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.

I woke up at half past six thinking I would catch a taxi to the bus station and travel to Si Satchanalai. Once I finished my breakfast and opened my phone, however, neither of my mobile apps could find any drivers in the area. For a while, I waited by the side of the road hoping that a taxi or tuk-tuk might go by, but to no avail. After a few minutes, I figured I should stop wasting my time and come up with a proper plan to get myself to Si Satchanalai the next day. In the meantime, I would spend the day exploring Sukhothai. Walking down the road, I soon came across a bike rental place, where I borrowed a creaky bicycle for a hundred baht. Although I would go on to physically exhaust myself, I was very happy I had decided not to walk: the distances between the different sites were considerable and there were often no tuk-tuk drivers waiting to pick up tourists at the more distant attractions.

Since it is my last week in Thailand, it is high time that I made a trip north of Bangkok to visit Sukhothai. It is not a trip to undertake in one day, both because of the long journey and because there is a lot to see in the area. Beside the three sites that are co-inscribed on the UNESCO world heritage list (Sukhothai, Kamphaeng Phet, and Si Satchanalai), there is also Phitsanulok, a historically significant city with several interesting attractions. Founded in the thirteenth century as Song Khwae (meaning “Two Rivers”), the city became the seat of the Sukhothai Kingdom in 1378. Song Khwae would retain its prominent status even after Sukhothai’s incorporation into Ayutthaya in 1448. King Trailokanat moved his residence to the city during the Ayutthaya-Lanna War (presumably to be closer to the battlefield) and renamed it Phitsanulok, meaning “The World of Vishnu.” In the sixteenth century, Phitsanulok went on to serve as the seat of the Uparaja (or heir presumptive) of Ayutthaya.

I woke up to an extremely foggy morning. Despite my inn’s prime location at the top of Batad’s rice terraces, I only caught a few glimpses of the terraces below through occasional tears in the clouds. The night before, I had arranged a tour around the terraces for eight o’clock in the morning, but I began to doubt whether I should go through with it as the fog showed no signs of lifting. I considered staying at the inn all morning. It was a cozy place run by a young lady and her mother, and I found the set-up quite charming.

I had a bit of a scare after midnight. The night bus from Manila to Sagada stopped on a mountain road in the middle of nowhere and did not budge for ten minutes, then twenty, then half an hour. As the cars kept moving past us, I wondered what could have happened. Had we run a flat tyre? Had there been a landslide? Either way, what would we do? Would we wait until morning for someone to repair the road or our bus? Would we turn back to Manila? In my groggy state, I eventually noticed that cars were only driving past us from the opposite direction, which meant that we were likely waiting to drive through a narrow pass. After what seemed like an eternity but realistically did not take longer than an hour, the cars stopped coming and it was our turn to go. Our bus then hurtled down the winding roads, which in some places narrowed to the width of a single car.

When I went to sleep at around one in the morning, I set my alarm to half past nine not believing that I could really sleep so late. I expected that even though I was tired, I would still end up waking up at around seven or eight because of my circadian rhythm. My first words upon waking to my alarm, therefore, were “oh my God!” It was not that I was upset but genuinely surprised that my body had finally asked for and given itself the amount of sleep it needed.

My night bus from Manila to Vigan had its ups and downs – both literally and metaphorically. One of its indisputably positive attributes was its one-by-two seat configuration. I sat on the single seat, which reclined quite far, and the monitor in front of me had a USB charging port for my phone. These were already great improvements over my long-haul bus rides in Europe, but there were considerable downsides as well. First of all, the driver only turned off the lights once we were well outside of Manila and all the tickets had been re-checked. Second, it kept getting colder and colder on board, and while I thought that wearing all my spare clothes would provide enough insulation, I still ended up feeling chilly. To that end, I repurposed my pyjama trousers from serving as an eye-mask to becoming a scarf, and shamelessly put my black underwear on my face.

Today was so rainy that I only realised mid-afternoon that my sunglasses were useless. The surface had been destroyed by yesterday’s rain showers, which blurred the view by wearing down the polarised coating in uneven patches. Luckily, I found a big mall during my wanderings through the centre of Manila and bought new sunglasses there. Taking a gamble, I decided to pay for them in cash, as I am almost halfway through the trip and I have not spent anywhere close to half of the quantity I exchanged. Still, I do feel a bit nervous that I might run out of cash in the middle of nowhere at the most inconvenient time.

I woke up early again this morning, as the curtains in my room were too thin to keep the sunlight out. I did not mind too much, though, as I had arranged to borrow a motorcycle at seven o’clock. Of course, the motorcycle dealer – whom the hotel had contacted on my behalf – did not show up at seven but at quarter past, which came in handy because I had not yet finished my breakfast by seven (the café had spent a full half an hour making two waffles).

My final Southeast Asian trip of the year took me to the Philippines. I left Bangkok just before two o’clock in the afternoon on a flight bound for Manila: I could have taken a direct flight to Cebu, but all of them were scheduled for the wee hours of the morning, and I did not want to feel tired given the strenuous week ahead. The plane’s touchdown at Ninoy Aquino Airport gave me my first flavour of Filipino culture. The sound of seatbelt buckles unclasping, overhead compartments opening, and people fumbling about only got louder upon the attendant’s request that everyone remain seated until the plane finishes moving.