Ahhh. The time has come. I'm finally posting about Mallorca.
Quick run down. About a month back (yeah, I'm very behind...), Lane, Kane, Tyler, Yus, and I flew to Mallorca, a Mediterranean island off of Spain's eastern coast, for the weekend. We met up with Angeline (Je veux que le matin), who had driven many hours from her home in France to Barcelona, and then flown out from there to meet us (although I don't know why she didn't just drive the whole way). What would be a blog post of mine without a disclaimer about it being very long? So here it is: this post is long. Sorry. Now that I've reflected on it a bit, I realized it would've made sense to split this into two posts, and then it wouldn't have taken forever to put together, but we're just gonna move forward and not having any regrets here... :)
We caught the airport bus in the afternoon with our backpacks and bocadillos (except me, who had so conveniently forgotten my bocadillo at home...it was probably liver pâté anyway). Between getting on the bus and boarding our plane, we witnessed a man getting caught sneaking onto our bus (the bus driver was TICKED and threatened to call the policia), a girl around our age ashamedly walking through the airport terminal in a duck suit (unless it was a chicken suit; my memory is failing me), and another girl also around our age screaming her intestines out on her cellphone (coincidentally, she was on our flight both to and from Mallorca). Several hours later, we were walking out onto the tarmac, because RyanAir is an economy airline that sometimes doesn't believe in jetways, and joining the probably-RyanAir-trademarked free-for-all that is choosing your airplane seats. Kane, Yus, and I sat in one row (Kane helped mediate our bickering and fighting), and Lane and Tyler hoarded their Príncipes cookies in the row behind us. When we landed in Mallorca, Yus met up with Angeline, and us bros found the bus (it was the last one for the night, so we were pretty glad we made it) and proceeded to search for our accommodations for the trip, Hotel Terramar. The bus driver told us we had to get out at the last stop on the line, and when we did, we stepped out of the bus to see the Mediterranean and Palma's coastline staring back at us. Needless to say, we were pretty stoked, especially since we had no idea we were exiting the bus almost directly on the beach.
Here are some pictures of the way out to Mallorca, from the bus ride to the airport, to making faces in the airport terminal while waiting for our plane to get assigned a gate, to stepping off of the bus near our hostel.
Our hotel was a two-minute walk from the beach, and was a ridiculously-good deal; free wifi in all the rooms, all you can eat breakfast (definitely one of my favorite parts of the trip; the melocotón jam + croissants was amazing), towel and sheet service, the whole shibang. Definitely recommend it if you're ever going to Mallorca. The only downside was that it was a bit outside of Palma in a town called s'Arenal, but we didn't really have much plans for seeing Palma outside of the first day, so that worked out alright. Well, after getting settled into our rooms, we forged tentative plans (oxymoron?) for the next day or so and hit the sack (I think I stayed up late writing one of the road trip blog posts).
In the morning, we headed into Palma, the biggest city in Mallorca. Actually, I should explain the car situation first. Yus and Angeline had decided to rent a car, and at first weren't going to stay in the same hotel as us. However, the next morning we found the two of them at breakfast at our hotel; apparently they had arrived right after we checked in the night before. Women are so confusing... Anyhow, seeing as they had a car with extra room, and wanted to spend time with us guys (I mean, who wouldn't?! :), we figured we could manage to fit 6 of us in the car. Usually, this wouldn't be so difficult. However, we had a Fiat 500 to work with. For those of you who aren't familiar with Italian automotive makes, a Fiat 500 seats 4 people (not to mention that it's meant for 4 European people). I'm sure you can connect the dots and somewhat have an idea about the amount of free room in the vehicle before and after we got all got into it.
Lane was a trooper and laid across us in the back for a majority of the trip.
Okay, back to the beginning of that last paragraph. Palma. Our plans were to walk around the city for a bit, see the cathedral and any other sights we fancied, and then head to the south of the island to find Cala Des Moro, one of the beaches we kept seeing on Mallorcan postcards.
Quite the good-lookin' city, I'd say.
On the way, we had the great fortune of finding a Dia and buying our food for the next couple days! Nothing short of a God-send :)
During our drive southward, we fared much better finding good radio stations than during our road trip through southern Spain. We even found a really good jazz station and listened to it for a while losing our way within some of the southern Mallorcan villages.
Eventually we found our way towards the general area of the beach we were seeking. Here's the hike down to what we initially thought was Cala Des Moro. It took us a bit of time to actually it, because this first trail we descended took us to a little cove about a tenth of a league (really, I looked up the conversion :) east of our intended destination. However, we decided it'd be a good place to eat lunch, and then afterwards found another trail that took us west.
There we are eating lunch in the top left! We had bought baguettes, meat, cheese, and juice at Dia, so we were set for pretty much the rest of the trip.
Finding the way to the real Cala Des Moro.
And then we saw it: Cal Des Moro, in all her beauty.
The water was more on the freezing side than not, but there was no way we were gonna pass up swimming in water that clear and inviting.
Seeing as the cove faced east, and the sun sets in the west (on most days), we were racing the shade that was slowly building up on the beach as we swam. Once our body temperatures had dropped a medically-significant amount and it looked like shade would conquer Cala Des Moro, we got out of the water, dried ourselves off, snacked on some Maria Dorados, and headed to higher ground to find us some more sunlight.
Here are the vistas we found!
Some of the cliff faces we were scaling had quite the drop below them, so Kane that it'd be wise to cut off the part of his jean leg that had been slowly detaching itself from the rest of his jeans. Then Lane and I bush-whacked a new route out of the ledge we had been sitting on.
Eventually, the time came to head back, so we hit the road and then ate dinner while watching the sunset. We got quite a few stares at our line of backpacks and shopping bags on the ledge.
The next day, wanting to see the north of the island, we decided to head up to Cap de Formentor, a cape known by some of the locals as "the meeting point of the winds," if Wikipedia serves me true (is "serves me true" even an expression?). We drove up a mountain road in our tiny car (which on flat ground would hardly break 120 kmph/~75 mph) to a scenic point with un montón de tourists. It was pretty impressive seeing gigantic precipices that seemingly cut the ocean open. From there, we snaked our way down windy roads that European tour bus drivers were all too eager to descend.
Eventually, we got to kilometer marker 17, which was pretty much the only bit of information we had about a hike we had found online. There was a gravel parking lot at the marker, with more than a few cars, but for the life of us we couldn't find the actual trail that the interwebs had told us about. The only thing left to do was to find another trail! We headed down to the shoreline, which here was anything but peaceful and sandy, threw more than a few rocks (this was a common theme this weekend; throwing rocks is one of the simplest ways to entertain yourself for hours), and then found a hill to conquer. It was so good being able to hike again! That's one aspect of Santa Barbara life that I have (our gramática class will tell you that if I were to use correct Spanish grammar conventions, that would have to read "that I had") definitely missed, so I was really grateful for that afternoon.
The improvised hike begins! We luckily stumbled upon cairns, helping guide us the rest of the way to the top. We even found mountain goats near the peak!
Here's us at the top (it's important to note all the bros with our favorite juices from Dia), and then heading back down to the shoreline (before having to head up yet another hill to get back to the car).
On our way back towards the hotel, we thought it'd be nice to stop by a sandy beach in the North of the island, so we spent a good hour in what I believe was the town of Port de Pollença. I forgot to mention this, but a lot of the names on the island sound different because they're in Catalan (the language spoken in Cataluña, the Spanish autonomous community in the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula).
Anyways, hanging out in Port de Pollença sure was a peaceful and restful way to conclude our day of hiking.
On our last day, Angeline unfortunately had to head out in the morning, so if you're reading this Angeline, stop here so you don't feel bad about missing Cala Pi. We decided to stay somewhat close to our area for the last day because our flight. was that evening, so we searched the world wide web until we found a pretty stellar-looking (that adjective is for you Hannah) beach about half an hour away from our hotel. With Angeline missing, we only had 5 people in a 4-person car (though the extra space could never make up for the loss of our resident French-culture expert). Anyhow, we spent that afternoon laying on the beach, wrestling, throwing more rocks, passing around a broken tennis ball, and swimming (well, just Yus and I on the swimming part).
Cala Pi is really cool because it's a cove that extends pretty far inland. I found a trail that takes you out to where the cove meets the wide ocean blue.
Here's the whole cove!
This lifeguard tower served as an excellent place to dry off after swimming and enjoy the view and the sunshine. It did say that it was for lifeguard use only, but hey, we're Americans and don't know any Spanish! Heh heh heh...
And then we headed back to s'Arenal for one more sunset meal on the beach ledge (this time assisted by McDonald's Euro Menu). Jules wanted to see the marina, so we snuck into the docks of the s'Arenal sailing club (well, I'm not sure if it was open to the public, so I'm just going to pretend we snuck in) and saw the sun dip below the horizon past a plethora of masts and sails. That evening we drove the car back to the airport, turned the keys in at the rental company office (where no one was on duty), and caught our plane back to Sevilla. Ah, I forgot to mention the ensaimada. Mallorca is known for this large pizza-sized pastry called an ensaimada, and my señora had asked for me to bring one back for them. Well, I was skeptical that RyanAir would let me carry it on, since they have such strict rules about
everything, but Maricarmen told me that people carry them back from Mallorca all the time and that it wouldn't be a problem. About that..... Basically, we realized pretty quickly that the Mallorcan RyanAir personnel weren't the kind to be lenient with their rules (Kane had been commanded to find a way to make his backpack smaller), so we slipped the ensaimada (basically a medium-sized pizza box) between my backpack and my pack. Not the most comfortable thing I've done, but it worked, and Maricarmen got her Mallorcan pastry (which wasn't even very good :).
Well, that was our Mallorcan adventure. I wish I had ganas to think of a nice conclusion for this post, but it's 4 am here (don't worry, I took a nap from 1 am til 3 am; these pre-sleep naps have become kind of common for me) and we're meeting up for breakfast tomorrow at this place that overlooks the river at the Puente de Triana.
Tsa luego!
