Blog Ten – Sol del Este, Menorca

Published by Alastair Reid on October 22, 2019October 22, 2019

Sol del Este, Menorca [9th – 23rd October 2019]

And so, once more, to La Gardenia in Sol del Este – the first village in Spain to see the sun rise. Brian and Joanne kindly provided the reception committee to greet us, as they had in 2018, and we arrived to a beautifully prepared master bedroom, complete with freshly laundered towels, large bars of chocolate, flowers and a bottle of cava, plus glasses. The domestics really do a lovely job!

Last year we had the novelty of arriving in the Port of Mahon by ferry, this year it was via the airport, as normal. We flew with Vueling from Lisbon to Barcelona, where the airport catering proved to be a cut above most other places we’ve been, then on with the same carrier to Mahon. We arrived at Mahon pretty late in the evening, to find the luggage carousel circling, with only a solitary pair of boxer shorts on it. Thereby, we assume, hangs a tale. Happily our suitcases joined them promptly.

A lovely couple of days crossover with family included an excellent dinner at Tapes, on the road out of Mahon towards Es Castell and Sol del Este – we’d passed it in the car for years: glad we eventually stopped a couple of years ago. It was great to hang out with Brian and Joanne, even though it was just for a couple of days. Then it was back to just the two of us again, though we do have a few acquaintances in the local community.

It’s hard to know what to write about La Gardenia and Menorca that we haven’t said and written many times before. It is always a delight to come here, and we never tire, even slightly, of this beautiful island, and our small corner of it. There’s always somewhere new to discover – including this time a megalithic site at Trebalugar, as we tried to skirt around traffic police, stopping hordes of drivers and testing for alcohol and drugs. We wondered why they had picked the middle of the afternoon to do this, then we remembered it was a Sunday, when many locals go out for long lunches, often accompanied by some nice wine.

Every year, we pay at least one visit to the stone circle, and the rest of the megalithic site, at Talati de Dalt. This is always an emotional visit for Fiona (and for Brian and Pauline when they go) as it was a place that their mum, Florence, particularly loved to come to, when we holidayed in Menorca with her, when Kathleen and Sean were kids. On this occasion, the stone circle smelled quite distinctly of gardenia (appropriately enough).

A walk in the nature reserve, up the coast at Es Grau, is also a recurrent favourite, because of the area’s tranquil, natural beauty. Each time we go, we hope to see one of Menorca’s very shy wild tortoises, and on this occasion our luck was in. During a forest walk, I was staring at a bunch of bright red berries, in one of my rare lapses into my previous life as a botanist, when I realised I was practically standing on a tortoise. It obviously felt that if it couldn’t see us, then we couldn’t see it!

Our final Saturday night of the trip was spent, together with around 2000 other fans, at the Pavello de Menorca, watching Hestia Menorca basketball club play in the LEB Plata – Spain’s third division. We saw the equivalent home match to the one we took in in 2018, coincidentally against the same team – Albacete. Last year was a disappointing 1 point loss, but this year the extra quality of players added, together with a couple of guys who have lasted right through from the amateur league of two seasons ago, saw Menorca triumph by 11. Even Fi is now extolling the virtues of the point guard and captain Jimenez, who is a particular favourite of hers. Looks good for a promotion challenge, we hope!

To bookend our trip, after our outward flights to Sicily were cancelled due to the BA pilots’ strike, Vueling informed us that there was a time change in our first flight home, from Mahon to Bilbao. Closer examination illustrated that that was a bit of an understatement: they had put it back from Wednesday to Friday. So now we have three hops home on the Wednesday: Mahon – Barcelona – Bilbao – Edinburgh, instead of two. However, some folk trying to book flights close to the time have discovered that, in the wake of the Thomas Cook debacle, other airlines have hiked their prices up as demand is high, so perhaps we are not so badly off.

In addition, Barcelona airport has recently been disrupted during the Catalan nationalist protests, so we’ll see what is happening on Wednesday. Apparently there have been protest rallies here in Mahon too, but obviously these have not been on days we’ve been in the city, as we were blissfully unaware of them. Spanish flags are again much in evidence in this part of the island, as they were at the time of the Catalan referendum, which led to the political imprisonments which have sparked the latest violence.

So, Retirement Trip Number Two draws near to a close. We felt that Trip Number One in Portugal and Spain had been so good that we couldn’t possibly emulate it. However, Trip Number Two has honestly surpassed it for us. Fiona’s planning and organisational skills have come up trumps once again, and we have had a wonderful, and at times quite spectacular, trip. There may have been a few more times on this trip when she wanted to throw me overboard, or push me into a volcanoe’s crater, but we have rubbed along pretty well on the whole, I think.

We would go back, in the blink of an eye, to Lipari – who wouldn’t want to spend some more quality time in a 1950s Italian film set? Also to the unique island of Stromboli – who wouldn’t want to live in the shadow of a persistently erupting volcano?

Sicily was certainly an experience, mostly a positive one, though we both agree that it is an island we’d find it difficult to actually fall in love with. We thoroughly enjoyed Ortigia, and the city of Syracusa in general, to which we’d like to return. Taormina and Ragusa were great towns with spectacular scenery, but one visit will probably suffice. Catania was not that great, and we’d avoid the airport there if at all possible. We’d love to see Mount Etna on a clear day.

The nagging feeling persists that Sicily has so many natural wonders, so many beautiful towns and cities, and as a result has such a burgeoning tourist trade, that it should be somewhere up alongside (the albeit much smaller) Menorca, in terms of its wealth and standard of living. The fact that it is so far short of that, with ropey public services and clearly poor people in abundance, indicates that the money that should be addressing those issues is being diverted elsewhere.

We finally made it to Portofino, which was almost impossibly picturesque, and implausibly expensive – again, a single visit will probably do us. We’d like to see a bit more of Genoa, and definitely of the Italian Riviera, which looks spectacular. Casablanca provided an intriguing, if brief, return to North Africa, but one visit will suffice, whilst Malaga and Lisbon would be great cities for (say) a weekend break, or a little longer stay. The MSC cruise was slightly reminiscent of the curate’s egg, but was mostly positive, especially our lovely cabin and balcony, and we definitely wouldn’t rule out cruising again in the future. The proverbial wild horses could not keep us away from Menorca.

So now we shall have one final meal up the road at Ignacio’s brilliant Cafeteria Sol del Este, as we look forward (?) to our imminent return to the cold and the madness that is the UK – still in Europe for at least a few days after we get back!

My dozen favourite images from our two weeks in Menorca are included in the gallery below. Click on a thumbnail to see a bigger image.

Image Gallery