Zurich - Quick Holiday in Mallorca

Cuevas del Drach
(photo (c).Candi... under a Creative Commons license)

I’ve been feeling in the need of a bit of a break recently. So, I got a travel agent (Kompas Travel – would highly recommend them) to find a short beach holiday for me for four days. It was fabulous. I gave them my dates, my desire for a beach holiday (suggested some locations, but they gave me another one), and my maximum price. They came back with two options, I picked one of them, and then everything was organized, including the transfers. This simplicity was just what I needed!

So, I ended up in Mallorca. I haven’t been there since just after my graduation (many years ago now!), when I went to a friend’s parents' holiday home in Porto Pollensa. I don’t really know why I haven’t been back.

The worst part was the initial flight time of 6.20am – it must be one of those many planes that fly over my home during 6am-7am. I had to get the first bus in the morning at 5,15am. This is one of the times where I’m glad I live near the airport.

I’d forgotten that when you book a package holiday, your transfer is bundled in with a load of other people, so on getting the transfer from Mallorca airport to the hotel, it was a huge bus that was subsequently delayed because some people had lost luggage. There was really no advantage to having carry-on baggage only. Also, although my flight back wasn’t until 10.30am and I checked in beforehand, I still had to have my pick-up at 7am to accommodate other people with earlier flights who also needed a transfer. But an hour’s taxi drive would have cost me quite a bit, so there’s always a compromise with a benefit.

To my surprise, I felt flummoxed when I went on the beach after arriving and saw all those people there – there were hundreds of them and I counted at least 80 heads bobbing about in the water, and I didn’t know a single person. In El Andalous, I’ve got so used to having the beach to myself, or knowing a few people by sight at least whenever maybe 6 or 7 others are there, and thinking it’s crowded when, heaven forbid, on the very occasional busy day, there are 20 people spread between the beach and the sea. So, it was a bit of a culture shock to see mass tourism in action.

To my delight, the water was really warm – I would guess around 28 degrees – and the beach itself was quite large. Consequently, although I am also not used to swimming where your permitted area of the sea is marked out for you with buoys, which makes me feel constricted, there was really plenty of space, particularly if I went over to the deep section (which was marked out as such with a warning).

On my third day, my body was telling me that I’d done a bit too much swimming (my arms were aching and my body was feeling floppy), so I took that day to do some excursions. In the late morning (it was my holiday, after all!), I went to see the Cuevas del Drach (Dragon Caves). I’d originally turned up the day before only to find that the tours for the next two hours were already sold out. I’d forgotten this was high season and that, unlike Egypt, tourists were everywhere.

Anyway, I bought a ticket for the next day, which was the third day of my stay. The caves were truly amazing and it was like entering the world of the Hobbit. Some of the formations looked like houses rising up out of the stone surface, some formed what looked like ornately-decorated columns but were just the markings of how the stalactites and stalagmites formed, some looked like a fine curtain pulled partly across; others looked like candles, or you could imagine trees. They were delicately lit up and then there’s the underground lake that reflects it all back again. It takes around a century for the stalactites to grow just 1cm, so many of them must have been hundreds of thousands years old; indeed some of the rock has been recorded as dating back 11 million years. It’s mind-boggling when you think humans have probably only been around for 200,000 years; the whole atmosphere to me was quite mystical. I could have cried at the beauty of it.

The tour ends with a 10-minute live performance of classical music with four musicians traversing the lake on a boat with the music reverberating in the cave. You don’t get an echo, but it’s been a tradition in the caves for 75 years now. But the real beauty is with mother nature herself.

In the afternoon, after a quick play in the water (rather than a proper swim), I took a boat trip (which itself included time for a 10-minute swim) along the coast. It was fun to be on a boat again and seeing some of the other beaches, it made me feel that the one at Porto Cristo was not so crowded after all! There were some bad reviews of the boat trips on tripadvisor, but actually I really enjoyed it – it all depends on your expectations I guess!

Anyway, after another day on the beach, and some lovely meals, I have arrived back in Zurich feeling suitably refreshed at having had a fix of proper sunshine and the opportunity to have had a few days where everything was done for me.