Spain! On $56/person/day! Yikes!!

Spain shall hereby be known as "the country where we spent the most money"...  In all fairness we did fly into the country twice, and Jen celebrated her birthday in Spain too.  But mostly?  It's just an expensive country to visit.

Here's the breakdown with some details...

Initial budget: $100/day, $50/person/day
Actual cost: 18 days at $2020 ($112/day, $56/person/day)

(luckily, wine is cheap)

• Lodging: $598 - 18 nights at hostels or 1-star hotels averaging $16/person/night
• Transportation: $901 - flights Turkey-Barcelona and Morocco-Madrid; car rental for Picos de Europa; trains/buses between major cities and to Gibraltar; nominal dollars spent on public transportation everywhere
• Groceries: $230 
• Meals: $134 - don't let the small plates fool you, tapas are expensive!
• Tours: $69 - most of this was our Gibraltar day trip; otherwise, admissions to various Barcelona and Seville museums/sights
• Alcohol: $32 - darn you, delicious Spanish wine!
• "Misc": $56 - $18 in laundry; $29 for much-needed (used) clothing; $9 for random things like contact lens solution and telephoning a hotel for directions

Other fun Spain facts...

• Cities visited: 7 (Barcelona, Pamplona, Llanes, A Coruña, Seville, Tarifa, Madrid)
• Bottles of wine enjoyed: we aren't saying
• National parks visited: 1 (Picos de Europa)
• UNESCO World Heritage Sites visited: 3 (Barcelona's works of Antoni Gaudí, Seville's cathedral, A Coruña's Tower of Hercules)
• King and Queen sightings: 1 (our only day in Madrid was the anniversary of the 2004 bombing)

To Vietnam, where there are lots more zeros on the money!

Tarifa and Gibraltar: last stops before a whole new world.

When you're THAT close to Gibraltar, you kind of have to go, right?

(That was our reasoning anyway. And then we heard there were Barbary macaques. That sealed the deal.)

We took the bus from Tarifa to La Linea and walked across the border (#3 on foot!). The officers shot a sideways glance at our passports and waved us through, and we crossed the active airplane landing strip to town.

first active airplane landing strip crossing

This bizarre UK oasis has its own currency, a downtown of fancy strip malls, and expats everywhere. 

thirty thousand of them, approximately

it also has churros y cafes

at an Indian restaurant

(of course)

We did the £10 Gibraltar tour which included visits to...

• a Moorish castle, remaining fortifications of which date back to the 1100s - although the original fortifications came even earlier under the reign of Tarik-ibn-Zeyad

fun with downward spirals

• "Gibraltar, a City Under Seige" - a bizarre life sized diorama of sorts, set among original buildings from the 1700s and presenting a day in the life during a siege (apparently it was quite boring)

but to keep things interesting

there were floggings

and low rations of food

• the Great Seige Tunnels, a series of tunnels in the rocks created by gunpowder and manual labor, used for fortification during seiges

the tunnels went on and on and on -

pretty amazing

• the Ape's Den featuring those wacky Barbary macaques

oh hai

• St Michael's Cave, a natural grotto intended for use as a hospital during WWII

now it's an amphitheater...

... Pink Floyd played here once

And that's just what you get for £10. Gibraltar is far bigger than we thought, and there is so much more to it (including naturally occurring, man-made, and historically) than we realized.

and here we thought it was just a rock

For another £8 we could've toured more war tunnels but we opted to just explore the trails for a bit instead...

when you go your way and I'll go mine

And we ascended and descended a lot of stairs.

a LOT of stairs

What a strange, strange place, this tiny little rock that everyone fights over. Now we know.

Back in Tarifa we watched the waves and caught the sunsets and decided it would be a great place to visit in the summer.

surf's up

winter or not, sunsets were still lovely 

next time: kitesurfing lessons

oh, and they have a bullring -

ole!

Definitely glad we stayed in Tarifa instead of Algeciras (which Lonely Planet describes as "an industrial town, a big fishing port and a centre for drug smuggling"). Um... no.

Food notes:

• Halal K2 Doner Kebab & Pizza in Tarifa sounds like an odd choice but it was actually quite good
• and the aforementioned churros at an Indian restaurant whose name I cannot locate (just follow the signs!)
• otherwise sandwiches and lots of salad to counteract all the bread
• and we finally ate the package of instant borscht we've been carrying around since Poland

it was just as salty and beety

as we remembered

Lodging notes: Tarifa's Melting Pot Hostel was fine for a few nights. The kitchen could have been cleaner but the guy who worked there was really nice, we had lots of space, and the price was right.

(this was a nice touch)

And it was a five minute walk to the ferry the next morning...

to Morocco!!

Seville simplicity.

Jen had very fond memories of her visit to Seville almost 20 years ago so we stopped there for a few nights before heading south. (In hindsight, those fond memories involve trying to find good sangria, eating lots of churros, and something about a cathedral. But that's beside the point.)

By Seville we were tired of the Euro so in the interest of "free" we walked through a lot of neighborhoods and admired the architecture.

random buildings

random plazas

random narrow streets

We visited the Plaza de España and browsed the intricately decorated city monuments.

this place is packed in the summer -
hooray for low season travel

we played with the "pop art" camera feature

and the "fish eye" feature

and we went back at night too

We sat across from the Cathedral and people-watched for a while.

(is this rude?)

We visited Mercado de Triana a few times and finally decided on chicken chorizo for our pasta.

lesson: less chorizo, more fruit

We took Clarence to visit the Plaza de Toros. Well, from the outside, anyway.

ole!

(see him there?)

On a whim we visited the Convento de Santa Paula. This did cost €3 each but the money went to the sweet nuns so that was fine.

even thought they didn't offer us homemade pastries as advertised,

they gave us helpful tourist tips on Seville

and the artwork was museum-worthy

Food notes:

• we found the churros...

oh yes, we found them

y chocolate tambien

• we also got a tip on cheap tapas at Taberna Coloniales - actually, no tapas are "cheap" but at least we finally had some seafood in Spain...

fried cod, aged goat cheese, cured ham -

totally worth it

• otherwise lots of hostel cooking

Lodging notes: Just to mix it up a little we chose our hostel using our wine-picking technique (by the price, followed by the name) so Feetup Samay Hostel was the obvious winner. It was clean and roomy and they played Radiohead so we'd call it "fine for two nights".

One could easily fill a week in Seville with sightseeing and delicious foods but we were happy to make it an easy, lazy, inexpensive couple of days.

Only one more Spanish town before Morocco... Crazy, just crazy.

Portugal on about $40/person/day.

Portugal was cheaper than Spain but still not all that cheap.

Initial budget: $100/day, $50/person/day
Actual cost: 16 days at $1298 ($81/day, $40.50/person/day)

Here's the breakdown with some details...

(note new categories)

• Lodging: $620 - 16 nights at hostels or Air B&B apartments averaging $19/person/night
• Transportation: $366 - trains/buses between major cities and transportation for day trips to the Douro Valley, Conimbriga, Buçaco Forest and Sagres; nominal dollars spent on public transportation everywhere
• Groceries: $156
• Meals: $40 - all pastries... not even kidding (okay, maybe there was one coffee in there somewhere but we didn't actually eat out at all)
• Tours: $69 - Porto walking tour; admissions to various Porto museusm/sights, Conimbriga ruins, and the fortress at Sagres
• Alcohol: $40
• "Misc": $5 - $4 for port tastings in the Douru Valley (we call that "entertainment"), otherwise public toilets
• Gifts: still $0, sorry...

Other fun Portugal facts...

• Cities visited: 7 (Valença, Porto, Pinhão, Coimbra, Luso, Lagos, Sagres)
• Pastries eaten: A BAZILLION
• National parks visited: 0 (but Buçaco Forest Park is a Portuguese national monument and on the tentative UNESCO list)
• UNESCO World Heritage Sites visited: 3 (Alto Douro Wine Region, Historic Centre of Oporto, University of Coimbra)
• Wine tours: 0 (but we enjoyed the tasting!)

Looking forward to getting out of Euro territory soon...

Sagres: a fitting finale to Portugal.

The draw to Lagos was nearby Sagres (what explorers once called "the end of the world").  Lagos had more lodging options so we stayed there and took a bus over to Sagres for the day.

there it is

complete with handy stool

We spent several sunny hours in Sagres exploring the cliffs and the fortress/nature area where men fished precariously off ledges and there was a bastion every three feet.

no ropes

on guard

ready, aim...

But Lagos itself was worth the time and we're glad we stuck around for another day. It's heaven for golfers, surfers, and anyone who appreciates a good cliff side view.

we fell into the third of those categories

The day after we visited Sagres we confirmed that it was, in fact, Saturday (everyone at the hostel seemed a little surprised), so we visited Lagos's Saturday market and waited out the rain in a cafe.

twenty-five markets in eight countries later

they're all completely different

and yet exactly the same

Patience paid off, the skies cleared, and we enjoyed a full afternoon meandering along a trail near old town Lagos that followed the cliff.

Portugal's Bandon

some parts were steeper than others

Now and then we descended long staircases to check out the beach or the views.

toward "the grotto"

(yep, those are stairs)

near...

far...

And once we stopped to play with a kitty.

he liked bread

It was almost impossible to not stop every three minutes to take a photo. Some of the other bazillion shots we took that day start here...

Food notes:
- we found this gem at the Saturday market

figgy gingery hockey puck deliciousness

- and it's an expat town so we also found this shelf at the grocery store

heads just exploded

- and we were still supposed to eat salted cod

but we still didn't

- otherwise we cooked at the hostel

veggies from the local Saturday market

- and drank tasty inexpensive wine

from camel glasses in honor of upcoming Morocco

- and Patrick took the Pepsi challenge with local beers

winner: still undetermined

Lodging notes: The downstairs setup was a little odd at Bura Surf Hostel (one bathroom for up to 14 people, beds in the entry room) but whatever, it's a surfer joint.  Since it was low season we had the four-bed dorm to ourselves. The folks who worked there were really nice and there was definitely a chill vibe to the place. We probably would've hated it in the summer, but it was fine for us this time around.

Obrigada/o, Portugal.  We liked you a lot and we hope to see you again real soon.  Next time we promise not to speak any Spanish in your presence...  (Sorry about that.)