Tunnels

Ever wondered how Madeira produces so much wine? It's the grapes! Look at the size of them, just hanging there over the streets, a single grape can fill 2 bottles.

Did you know that experts have warned people not to use hotel kettles to clean their underwear? That means that not only is that actually a thing, but it happens enough that experts have needed to warn people not to. Seriously, how does someone even think to do that? And why not just fill up a sink with the already boiled water? I didn't even know that putting things into a boiling kettle was a thing until someone said that you shouldn't boil eggs in a kettle a few years ago. That one surprised me and also seemed a little bit ingenious if it works, but this one disgusted me.

Presumably the people doing it don't also use it for it's intended purpose, so it seems like a totally self centred thing to do. "Well I don't drink tea or coffee, so this can just be a tiny underwear washing machine", no consideration for the people who might need to use it in the future. Apparently it doesn't even do a good job of cleaning the underwear, so all you have is hot wet pants out of the bargain.

We have a tiny travel kettle that we bring on holiday if we don't think we're going to have a kettle. It just about fills 2 mugs when it's full, but it's enough for a short period (Not drinking tea is not an option, I feel like I need it to live!). In light of these revelations, that policy has been updated to include every holiday. Leaving the hotel kettle free to wash my underwear.

So this year, we thought we would go on an island holiday, after a bit of shopping around, we settled on the Portuguese island of Madeira and in doing so, single handedly reduced the average age of people on the island of Madeira for 1 week. That's only a half joke, we were asked by a couple in a cable car if we weren't a bit young to be in Madeira. We were also in the cable car, we weren't just passing underneath and looked so out of place that we prompted a shouted question from the sky. That would have been pretty aggressive and may have made us feel unwelcome.

The cable car was taking us up a hill at the time, Madeira is pretty much just hills, walk for a couple of minutes in any direction and the road either becomes almost impossibly steep for anyone not actually out for a hike, or it leads to a tunnel through the hills that you cannot actually see the end of. Of course you are going to walk through the tunnel because that is a much more appealing prospect than turning around and demonstrating to any passersby that you don't know where you're actually going and you will squeal with delight when the sunlight starts to pour in as you round the curve and you realise that the tunnel doesn't continue across the entire island for some reason. Even though there was no indication at the entrance that the tunnel was almost infinite, you still weren't sure until you saw the other end. Of course that tunnel will just lead to a big road junction and the only logical direction to take is through another seemingly endless tunnel and although this one will have signs on the wall indicating the length of the tunnel, you will still wonder if for some reason the 'M' stands for Miles instead of Metres and if the other end of the tunnel just leads to another road junction and you will be forced to walk through another tunnel and then another for the rest of your lives because you can't work out how to leave the unending maze of tunnels and you only saw other pedestrians in the first tunnel and the cars are going by too fast to stop anyone and ask for directions, which of course you would never do anyway because in spite of the evidence to the contrary you will still believe in your own sense of direction winning through and delivering you back to civilisation eventually.

Or not, I don't know how you spend your holidays.

The cable cars brought us up to Monte, Monte has a Botanical gardens, which you can see pictured where I have just crossed some little stepping stones to get to a tiny room which had absolutely nothing in, the room seems to exist purely to be at the other side when you cross the stepping stones. I'm not entirely sure what I had hoped would be over there, but what you can see in the picture is pretty much all there is to it.

The best thing about Monte though and the main reason for taking the cable car up there (and not purchasing the return journey even though the return journey is less than 50% more than the one way journey) is the optional mode of transport back down the hill, the apparently quite famous toboggan ride! (Here's a link: http://www.madeira-web.com/PagesUK/monte-toboggan.html). You get to sit in a basket and be dragged down a hill by 2 men dressed for a game of boules. The toboggan brings you down about half way and there is a choice of a taxi down the rest of the way or just walk down the rest of the way. Naturally we walked, it was downhill, how hard could it be? Quite hard as it turns out, but we made it.

The other main activity of note (apart from the Kakuro puzzle book I bought especially) was the Catamaran trip, we've done Catamaran trips before, but this was the first time we actually saw Dolphins.

The Drive

What the crap is this? How do I move the lever? And can anyone tell me what the L stands for?
Also, my left foot and to a lesser extent, my left hand feel a bit lost, what are they supposed to do?

These were all questions I asked myself when climbing into my shiny new rental car. I hadn’t specified a transmission type, so I guess that gives you an automatic as standard. I was genuinely a bit flummoxed as to how to move the lever at first (as it turned out, I had to hold in the foot brake to move it). The L is a low gear for steep hills and towing and the left limbs just needed to relax and let their opposite number do all the work for once, except for you, you should be up here too, 10 and 2 my friend.

A bonus mid-year trip for us, we tried and failed to get Glastonbury tickets and found ourselves with a surplus of holiday days. After a bit of shopping around we found a couple of cheap flights to Dublin, which was perfect by virtue of being so close.

Just while I mention the flights, I thought I should mention Ryanair, who unsurprisingly due to it being Ireland, had the cheapest flights, so were who we had booked with.
A few years ago, it became law that all passengers had to be allocated seats when they checked in for their flight (prior to this, on budget airlines it was a bit of a free-for-all and in some cases a mad scramble to get in the queue by people trying to make sure they sat together). All in all, the change is quite positive as you have the safety reasons I presume they did it for (to balance the plane) and that mad scramble to get in a queue has gone as everyone already has a seat.
Because of this change, most airlines now have an early check-in option where you can pay a bit more to pick your seat if you want to guarantee you sit together or you can wait for the free check-in and your seats will be randomly allocated, but they cannot guarantee they will be together if the plane is already pretty full. That’s how it works with most airlines nowadays, Ryanair has a slightly different policy to everyone else, in that if you don’t pay to pick your seats, you definitely will be separated, it’s not that they don’t have any seats together, because after the allocate the seats a planes length apart, they once again offer to let you buy the neighbouring seat. So Ryanair have actually put a price on sitting together. That price is only a few pounds, but after the underhanded tactics, that becomes a few pounds too many (also, for a 40 minute flight, I think I can handle being by myself). I wasn’t the only one, no-one near me seemed to know their neighbours either (and there are stories of parties of 15 being separated across an aircraft: http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/news/travel/2017/06/ryanair-sits-hen-party-in-fifteen-separate-rows-as-outrage-over-seating-policy-grows-)
It shouldn’t really be surprising, Ryanair were the masters of the hidden fee before they were banned and I have heard of them wanting to introduce a toilet charge and an extra charge for heavy people. I just wonder if this policy differs at all with families and if their booking processes would ever leave by themselves too? Possibly it is different, but it wouldn’t surprise me.

So, Ireland and that rental car, we went with the rental car just due to the price of accommodation in Dublin, at the cheapest end of the scale was about £200 a night, but about ½ an hours drive north is Laytown where we found a great little B&B called Tara House for less than ½ that (which we actually forgot to pay due to arriving really late and leaving really early – You will be glad to know we have since settled that debt, it would be a little strange to be sharing the story if we hadn’t), also, in Ireland they drive on the right (by which I mean the left) side of the road, so I knew I could drive there without confusion. OK, I admit, there is nothing inherently wrong with driving on the right, lots of people do it and probably find us really strange, but the left (by which I mean… wait, no I was already using the direction then, carry on) is the right side for me.

Having the car (however confusing the automatic transmission was to start off with, and you, leftie, what did I say? Get back on that wheel! 10 and 2!) was great as it meant we didn’t just have to spend our time in 1 city and in fact only actually went into Dublin City Centre once, here’s me in Dublin Castle to prove it (I’m not that pair of girls on the right or that couple sat in the distance, I’m on the left of this picture. Though one of those girls does seem to be looking at the person taking the photo, as if wondering why they are being photographed, you’re not! It’s me, over here. It’s really hard to get pictures with no-one else in them, though now I have put a focus on them, I’m wondering if I am supposed to have blurred the faces since I don’t have their permission to put the photo online? If they get in touch, I’ll take it off or blur it (the chances of that happening since I know they aren’t one of the one people I know to read this thing are almost astronomical, but just in case they do find it somehow, Hi! I hope you had a nice holiday / trip / day out)

There are lots of nice places to go and things to do nearby, we went to a place called GoQuest, which is a bit like a cross between the escape games we love so much (see Riga, Budapest and my last 3 birthdays – not blogged about – for proof) and the crystal maze, where there are loads of games and a 90 minute time limit, there were some games we couldn’t do as we there were only 2 of us, but we were Team Corndogs (of course) and we scored 19 points (quite respectable for a 2 person team they said).

There are some nice little towns nearby as well, like Swords, where there is a castle that is slowly being restored back to how it was built, they have rebuilt the front wall and a chapel and… actually, you know what, I’m going to allow this picture to pass without comment.

There’s also Malahide, which really we just used as a place to park the car while we took the train into Dublin, but it’s a nice little seaside town with a harbour and we came back to Malahide for our evening meal that day too. And Howth, which is a nice quiet little place, where (excitingly) it is free to park, obviously (I pretend) that’s not the main reason to spend a day there.

So we were free to explore and see the area at our own leisure, which was nice and we visited Ireland without any home alone-esque running for the plane, which was also nice. But when we came back, I was faced with this. What the crap is this?

Monkeys!

"It's crazy, no?"
This was the opinion of a Costa Rican taxi driver on the fact that the sun sets at different times throughout the year back home, because in Costa Rica, the sun sets at about 5:45. Every day. Imagine how blown his mind was when I told him there are some places that have days with no sunlight at all.

This holiday left me with a proper conundrum in relation to the blog, not one of those made up conundrums like what colour pin to use in the map, but a proper one as this holiday didn't even fit with the name of the blog. The address of the blog has always been europeanmusings.blogspot.com and the title at the top has always said "adventures in europe" having been initially created to talk about a single trip I took 10 years ago, the name and address has always remained accurate with all of the subsequent holidays as I'd still never left the continent before (Actually, technically I have as Turkey is in both Europe and Asia, but I still consider that to be Europe so that still fit).

Costa Rica isn't close to being in Europe, Not being as many people assume a part of Spain, but over 5,000 miles away in Central America. The options seemed to be, don't write about it (I don't understand what you mean), make a new non-european blog (Surely you already have enough blogs?) or change the name and address of the blog (I have no further comments on that option, that seems logical to me). Having pondered on the website issue for a moment and decided that I would just change the name of the blog, so the address is now travel.wannacorndog.co.uk and the title is changed to "A Travel Blog". Now it can be used for any holidays at all, it's so generic that I won't even have to change the name when they start selling seats on the easyrocket.

This year we decided to have a special holiday, where we not only went further away but for longer and on a chartered flight with in-flight films and everything.

We stayed in a small town on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica called Quepos, mainly chosen because the airbnb we found there had lots of pictures of monkeys on it's advert pages. As it turned out, the monkeys were not snapped on one particularly lucky day, Most days while on our balcony or in the pool we would be visited by large troops of either White Faced Capuchins (referred to by locals as the Cost Rican Mafia, one distracts you, the rest rob you) or Squirrel Monkeys.

You can't talk about Costa Rica without talking about the wildlife, it's one of the main reasons people go there and with good reason, the biodiversity is incredible. At home at the right time of year, we might occasionally see squirrels, hedgehogs or rabbits which don't get me wrong is endlessly exciting when it happens, last year when blue tits nested near our house, we were fascinated by it, but in Costa Rica you can see Monkeys and Sloths (not from our apartment but there was one we could see above the pavement next to the zip-coaster in Manuel Antonio), we saw macaws and a toucan and lizards, the lizards are so much bigger than you find in Europe, here you get Iguanas.

The next town over from Quepos is Manuel Antonio, they're both very small and incredibly close together, that it's almost pointless them being separate towns, but they are because they both contain all 4 ingredients of a town in Costa Rica (School, church, bar and a football field - obviously). Manuel Antonio is basically one big hill, so to get there it still makes sense to take the bus (plus  it only costs about 50p). We travelled here on our first Monday to visit the National Park, the parks quite small at just a few kilometres squared but it is quite well known so it's a popular tourist destination. It also turns out to be closed on Mondays, so we failed, there's quite a nice beach at the same end of the town, so it wasn't a completely wasted day, plus we decided to wander back up the hill just until we found a restaurant to get a bit of food. Unfortunately, it also turns out nothing seems to be open in the day, there is nothing like walking uphill in the blistering heat to make a couple of miles seem infinite.

On attempt 2 the following day, we actually made it inside the national park, the best bit was probably sitting in the picnic area and watching Capuchins steal people's lunches, just to live up to that Mafia comment.

It wasn't just Monkeys (though to look through the photo's on our camera you'd be forgiven for thinking it was just 12 days of hanging around with Monkeys, don't you try and pretend that doesn't sound like a great holiday). There's was loads to do while we were there and the lady that ran the apartment complex was really helpful and would help book us on to whatever activities we wanted, so we had a go at a few new things, like white-water rafting.

I nearly had a go at white-water rafting once, in 2008, me and Titch were in Bad Gastein where it was one of the available activities, we chose instead to do canyoning, which was basically the same thing, just without the boat, since then I have thought I'd like to give it a crack some, but just never got round to trying it (it's not like it's been a dream or anything, this would have been quite easy to at any time, you can do it in Wales if you really want).

We decided to just do the more gentle rafting course, so there was very little of falling out the boat (there was just one occasion where that almost happened) but it was fun, the guide would try and make us surf the waves (which we were not good at) and ride down while spinning like a washing machine (which we were). They had a professional photographer out taking photographs, which we had to pay for if we wanted them, it's probably not a big reveal to say that we did buy them as I've probably already put at least one next to this block of text. We decided that we would probably miss having the photos more than the money, we could get more money, it's much harder to make copies of photos you don't have...

Then 2 days later we had a go at horseback riding in the town of London (named after a small little known English city), riding horses takes some getting used to, but it can be immensely satisfying when he does what you want him to.

What was quite good about the trips we went on, was how they all included food as part of it, it was generally the same thing, for breakfast it would be Gallo-pinto, which is rice and beans, usually with scrambled egg, then for lunch, it would be Cassado, which is... rice and beans, plus veg and chicken or fish, there are a lot of rice and beans in Costa Rica.

On our way back to the airport, we decided to fly from Quepos airport back to San Jose as it took about 20 minutes rather than the 3 hour taxi and actually cost about the same. It wasn't an option on the way in as the flights had stopped by the time we arrived because it is only a tiny airport and it only operates during the day because (and this is true you can look it up) there are no lights on the runway.

The British Airways flight that brought us to Costa Rica was the largest plane we had ever been in, but in flying back to the airport, we also rode in the smallest one we had ever been in during this holiday, it was a tiny 12 seater where the only crew is the 2 pilots, one of who sits momentarily in an empty seat for the brief safety talk "Remain seated, No smoking, enjoy the flight" just before lift off. Oh and the empty seats, it turned out that we were actually the only people on the plane, so for the price of 2 relatively cheap tickets, it was like we had hired a private plane.

We could see Quepos from the sky, easily recognisable by the harbour, I found the most striking thing about the view to be just how little there was around it, that's how the whole place is, nothing but trees and mountains. Leaving this holiday was harder than most, we had literally just spent 12 days in paradise.

Finally, did anyone know that this is how pineapples grow? For some reason I'd always envisioned them hanging from some sort of tree.