The Roller Coaster Ride of Backpacking

Backpacking is like a roller coaster ride. Some days you´re up...somedays you´re down. And somedays your entire car derails off the track and you gripping on for dear life.

Coming into Toledo on Monday, we knew we were taking a chance by not having any accommodations reserved well in advance. But we lucked out and happened to snag a night at the "hastle." We were living high, literally like kings of the castle. There were hardly any other travelers staying at the hastle...it was eerily dead there. So we decided that it´d be safe to reserve an extra night there first thing Tuesday morning. No problem.

After having breakfast Tuesday morning, I approach the front desk, and using my best Spanish, I confidently tell the staff lady "un mas noche, por favor." She looks at me, shakes her head and goes,¨"No. No no no." I look at my buddy Eric, wondering if I really butchered their mother tongue this time. The lady then shows me her bookings for the day...and all the rooms were taken! What the.....??? How could this be? There´s nobody at the hostel right now, there´s over 90 beds, and it´s a Tuesday, not exactly your prime travel day. And how could all the beds magically disappear within a 24 hour period, when plenty were available the day prior?

We hijacked the only available computer at the hostel and started popping in our Euro coins to access the Internet. As we were trying to figure out our future travel plans and accommodations, massive groups of kids and young college kids started piling into the hostel. They just appeared out of nowhere. One of the girls who arrived was wearing a Clemson shirt, so I yelled out "Hey Clemson!" thinking a fellow alum would be more than happy to talk with me. She was mortified. As I started asking more questions, I found out that this group of young students was from Virginia, probably with a church group touring Spain for 2 weeks. They were probably straight out of high school. One girl kept bugging us on how to use an International Calling Card. They all seemed pretty naive. And I wasn´t too happy with them, because they had taken our accommodations for the evening. I tried to extend the American hand of friendship, but after losing my room to these dang ungrateful kids, they were now my sworn enemies.

We didn´t make much progress on the planning...we were trying to find a campground in Cordoba for Wednesday night, but the computer kept crapping out on us, so we finally got so frustrated that we left and decided to access the Internet later that day while exploring Toledo. Turns out, Toledo doesn´t have anywhere to access the Internet. I figured most castles nowadays would be hooked up with all the finer things in life, like wireless internet and TiVo. I guess not.

So we wandered a mile or so out of town and found a campground named "El Greco" to lay our heads. This was supposed to be a 1st class campground, complete with working restaurant, bar, convenience store and swimming pool. My Lonely Planet travel book made a big deal on how the view from the pool was "spectacular." We arrived there, and luckily were able to get a spot to camp. But the restaurant/bar was closed on Tuesdays, the conveniece store was closed, and the swimming pool had been drained for cleaning. But the book was right...the view from the pool was "spectacular." You could see the whole town of Toledo from there. I noticed that the book didn´t mention the plague of feral cats running around the campsite. I was afraid to pet them for fear of catching some nasty disease. Eric and I ended up wandering back into town on a quest to find a supermercado, but at 21:30 on a Tuesday night in a small town, that is a mission impossible. We finally found a 24 hour conveniece store, horded up on sandwiches, fruit and juice and just found a park bench to gorge ourselves silly. We then made the trek back to El Greco in the dark and decided to call it a night.

Wednesday had to have been the low point so far in this trip. Our original plan was to hike back into town and jump a bus heading towards Ciudad Real, then find a connector bus or train to take us to Cordoba for the evening. In Spain, it´s cheaper to ride buses from city to city than to take the train, and most of the Spanish take buses. When we arrived at the bus station, we found a bus service to take us to Ciudad Real, but it was schedule for 16:00...a good 5 hour wait. And I didn´t know what awaited us after that. We could be stuck in the armpit of Ciudad Real since it, too, is a small town. So after some wrangling with Eric, we finally came to a consensus to hop the bus back to Madrid since that seemed to be the hub for all transportation across Spain.

Back at the bus station in Madrid, we changed our plans about going to Cordoba and instead booked a bus for Sevilla (Seville) since it seemed to have more going for it. The bus ride took a total of 6 hours, with a stop-over at some sleazy truck stop in the middle of La Mancha. The bus we took, Socibus, looked pretty good from the outside. Inside, it felt like a rickety airplane about to fall apart at the seams. They had a movie playing on the screen at the front of the bus, but the image kept flickering in and out, and they didn´t have any audio for it, so I gave up after giving it a try for a few minutes. There was some smell eminating from somewhere around me. It smelled like a dirty diaper, but for all I know, it could have been me. When you start realizing that you´re the one that stinks, it´s a pretty low point in your travels.

Getting into Sevilla, we backpacked to the hotspot party hostel in town, Oasis Hostel, hoping we might luck into getting a few beds for the evening. But the snobby Frenchy lady there shooed us away, saying they were booked for next couple of weeks. So we then wandered to a cheap hotel that my book recommended, but it seemed deserted and noone responded to our buzzing. Getting frazzled, we scoured the barrio looking for an internet cafe. The first one we found was full, so we finally found a second one, sat down for half an hour and looked online for places to stay. Luckily, a hostel nearby still had a few beds available. We jumped on that and reserved it for Wednesday night, then reserved a more fun hostel for the next two evenings.

Finding the first hostel, Hostel Urbana, was a chore, especially when it´s 22:00 and you haven´t eaten in 10 hours. Both Eric and I were getting delusional. We finally bumbled upon it, checked in, then wandered the city at night looking for food. I was starting to get to that "Man vs. Wild" point, where I was about to eat anything alive that moved in front of me. We finally ended up at a pizzeria and I ordered a rice dish with vegetables and had a cerveza. It was probably the best meal I´ve had, since I was so famished.

Hostel Urbana was cramped and not much fun. We discovered in the morning that a South Korean girl and her French-Canadian friend had shared the room with us that night. The South Korean was chatty on Thursday morning, but the girl from Montreal wouldn´t get out of bed. She appeared to be hung-over. We ditched the unfun hostel, then proceded over to our new digs at the Triana Backpackers hostel in the Triana barrio of Sevilla. This hostel is filled with Americans, Canadians, and folks from the UK. Plus they have unlimited internet free access (hence my being able to ramble so much with this posting). They even have a rooftop deck where you can sit and drink and enjoy the evening. After the chaos of the last few days, we are finally back on top again, and have sworn to have everything planned a few days in advance.

We spent Thursday wandering Sevilla, looking for camera stores and supermercados. We found the coveted 1 € bottle of wine, which we thought was only legend. But it does indeed exist. Trader Joe´s Two-Buck Chuck in California can´t compete with the 1 € wines. We spent the afternoon seeing "el catedral" in town, which was larger than the one in Toledo. It had a lot of ornate wood carvings inside, and was similar to the ornamentation at Toledo´s cathedral. We climbed the cathedral´s bell tower and were able to look out across all of Sevilla. Eric happened to be standing under the very bell that started going off and probably suffered some ear damage. But the crown jewel at the cathedral was Christopher Columbus´ tomb, held up by four statues acting as pall bearers. It´s amazing the stuff I somehow bumble myself into.

We then checked out the Alcazar Real just south of the cathedral. Alcazar used to be the palace grounds where royalty stayed. It contained beautiful architecture and tiling, with a definite Moorish influence. I hung out in the gardens, listened to the peacocks and pigeons going off, got lost in their outdoor maze, ended up losing Eric, then just wandered back to the hostel to officially check ourselves in. I partaked in my cheap bottle of wine and some microwavable paninis picked up at the supermercado. Not bad for cheap wine made in La Mancha.

We then went out with all the other folks from the hostel to a flamenco bar in town. The girls we roomed with at the previous hostel came as well, so Eric and I spent the evening chatting with them. We then ended the evening at a bar in the Triana barrio, drinking pitchers of sangria and discussing all things Canadian. I somehow confused the girls when I started talking about how Rush is Canada´s biggest band. Neither of them had heard of Rush, which suddenly made me realize that I was dealing with a generational gap type of thing here, and that I really was old. Dang it. I thought everyone knew who Rush was. C´mon...they wrote "Tom Sawyer" and "Closer to the Heart." How can you not know them? It´s a Canadian travesty, I tell ya.