(written 28/3/06, in Santa Margherita Lígure, Italia, by
Liz)
After a fairly good night sleep with noisy Spaniards in nearby rooms, we made our way by foot back into the center of town where we stopped at a café for a breakfast of coffee and toast.
We then spent the morning wandering around the town and looking at various Roman ruins. Our first stop was at one of the first Roman bridges ever built, still apparently in original condition, and very much in use. We then walked through the town to the other side, and on our way passed some fenced off Roman ruins. Some of these were in very good condition, and just sitting in the middle of a bunch of modern houses. Something nice to wake up in the morning and admire anyway.
Our next stop was at the ruins of Teatro and Anfiteatro Romanos. These were two huge sites right next to each other. The first was like a theatre for plays and so on. It was in very good condition, with faded marble columns, statues and a semi circle of seats rising up to form the theatre. The second was not in quite as good condition, but it still looked pretty amazing - it was a gladiator's ring, like the Collusseum in Rome, although quite a bit smaller. We were given lots of information on these two sites along with our tickets, but it is all in Spanish, so I can't say much more about the history of them, other that the first theatre was built in 15 BC, and the Gladiator's ring was built 7 years later. To give an idea of their original size, together they seated 20 000 people.
After a good look at these two sites, we went back to our car which we had left parked outside our hotel and drove out of Merida.
Our next destination was
Sevilla (Seville), but it took us a little while to drive there, as the rain started pouring down, and we got stuck behind some quite slow traffic.
Eventually arriving on Seville's outskirts, we decided to head straight to the camp ground, instead of trying to negotiate Seville without a proper map. It had stopped raining, so we thought camping would be our best option.
We found the camp ground (Camping "Sevilla") quite quickly, but were a bit disappointed. We were close to the freeway, and at the end of the airport's runway, so it wasn't exactly peaceful. It also turned out that our guidebook's promise of a shuttle bus into Seville didn't actually exist, and that we had to walk along a section of the 120km/hr freeway to get to the bus stop two kilometers away. We weren't too excited about staying here, but didn't really want to try and drive through Seville to find a different accommodation option either.
After putting up our tent, we walked to the bus stop, keeping a careful eye on the traffic shooting past us, caught a bus quite quickly, and found ourselves in the middle of Seville.
On our way into town, we had seen huge crowds of what we presumed were soccer (football) fans getting off buses and going into a stadium. Once we had gotten off our bus, we headed to a nearby bar to see who was playing - there were lots of locals there watching the game.
We then wandered through some of Seville's very pretty gardens - orange trees are everywhere, with huge big oranges clustered all over the branches, and a number squashed on the ground.
We could hear the cathedral bells ringing in the distance, so we made our way through a maze of little cobble-stoned narrow alleyways towards the sound. A little while later we popped out into the square that the cathedral dominates, and stood staring.
(continued 11/4/06, in Náfplio, Greece, by
Tim)
The imposing bell-tower was striking the hour, or perhaps just the afternoon with a crazy cacophony of bells doing their best to attract attention. Plenty of people, including ourselves, were happy to hear them ring away for several minutes.
We had a look inside the cathedral, as it was free entry that day, where a certificate from Guinness marked it as having the largest area of any in the world. It certainly was huge, although the public weren't permitted to wander around much of it. In fact, a service was about to commence - we had no problems with that as that is what the building was meant for in the first place.
Just back up the street a little, we thought the idea of a jug of sangria sitting in the sun under the orange trees was the way to go, and we sat there for quite some time with a few tapas and more bell ringing to entertain us a little later on.
We wandered off to a restaurant for dinner, wine and more tapas, which proved to be enough for us for the evening, so we headed back through to the main street leading back to the camp site, where we thought it safest to get a taxi back. The driver dropped us right at the gates for a higher fare than we were expecting, but we had survived and enjoyed our first day in Sevilla.