Author Archives: Steve Walker

About Steve Walker

Once a tech in-house PR type, now professional photo/videographer and recreational drone pilot. Violinist. Flautist. Occasional conductor. Oenophile.

Orienteering

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Saturday 28 September. Yesterday’s antics in caves smacked a little uncomfortably of being tourism, so today is reserved for holidaymaking, although we decided we had to earn the privilege by going for a short walk after breakfast, i.e at about 11.30. Accordingly, we girded our loins, or clad them in Rohan, which is emotionally the same thing, and set out along the road, clutching the hotel’s booklet about local hikes – particularly a short one which led to a lovely viewpoint over the valley – and Jane’s phone with Google Maps active. The latter turned out to be not quite a mistake, but something of a misdirector.

As we walked along the road to the point where our track turned off, it became ever more apparent how popular Mallorca is with cyclists; and furthermore, since we’re in the lumpy bit on the left of the island, cyclists of a particular grim, determined fitness. It wasn’t quite a stream of lycra-clad, piston-legged obsession passing us, but it could quite legitimately claim to have been a rivulet. All the bikes seemed to emit that particular “I have a carbon-fibre frame, an SRAM chainset and an aerodynamic wheelset as well as an overpaid rider” noise as they whizzed past us. On certain sections of this road, there’s a 40kph speed limit, which I think is intended for cyclists to observe; I bet half of them don’t. I’m impressed by their fitness, but wish they could look as if they were enjoying themselves more.

Anyhoo. We reached the point on the road where we turned off on our track and soon started ascending to the point where we got a nice view of the village nearest to our hotel, ~~Leyton~~ Orient (my brother stayed at a hotel there on his recent holiday in these parts and said it was fab).

There were a few meanderings as we tried to make the description in the book match the reality as presented by Google Maps, but these rarely led to bad-tempered exchanges. After a bit more ascending, we passed an ivy tree which was flowering and providing the bees with ever such a nice collection of pollen and any passers-by with a lovely buzz.

we had an interesting stile to climb over

and walked along in delightful dappled sunlight.

passing circles, some made of stones

and some grassed over

which we eventually realised must have once been pits where charcoal was created, called “Sitjas” locally. We fairly soon reached a point with a lovely view back over the village and the valley.

At this point, the Google Maps Bugger Factor kicked in. Jane had read the booklet, consulted Google Maps and decided that our viewpoint was reached by carrying on, which involved crossing another interesting stile

and then, much to my alarm, heading downhill (because this would inevitably lead to having to come back uphill on the return journey, and I’m not good at uphill). On we carried, and you can see from this graph what happened next – we were at around 45 minutes so far:

Yep – down we went, in relentless search for this benighted viewpoint that Jane sought using her phone. After a while, we reached somewhere where you could sort of see a view across the valley a bit if you used your imagination. We could hear voices in the (downhill) distance and Jane said that the viewpoint on Maps was probably over there and it was by a waterfall but only if it had rained recently. I therefore called a halt to the descent on the basis that (a) I wasn’t sure that the Maps place was what was described in the hotel booklet and, more to the point, (b) I was buggered if I was going to walk any more uphill than I had to. So we respectively walked (Jane) and shuffled (me) back up to the second stile – with a small but pointless detour in search of the elusive viewpoint, and it was when we got back to the stile that we realised that this was the view mentioned in the booklet.

After a rest for half a banana each, we pottered back down the way we came up and got back to the hotel just in time for a Nice Lunch. And now it’s 6pm, which means it’s time for a Nice Gin over which we can plan the morrow – possibly a visit to Valldemossa, as we both fancy a Chopin trip, and it’s not too far from there to Puerto ~~Anthrax~~ Andratx, where there are some more opportunities for another Nice Lunch. Tune in tomorrow to find out what happened, eh?

Cave at Emptor

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Friday 27 September. After yesterday’s sloth, we had resolved to be up betimes and hasten ourselves off to the bottom right bit of Mallorca in order to visit a major tourist attraction – the Caves of Drach – and its younger brother – the Caves of Hams. I suppose we were early in the sense that we hit the hotel breakfast buffet just before the halfway mark in its open window. We departed the hotel at about 1015, with the car’s satnav being a little equivocal about which way we should turn out of the (really very dangerous) hotel exit. After a certain amount of swearing and U-turning, we set off, only to find that the satnav lady was taking us the pretty way (referred to in the hotel guide booklet as being good for an excursion, but not as a regular route). It soon became a very tortuous road, as it became clear that we weren’t going through the middle of the two great slabs of mountain that stand out from the scenery, but over the top of one of them.

Fortunately, the road was quiet, with the main traffic being cyclists hurtling down the hill. We found that they bounced off the bonnet reasonably unobtrusively and hardly damaged the car at all.

No, of course we didn’t, really. We made it to Bunyola, the nearest large town (and scene of a remarkable pre-Christmas lunch over 30 years ago – catch me when I’ve had a few and I’ll tell you all about it – since when the village of Bunyola has become the town of Bunyola and has developed something of a traffic problem). Eventually the road became a perfectly normal road and an hour or so later we were at Porto Cristo, the home of both sets of caves, just in time for the 1200 entry to Cuevas del Drach.

Sadly, every other tourist on the island had had the same idea, and so the 1200 visit was full. We decided to go for a 1500 tour and then departed for the other caves, the Cuevas dels Hams, which was much quieter. OK, deserted.

We bought tickets and the very helpful lady at the desk told us that the coffee was better in the coffee bar inside – inside the cave, that is. So off we went, and had coffee whilst waiting for the tour to start, serenaded by Mozart. I think every piece of music they played (see later) was by Mozart, so either they had a big thing for Wolfgang Amadeus or they assumed that the punters would at least not be offended by it. Actually, it was rather nice hearing Mozart’s 38th Symphony in a cavern whilst drinking coffee.

After we went in on the tour, the first thing that was promised was “The Blue Cave”. And it really was very, very blue.

but that was because they’d used blue light to illuminate it. We trooped into a small theatre and were shown a short (but not really short enough) film, entitled “Genesis”, which went through all sorts of pretentious preliminaries before telling us about the discovery of the caves. Then we trooped through the caves themselves which were very colourful

but the colours were because of the artful placing of coloured lights, not really because of the formations themselves, even when the overhead commentary covered the topic.

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A post shared by Steve Walker (@spwalker2016) on Sep 27, 2019 at 4:51am PDT

The name of the caves themselves came from some mysterious formations, where stalactites went round corners and bent back upwards, like fishhooks – and “hams” is the Mallorcan for fish hooks.

The final showpiece was a “concert”, in a cavern where the caves met the water at sea level (30 metres underground). More Mozart, you’ll notice, as an illuminated boat slowly swished around against a backdrop of projected video.

After an hour or so we emerged, blinking, back into the daylight, thinking that it was colourful enough, but that the overall presentation was a bit cheesy. A coffee break passed the time agreeably until we should go back to the Drach caves, which were somewhat more popular.

Drach is an altogether better experience – bigger, less cheesy and more impressive even though less colourful. Jane and I had been here before whenever it was that we last visited Mallorca, a date lost in the mists of time. I don’t have any photos of the Drach caves from that visit and we bought a calendar at the obligatory retail opportunity back then, which makes me believe that they didn’t permit photography in the caves then. Today is, unsurprisingly, very different, and photography is allowed, without flash (although there were many instances of people using flash, presumably because either they didn’t know how to turn the flash off, or, more likely, hadn’t spotted that their flash was operating). And I’m glad it is, because it’s very beautiful and very impressive – the Drach organisers let the formations speak for themselves much more than the Hams people do.

One processes through a predetermined route, with lots of photo opportunities. There’s one point where the path widens sufficiently that people can – phew! what a relief for them! take photos of themselves in front of the formations

and the end point is (also) a concert in a, erm, cavernous arena, where there’s a lake big enough to support a boat with a quartet of musicians on board – two violins, ‘cello and harmonium. One is not permitted to photograph or video this and I was astounded that not one person attempted to use their phone or camera during the 10 minutes of the concert (except me, and that was a misunderstanding of whether it had ended). The music was pure cheese – Pachelbel’s Canon, Elgar’s Salut D’Amour, that kind of thing – ending, perhaps inevitably, with the Barcarole from Cavalleria Rusticana.

Cheese aside, there is merit in both of these tourist places – Drach is more impressive and better organised, but it’s possibly worth booking your time slot in advance, if you can be that well organised, just like we weren’t. Anyway, I’m glad we did both, and it was a nice opportunity to walk down into Porto Cristo afterwards to see what opportunities there were for “lunch” (it being 4pm by this stage). It looked, it has to be said, promising.

We settled on a restaurant called Cap D’Es Toi, and had a very satisfactory meal there. Now, look: I don’t approve of posting photos of food, but I have to make an exception for the “Filet of St. Peter Fish with Fried Onions”. There really was fish under there, honest!

and I manfully stepped up to the challenge of finishing and probably irredeemably damaging my health. But It was delicious! (I should add that I felt a bit queasy during the night, but serve me right, I suppose)

After that, there was nothing for it but to walk back up to the car and head back to the hotel, via, it has to be said, a less torturously twisty route. Having arrived here, all that was needed was to process several hundred photos and write this blog post, which I hope you’ve enjoyed reading.

Tomorrow might see us going for a hike around the local hills. But you’ll have to read on to find out if that happened, won’t you?

Re: Vueling

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Thursday 26 September. Yesterday was the transition day from Barcelona to Mallorca and from tourism to a holiday. Tourism is hard work; a holiday is for relaxing and recharging, and that’s something we want to do over the next couple of weeks whilst still getting out and about a bit.

The travels yesterday happened pretty smoothly – no significant problems and only minor niggles. We were collected from our hotel and deposited at Barcelona’s magnificently named El Prat airport, whence we would be flying on Vueling – a first for me. First impressions are important and I have to say that the Vueling check in process was not trouble-free: we had to spend no little time seeking a working machine that would print our baggage label; and then we had a similar amount of trouble finding a working bag drop machine. There was a single Vueling operative there, ostensibly to help; but the only contribution he made for us was to tell us that the process was self-service. Eventually it was and we managed to get our bags accepted, and off we went to join the security queue.

The rest of the airport experience was pretty standard – a slightly aggravating security queue, a meal at TGI Friday’s which was OK; and many minutes standing on the airport bus waiting for the mystery bus tour to the middle of the airfield to start whilst last-minute people dashed on board.

The flight was pretty standard, too – mercifully short, as Vueling clearly expect their customers to be, going by the amount of legroom available.

Palma airport was a bit of a surprise in its sheer size and busy-ness – there are some 18 baggage carousels, and people were coming and going the whole time, and this was only a Wednesday lunchtime. We had to wait about 20 minutes for our bags to arrive, just long enough to start questioning the accuracy of the Vueling bag handling processes.

We made our way past a human zoo of people queuing for their hire cars at various booths (including Goldcar – after the coverage they’ve received, I was astonished that people are still prepared to use their services). By contrast, we were met by our charming Castaways rep, Jane, who took us across the way to a chap who was standing there, evidently awaiting us. He turned out to be the car hire rep for Roig – a slightly odd man but very well-organised. So we fairly soon found ourselves in charge of a Renault Captur and trying to get out of the airport car park, a process somewhat complicated by cars in front of us being driven by people who clearly didn’t have a clue and who needed help from a very harassed-looking airport parking operative. But we got out eventually, and started making our way (tentatively, since it’s a long time since I’ve driven on the wrong side of the road, and I also had to deal with a manual gearbox which has not been a feature of my life in the 21st century) towards our hotel, L’Hermitage. We had paper directions, which was just as well, since the car’s satnav was speaking Danish at this point.

Reader, we made it – no actual crashes, and no actually getting utterly lost, but a few unplanned detours and occasional need for heavier pressure on the brake pedal. So here we are at the hotel, which looks just the right place to have as a base for relaxing and refueling.

We have a full week before we move on to Menorca – a great opportunity to explore Mallorca and possibly take a day trip to Ibiza, too. But today is a day for taking it easy and considering our next steps, which will be documented, as ever, in full here. See you later!