La Tomatina was chaotic and spending a couple of days in Valencia after the tomato fest provided a bit of a recharge and some downtime. It also gave us a chance to plan our next move. This wasn't as easy as expected as we still had many places we wanted to get to in our last few weeks in Europe with a focus on getting to Italy and making sure we were in Munich in time for Oktoberfest. Our initial plan was to head from Valencia to Portugal to spend some time in Lagos and the Algarve. But the cost and time it would take to get to these places proved exorbitant and not worth the small amount of time that we would be there. (Even though Portugal is right next to Spain, this proved unhelpful to our cause.) Next we looked into going straight to Italy. But this too proved prohibitively complex (for us tired mlungus) and expensive to organize. And that's when we came up with the brilliant idea to skip out on Portugal and book ourselves onto another Contiki that focused on Italy. We'll talk more about the Contiki in our next blog post, but we gave ourselves a four day gap between leaving Valencia and meeting up with the Contiki in Paris. So going back to the drawing board for where to go after Valencia resulted in us keeping it local and heading to Granada in the south of Spain. We had heard many good things about Granada and in the end, we were excited to check it out - and it made for much cheaper transport out of Valencia and back up to Paris.

So, after all this planning, we boarded a bus and headed south bound through Spain and its beautiful midlands.

Granada is a small Spanish town which is famous for its Alhambra Palace set on top of the hills overlooking the town. The town, though rustic in some senses, but fully commercialized with more than enough brand shops and restaurants to keep its locals busy, is still authentically Spanish. Its thrives on its Tapas bars and squares (the two main ones being Plaza Nueva and Plaza Bibarrambla) where's you can enjoy Spanish flavours and local company. There's also flamenco shows and the famous Spanish siesta to ensure your afternoons and evenings are accounted for. We never actually made it to a flamenco show as we saved it for our last night and, due to some ill informed staff, we were given the wrong time for the show and arrived too late - they generally start around 9:00pm-9:30pm if you're looking to go to a show. So flamenco shows and Portugal are left on our hit list for next time we're in this part of the world.

Granada is another great city to escape to for a good chill. There isn't a fortune to do there (though as with any city, if you're really looking for things to do, you will find something to go see or keep you busy). We got a good feel for the city by doing a free walking tour. Our tour guide was brilliant, as they usually are on these tip-based tours, and gave us all the necessary history of both the city and Spain as well as giving us a sense of the general lay of the land and some truths to some of the myths of the city. Our other big adventure was the must do tour of the Alhambra. Its best to do this by pre-booking your spot online before you go. We landed up going in the late afternoon which proved good as it was a bit cooler, less packed and generally more pleasant. Don't waste your time with the audio guide as you can pre-download a free audio guide onto your phone/ipod from their website or you can use Bluetooth or wifi to get the same guide at the main entrance to the grounds. The time you book is actually for the entrance into the main palace and not for the rest of the grounds so you can get there as early as you want before hand for missioning around. Most people recommend at least four hours but we found two hours to be sufficient.

As for the nightlife, we did three tapas tours (really pub crawls) through with hostel in three days. Most bars offer free tapas with drinks until midnight and there are plenty of bars around to find the niche or crowd that you're looking for. We were fortunate enough to have the, since named, LeGrande Lebowski leading our tapas tours as he literally knew everyone in town and got the best specials, but in truth its hard to go wrong here at night and it seems easy to negotiate good deals with the bars, especially if you're in a sizeable group.

So we look back on Granada with no regrets and we lucky that our change in plans took us to this brilliant little town in the south. We highly recommend this as a stop when you're in Spain.

Trek on…Brett and Darren.

PS tomorrow will be exactly 6 months since we've been away so we thought we'd put up some stats of our trip so far:

Flights: 31

Busses: 10

Trains: 7

Modes of Transport: 11

Airports: 35

Hostels: 22

Hotels: 36

Different Beds: 67

Cities: 57

Countries: 20

States: 16

Continents: 3

Currencies Used: 12

Time Away: Months - 6.0; Weeks - 26.1; Days - 183.0; Hours - 4,393.2; Minutes - 263,592.0; Seconds - 15,815,519.3