Malaga; Friday, 12 March, 2010

In spite of the terminal transit being upgraded at Gatwick and having to catch a bus from the station to the North Terminal, I was walking up to the checkin desks less than 30 minutes after leaving my desk at work. What was even more surprising (given I had looked on line earlier in the week and found that my flight only had two seats left, and these were more than 10 times the price I had paid!) was how empty the checkin area was. 15 desks open, 10 checkin staff looking for customers!

It wasn’t just the checkin that was empty, I walked straight through security only stopping to take my jacket off and unpack the laptop. Walking out into the departures lounge it looked very busy, but that was only because one full Emirates flight to Dubai was running spectacularly (four hours when I arrived, and getting worse) late and most of those passengers were crowded around the information desk at the entrance to the lounge.

I had a brief stop for lunch and was going to settle down with a book for a while when my flight appeared with a gate number, so I wandered over in that direction (knowing that the plaintive calls of “please be aware this gate is a 15 minute walk from the terminal building” are actually pretty true!). I arrived at the gate and got into the “couldn’t be assed to pay any extra and don’t need special assistance queue”. When we were called forward 10 minutes later, a full 40 minutes before the flight was due to depart, it was only at that point that I looked round and discovered a very, very long queue had formed behind me!

A packed, but uneventful flight later, we arrived in Malaga, making one of the more spectacular approaches to an airport. The whole way down there had been thick cloud. That cloud had finally cleared about 30 miles before Malaga revealing the mountains. The plane came down, over the mountains, over the city, out into the Mediterranean, turned so the setting sun was beaming straight in through my window and then in a straight line from over the sea to the centre line of the runway.

Malaga airport appears to be almost as large as Gatwick, and with only two border police on for a full easyJet flight there was quite a queue to get through immigration. In fact the queue was so long that by the time I got down to the baggage reclaim belt it had stopped running and my bag was just sitting on it waiting to be collected.

There are many ways of getting from the airport to the city; I had chosen the train, which meant a five minute walk through a car park and over a dual carriageway to the station. The guidebooks all said that you should catch the train through the central station to the next one on at the end of the line as this is the closest to the city centre. Unfortunately, these guide books (written as they were in 2007) didn’t have the information that the line between the main station and the centre of the city has been closed since 2008 for “upgrade works” that don’t appear to have completed yet. I hadn’t realised this until I tried to purchase a ticket! I caught the train to the central station and then, having only looked on the map at how to get to the hotel from the end station, caught a taxi to the hotel. Of course I didn’t realise that the centre of Malaga is currently being rebuilt and all the roads are up, that it’s got enough one-way streets and one-way systems to make a British town planner wet themselves, and I’d also forgotten that it was now just before 7pm on a Friday evening, and consequently the journey took some time.

Having checked into the hotel I dumped my stuff and went for a wander around the old town for a while taking in some of the sites including the Cathedral and the bottom of the castle (it was closed for the evening so I wasn’t going to start walking up a massive big hill!). I spent a good two hours wandering around before I suddenly remembered this is exactly what I had done last year in Granada and got myself caught out by the Andalucíans having dinner earlier than in other parts of Spain and finding at 10pm that there was nowhere to eat. So just before 9, I found a nice looking restaurant and had dinner. By the time I had finished dinner I went for a bit more of a wander and discovered that my earlier assumptions about Andalucian’s having dinner early was wrong, it’s just the people of Granada that keep shorter hours as Malaga’s restaurants were still piling in the customers at 10pm.

I wandered back to the hotel and, after dispatching a mosquito that was buzzing round the room with a particularly heavy guide book, turned in for the night.