The two sides of Benidorm
Tuesday, October 30
Camping Torre La Sal 2, Oropesa We came to the end of our month-long stay here fully relaxed, having enjoyed everything that the site has to offer – both sides of the road, three different pitches, meals at both the restaurants, the music, the dancing, the three different pools and, of course, the tennis and padel courts. We’d also made some new friends and in the week before we moved on, we had a few good nights with Ken and Hilary Bibb from Sussex. Like us, they are touring around in their motorhome and on the Tuesday we were treated to a barbecue, sheltered from the insistent rain in their very useful awning. The following day, we had a few drinks during happy hour (4-6) at the Rincon restaurant just outside the campsite and then surrendered to a takeaway pizza at the Sisal bar one last time. Thursday, November 1 La Marina camperstop, El Saler, Valencia What is it with the Spanish and their bank holidays? Our plans to move south on the Thursday, purely for a bit of retail therapy at Ikea, Decathlon and Lidl on a large commercial park in Valencia, was scuppered by the fact that it turned out to be a bank holiday. On a Thursday! With the shops shut, we decided to move on anyway to a camperstop near to the park at El Saler, somewhere we had visited last year. We arrived early enough to have a good walk on the beach (weather beautiful, sea spectacular, forgot to bring our bathers) and a walk around the little town but decided to have an early night and an early start to the next day. Friday, November 2 Camping Javea, Javea After packing up and moving off, we made it to Decathlon early and had Jane’s tennis racquet restrung (excellent value for €15). We trousered a few other titbits then walked over to Ikea and bought a lot more stuff we didn’t need. By the time we emerged, picked up the racquet and stowed away all the stuff, the whole of Spain had descended on the park and we realised that Lidl was a non-starter. Instead, we headed for our next location, Javea, a large town and resort on a peninsular jutting out into the Med’ just south of Valencia. It’s a smart site, very popular with British travellers, but we couldn’t book a table for their meal+supper deal on Friday. As a consolation prize, we walked into Javea to a highly-praised Indian restaurant on the seafront. It was as good as reviewed and, when we made it back to the camp and joined the Brits dancing to the music of the turn, we thought we’d had a lucky escape. Over the course of a week or so, the weather was up and down but we managed a few games on the site’s excellent tennis court and cycled around the area. Javea itself is a busy town with lots of handy supermarkets, including a very popular Iceland, full of ex-pat specials like Heinz sandwich spread, white bread and British beer. The harbour area is lovely, too, and we had a coffee at a lovely restaurant overlooking the beach. On the Monday after our arrival, we fancied another Indian at lunch but found it shut. An Italian on the beachfront was open but it was, frankly, disappointing... Tuesday, November 6 Camping Villasol, Benidorm ...as, to be honest, was Benidorm. It’s one of those places where we’ve often tried to spend a night, only to find the best campsites full. This time, though, we found Villasol had plenty of pitches available and chose one on one of the higher alleys, away from the road and very quiet. This is where the British come to spend the winter and it’s easy to see why: there are scores of them dominating the site and many come back year after year, to the same pitches and the same neighbours. The pool area is lovely, the bar is always open (pints are €2; wine is €1.50) and the weather is warm and sunny. There’s a busy activities programme offering regular fitness classes and a version of padel played on the football court twice a week. The site supermarket is well-stocked and reasonably priced, there is safe cycling to good supermarkets in Albir, about 5kms to the north, and, of course, there is Benidorm itself, about a kilometre away to the south. Before the weekend came upon us, we had a walk and a cycle around the town, finding the strip by Levante beach predictably loud and garish, but the old town by the headland to the south was delightful, full of interesting bars and shops and as charming as the flipside was grim. We cycled to the base of the El Tempo skyscraper, just for a look, and found what is meant to be the tallest occupied building in Spain unoccupied and something of an unfinished white elephant. It is, though, quite spectacular. More functional and just as impressive is the ‘groundscraper’, Benidorm’s council building which lies at the head of a lovely park area, the green lungs of a town/city that is billed as one of the most sustainable in Europe. On Thursday, we found ourselves chatting with a couple who, like us, are here for winter before going back to warden jobs on a U.K. campsite. “It’s not the campers you have to worry about,” they said, “it’s the other wardens!” As they knocked back an alarming number of bottles of Spanish beer and became more and more passive-aggressive, we decided their views were untypical. Surely none of the people we’ll be working with will be such utter gobshites! Friday, November 9 A lovely day! Through Facebook we had made contact with two of our very old friends from Spondon days, Billy and Andrea Poole. They saw that we were in Benidorm and as they were just a few miles up the road, looking for that elusive ‘Place in the Sun’, they drove down for lunch at Villasol. It’s probably 20 years or more since we were all together and there was a lot of fun to be had catching up in what had happened to ourselves and our kids, sharing photos of grandchildren and, of course, putting away lots of food and drink (well played, Andrea, for offering to drive!). They had exciting news, too, having put down a small deposit on a lovely-looking finca inland from Calle, one of our favourite places and a lovely part of Spain. After five hours! of catching up they returned to their temporary home, and their two dogs, while we went back to our more modest Place in the Sun. Hopefully, it won’t be 20 years or more till we get back together. On Saturday, during the day, we walked back into the town to take in the sites and gird our loins for a full-on trip during the night. In the early afternoon, the strip and the even uglier, seedier streets two blocks back from the beach, are just about tolerable. The bars, almost all English-themed pubs, are full of people in replica football tops watching Premiership football. As one match turns into another, with international rugby to break up the monotony, people are just taking things easy, lining their stomachs with kebabs or chips, ready for the serious business when the sun goes down, the neon is cranked up a notch and Benidorm goes into full Sodom and Gomorrah mode. Some of the sports bars transform themselves into lap-dancing joints, strip clubs and, after midnight, live sex shows. Almost all of them in the early evening feature singers and tribute acts, all of them putting their heart and soul into performances that struggle to take people’s attention away from the live sports shown on massive screens. Walk into the old town, though, and you’ll find the Spanish enjoying drinks and tapas in some really swish little bistros. On the night we were there, a communal procession wound its way through the streets, fostering a lovely atmosphere during the fiesta weekend (yes, another one). Marching bands would stop and perform little impromptu concerts while little children in traditional dress let off fireworks. It was easy to imagine we were in a little village in Andalusia... until we walked back through the Soho-style strip. By 10.30 at night, the mood had changed markedly and it was hard to see anyone having what you might call ‘a good time’. Small groups of drunk men and women were cursing some imagined slights, bitching about rude ‘foreigners’ and staggering onwards to their next €1 pint or shot. What must the Spanish think of us, we thought. Presumably this was once a charming little fishing village that has been completely colonised by the British, to the extent that it’s amazing it hasn’t replaced the Euro with the pound. By busy crossing points, ‘LOOK LEFT’ is written in the road in large letters, as much for the benefit of the hundreds, if not thousands of mobility scooters that monopolise the pavements, as the pedestrians. If, let’s say, Blackpool, was full of hard partying Germans, French or Dutch holidaymakers for 365 days a year, as Benidorm seems to be with the British, I dread to think what xenophobic nonsense would be generated in the U.K. As it is, the Spanish seem to tolerate it. The police keep a lowish profile (although some reports say they are clamping down on some of our more antisocial habits) while, as we discovered, the Spanish population remain largely in the old town. Even this area, though, has its edgier quarters. Sunday, November 11 Camping Villasol, Benidorm Despite the temptations of cheap beer and kebabs, we were very well behaved last night and we spent Remembrance Sunday/Armistice Day doing some laundry, relaxing in the sunshine and preparing to leave Benidorm in the morning, to head for an aire near to Murcia airport (a recce’ ahead of our flight back to the U.K. in January) and then on to our winter roost near Cartagena. Villasol is a lovely campsite with some lovely people on it (I’d bet we were the only residents in the ‘jungle’ last night). We were glad to have had the Benidorm experience but once was enough... we won’t be returning in a hurry. |
Pictured, from top, a dramatic view of the seafront at Benidorm; Jane with the panorama of Javea in the background; some views of Javea; the lovely pool complex at Villasol in Benidorm; the spectacular but daft El Tempo building in Benidorm: some images from our day and night in the town
|