By the time we reached Madrid airport, I had already decided that getting home was going to cost us more than we wanted to spend. Our original Qatar Airways flights had been cancelled, the app had been of little use, and my fairly simple plan to speak to somebody at the airport had come up against the absence of anybody to speak to. I asked a man when the Qatar Airways counter might open. He muttered one word, “guerra”, and gestured towards the empty desks. War. There wasn’t much more to be said, at least not by him.
It was an odd way to end a holiday that had begun with such a straightforward idea. Leah and I had left Singapore on 18 February 2026 for a trip through Qatar, Spain, Portugal and Morocco, starting with a few nights in Doha before joining a guided tour through the Iberian Peninsula and across the Strait of Gibraltar. It meant a lot of ground to cover, but the appeal was obvious: somebody else would organise the hotels, the coach and most of the logistics, while we could concentrate on the places, the people and, perhaps most importantly, what we were going to eat.
Looking back at the photographs, I can see the whole journey in fragments: museum galleries, blue-and-white tiles, medieval stonework, plates of food, sea views through coach windows, the same suitcase outside another hotel room. There were wonderful days and thoroughly ordinary ones, with enough rain, queues and tired feet to keep the grand historical narratives in perspective. The ending was certainly memorable, but fortunately it wasn’t the only thing worth remembering.
Doha: Three Nights Between the Old and the New
Doha was our first stop, and in some ways a gentle way into the trip. Its newer districts are full of immaculate roads, polished towers and enormous buildings that seem to have been conceived with a great deal of confidence and very little concern for keeping things small. Yet around Souq Waqif, the mood changes. The market lanes, shopfronts and restaurants have a more informal rhythm, particularly in the evening when people come out to eat, browse and sit around. We walked, looked at things and tried the food without feeling the need to turn every hour into an organised activity.
The museums were what particularly caught my attention. I. M. Pei’s Museum of Islamic Art is severe and geometric from outside, but inside it has an extraordinary range of objects, from metalwork and textiles to ceramics, manuscripts and jewellery. Jean Nouvel’s National Museum of Qatar looks almost impossible at first glance, its intersecting forms inspired by a desert rose. I enjoyed the buildings as much as the collections. After years working in graphic design, I still find myself paying attention to surfaces, patterns, proportions and how things have been put together, whether the object is an old vessel or a very expensive contemporary building.
We also spent evenings around the market and the waterfront, where the city’s older maritime history is still present beneath the modern skyline. There were plenty of meals, photographs and opportunities to do nothing more demanding than take in the surroundings. Our stay gave us a look at a place that had changed enormously in a relatively short time, and it was a useful reminder that a country’s public image rarely tells the complete story of what it’s like to walk around there. From Doha, we headed for Madrid, where the longer and considerably colder part of the trip began.
Madrid: Art, Old Streets and Chocolate for Breakfast
Madrid was a complete change of scene. The air was cooler, the streets felt familiar in that European way, and we were suddenly surrounded by monumental façades, old apartment buildings, busy squares and cafés where people seemed in no particular hurry to leave. We wandered around Puerta del Sol, Plaza Mayor and the adjoining streets, taking the usual photographs of buildings and shopfronts and occasionally stopping because something in a window caught our attention. It was the start of a recurring pattern: an official itinerary punctuated by our own smaller diversions.
Art was one of the reasons I wanted time in Madrid, and seeing Picasso’s Guernica at the Reina Sofía was particularly worthwhile. I knew the painting, of course, as anybody who has spent enough time around art books and design studios probably does. What reproductions fail to convey is its scale, and the way the whole composition occupies the space in front of you. I was as interested in the choices Picasso made as in its historical subject: the compressed figures, fractured viewpoints and refusal to offer an easy or comforting image of suffering. Looking at it in person is a different matter from recognising it on a page.
We also found time for the less intellectually demanding pleasures of Madrid, including churros dipped into properly thick hot chocolate. There were tapas, bars, wandering through streets we didn’t know and other stops that had very little to do with art history. I liked how comfortable the city seemed with mixing the grand and the ordinary. A magnificent building could sit beside a perfectly mundane shop, and somehow the combination made sense. We would return to Madrid at the end of the tour, although under rather different circumstances.
Salamanca and the Road into Portugal
Salamanca looked especially good in the sun. The city is famous for the warm sandstone of its historic buildings, and there were moments when the façades really did seem to glow. We spent time around its university, founded in 1218, and the old cathedral precinct, where you could easily lose an afternoon studying the carvings, inscriptions and decorative details. The famous frog hidden in the university façade is the sort of small tourist tradition I rather enjoy, partly because it gives everyone an excuse to stare closely at a wall for ten minutes.
The Plaza Mayor was another highlight, grand without feeling as though it belonged only to tourists. It’s the kind of square that benefits from time, but time was one thing our coach itinerary didn’t always provide in generous quantities. From Salamanca we carried on towards Portugal, trading one collection of historic towns for another. I was beginning to understand just how much of this journey would be spent looking at old stone, painted ceilings and religious buildings, which suited me perfectly well as long as there was a decent meal somewhere in between.
Porto: Tiles, Rooftops and a Glass of Something Fortified
Porto looked like the sort of city that hasn’t tried too hard to conceal its age. Buildings crowd together on the hills above the Douro, some beautifully restored and others showing every year they’ve been standing there. I like that slightly uneven quality in a city. It gives you interesting things to look at between the official landmarks, whether it’s an old sign, a tiled doorway or a row of houses that seems to have been assembled without much concern for symmetry.
São Bento railway station was as good as people said it would be. Its enormous blue-and-white azulejo panels depict scenes from Portuguese life and history, turning what might otherwise be an ordinary transport concourse into a public gallery. I spent a fair bit of time looking at the panels and the overall arrangement, thinking about how much visual storytelling was being carried by ceramics rather than printed graphics. We also explored the streets above the Douro, where the rooftops and river views made it difficult to resist taking yet another photograph of essentially the same scene.
Across the river, Vila Nova de Gaia is home to many of Porto’s famous wine cellars, and we made time for a visit and a tasting. I enjoy these stops partly because they introduce a little practical history into the experience: barrels, buildings, shipping and the people who figured out how to make a drink survive a long journey. There were also pastries, cafés and ordinary meals that were enjoyable in their own right. Porto was one of the places where I felt we’d only scratched the surface, and I wouldn’t mind coming back without a tour bus waiting for us.
Coimbra, Fátima and the Weight of Old Stone
Travelling through central Portugal brought a succession of places that might each have justified a slower visit. Coimbra had its university-city atmosphere and attractive cloisters, where the old stone corridors and the changing light were worth lingering over. Fátima was different altogether, its immense sanctuary associated with the reported Marian apparitions of 1917. Even with visitors moving around the square, there was a noticeable sense of quiet in parts of the complex, especially as the daylight began to fade.
Alcobaça and Batalha were the kinds of stops I particularly enjoy. Alcobaça Monastery has a tremendous sense of height and restraint, with vast Gothic spaces that need very little ornament to be impressive. Batalha is more elaborate, built to commemorate Portugal’s victory at Aljubarrota in 1385, and its stone tracery, vaulting and chapels repay close attention. Some of the weather was miserable, but I don’t think medieval monasteries necessarily suffer under grey skies. The damp, gloomy atmosphere reminded me a little of The Name of the Rose, though that was a visual association rather than a filming connection.
We also visited Nazaré, where the fishing boats on the sand and the overcast Atlantic shoreline gave the place a different character from the big-wave surfing photographs for which it has become famous. We weren’t there to chase giant waves, and the rather subdued weather didn’t encourage much lingering. Still, there were good things to eat, a few interesting little shops and enough seaside atmosphere to make it a worthwhile stop. It was another reminder that a place doesn’t have to look its best to leave a decent impression.
Lisbon, Belém and the Road Along the Atlantic
Lisbon is a city where the streets themselves are a large part of the attraction. The patterned calçada portuguesa pavements, yellow trams, tiled façades and steep little streets give even an unplanned walk a sense of character. We went through its public squares and historic neighbourhoods, finding the usual mix of grand civic spaces, ordinary shopfronts and the occasional detail that made me stop for a photograph. There is an elegance to the city, but also enough wear and everyday life to stop it feeling like a carefully preserved museum.
Around Belém, we visited the Monument to the Discoveries and the Belém Tower, two very different reminders of Portugal’s maritime past. The monument is a great slab of national storytelling, with its procession of explorers and other historical figures, while the tower is smaller and more intricate, originally part of Lisbon’s riverside defences. The heroic presentation of overseas exploration inevitably leaves plenty out, particularly for people from countries that experienced colonial rule, but I find that tension worth thinking about rather than pretending it isn’t there.
The waterfront was pleasant in good weather, and there were more views, coffee stops and photographs of the city than anyone strictly needed. We also went out towards Sintra and Cascais, where the scenery changes considerably. Sintra’s wooded hills and historic buildings have an almost storybook quality, while the cliffs around Boca do Inferno are a reminder that the Atlantic has been doing its own destructive sculpting for a very long time. We watched the water surge into the rocks and took photographs that, predictably, never quite captured the force of it in person.
Back into Spain: Roman Bricks, Moorish Arches and Seville
Our route eventually brought us back into Spain through Mérida, where Roman remains sit among the newer city. At the National Museum of Roman Art, Rafael Moneo’s monumental brick arches were particularly striking. I liked the way the building referred to the architecture around it without simply pretending to be ancient. That’s a difficult balance to get right, and the museum manages it with an assurance that makes you look almost as closely at the structure as at the objects inside.
Córdoba was another city where several layers of history could be seen within a relatively small area. The Mosque-Cathedral is the obvious centrepiece, with its rows of columns and alternating red-and-white arches forming one of the most recognisable interiors in Spain. Later Christian additions sit within the older Islamic building, and the combination isn’t always harmonious, which is part of what makes it interesting. You are looking at a place that has been used, altered and argued over for centuries rather than a neat example of a single style. We also wandered through the Jewish Quarter, past whitewashed buildings, narrow lanes and flowerpots arranged along the walls.
Seville was more expansive, with its huge cathedral, the Giralda and the extraordinary Plaza de España. The last of these is almost an exercise in decorative excess, with brickwork, coloured tiles, bridges, arches and ceramic panels representing Spain’s provinces. As someone who earns his living noticing details other people may have learned to ignore, I had a good time looking at the patterns, images and inscriptions. We had walked through so many historic places by then that a little repetition was inevitable, but there were still moments when an interior or a square could stop me in my tracks.
Ronda in the Rain, and a Day for Doing Nothing
Ronda was one of the places I had particularly wanted to see properly, and the weather chose that moment to become thoroughly unhelpful. The town stands above the El Tajo Gorge, with the remarkable Puente Nuevo bridge linking its two sides high above the river. It’s the sort of place that has attracted writers and artists for generations, and I could understand why even from what little we managed to see. Unfortunately, the rain started coming down hard soon after we arrived, and I decided a warm restaurant was a much more sensible option than trying to appreciate a dramatic landscape while thoroughly soaked.
While most of the group went on with the guide, I settled into San Francisco Bodega Bar Restaurante Cafeteria for tapas and a glass of wine. Watching the rain fall on the cobblestones turned out to be rather enjoyable, and I still think it was a reasonable decision. Ronda is somewhere I’d happily revisit, preferably overnight and in better weather, so I could spend time around the bridge and the old streets without feeling rushed.
From Ronda we continued to Torremolinos on the Costa del Sol, where we checked into our hotel and took advantage of a free day to recharge. The following morning we walked along the Paseo Marítimo towards Plaza del Lido and saw Salvador García’s Mujeres corriendo por la playa, a sculpture paying tribute to Picasso’s painting of women running on the beach. Torremolinos has been a popular holiday resort for decades, and the promenade had just the sort of relaxed seaside atmosphere we needed. After taking some photographs, we went back to the hotel and did very little else, which was rather the point.
Crossing from Europe to Africa, with All Our Luggage
Our transfer to Morocco began early on 6 March, with another tour provider collecting us after breakfast for the drive to Algeciras. I had made the mistake of assuming our coach would simply drive onto the ferry with everyone aboard. Instead, we had to take our large suitcases through passport control ourselves and then board another bus to reach the boat, all while it was raining. It wasn’t particularly difficult in the grand scheme of things, but it was awkward and tiring, especially when you’ve packed for a trip lasting several weeks.
At least the ferry’s passenger area was comfortable once we finally got aboard. Crossing the Strait of Gibraltar is interesting when you remember how narrow it is compared with the distances and histories it connects. For thousands of years people have been moving between Europe and North Africa across these waters, for trade, conquest, work or simply to get somewhere else. We were doing something much more ordinary, although the queues made it feel complicated enough. Moroccan passport control was conducted on the ferry, and that turned into another rather confusing line of tired people trying to work out where to stand.
By the time we reached Tangier, disembarked and cleared the remaining formalities, we were more than ready to sit on the coach again for the journey to Fez. There was a separate worry hanging over us too. We’d learnt the previous day that our return flights from Madrid through Doha to Singapore had been cancelled because of the conflict involving Israel, the United States and Iran, and the resulting airspace restrictions around the Middle East. At that stage I still assumed that Qatar Airways would be fairly easy to contact and would help us arrange another way home. I was wrong about that, as events would eventually demonstrate.
Fez: Crafts, Courtyards and a Language Problem
We had a little time after breakfast to look around Zalagh Parc Palace, our hotel in Fez, before setting off. The hotel had an old-fashioned, rather grand feel, with spacious public rooms, decorated ceilings, gardens and pools. It was a good place to take a few photographs without having to do any serious sightseeing. Fez itself is one of Morocco’s four imperial cities and is often described as the country’s spiritual and cultural centre, with roots in the Idrisid period around the turn of the ninth century.
We began with a panoramic tour past the exterior of the Royal Palace and the old Jewish Quarter, then visited a hilltop fortress viewpoint overlooking Fez el Bali. Seen from above, the medina looks enormous, with a dense arrangement of roofs, walls, minarets and courtyards that stretches across the slopes. Our next stop was Art D’ARGILE, where we watched artisans working on ceramics and zellige mosaics. The amount of handwork involved was impressive, especially when you considered how mathematically precise the finished patterns appear.
Then came a walk through the narrow streets of the medina. We stopped at a silver craft shop, a fabric shop and a leather tannery, with plenty of smaller shops and workshops in between. The tannery’s dyeing vats were one of the more recognisable sights, although the surrounding buildings and the everyday activity in the lanes were just as interesting to me. We had lunch at Dar Alamia inside the old city, where a traditional Moroccan meal made a very welcome interruption to the constant walking and looking.
One thing did make this part of the tour less enjoyable than it should have been. Leah and I were the only English speakers in a group otherwise made up of Spanish-speaking travellers from Argentina, Mexico and Spain. We’d been expecting bilingual local guides, as we’d had throughout Spain and Portugal, but the Moroccan guides spoke only Spanish. Our tour director could manage some basic English, but it wasn’t enough to explain everything we were seeing, so we often ended up looking things up on our phones. It was frustrating, especially in a city with so much history, and it meant we probably missed more than we realised at the time. By the evening we were ready for dinner at the hotel and a bit of quiet.
Rabat, Casablanca and the Long Road to Marrakech
The next morning we left Fez for Rabat, the capital, which felt calmer and more formal after the narrow streets of the medina. We saw the exterior of the Royal Palace and visited the Mohammed V Mausoleum, with its white marble, green tiled roof and elaborate Moroccan decoration. Nearby stands the Hassan Tower, an unfinished minaret intended for a vast mosque begun in the twelfth century. The surviving tower and rows of columns give you a sense of just how ambitious the original project was, even if it never reached completion.
From Rabat we continued to Casablanca, passing through United Nations Square and travelling along the Boulevard de la Corniche beside the Atlantic. Casablanca had a noticeably different character from the other Moroccan cities we’d seen: bigger roads, busier commercial districts and the general atmosphere of a working port city. We stopped to admire the Hassan II Mosque from outside. Built beside the ocean, it’s so large that the whole complex feels as much like a statement of national ambition as a religious building, and the setting makes it particularly striking.
We then carried on to Marrakech, arriving towards the end of another long day. By the time we’d checked into Kenzi Rose Garden, we weren’t terribly interested in exploring anything else. One advantage of this sort of tour is that you cover an impressive amount of ground, but the disadvantage is that a city can sometimes become little more than the place where you’re having dinner and sleeping. Marrakech would have its turn the following morning, when we had a proper visit scheduled.
Marrakech: Olive Trees, Palaces and a Busy Square
Marrakech is often called the Pearl of the South, although I think it would take more than a brief organised visit to understand it properly. We started at the Menara Gardens, where a large reflecting basin, an old pavilion and rows of olive trees make for a surprisingly restrained landscape. The city can be very busy, so beginning somewhere relatively open and quiet was welcome. We then stopped outside the Koutoubia Mosque, whose twelfth-century minaret is closely related in design to the Giralda in Seville, which we’d seen only a few days earlier. It was another of those architectural connections that became easier to appreciate when travelling on both sides of the Strait.
Bahia Palace was one of the day’s highlights, especially for its decorated ceilings, tiled courtyards, carved wooden surfaces and intricate architectural details. It was built and expanded in the late nineteenth century for important figures at the Moroccan court, and you can see how much of its effect comes from craft rather than sheer size. I found myself photographing the doors, patterns and overhead details as much as the rooms themselves, which probably tells you where my attention tends to go in places like this.
From there we went into Jemaa el-Fna and the surrounding souks. The square was busy with the usual mixture of people, stalls and activity, while the adjoining market lanes seemed to contain every possible variety of leatherwork, ceramics, woodwork, textiles and spices. We went with the group, stopped where the guide stopped and tried to take in as much as we could despite the continuing language problem. Afterwards we returned to the hotel for lunch before leaving for Casablanca again, where dinner and our room at Le Palace d’Anfa were waiting. It had been another of those days when you’d seen enough by mid-afternoon to keep you occupied for a week.
Back Across the Strait, and a Beer with Philippine Connections
On 10 March we set off from Casablanca for Tangier and the ferry back to Spain. After our rather wet and cumbersome journey into Morocco, we were grateful to find much better weather this time. The crossing to Tarifa was smoother, more comfortable and generally less stressful, which was a small but welcome change. It was good to get back to the Costa del Sol and our hotel in Torremolinos, where we could finally stop moving for the evening.
We decided we’d earned a proper dinner and went to Restaurante La Paella. When I asked for their best local beer, I was amused to be offered San Miguel Especial. As a Filipino, the name was familiar enough, but the history is slightly more interesting than it appears at first glance. San Miguel began brewing in Manila in 1890 during the Spanish colonial period, and the Spanish business later developed its own identity. So there I was in Spain drinking a beer whose origins lead back to the Philippines, though it wasn’t quite the same beer as the Pale Pilsen we know at home. After a long day of transfers and ferry logistics, it was a small historical detail worth raising a glass to.
Málaga: Picasso Can Wait Until After Lunch
The next day was free, the weather was good and we decided to go to Málaga. Its historic centre is a pleasant place to wander, with pedestrian streets, old buildings and plenty of reminders of its Roman, Moorish and later history. It’s also the birthplace of Pablo Picasso and Antonio Banderas, which was enough to give us a loose plan for the afternoon. We arrived around lunchtime and saw a queue outside the Picasso Museum, so we decided there was no reason to join it on an empty stomach.
Instead we went to Bodegas El Pimpi, a Málaga institution since 1971 and a restaurant in which Banderas is a shareholder. The interiors are full of traditional Andalusian character, including tiles, old photographs and wine barrels, and the whole place feels cheerfully busy. We started with vermouth and, by now almost inevitably, San Miguel Especial. Lunch was a generous affair: boquerones fritos al limón, a pringá sandwich with crisps, a traditional tapas platter and gambas al ajillo. It was one of the more enjoyable leisurely meals of the trip, largely because we weren’t trying to rush off to the next coach departure.
By the time we finished eating, the queue outside the Picasso Museum had disappeared. The museum occupies the sixteenth-century Palacio de Buenavista and shows a broad range of Picasso’s work, which I appreciated more than another survey of the handful of famous images everybody already knows. Afterwards we continued walking around the centre and admired Málaga Cathedral from outside. It’s affectionately called La Manquita, the One-Armed Lady, because its second tower was never completed. Between lunch, the museum and a bit of wandering, the day felt pleasantly unambitious. We headed back to Torremolinos without needing to have accomplished anything more.
Granada: The Alhambra, Second Time Around
We left the coast for Granada on 12 March, where the Alhambra and Generalife Gardens were the main attractions. This was our second visit, so I was interested to see whether the place would still hold the same appeal. I remembered our earlier tour being shorter, and I think we’d seen only one palace that time, though I could be mistaken about the details. What I do know is that this visit involved more than three hours of walking and took us through all three principal Nasrid palace sections: the Mexuar, the Palace of Comares and the Palace of the Lions. It was far more extensive, and considerably more tiring.
The Alhambra is one of those places where the scale and the details work against each other in the most enjoyable way. You’re constantly aware of the vast palace-fortress complex overlooking Granada, but then a carved wall, an intricate wooden ceiling or the reflection of an arch in a pool brings your attention back to something much smaller. The geometric tilework, plaster decoration, courtyards and careful use of light are extraordinary, particularly when you remember how much of the work was done by hand. Even on a second visit, there was enough to keep me looking and photographing.
The Generalife Gardens had a gentler quality, with pathways, fountains, planted courtyards and views of Granada below. Water is so central to the experience that you notice its sound as much as the architecture. It’s easy to understand how this landscape inspired Washington Irving and other writers, even if by that stage I was paying rather more attention to how far we’d walked than to the romantic history of the place. We checked into Meliá Granada afterwards and had a nice dinner at Tinta Fina & Co Restaurante Vinoteca, where I tried white vermouth for a change. After that, we went back to the hotel and were quite happy to call it a day.
Toledo: Don Quixote, Escalators and a Highlander Sword
Our last full tour day took us north from Granada towards Toledo, passing some of the famous windmills of La Mancha along the way. Seeing them on the horizon immediately brought to mind Don Quixote charging at what he believed were giants, one of those literary images that somehow survives even if you haven’t read the entire book for years. Toledo then appeared above the Tagus River, its historic centre perched on a hill and looking exactly as though it had been built to resist anyone trying to get into it.
What surprised me most was how thoughtfully the city has dealt with accessibility. Toledo is undeniably steep, but escalators have been built into the hillside approaches to the old town, so visitors who might struggle with the climb can reach the historic centre far more comfortably. They’re integrated so discreetly that from outside the old walls you could easily miss them. After days spent navigating stairs and cobblestones, I thought it was a particularly intelligent bit of infrastructure, and it made the visit much easier than the approach might suggest.
We had a hearty lunch at Tapas Restaurante GO ALCÁZAR and then explored the old streets on a short guided walk. Toledo’s history of swordmaking meant there were plenty of shops selling blades and replicas, which is how I ended up buying a miniature version of the katana that Juan Sánchez Villalobos Ramírez gives Connor MacLeod in Highlander. It seemed entirely appropriate to buy a prop from an eighties fantasy film in a city associated with steel for centuries. Sometimes a souvenir doesn’t need a more sophisticated justification than that.
There were other small details I liked, particularly Calle Alfileritos and the image of the Virgin Mary set behind glass in a wall niche. According to local legend, women would leave pins there while praying for luck in love, giving the little shrine its name, the Virgen de los Alfileritos. We also saw the Jesuit Church of San Ildefonso, passed through the historic Jewish Quarter and looked at shops selling traditional marzipan and yemas. Toledo’s reputation as a city shaped by Christian, Jewish and Muslim traditions makes sense when you’re walking its streets, even if the idea of those cultures always living harmoniously together is a more complicated story than the tourist shorthand suggests.
From Toledo we continued on to Madrid, where our organised tour ended. It had been an extraordinarily full few weeks, and ordinarily we’d have been thinking about repacking and getting ready for the return flight. Instead, we still had the unresolved Qatar Airways problem waiting for us, and by then it had become increasingly clear that it wasn’t going to sort itself out.
The Expensive Way Home
We spent much of the following day trying to contact Qatar Airways without getting anywhere useful. Our Madrid-to-Doha and Doha-to-Singapore flights had already been cancelled because of the military conflict and airspace disruptions affecting the region. I had made the rather foolish assumption that we could simply speak to someone from the airline at the airport and discuss rebooking. So after checking out of the hotel, we headed there with our luggage, expecting at least to find an operating counter. As I mentioned at the beginning, that plan came to an abrupt end with an empty desk and a man muttering “guerra”.
The app wasn’t giving us a practical solution either, and we’d reached the point where we were tired of trying to get an answer. We began searching for other flights home and eventually booked seats on Turkish Airlines via Istanbul. The tickets were expensive, much more than we’d expected to pay, but at that moment the attraction of having a confirmed route back to Singapore outweighed almost everything else. We’d been travelling for weeks, the uncertainty was exhausting, and we wanted to get home rather than spend another day refreshing an app and wondering whether anything would change.
In hindsight, I think we could probably have approached the situation more calmly. We might have compared more options, allowed ourselves a little time to think or found another arrangement that didn’t cost quite so much. But hindsight is much easier when you’re sitting comfortably at home and no longer trying to make decisions with all your luggage beside you. We made the choice that got us moving again, and we eventually returned to Singapore via Türkiye, which hadn’t been on the original itinerary at all.
What Stays After the Suitcases Are Unpacked
Sorting through the photographs afterwards was like making the journey a second time, only without having to get on the coach at seven in the morning. The obvious sights were all there: Doha’s museums, Porto’s tilework, the monasteries of Portugal, Córdoba’s arches, the medinas of Morocco and Granada’s Alhambra. But there were also the less impressive-looking pictures that I found myself spending just as much time on — a table after lunch, a worn shop sign, the view from a bus window, a souvenir on a hotel bed or the same streets photographed from slightly different angles because I couldn’t decide which one I preferred.
Travelling through Portugal, Spain and Morocco in one continuous journey also made their shared history much more visible. The building materials, decorative patterns, courtyards and religious architecture kept echoing across different places, while their histories of empire, trade and migration were never far below the surface. Coming from the Philippines, I felt some of those connections differently. We inherited plenty from Spain, whether we wanted to or not, and seeing the places where parts of that history began gave familiar details a slightly different context. Even a bottle of San Miguel in Torremolinos ended up sending my thoughts back to Manila.
A guided tour was a practical way to cover all that distance, though it came with familiar compromises. There were days when we wanted more time somewhere and others when another monument sounded much less attractive than a long lunch. The language arrangements in Morocco were disappointing, and the flight cancellations were an expensive reminder that international events can reach right into the middle of an ordinary holiday. Still, the trip wasn’t defined by those problems. They became part of the story, alongside all the good meals, weather changes, remarkable buildings and little surprises we hadn’t planned for.
If we did it again, I’d probably leave more room for slow days and places that deserve more than a couple of hours. I’d certainly have a better backup plan for flights. But I wouldn’t trade away the odd little moments that came with the actual journey, even the ones that didn’t look particularly memorable at the time. There’s a lot of pleasure in simply looking back through the photographs and remembering where we were, what we’d eaten and what happened next, without needing every day to have been wonderful. Most of them were interesting, and that’s enough.
Leave a Reply