Where to find the Travelling Turtle Adventures:

🕵️‍♂️ #FinalProblem2024 bsky.app/profile/poli...
🌍 #ContinentHop24 bsky.app/profile/poli...
🚞 #NarrowWay bsky.app/profile/poli...
🇪🇺 #Schengen200 bsky.app/profile/poli...
🦤 Old Twitter journeys x.com/politic_anim...
🎞️ YouTube youtube.com/@travelling_...

Where to find the Travelling Turtle Adventures

🕵️‍♂️ #FinalProblem2024 bsky.app/profile/poli...
🌍 #ContinentHop24 bsky.app/profile/poli...
🚞 #TheNarrowWay bsky.app/profile/poli...
Older journeys over on Twitter x.com/politic_anim...
The YouTube videos youtube.com/@travelling_...

Goodnight from Donostia/San Sebastián. Tomorrow, we’re heading a little east to start the second of this week’s Turtle Travels adventures, a much more leisurely trip than #ContinentHop24, as we begin Europe’s longest narrow gauge railway journey, through a fascinating bit of the world. #TheNarrowWay

Ok, we are moving again now, past Monte Hacho… #ContinentHop24

The Moroccan mountain of Jbel Chendir, and Ceuta town on its low lying isthmus now firmly in sight. But we worryingly seem to be slowing right down, possibly waiting for something else to leave Ceuta harbour. #ContinentHop24

Could that possibly be another continent emerging from the haze? #ContinentHop24

It is very very windy for lightweight turtles, so Mrs Turtle is just going to take the briefest look back at Europe. #ContinentHop24

The Rock of Gibraltar disappears astern. The Rock is one of the Pillars of Hercules guarding the entrance to the Mediterranean. Monte Hacho, on Ceuta’s peninsula, is probably the other. #ContinentHop24

Getting rid of the pilot. They sail this route about six times a day - I’m amazed they feel in need of piloting. #ContinentHop24

And about five minutes late, we are edging, escorted, out of Algeciras port, towards the Spanish enclave of Ceuta on the African shore of the Straits of Gibraltar. Let’s see if we can make up those five minutes… #ContinentHop24

We are on board High Speed Craft ‘Cecilia Payne’. She is the predecessor ship to the ‘Dublin Swift’ that I travelled on in #GoWest adventure, though she was called ‘Jonathan Swift’ on the Irish Sea, being renamed after a British-American astrophysicist when she moved to the Straits. #ContinentHop24

We have been released to go on the atraque. #ContinentHop24

Not even bloody started boarding yet. #ContinentHop24

World’s slowest escalator… #ContinentHop24

Getting there… god, it is hot and there is, outwith these few palm trees, zero shade and lots of reflective hard surfaces. #ContinentHop24

Now that’s a familiar looking rock on the horizon, even if I’ve never actually seen it in real life before. #ContinentHop24

Enjoyable getting to shoot straight past the (remarkably expensive) cash-paying traffic at the regular toll booths along the Autovía, courtesy of our electronic bus tag. The bus is about three minutes late now, and I could really do with that not growing as we approach the endgame. #ContinentHop24

Estepona seems a pleasant sort of place. Can’t help feeling it would be a little different if the Mouse had stuck with this town as its preferred site for EuroDisney, rather than some obscure place called Paris. #ContinentHop24

Fascinating contrasts along this road - to the right of the motorway, steep, jagged mountains stern and wild. To the left, every low hill to the coast is topped with either terracotta-tiled villas, whitewashed apartments, or a crane building one or the other. #ContinentHop24

If the train journey to Bordeaux was like reading an expensive wine list, this bus journey is like reading a travel agent’s window: Torremolinos, Fuengirola, Marbella… At the end of WWII, Marbella was a jasmine-lined village of 900 people. Now it is 160k. #ContinentHop24

The Costa del Sol is the only place where I’ve seen a green bridge across a motorway for…a golf course. They’re normally to let the wildlife cross. #ContinentHop24

At last the Autovía del Mediterráneo lives up to its name, climbing high enough that the hazy, blue-grey sea can be seen above the lines of villas and apartment blocks of the Costa. #ContinentHop24

Our Cádiz-bound coach, every seat taken, makes a spot-on punctual departure from Malaga’s bus station, meanders around the palm-tree-filled intersections, and accelerates west on the Avenida Andalucía. #ContinentHop24

Malaga bus station, in a feat of integrated transport/air conditioning, is next to the rail station. The architecture looks like a bus station for an English market town, but with smarter buses and more digital info. Here’s my next green steed to take me along the Costa del Sol. #ContinentHop24

Malaga station is primarily a huge shopping centre with a handful of platforms attached, but it is air conditioned, and can supply me with a queso baguette that is either superb, or I’m just starving so everything tastes good, so I’m not complaining. #ContinentHop24

Through some sort of timetabling subterfuge, we arrive at Malaga María Zimbrano two minutes early. The station is named for a locally-born philosopher, much less confusing for English people than the other station called ‘Malaga Victoria Kent’ named for a Second Republic politician. #ContinentHop24

And so up, for over 7km under, and then steeply down from the Sierra Nevada, the final barrier before the Mediterranean shore. As we descend sea-wards, white-washed houses begin to crowd the jagged slopes, almost the first bit of serious population density since Madrid, 3 hours ago. #ContinentHop24

We call at Antequera Santa Ana, a vast, dual-gauge junction complex in the middle of nowhere. Technically this is the junction for trains to the port I need, but that’s a very slow and infrequent line. We’re sticking to the AVE as it heads straight for the Sierra Nevada. #ContinentHop24

Beyond Córdoba, where we’ve trimmed our delay to 10 minutes, our train branches off onto the newer Malaga high speed line, opened in 2007, and somewhat more ‘normal’ for a high speed line in the ferocious way it approaches the topography. #ContinentHop24

Dropping out of the Sierra Morena, home of lynx and barrier between Castile and Andalusia. Another empty landscape, but every valley has a little house, and a small reservoir lined with bougainvillea (I think.). We are stopping at Córdoba, to the relief of the Americans next to me. #ContinentHop24