At last, the Mezquita in Cordoba!

Friday - Corboda - Finally, we got to see the mosque! (This was the one thing that we ended up missing during our trip three years ago, because we had to return early to get replacement passports after getting robbed.) We walked into the Juderia to find a place for coffee and croissants (inside, because it was chilly). Then into the Mesquita, with its hundreds (thousands?) of pillars and striped arches surrounding a small cathedral.

Afterwards we walked to the Alcazar, where a crowd in fancy dress was waiting to enter, so we figured that we'd better come back later. The Fiesta de Los Patios started today, meaning that people opened their private courtyards for viewing, competing for prizes for the beauty and variety of the potted flowers on display. By the time peole were closing (2pm), the crowd at the Alcazar had dispersed so we could see the palace and gorgeous gardens. Who do you have to be to have your wedding in the Alcazar's chapel? Whoever they were, her dress was lovely.

We made it to the train station in time to catch the 16:29 bullet train back to Madrid, where we went back to the same comfortable hotel. We got to the Finca de Susana restaurant, the place we discovered three years ago with Lauren, in time to make their first sitting, and Monica treated us to a wonderful farewell (to Margy, anyway) meal.

Paleolithic cave paintings!

Thursday - Benaojan to Cordoba - We were very sorry to leave the lovely little Molina del Santo, with a terrace overlooking a pool, gardens, and brook with a waterfall. Their breakfast was the best ever. We drove the few miles to the Cueva de la Pileta, arriving to find 25 school kids ready to enter. The guide kindly let us go at the front of the group and guided in English as well as Spanish. The Paleolithic and Neolithic cave paintings were incredible - the real thing!

When we drove north to Acipino, the road to the Roman ruins was washed out, so we had a long walk in. The amphitheater overlooked piles of rubble where buildings had been, and then a gorgeous view of hills and olive groves. During the walk back to the car we talked to a young American who was living in Ronda, teaching English, who said that it had rained for three months this winter, which is why everything looks unusually green.

The drive to Cordoba was uneventful, with the help of GPS Jack, including and uninspired lunch at a roadside cafe and seeing flamingos in a marsh. We only had to circle the train station three times before we found the rental car return -- not bad. Meg and I took a walk around the mosque and across the newly restored Roman Bridge while the sun set. Monica went sleep early after all that driving!

Off to the mountains!

Wednesday - Sevilla to Benaojan - We packed up and taxied to the Seville train station where we had breakfast and rented a car from an adorable trainee. She was very nervous, and had to run after us twice to have Monica sign additional papers.

We managed to find our way out of town and drove south on the highway to Arcos de la Frontera, our first White Town. We walked its narrow streets, had lunch outside, and looked out over the valley from the miradors. Meg stood in the stone circle where Christians used to exorcize their children before baptizing them -- better late than never.

We followed the narrow road through the mountains, over a pass at 1,100 meters. When we arrived in the tiny town of Benaojan, we couldn't find the hotel. A local gave us confusing instructions and we ended up almost stuck at the end of a dirt road. Thank goodness Monica is a great driver and was able to turn around in someone's driveway, avoiding a tree and a stone wall! When the locals saw us again, still searching, they led us to the inn. We figured they thought we were absolute idiots! We hope they are still laughing about us.

After getting settled in the gireous inn, with gardens, a swimming pool, and little brook with a waterfall, we drove into Ronda to see the incredible 18th century bridge over the gorge that splits the village. After walking along the cliff edge and across the bridge, we had light dinner at the parador, scoring the corner table with a view and loving the duck pate, grilled veggies, goat cheese in puff pastry, and wonderful service.

The GPS ("Jack") took us home, past about 30 construction workers at the spot where made out earlier wrong turn near the inn. More laughter, we assume!

Last day in Seville

Tuesday - Sevilla - We took a taxi to the Plaza de Espagna, the outrageous huge tiled semicircular space built for the 1926 exhibition. Unfortunately, it was under construction, so we couldn't rent rowboats in the little moat. But the tilework was incredible. Each of Spain's 50 states has a tilework picture. The day was gorgeous -- apparently when the weather report predicts rain, they are only kidding.

We walked to the Cathedral, the largest Gothic cathedral in the world, and climbed the 34 ramps up the Giralda tower to get a view of the city. The place is so big that it has all the spiritual feeling of a bus station. The architecture has a little bit of everything Gothic -- enormous and impressive.

Lunch was a wonderful Morrocan feast in a restaurant that turned out to be around the corner from our hotel. In the evening, we walked along the Guadalquivir and watch the crowds over a truly inferior caipirinha, which Meg purchased for the three of us. Maybe Meg or Monica will remember what we did for dinner!

Second day in Seville

Monday - Sevilla - We slept late despite a small dog somewhere in the neighborhood that started barking at about 8am.

We went to the Flamenco museum, which explained about the various styles of Flamenco dance. We signed Meg up for a lesson tomorrow, since she's taken classes in ballet and tap. A massage as on Monica's list of things to do, so we (eventually) found the nearby Arab baths and signed Monica up for a bath and massage tomorrow.

We took a taxi to the bull ring for a tour, but we realized that restaurants would close soon (they close from 3 to 8), so we went to the nearest restaurant for a quick lunch. We had a lovely lunch with grilled vegetables - including more grilled artichoke hearts with ham than we could eat.

The tour of the bull ring was led by a woman with the flattest delivery we've ever heard. It sounded as though she had memorized the entire tour -- in both Spanish and English -- phonetically. Luckily, the bull ring and museum were pretty cool anyway.

We walked across the Guadalquivir River bridge to the neighborhood of Triana, and saw lots of ceramic studios. I thought about buying tiles to go between the kitchen counters and the windowsills but didn't see anything worth the hassle of lugging home.

In the evening, we went to a flamenco show that was short but good. We stopped for ice cream on the way home. We like the idea of having a large lunch and a small dinner (and who ever said that ice cream isn't dinner?).

We arrive in Seville

Sunday - Madrid and Sevilla - After a noisy night of cars honking and people yelling, we remembered the drawbacks of downtown hotels. We had breakfast at the Atocha train station after saying hi to the turtles in the huge rain-forest-like atrium. The AVE train to Sevilla took 2.5 hours and was quiet and fast.

We took a taxi to the Hotel Montecarlo, near the Puente Isabel and the bull ring. We wandered around a bit and had a lovely outdoor lunch in a small plaza, with little bundles of grilled asparagus wrapped in ham, and little steaks with Roquefort. It was just barely warm enough for us to want to sit outside.

The Alcazar was amazing, a palace built on top of an old fort by a Christian king in a Moorish (Mudejar) style. After seeing the Moorish architecture in Grenada during our last trip, it was fascinating to see a the mixed Moorish-Christian style.

Then we walked around the Barrio de Santa Cruz, the old Jewish quarter, with incredibly narrow streets that were darned confusing. We bought tickets for a flamenco tickets for tomorrow. After resting at the hotel, we had dinner at lovely formal taverna. The appetizers were fantastic, but the main courses were disappointing. Meg got "black rice" for an appetizer, which I'm pretty sure was rice with little pieces of squid and that the black was from squid or octopus ink, but she chose not to think about it.

Margy, Meg and Monica go to Spain

Saturday - Madrid - Meg and I arrived after about four hours of sleep on the plane and took the Metro to the Hotel Prado right near the Plaza Santa Ana. Monica arrived soon after. It's suprisingly cool here, a little cooler than Vermont. Rain is predicted for the entire week, but it's mainly just a bit cloudy.

After settling in, we walked over to the Plaza Mayor to show Monica. (We were there three years ago.) We had a disappointing lunch in the basement of a restaurant at the Plaza Major because it was too cold to sit outside. That's partly because although we love the idea of tapas, in reality, it usually comes down to excellent smoked ham on bread, or fried potatoes.

Since Meg and Monica will have time to go to the Prado next week, we went to the Centro del Arte Reina Sofia for modern art, especially Dali and Guernica. The museum is a huge old building around a courtyard, where we recharged our brains between Dali and Picasso.

We had a tapas-style dinner at La Trucha, which included trout, eggplants, and garlic shrimp. And we managed to stay up to a decent hour, so we were tired enouhg to sleep through the night and wake up on Spain time.

Going through the Panama Canal

This was really fun, but I'm too tired to blog in detail.

Started at Gamboa dredging station. Odd pitch from pastor of church there; bought his book anyway because of his work in prison ministry.

Got on Isla Morada - an old wooden boat built in Maine, owned by Al Capone, then Steve McQueen.

Saw lots of big ships in Gatun lake.

Saw the Culebra Cut. Have a picture of a massive passenger liner going through the cut. The cut is twice as high as the ship was. They moved an amazing amount of rock.

Went under the Centennial Bridge. 220 Million Dollar bridge. Looks beautiful. How come the crappy replacement for the Crown Point bridge is going to cost 175 million? It's a lot less bridge.

Went through the locks. Not dramatic, but pretty neat.

Dad had a good time - actually, we all did.

Jimmy, the tour guide on the boat was an impressive personality. Perfectly fluent in English and Spanish - idiomatically, and with an encyclopedic knowledge of the canal.

Got off the boat at the spot where we rented the pedi-bike.

Back at hotel - ran in the gym - another folkloric show which would have been annoying had not the kids doing it been so earnest and put so much work in to it.

Here are random pictures.

Panama 3 - Porto Bello, Colon, Gatun

Our first day out of Panama City, we left on the bus this morning for Porto Bello, on the new Camino Norte connecting Panama City to Colon. This is a relatively lightly travelled (at least while we were on it) four lane divided highway that apparently cut travel time from Panama City to Colon from 3 hours to 1 and change.

Most of the way to Colon, we turned off to the old city of Porto Bello. After calling at Porto Bello, Columbus moved down the coast to Nombre de Dios to establish the original Spanish customs facility for the new world. After various pirate depredations, shipwrecks on the coral reefs, and the realization that it was difficult to defend, in 1597, the Spanish moved the customs site to Porto Bello.

Porto Bello is easily defended, at the head of small narrow bay, with mountains all around as look-out points. Nevertheless, it was attached seven times by pirates, most noteably Francis Drake, who died there and was buried at sea in a lead coffin. Despite the large amounts of treasure retrieved from those waters, his coffin has not been found.

Porto Bello is a dead town. Somewhere along the way, a "black Christ" destined for Cartagena was unloaded there, and it never left. It has since become a major pilgrimage site. The original three forts (on either side of the bay and at the customs house) were reconstructed in the 1700s after Vauban's designs, though never completed since by that time the importance of the Spanish trade had dwindled.

All that's left today is the customs house and the remains of the forts, and the black Christ. It fascinates me that the Spanish didn't leave more behind. Compared to Lima or Rio de Janeiro or Boston or New York, all of the wealth flowed through Porto Bello, and none of it stayed - not for artisans or tradespeople.

The museum has a short video - very good history overview. The church is still accessible. The ruins of the forts are scattered about. Other than that, it is almost the caricature of a dead Caribbean town. There was puppy lying on the cement floor of the artisan's market. Zac fell in love with it and has commented on it several times - "Sooo cute...." I would have liked to spend more time there just getting in to the total slowness of the place, having a soda at the road-side stall, looking through the market, etc. But you really have to get in to the "stopped" nature of the place. There are no beaches to speak of. Pictures to follow.







Then on to the city of Colon itself, a spot apparently visited by Columbus on his last trip to the Americas, though the city was not founded until 1850. Apparently Caravan was the only tour company housing tourists in Colon, and you can kind of see why. Though there are a couple of nice hotels, they are oriented towards the Free Trade Zone business people, casinos, and cruise ships. Even by my relatively relaxed standards, I'm not sure I'd walk around after dark there. There are Tourist Police everywhere.

We ate at a Radisson - a perfectly nice buffet, but I was surprised by the police presence in the lobby. Turns out the head of the Tourist Police was meeting with the owner of the hotel about the security situation.

If you followed the jump to the Wikipedia "Colon" article you have a sense of the situation there. In Colon itself, the public housing apartment blocks are just about as grim as any I've ever seen. But outside Colon, on the way to Porto Bello, we passed through two or three small towns with very neat subdivisions of working-class housing, overall giving the impression of a tidy thriving community. That's sort of the "Costa Rica" part of Panama. Which makes the situation in Colon all the more puzzling.

Caravan seems very concerned to support the local arts scene, and commissioned a Colombian designer to do contemporary fashions based on Kuna Molas. It turns out the hospitality director at the Radisson is the mother of the ex-Miss Panama, who in turn runs a fashion school. So this was an opportunity for the students to practice modelling for an audience - us. It was a little surreal, but I got one or two pictures (it was against the light).

They also did some local dancing featuring last year's winning Carnival costumes. Overall, it was pretty cute.





We went to the Gatun locks, where there does not appear to be a visitor center, which is a pity. I did get some shots of the new construction for the new locks, and we saw a tree sloth on our little walk.

Then finally on to Radisson in the rain forest. Not quite as exotic as it sounds, but very nice and quite new - built around an existing golf-course. I went out for a run around the golf course. The front-desk attendent was very nice, but didn't know about how far it was. She said it usually takes out 45 minutes. I wanted to kid her that she must be a fitness coach, because it took me exactly 45 minutes, with some walking thrown in because it's VERY hilly and VERY VERY humid. I also did see the evening passenger train from Colon to Panama City go by - locomotive at each end and 6 passenger cars.

Zac and my dad and I swam in the eternity pool that the hotel has - I'd never been in one. Kinda cool. Here's the view from our room, including a little peek at the Centennial Bridge:

Panama day 2 - Jordan Sr. Sees The Canal

Today was pretty simple: we went to Panama Viejo, and then to the Miraflores locks on the canal.

Panama Viejo was the location of the city from 1516 when it was founded until 1675 or so when the Spanish governor, or Captain James Morgan, depending on which story you believe, ordered it burned. In the case of the governor, the motive was to keep it out of the hands of Morgan; in Morgan's case there is no obvious motive.

The site was deserted for a couple of hundred years, and has only been researched and restored recently. Really, it's a lovely park with a bunch of walls and the outlines of the original cathedral. Most noteworthy is the tower formerly attached to the cathedral and also used (ineffectively, it seems) as a lookout tower.

Dad rather ill-advisedly decided to climb to the top of the tower after telling Zac and me that he wouldn't. But he seems to have survived.




There's a small museum associated with Panama Viejo - worth perhaps a bit more time than we gave it, but only because I'm the kind of person who reads all the exhibits. It did have a small model of Panama Viejo, which I'm hoping Zac got a good picture of.

Lunch was on the third floor of the Miraflores Locks museum, with ships passing literally right off the balacony. It was hard to eat with all the excitement going on. I got a limited number of pictures before the battery on the camera died (both batteries). And some video of ships moving very slowing into the locks.


The locks really are a place some of us could stand around all day watching the ships go by. We have many unanswered questions about the locks, like why are there two chambers on the Miraflores locks? Wouldn't one do? And why are there two doors at each end of each lock?


One would have hoped such questions would have been answered by the museum, which is rather slick, but pretty low on information. The visitor's center does have a nice auditorium in which they play a rather lame movie about the canal. Better they should have bought a Discovery Channel or History Channel show and edited it down.

Still, the museum is fun and does provide some background, like the fact that the French moved about 1/4 of the materiel needed to excavate the canal, the the Americans the other 3/4. And that Walter Reed, of Army Hospital fame, collaborated with the Cuban(?) scientist who figured out that mosquitos carried yellow fever. A massive public health campaign (spraying, eliminating standing water, etc) eliminated the problem in Panama. No mention of Malaria, though.

In the evening we had dinner at the hotel (which is a pretty decent though slightly disorganized buffet), and the Caravan folks had arranged for a group of folk-dancers to do a little display of Panamanian dances. They were enthusiastic, and it was pretty good.


The people with us one the tour are far nicer than they have any right to be. As usual, if I'm willing to let my pre-conceptions go, people are pretty nice. Most are somewhat more outgoing than I would be (particularly the older women - I think there are a certain number of husbands who are being dragged along). But all whom we have encountered are perfectly fine conversationalists, so it's a pleasant group to hang around with.

Panama day 1

We arrived at 10 pm after a long (5:30 hour) flight. It was long enough that the fact that the in-flight entertainment didn't work was in fact rather tedious. Continental has a system like Jet-Blue's Direct TV except that they charge for the movies and cover the lower right part of the screen with an ad until you pay. No one in coach could get their credit cards to charge.

By unhappy chance, I selected the one row on the plane that does not have a window, so we didn't even get that bit of entertainment. Continental listed the food as a "snack" but it was really rather substantial hot sandwiches and a salad, rendering it rather superfluous that we had a supper at the concourse diner (really good vanilla malteds) and bought snacks for the plane.

In the end I was glad we switched from the back to the front of the plane because it vastly decreased the amount of time it took us to go through immigration. The line behind us was long.

I noticed at the terminal that Panama smells like Latin America - what ever that means. But it does smell different from the U.S. Just as Europe does.

An uneventful cab ride through the dark outskirts of the city led us to our very nice hotel. Rather than pay AT&T $2.30 per minute to call home - as Di insisted we do despite my assurances that if the airplane crashed, it would make the news - I broke out the computer and Skyped margy's cell phone.

Sunday we slept in, had a fine breakfast buffet at the hotel, and after some confusion about changing rooms (as we had arrived a day before our tour began), we decided to go to the Calzado Amador - a peninsula created by fill from the canal excavation, connecting a number of islands on the east side of the city.

Recall that Panama runs basically East-West at this point, with the Pacific to the South. A little negotiation with the cabbie revealed that the Calzado Amador is referred to locally as "el cau-way" - that would be "causeway" to English-speakers.

We rented a two-person-powered pedal cart and spent a hour and a half pedalling up and down the causeway, including a stop at the yet-to-completed Frank Ghery bio-diversity museum,of which we seem to have neglected to take any closeups. Planned opening: end 2011


Zac and I worked pretty hard in the heat, and I was ready for some refreshment. Panamanian beer is all light lagers, not particularly my favorite. But at the Greek place we found overlooking the water, some hummus and a fried corvina (cod?) was very refreshing.


Returning to the hotel, in the end we're not changing rooms. Dad's napping and we're waiting for the 6pm tour get-together.

All in all, a much more laid back vacation than we're used to.

Blog Hiatus

Much water over the dam in our lives, so this is a place-holder post where I'll try to catch up. Long long story short - Zac and Jordan and Jordan Sr. are in Panama working through Jordan Sr.'s bucket list. Posts on the Panama trip to follow.