But not bad enough to cancel the normal boat. Well as I found out it was more likely cancelled due to lack of people. The normal boat was just about empty, and the sky was blue and the ocean calm... go figure.

Well we landed in Madrid early early in the morning, got bugger all sleep on the plane, and lost 4 hours on the time zones. I have felt better. After working through the maze of an airport that is Madrid, and it is a maze, we were surprised we got out, it reminded me of the film "13 Ghosts", all glass, you can see where you need to go, but can´t get there.

We arrived at the hostel very tired and wanting to sleep, but were told that we couldn't check in till 11, and it was only 7am. But we were allowed to wait in the bar. The bar thankly had long bench seats which we immediately turned into beds. For the next 4 hours we slept, amongst the many guests having breakfast and checking emails. We finally got to check into the rooms and promptly went to sleep. We were so tired after the flight that our eyes were burning when they were open.

Madrid is a late night party town, the restaurant downstairs only opens at 10pm and closes somewhere around 3am. Where we were staying ended up being on the border of the gay area, so there were plenty of things going on and parties everynight. Recommend staying in that area. It has everything you need there and more.

Checked out the sites of Madrid, doing the typical museum run, they are free on Sundays. Thankfully as I am not an art buff, it was cool to see it, but not my cup of tea. The palace is huge and the parks would be great to hang out in Summer. A tad to wet and cold in Mid March. The El Rasto markets on every Sunday was ok, it pretty much was a brick & brack market. Nothing that I hadn´t seen before.

We ended up spending a week in Mardid, it was the end of the joint tour of my friend Bri. She was heading off to meet up with family and so was I.

We spent the rest of week hanging out with people we had met and going to clubs. Where most of the time we monopolised the dance floor.

Next stop Czech Rep.