Christmas and Snowboarding in Andorra,
New Year 2000/2001 in Madrid

Travelling over xmas and newyear? I would have never have thought it as I tend to avoid these touristy times... but being between jobs(Some may say "again?") you gotta make the most of the time available. It was a tearful goodbye from British Airways (I was the 3rd person to announce they were leaving that week alone - so it was BA who were tearful to be loosing yet another talented young operator!). No hard feelings though - they gave me a wooly cap and $20 clothes vouchers as a goodbye present... maybe a hint to extend my wardrobe - as I never wore a tie to work and made 1 pair of trousers last at least 3 days at a stretch.

Needless to say it was not with British Airways that I set out for Barcelona for the following morning on the 21st December...the attraction of the half price easyJet service just beating any latent company loyalty. Of course it did mean I had to wake up up at 4am to get to London Luton by 8am. And then they didn´t even serve breakfast on the flight!!!!

Unfortunately a woolen hat had not been the only parting present from BA and I arrived in Barcelona nursing the worst flu know to man kind. So I ended up heading straight for the cheapest hostal around (my previous trip to Barcelona 2 yrs ago paying dividends), and slept for 18 hours straight. So much for my plans to head straight for Andorra and get onto the ski-slopes and put my wooly hat to the test.

As luck would have it, my companion in the room turned out to be Jesus, someone I had encountered briefly in a club in London about 5 days earlier. (You´re thinking I´ve had way too many flu tabs at this stage aren´t you?) This time we were able to exchange names and have a conversation. Apparantly he doesn´t believe in god, but did walk 800kms in a month as part of the pilgrimage trail to Santa Compostella on the north coast of Spain. Anyway - the next day thanks either to the box of chewable vitamin C, or my close encounter of the Jesus kind, I was feeling a lot better and managed to meet up with a friend of a friend of a friend from Miami. Isn´t networking coool? He treated me to real Paella (not the stuff from the bag that most tourists end up paying loads for) and put me up for the night in an apartment with a hot shower (something you are not entitled to in a $8 hostal, even if you do get Jesus´s email address thrown in with the deal).

So finally on 23rd Dec I was on the wrong bus to Andorra, I discovered when everyone piled out in an obscure village at the base of the Pyrenees. It was round about this stage that I realised I needed to take my Spanish lessons a bit more seriously when upon asking for directions everyone just ends up laughing at you and shaking their heads. Finally I ended up loosing my woollen cap on a bus that dropped me off in Andorra la vella - the equivalent of the biggest duty free store in the world, and incidental capital of Andorra. I nearly got addicted to nicotine just breathing the air due to the mountains of duty free cigarettes that were piled up outside every shop.

Although the night in Andorra la vella was without incident, I was a bit worried that by this stage I had still not seen any snow. But my 8km walk to a campsite near the skivillages of Arinsal and Pal soon alleviated my fears, as upon my arrival it started to snow. WOOHOO - after putting up my tent, it was straight to the Pal for a bit of snowboarding, and thats how I spent Christmas day too.

Christmas evening I thought I better try do something special, but ended up as the only guest at an Indian restaurant/bar in Arinsal owned by 4 ski-instructors who spend their days instructing, and nights working in the pub. Anyway, they decided I needed some special treatment, so for £20 I got a 5 course meal, a bottle of wine, a bottle of champagne, and a springbok shooter. Then I was taken out to the local nightclubs, where more beer was consumed. I consider myself lucky that I woke up the next day in my tent, and not in some icy gutter!.

So I spent the next 2 days snowboarding and getting hammered, or hammering. Literally. I made the pub owned by the ski instructors my local, and they had a game that involved hitting nails into a tree trunk with the sharp end of a hammer, - whoever hammered their nail in last would have to buy a round of drinks for the participants of the game (not that scary as the prices were really cheap). Apparantly although the game was invented in England, its banned from all English pubs (just imagine a drunken Englishman with a hammer being made to buy a round of drinks....).

By the fifth day on the slopes, I was getting a bit board of doing the limited blue slopes, scaring beginners as I'd shoot by at 100km/h, and doing the few ramps that were around, and decided to learn to ski. No problem. I hired the kit, got onto the slopes only to be told the next available ski instructor would only be free 3 hours later. So having never worn skis before in my life I thought I?d just try see what the whole mallarky was by myself. Having spent many days dodging ski schools in my life, I had a good idea of the basics, and after an hour on the baby slopes snow ploughing I thought I had the hang of things and hopped onto the lift for the main slope. It was on the main slope - about 1km long - that I realised that things weren't all that easy, and that its a lot harder to recover from 15 falls on skis than a snowboard...but I made it to the bottom without killing anyone!

The ski-lesson was good, and after 2 days, I had really sore thighs, but I wasn't falling over anymore. But it was nearing new year, and I needed to find the backpacker crowd to have some fun with. Ski and snow boarders have too much attitude. So I headed back to Barcelona, to find that all the hostals were full, and none of the people I knew were in town. So 24 hours after leaving Andorra, and a trip on a night bus, I arrived in Madrid, hoping to find the friend of a friend of a friend, but emails were not working, and after killing some time at the Real Palace, the Prado museum and various other Madrid sights I realised that I was going to have to meet some strangers, or have a very sad new years. So I paid the new years eve price for a couple of beers (£4) and got into a conversation with John and Nelson, a couple of Americans and a Canadian couple who would be cycling in SA in Feb. Our group snowballed in size when we met a large group of Brits and together we counted in the new year, with cheap bottles of champagne, crazy wigs, and grapes (the madrid way to bring in new year - along with bottle throwing), before hitting the clubs (before getting hit by flying bottles).

Jon and Nelson and I - none of whom can speak Spanish - ended up spending the evening with 3 girls from Alicante, a town on the Spanish Med. Coast, none of whom could speak English. It was fun, and if I didn't look like I had been camping in the snow for a week, that I'd not had sleep and a shower in the last 48 hours, I could have had a warm bed to sleep in - but alas.... come 8am I was back at the bus station waiting for a bus back to Barcelona.

I finished my holiday on a quiet note, recovering from new years, visiting museums, and meeting people in the friendly bars around the city. My last afternoon was spent ovelooking the beaches of Barcelona, enjoying the sunshine, and watching seagulls dance across painted skies, not looking forward to the grey and cold that would be awaiting my return to London.