While there was a very long short-list of places to go, Vienna eventually won the coveted prize of being the destination of my November trip, 2009. Before I stepped onto the plane I confess that I have little idea what there is to see in Austria’s capital city. It certainly has a famous name but you can’t base an entire trip on an Ultravox song and the teenage home of one of the least loved people from the twentieth century.

Having dropped my bags off at the hotel, I decided to just get the metro to the centre of town and see how things panned out. Public transport was pretty swift and efficient as far as I could tell.

That strategy, as basic as it was, worked out rather well. I had picked Stephansplatz as it was pretty much right in the middle of Innere Stadt but had no real idea what I would find when I exited the U-Bahn.

Stephansplatz features the huge and very grand Stephansdom. The roof has very detailed green and yellow tiles which looked bright and cheerful during the day and a little sinister at night, especially when foggy.

(These last two were both taken on a recent acquisition: a 50mm Canon prime lens.)

Going in late November there was also the lure of the odd Christmas Market. What I hadn’t counted on was seeing one on pretty much every street corner.

The biggest was in front of the Radhaus (townhall). It was huge and very well attended, with everyone taking their share of punsch, kartoffelpuffers and wursts (sausages). There were also huge numbers of gingerbread and chocolate and kitsch Christmas tree decorations.

One of the nice things was that, for the first couple of nights at least, mine was about the only English voice in the crowd. This caused a few minor problems ordering food — I didn’t recognise the word for garlic (knoblauch?) — but it’s nice that locals visit these things as well as tourists.

Later in the week I got as far as Schloss Belvedere where there was another reasonably sized market. Many of the others were much smaller.

I can’t say that I was very tempted by any of the baubles, but the glühwein was most welcome in the Autumn chill.

During the day I did a lot of walking around, checking out the many and various grand, old buildings.

Karlskirche looks impressive from the outside.

But the inside is in the process of being renovated. They’re making good use of the scaffolding by allowing tourists to climb up to the roof too. It’s really neat to see the artwork so close.

And then when you get to the top the view is pretty spectacular, albeit obscured slightly by the grill on the window. I have to say that the window looked more secure than the platform felt. With all the people climbing up and down it was wobbling quite alarmingly.

Other than the public transport and the ability to climb towers, another way to get around would be the horses and carriages. There was no shortage around the Hofburg and Stephansplatz, though they all looked miserable in the cold and fog.

Perhaps the most grand building, certainly the one with the best lighting after dark, is the Radhaus. The parliament building, which is next door, looks quite ordinary by comparison.

My flight back to London was pretty late and, having seen many of the obvious sights and getting weary of the cold, I ducked into the Natural History Museum. I’d avoided it on the previous days as there’s a similar-seeming one in London, but, well, it was cold outside. Luckily I was wrong: it was well worth visiting in its own right. As with the one in Kensington, the building was impressive.

There was a nice Darwin exhibition that managed to explain some pretty sophisticated concepts. And they also had a primate wearing glasses, which I thought was funny. It was designed to make a point about how active evolution is when we’re altering the kinds of things that nature typically selects against.

Continuing the theme of how easily amused I am, there was also an infrared camera. My camera looks really big from that angle!

Overall Vienna was a great place to spend a long weekend and it’s relatively small which makes it very walkable. There’s lots of stuff to see both inside and out. If there’s one down-side it’s that they seem to hide their best food. My success rate at just stumbling across restaurants was not high, and getting anything more than a (very good) cake after lunch was more miss than hit. Not since Copenhagen has a dinner been so lame. Next time I guess I should pay more attention to the guide book.

If you have not had your fill of pictures, take a look at the full Vienna set on Flickr.

I thought that I was doing well. Before I made the trip to Spain I had already been on the Internet and booked tickets for the Alhambra, Granada’s most famous site.

Two things, however, had escaped my attention. Firstly, Granada is about two hours by taxi from Canillas de Albaida, which meant getting up at an unsociable hour¹.

Secondly, I hadn’t thought to print a map and the guide book that I’d brought didn’t have a map. This was unfortunate as I missed the path down from the Alhambra down to the town centre and ended up in what seemed like the middle of nowhere.

By this point I was getting thirsty and hungry and so nipped into a promising looking cafe for a coffee and croissant. As luck would have it they also had free WiFi and I was able to find a map on my iPhone.

It turns out that I wasn’t too far from the centre after all and it only took ten minutes to get to the Cathedral. This immediately seemed more like it, with crowds of tourists trying to get in to see… something.

After staying in Canillas de Albaida, a town of only seven hundred people, the crowds came as a bit of shock² and I wasn’t quite prepared to fight my way to the front to get in or even find out what the queue was for. Instead I went around the Cathedral, noting that there ware various shopping streets fanning out and, generally, lots of activity for a Wednesday.

Around one side of the Cathedral was a busker, at the back was another entrance to the church and service going on. I snuck around the side and surreptitiously took a few pictures, slightly embarrassed by the volume of the thunk as I released the shutter. A few minutes later another tourist burst in with a video camera and stood right in the middle taping the whole service.

I spent the next hour wandering around the town, down the shady shopping streets, by the river and, finally, into a cafe for a quick sandwich.

The walk back to the Alhambra in the afternoon was rather less confusing than the journey down into the town. I expected to see a large, obvious sign pointing downhill at the junction I missed but apparently the turn is so obvious that even tourists couldn’t possibly miss it and it therefore remains unlabelled.

The Alhambra is every bit as spectacular as you’ve probably heard. The scale is incredible. If the engravings had been only in one room it would have been impressive and you would have admired the workmanship. But these intricate designs are in pretty much every room over the whole complex.

It took all afternoon to wander around and as 6pm approached, the agreed taxi pick-up time, it became clear that there were likely bits that I’d missed but that I was too tired to try to find in any kind of hurry.

Overall, it was a long, tiring, fun day. I slept on my way back to Canillas de Albaida, please with what I’d seen.

1. Why is it that I often end up setting my alarm earlier when on holiday that on a normal working week? [↩]
2. Just imagine the culture shock when I got back to London less than a week later. [↩]

The main purpose of this trip was to get away from the hustle and bustle of London, get “back to nature” and go trekking in the Parque Natural Sierras De Tejeda, which is near to, but less hilly than, the more famous Sierra Nevada.

On that front there were absolutely no complaints. I was there for a week and went on four walks. They were fun and varied, passing through tiny, white-washed villages and abandoned inns.

It’s been a while since I’ve done any walking and so was wondering about my fitness levels before I set off but I didn’t have too much trouble — I got a little bit out of breath on some of the steeper uphill sections and my knees groaned when going downhill. The worst bits were the steep downhill on lose rocks and scree. Fortunately I stayed mostly upright with just a few minor scuffs to show for it.

Some of the hardest parts of the trekking were down to the weather. It had been an incredibly hot summer, even by the standards of southern Spain. Fortunately there was only one day where, shortly after lunch, I was wilting under the direct sun with little shade and a dwindling supply of water. A few weeks earlier and I would have had difficulties on most of the walks, even with factor fifty sun cream and more water than I would have been comfortable carrying!

On the plus side, the streams were almost dry which made the many crossings significantly easier; staying dry would have been much harder back in April or May.

Despite having enjoyed the walking, I did chicken out of the last day — an ascent of Cerro Lucero — in favour of a more thorough look around Competa and some well-deserved relaxation. This was, after all, a holiday!

I can’t say that it was a promising start. Malaga airport has maybe a dozen baggage carousels but only one of them seemed to be in use for the three flights that arrived around the same time as mine. This would have mattered more had my luggage been in any hurry to arrive from the hold.

Things quickly improved, though. As the bus headed east from Malaga and the roads got smaller and more hilly, the scenery also improved. Fewer Ikea’s and mobile phone stores and fast food restaurants, more white-wash and shady squares and hazy views back to the Mediterranean.

The bus dumped me near a building site — apparently the sewers were being replaced — but a few minutes uphill took me to a pleasant square and the hotel were I would be staying for the next week.

Canillas de Albaida has a population of only about seven hundred people and has the laid-back feel and community that you’d expect given that size. It’s nice to have total strangers say “Hola” as you pass; people actively avoid any eye contact in London.

It’s sat on the very edge of the Sierras De Tejeda Natural Park. The “natural” in Natural Park, incidentally, is not a typo. This region of Spain has decided to designate the area to be a park but this appellation is not recognised by the Spanish government and so cannot be called a National Park.

It didn’t take long to explore it fairly thoroughly. There’s the main square with the hotel and one of the three restaurants. Looking down over the town is the church of Santa Ana. To one side is the cemetery. And that’s about all. There are a couple of super-markets that are occasionally open, a pharmacy and hardware store that I didn’t visit but reportedly sells pretty much everything you can’t get at the other shops.

A thirty minute walk down a pleasant path was the “big” town, Competa. It’s all relative of course, as Competa only has a population of about four thousand.

The main feature of Competa is its square and church with a bell tower that at various points in its history has also been a minaret¹. I was lucky to experience a couple of great sunsets over the church and an enormous ice-cream in a cafe in the square.

It’s a hard job but someone has to do it.

1. Though perhaps not in its current form. It has fallen down and has been rebuilt a number of times over the centuries. [↩]

I spent a week walking around the Sierra Tejeda Natural Park, staying in Canillas de Albaida which is about an hours drive from Malaga in the south of Spain.

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Over the following few posts I’ll be talking about and showing pictures of the tiny, white-washed villages, the diverse and beautiful mountains and, as a contrast, the buildings and culture in Granada.

• Canillas de Albaida — the town that I stayed in
• Walking in Andalucía — what I went to Spain to do
• Granada — what I did on my “rest” day

Stay tuned for any future travels of mine by subscribing to the RSS feed or by email.

My previous exploits in San Francisco have been well documented (1 2 3 4 5) so I shall just get straight into the images.

This time I have no particular theme to link the pictures together. I quite like the Golden Gate Bridge peeking through the fog and the yachts. I got a better day to visit Coit Tower and the Transamerica Pyramid.