Mallorca 2009 Chapter 1

MALLORCA

Chapter 1



Another year. Another country. Another almost impossible language to learn! But what a beautiful place! However, I am getting ahead of myself so let me start at the beginning.
This holiday is a bit different because we invited two very good friends to join us in our explorations, and happily they agreed to do so. As they live relatively close to us, we arranged to all fly together, so on the appropriate date we nipped off to fetch a hire car to take us all to the airport and they were dropped off at our house by their family. I had been concerned for some time that the car we had hired would not accommodate four adults, their main luggage for five weeks and their hand luggage, but I was wrong. Our little Citi Golf managed admirably albeit a little breathless up the hills. Once at the airport the car was returned and in no time at all our luggage had been checked through to Frankfurt via Dubai and we were free to wander. Personally, I couldn’t wait to get to Dubai, where the duty-fee shopping is supposed to be so good, as I had set my heart on buying an electronic reader for my self. (For the uninitiated, this is basically a handheld computer which stores electronic books) But it was not to be. Of the two likely outlets, one just looked mystified while the other said that they had had, but were sold out. Oh well, perhaps on the way back!
We came to the conclusion that Frankfurt is quite a boring place to have to spend any time, apart from a little excitement when a small posse of police arrive brandishing machine guns and shooed everyone to one side who was trying to get up to the restaurant floor. We took ourselves off to the other side of the airport for a while and when we returned, all was calm again. We wondered if there was any connection between this episode and the alleged threat from Al Quaeda to attack Frankfurt during the Oktoberfest.
At last our flight was called and we embarked for the final leg of our marathon trip. From my window seat I could watch the luggage being loaded into the plane, by hand and piece by piece, and I was not really surprised to discover that the one wheel on one of our suitcases had been almost wrenched off . Oh well, c’est la vie, and at least it didn’t get lost or left behind.
At long last we reached our destination; weary and grubby, but excited none the less. Picking up our hire car took an interminable time, mainly because we were beaten t the desk by two other couples, but finally we were through and went off to look for our vehicle – a white Citroen C3 – perfect! We quickly unpacked the Tomtom, woke ‘Jane’ from her long sleep and tried to put her to work. To begin with, she was very grumpy and insisted that there was no such place as Mallorca, but we finally won her over and she began to operate in her old cheerful way. She wasn’t too sure about te streets that we were asking for, but eventually seemed to find something and off we set. We had phoned Dale, who lives in the complex and keeps an eye on the apartment, and she had assured us that it should take us about half an hour, and that she would be there to meet us with the keys, so what could go wrong? Well, we missed a couple of turns, for a start, and only much, much later did we discover that there was another place with a similar name on the mainland, and that this was where Jane was valiantly trying to direct us to when she took us all the way to the ferry port in Palma and said “………..and now take the ferry!” By now we were all beyond exhausted and in no mood for games, it was pitch dark and we had simply no idea which direction we were going as we couldn’t even see the sea and keep it on our left. But we reset Jane and this time we got there – two hours after having rung to say we were on the way!
Dale, her daughter and a friend Pat were on hand to hel us carry all our luggage up the 54 steps to the apartment, and when we arrived it was to soft music playing and candlelight, a lovely light breeze coming off the sea, groceries in the kitchen and REAL beds. Once we had been shown where everything was, they all disappeared back to their own apartments and we fell in to bed, still not really knowing quite where we were.
The next morning dawned fair and sunny and we readied ourselves to go and explore. High on the list was the purchase of SIM cards for our various cell phones and modems, but this we couldn’t do as we needed our passports for this, something which I imagine is what South Africa is heading for with this new registration of phones.
So instead, we made some supermarket purchases and then did some sight-seeing.
The main Santa Ponsa beach was quite full, with the sun loungers all laid out in pairs under cute palm-leaf topped sunshades. It is so strange to us to see the lapping gently lapping the shore instead of crashing in as it does on our beaches, but we were pleased to note that the beaches are sandy and not pebbly
On our second day out, having remembered to take the passports this time, we mananged to re-establish contact with the outside world, and thanks to Andre, you are all able to read this.
We discovered a delightful place to have lunch which overlooked the beach and spent a lazy time eating and watching all the activity, deciding that we would definitely return there at a later date.
By the third day, we had all sufficiently recovered from our jet lag to want to be more adventurous and to explore a little further from home. Once again Jane insisted that we wre trying to go to a non-existant place so we set off without her guidance, but generally heading west. We were soon out of Santa Ponsa and into open countryside which is lovely. Quite rough and mountainous in the area that we were heading, with unbelievably stony ground dotted with olive and almond trees. We saw a few sheep and goats but not a great deal of either, and no sin of any other livestock, but perhaps they are all on the eastern side which is apparently flatter and more arable. We stopped for lunch at a little restaurant along the way at a village called Es Capdella, and ate a traditional Mallorcan meal. It was very tasty and we enjoyed it but came to the conclusion that it had been devised to use up stale bread, The basis was two slices off one of those oval cottage loaves, sprinkled with olive oil and covered in tomatoes. With that came a mass of black and green olives , a few tiny gherkins and something that looked remarkably like seaweed, and tasted only salty, and that was your basic open sandwich. Then there were various toppings and we chose the pork, which turned out to be more like thin slices of brawn but which was delicious. Cynthia opted for chocolate cake which turned out to be quite wonderful with gobs of semi-liquid chocolate inside and a vast blob of real cream on the side..
We then drove on to Sant Elm, which appears on our map as San Telmo, so obviously spelling is not very important here. This is a lovely seaside place on the west coast, with islands dotted on the bay and craggy cliffs leading down to the sea in some places. It is supposed to be where King Jaume 1 landed when he came to overpower the locals but as we had already seen another landing place at Santa Ponsa, we think this is an historical fact that gets used by quite a lot of the villages around the coast.
Today is Sunday 4th and we have declared a rest day. Time to do washing, write postcards and do other chores. After today I will try to write more frequently and in shorter missives, but I just had to catch up with all we had done.