Holiday destinations

Im going to Spain soon, I know we have a few people on here who are Spanish and/or have lived in, or been to Spain a lot.

If anyone has any ideas on the following it would be great:-

I fly into Santiago de Compostela, has anyone been there ? Is it any good (much to see or do) or are there any nice places around it ?

For instance is Vigo any good ?

Lastly I'm trying to get from Lisbon to Seville later on, any ideas if there is a direct train or bus. On the Renfe site, it suggests going through Madrid on an overnight train, but this seems a bit like going 2 sides of a triangle.

Also any ideas if its possible to get tickets for the Seville derby (I'm guessing it will be sold out, its the same weekend as Barca v Real Madrid) and when do they announce if a game is on a Saturday or Sunday ?

Thanks for any help.

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Originally Posted by cfdh_edmundo

Im going to Spain soon, I know we have a few people on here who are Spanish and/or have lived in, or been to Spain a lot.

If anyone has any ideas on the following it would be great:-

I fly into Santiago de Compostela, has anyone been there ? Is it any good (much to see or do) or are there any nice places around it ?

For instance is Vigo any good ?

Lastly I'm trying to get from Lisbon to Seville later on, any ideas if there is a direct train or bus. On the Renfe site, it suggests going through Madrid on an overnight train, but this seems a bit like going 2 sides of a triangle.

Also any ideas if its possible to get tickets for the Seville derby (I'm guessing it will be sold out, its the same weekend as Barca v Real Madrid) and when do they announce if a game is on a Saturday or Sunday ?

Thanks for any help.

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Santiago is a pilgrimage town full of churches and religious sites to see.
You will not be too far from A Coruna home of Deportivo there. About 1 hour by bus I would estimate.

Go to Cuba, people, particularly before Fidel pops his clogs. Amazing place, unlike any other country on the planet.

Here's some stuff I wrote about it just after I got home; I know it's a bit long and will probably run into two posts so apologies in advance.

What they have in Cuba is the germ of something quite special. My grasp of Cuban history ain't great, but they did themselves a great favour in getting rid of the dictator and US puppet Batista back in 1959. They then launched into the ‘60s on this tide of incredible optimism and some of the things they did and accomplished back then are still remarkable. A simple example: Fidel's first attack on the Batista regime was a botched assault on the Moncada Barracks in Santiago in July 1953. In 1960, a year after the revolution, the barracks was turned into a primary school. You've got to applaud the attitude of a regime that does things like that.

There's a big billboard near the sea-wall in Havana, pointing towards Miami, that says "Mr. Imperialist, we have no fear of you". I kinda admire that kind of spunk - rhetorical and all as it is, cos if Dubya decided to invade Cuba in the morning, Fidel would be history by the afternoon.

I think Fidel and Che were motivated by a genuine idealism and desire to change the world for the better. Having led the revolution, Che could very easily have sat back on his laurels and served out his time as Minister for Health in Cuba , but instead he toddled off to Bolivia to try and repeat the success and we all know how he ended up. There's a very real sense among Cubans, even today, 40-odd years later, of Che being their lost and lamented icon, the favourite brother who was cut off in his prime. One of the very few sad songs I heard while I was there - and heard several times - was a ballad about him called "Hasta Siempre Commandante". I reckon they still love him for a good reason.

The revolutionary regime practically eradicated illiteracy in the space of a couple of years and poured money into providing a public health service that even has the possibility of generating a lot of "health tourism" revenue for them it's that good.

Or it would be if it weren't for the US blockade. You can't look at the state the country is in today without taking the blockade into account - it prevents them from dealing with their natural trading partner, from acquiring all sorts of equipment, spare parts and technology that are owned by US corporations who are forbidden to sell these things to Cuba.

The blockade, allied to the collapse of the Soviet bloc (Cuba‘s main trading partner), left Cuba fcuked in the early 90s and I think it's only really since then that the rumblings of discontent have started gathering momentum. That's not surprising really, there is appalling poverty in the country and if you don't have some kind of access to tourist dollars, you are rightly screwed.

Another example: according to one old guy we got talking to, the old age pension is 90 pesos a month. There are 26 pesos to the dollar. There are one and a bit dollars to the euro. Go do the maths.

They do. They see tourists and they see a potential lifeline, even a temporary one. Straightforward begging and attempted scamming is endemic. One of the hardest things I had to do was to learn to start saying no to the endless stream of people who’d come up looking for money, even to people whose hard-luck stories were patently genuine. One wee girl, about 12 or 13, came into a bar and asked the Cuban I was with could I give her two dollars to put with the one she had. If she had three dollars she could buy a pair of shoes. If she had a pair of shoes, she could go to school. I said yes to her - she kissed me in gratitude and literally skipped out of the bar. The thought of not being able to say yes to the next person and the next person and the next person made my eyes well up.

When things have got that bad, discontent and dissent is inevitable. The reaction of the regime has been that of every totalitarian regime the world over, left or right: to clamp down heavily. (I’ll come back to the totalitarian bit later - Fidel is president for life.) More than once, people in Havana joked to me that it was the safest city in the world: "There are two million people in Havana - one million citizens and one million policia". And it's true - there is a cop, if not on every corner, then on every second corner.

That's great if you're a tourist - I felt safer on dark unlit streets in Old Havana in the small hours of the morning than I would in Grafton Street. But if you're a local, all those policia have to do something to pass the time so they're forever stopping people and taking their details for the slightest transgression, or for no transgression at all.

Another example: last Wednesday night in Santiago, there were a lot of soldiers about the town, obviously on leave. Soldiers on leave have one thing (among others) in mind. Sitting on a balcony with three Cubans, we watched as the policia stopped and questioned a series of young women for no apparent reason other than the fact that they were dolled up for the night. The presumption was clear: young woman equals prostitute. There’s something gravely wrong with a regime that thinks that way. One of the people I was with was incandescent with rage and it took half an hour for the others to get her to calm down.

No wonder, then, that people look for change - whether regime change or change in their own personal circumstances, it makes no odds as the same motivation lies behind both. Naturally, the locals are too wary to talk openly to tourists about political change. But every night, people line the sea-wall in Havana - the sea-wall that faces Miami - watching the sun set to the west and the look of longing on their faces is obvious.

One lad I got talking to one night - a guy in his early 20s - told me of his determination to emigrate to Miami, even though it meant having to renounce his Cuban citizenship. The mad part was that he was fiercely proud of Cuba and the good side of it, but equally determined to escape the bad side - having to hustle all the time just to cope with the hassle and the grind. The country is full of contradictions like that - some of the areas that you’d think would be ripe for rebellion against the regime are the very ones most festooned in hand-painted declarations of loyalty to that regime. God knows, they’re not being bought off, they’re far too run-down for that to be happening.

But I think there’s a real recognition in Cuba that while material hardship is undeniably and unbearably painful, material things aren’t everything. For example, racial harmony seems to be pretty much absolute - all around, you see people of Latin, black and mixed race and it’s plain that the colour of a person’s skin is utterly irrelevant to them. As I said earlier, practically all their songs sound happy and uplifting - I commented on this to Cubans and they seemed genuinely surprised that I’d even mention it.

Probably the best expression of the whole contradiction of Cuba that I came across was in the Rough Guide - it said that Cubans don’t have the right to vote, but if they did, they’d probably vote for what they have.

don't despair - there are little seeds of hope everywhere. I read in the English-language edition of "Granma", the Cuban government paper, that your House of Representatives has approved an amendment seeking to end the ban on US citizens travelling to Cuba. I haven't a clue what that means in terms of your political process but it sounds like a step in the right direction anyway.

The feeling you described is very similar to something I felt a lot of the time while there - what I'd characterise as "western guilt". I got off the overnight train from Havana to Santiago at one of the two stops along the way, just to have a smoke, and clustered around the door of every carriage were people trying to sell passengers these ham and cheese rolls at five pesos a go. See my earlier post for the exchange rate. I wasn't hungry but if someone was so desperate that they'd meet a train at three in the morning to flog a roll for about 15 cents in our money, I felt obliged to buy a couple.

I don't know where the guilt came from. I certainly didn't cause the poverty. Nor would I have been able to put any sort of a dent in it. As one Cuban woman said to me, "You could give a dollar to each poor person that asked you, but the dollar wouldn't last very long and you'd have nothing left for all the others."

The other part of the guilt related to their illusions of what the outside world is like. I mentioned the lad who dreamed of emigrating to Miami: I didn’t feel entitled to fill him in on some of the less salubrious aspects of life in the west, I had no right to spoil his dream. The same woman was stunned and appalled when I told her that in my city, people sleep in doorways during winter. And at the same time, some of the technology we take for granted is beyond them, for reasons of either cost or control. Mobiles. The internet.

I read here about the RTS protest on Monday. Cycle lanes? Public transport? God they would so love to have our problems! Yes, all those old Chevys and Oldsmobiles in Havana do look so incredibly photogenic and sitting in one with your arm out the window you do feel like James fcuking Dean for a moment. But in Santiago, they don’t have buses, just these old clapped-out open-topped trucks with up to 40 people crammed in the back under a tarpaulin in 30-degree heat - you’d gag on the fumes belched out as they rumble past but those poor sods have to stand there and breathe it in for their whole journey. Lead-free petrol wasn’t invented back when these yokes were built and they’d probably think a catalytic converter is someone who’s changed their religion.

Yet nowhere did I encounter the slightest hint of resentment, let alone anger, directed at me for being one of the very obvious "haves". I couldn't understand that. I just don't buy the notion of the eternally stoical downtrodden, endlessly bearing their crosses with fortitude. Not all of them at once. But something keeps them going. It's not found at the bottom of a bottle of cerveza or rum, the way it would be here. Not once did I see anyone looking a bit p1ssed in Cuba, unless it was when I looked in the mirror while washing my teeth at night. Yet they find solace somewhere.

That brings me back to the music. Now maybe I got it totally wrong and millions of Cubans are just living out their lives in some Caribbean version of “The Truman Show”, where they’re mere extras in a giant Buena Vista Social Club theme park that Fidel has built to rake in the tourist dollars.

But my god, the music is everywhere and it’s infectious and continually uplifting! You walk down one of the narrow streets in Old Havana and the walls are just throbbing with salsa, son and rumba (and also this really appalling Cuban rap which, in all fairness, Fidel should come down very hard on).

Most of the time I hadn’t a bog’s notion what they were singing about but there’s an unmistakable joy in the music, in the harmonies, in the call-and-response and in the loping rhythms. One night I ended up at a gig by this group of seven old guys, they were the third great band I’d seen in three different places that night; the MC got up to announce the end of the gig and these lads just kept on going for another hour or so because they were on such a buzz. It simply didn’t matter that there were only seven people left in the audience because they were just off on one and they weren’t letting it go.

Then after a while you start listening to the layers of the music and thinking about the history of Cuba. Most groups would have two guitars, one of which would be strung in three sets of two strings, rather than six strings an equal distance apart. It’s called a tres and it’s tuned very high but then you start following it and you think, “Hey, that doesn’t sound so different to a lot of African music.” The percussion is also obviously African in origin…

…Oh god, I gotta have a quick digression. Earlier, that same night, I’d seen another group in a different bar and midway through a song, the bongo player went into a solo and sweet jesus, his hands were a blur. Then in the middle of all that, he gets up off his stool and starts waddling across the floor, the bongos still gripped between his thighs and if anything, his playing accelerated. Then he sits down and calls over a woman who was sitting at our table and after some persuasion, she goes over and takes over the solo from him without dropping a beat. Unbelievable.

Anyway, you start thinking about the history of Cuba and there’s an obvious mixture of African slave and Spanish slave-master going on in the music. Then Havana goes and hits you with another whammy of a contradiction because you’re walking down a street one night and hear a crowd cheering in a bar so you go in to check it out and the place is packed with Cubans lapping up an amazing flamenco band. What?!?! They fought a thirty-year war of independence at the end of the nineteenth century to get rid of the Spanish and now they’re revelling in the music of the coloniser. I dunno, it’d be like walking into a jampacked Morris-dancing gig on the Falls Road.

But in all honesty, I think that whatever it is they express through their music (whether as performers or listeners), Cubans have already found a way to set themselves free of the awful crap they have to put up with. There’s a spirit and a contentment about them that we just don’t have. We’ve got all the gizmos and the knick-knacks and yes, we do have a vote, but they’ve got something completely different. Music is a cultural expression of how people feel and after two weeks of watching them, talking to them and listening to them, I think that in many ways, in their heads, Cubans are more free than either Fidel or Dubya could ever make them.

Me mate just bought two holiday homes in Bulgaria. 1 in the ski resort the other by the beach so im sorted for this year

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Originally Posted by Block G Raptor

Me mate just bought two holiday homes in Bulgaria. 1 in the ski resort the other by the beach so im sorted for this year

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Lucky sod, probably cost him 30,000 for both:D.

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Originally Posted by Dublin12

Am thinking of going over to Croatia sometime in May,anyone been?,if so, is it as good as the brochures make it look?

What are your holiday plans this year?,if it sounds good I might change me mind about Croatia

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Bit late but... I am a northern adept, but there's one southern country I have very good memories on as well: Croatia. A must-see. It's very authentic, not spoiled by mass tourism at all. The people are very relaxed and so friendly it's almost unreal. The sceneries are incredible, and the weather is just as fine as in Spain or Italy. I visited the Kvarner Islands twice, and those were amongst the most incredible places I ever went to.

Yes, the Croatian girls are a must-see as well :o My first trip to Croatia was when I was 15 years old and just discovered the fascinating thing that a female body can be... Then the hotel organised a miss contest, and I was front row during the show... No further details needed, or I will labelled a maniac ;)

But anyway, bottom line: Croatia will not disappoint you. BOOK THAT HOLIDAY



My own holiday plans? I have personal issues preventing me from much travelling, though I have two shorter trips coming up.

Within two weeks: Scotland (normally it will the Hebrides)

August: M'era Luna Gothic Festival, in Hildesheim (Germany). 40000 Goths gathered, look very much forward to that!