My Travel Adventures

My train left Málaga as scheduled at 7:30 in the morning, calling at Antequera and Córdoba before reaching Madrid at half past ten. I had an hour to kill until my friend Victoria arrived from Barcelona, so I took a short walk from the train station, passing by the Lope de Vega House Museum on the way to the Metr ópolis Building. From the eastern end of the Gran Vía, I looped back along the Cibeles Fountain, and we met at a brunch restaurant close to the train station. A long queue, I noticed, was snaking its way along the Museo del Prado, so we decided to visit it first thing in the morning the next day rather than in the afternoon.

With all tickets to Alhambra and Granada’s other main attractions sold out, my expectations for the day’s trip were minimal. I would, I told myself, have to come again anyway, so I might as well treat this trip as an opportunity to prospect for a future visit and eliminate a few minor sites on the list.

I woke up at six o’clock in the morning with a burning desire to test the public transport network in the greater Málaga area. My mum’s house lies around forty minutes by foot from the centre of Sayalonga, and I read that there are four regular departures for Málaga on weekdays. The bus stop was not particularly easy to find. It is marked accurately on Google Maps, but there are no evident markers or noticeboards nearby. I only became sure that I was in the right place when a fellow passenger came to stand beside me. To my great surprise, however, the bus arrived by this roadside stop in a Spanish village on time, and it reached Málaga just a few minutes behind schedule.

On the 26 th we made a short trip to Málaga. I hesitate to call it a day trip, as we only reached the city at noon owing to forgetfulness and general malaise. We made our first stop at the Moorish Castle of Gibralfaro, which served as a good introduction to the history of Málaga. The city was founded around 770 BCE by the Phoenicians, who named it Malaka – a name that either derives from the word for salt or the word for trading post. Although the Phoenicians were the first to build fortifications on the hill overlooking Málaga, the current fortress dates to 929 when the Caliphate of Córdoba was founded. The name Gibralfaro traces its origins to this period: the first part of the name is likely a butchering of “jabal,” the Arabic word for mountain, and the latter part comes from the Greek word for light. The fortress was one of the last Moorish footholds in Spain, only falling to Ferdinand and Isabella in 1487.  

For Christmas, I visited my mum at her new home in Sayalonga, a mountain village to the east of Málaga. Reaching this village is no easy task: it takes almost an hour’s drive from the airport, and the last stretch is composed almost exclusively of winding and steep roads. I spent the 23 rd and 24 th participating in the joint efforts to prepare for Christmas Eve by making sweets and hanging decorations. On the morning of the 25 th , I decided to explore the neighbourhood and take the 45-minute walk to the centre of Sayalonga.  

Not long after my flight from Sukhothai landed in Bangkok, I called myself a Grab cab to the river and took a final tour of the city that had been my home for the past five months. I began on the pier across from Wat Arun and noticed that the winter sun was casting harsher shadows on its sides than I remembered. I then walked to the Grand Palace without paying for the tickets and walking inside: I merely strolled all the way to the gate and back again, weaving my way through the crowds of inappropriately clad tourists as they scrambled to buy trousers with elephant prints. I also remembered I had never taken a good picture of the City Pillar Shrine, so I tried my luck after eating some pad thai at a nearby restaurant.

I originally intended to visit Si Satchanalai by bus, but a few considerations made me change my mind. Firstly, I could not find the bus timetables on the internet. The receptionist at my hotel even insisted there was no bus at all, but I did not believe her, as the bus I rode from Kamphaeng Phet to Sukhothai had the words “Si Satchanalai” written on its side. Still, I did not want to wait at the station for an hour or two before catching this likely infrequent connection. Secondly, while I was doing my research on the sights in Si Satchanalai, I realised that some attractions were a bit far away from the nucleus of the historical park.