Wild

I needed to get to the bus station this morning, a bit over a 20-minute walk. Easy but I had my backpack to take. Not very heavy but...

The very convenient bus I caught when I arrived seemed to have been defeated by the one way system and didn't even feature in Googlemap's results. Their suggested route involved a 10 minute walk in the wrong direction to the metro, a train for one stop, a change to another train for one stop, then a 7 minute walk. So my bag and I walked. 

Highlights from five hours in a bus: large field-sections in shades of yellow and green, a field full of singing sunflowers, a stop for excellent (or perhaps just much-needed) coffee, a long stretch of motorway lined with azalea bushes bursting with white or deep pink flowers.

Then Cordoba. This is the place that has motivated my trip and I arrived about as incompetently as was possible. As the bus pulled in to the most beautiful bus station ever (circular with a garden in the middle full of palms, orange trees, bougainvillea and wisteria) I realised my phone was almost out of charge. No problem - I have a back up charger. Ahem. That had lost its charge too. Before everything died I made a note of where I was staying and my host's phone number, then set off the old-fashioned way - with a dreadful paper map scavenged at the station and a tongue in my head. I started in the wrong direction, by shamefully forgetting to use the sun to set my compass. Then I practised my lapsed Spanish on locals. A few seemed to know as little about the area as I did but were nonetheless quite happy to send me the wrong way. But after a lot of unnecessary walking I eventually got to the right number in the right street and when no-one answered the bell a lovely couple phoned for me and sorted out the end-game. Bless them, after a man who refused. Lord knows what he thought I was up to in asking for help.

It was 15C warmer than this morning when I left Madrid so I used a 'siesta' to to charge everything and to sew the strap back onto the bag I have been overloading every day since I bought it six years ago.

In the slightly cooler evening I walked into town. It felt at first as if Cordoba has a very thick skin, unsurprisingly with so many people like me clogging its streets, but as I followed my whim at each corner, it soon relented, and I found myself at one of the stages of Rio Mundi - Cordoba's International Festival of Rivers. It was only later that I learnt that I could have gone in search of the Amazon, the Niger or the Guadalquivir or any other of nine rivers, but as I'd stumbled on the Thames I was condemned to a Pink Floyd tribute band. Ah well, I danced anyway, the children were enjoying themselves and at least I had the Roman bridge over the river on one side, beautiful buildings on the other (extra) and bats overhead.

Epic failure to understand tiles in extras, especially for Tivoli.