Day 1: Home to Algeciras via Malaga

At some point last year, we took advantage of a BA sale to book cheap flights to Malaga for this weekend. When I say "cheap", I'm not sure there really is any such thing as a cheap flight anymore, but these were less than £300 each for business class returns, which seemed like a good deal by today's standards. The downside was that the outbound flight was at 06.15 from Gatwick.

Gatwick is never a fun drive and in the end we decided to drive down on Thursday night and stay over at an airport hotel. That meant that we were able to set our alarms for the (comparatively!) civilised time of 4am this morning, drive a mile down the road to the airport parking, and be through security at the airport by the time the lounge opened at 5am.

We had our first breakfast in the lounge, before boarding the plane and getting a second breakfast during the flight. Having had a sausage muffin for my first breakfast, I went for the pancakes option on the flight and they were really nice  

The flight to Malaga is around three hours and it was cloudy for the first half of the journey at least. By the time we were coming in to land, the weather had notably improved.

We weren't quite sure what to expect on arrival at Malaga airport. We experienced absolute chaos trying to get through the new EES system for the first time back in October in Madrid, before having our fingerprints taken in Helsinki last month. So we thought we were now registered in the new system, but weren't 100% sure what that meant we now had to do when we landed. After getting off the plane, we quickly ended up in what looked like a very long queue, which turned out to be leading towards the registration kiosks. Luckily it moved fairly quickly. We got to the front, scanned our passports and got a message telling us to head to the e-gates. So it seems like we did successfully register in Helsinki. The e-gates were much smoother than they had been in Madrid and we were soon officially in Spain. Phew!

We caught a local train from the airport into the centre of Malaga and then had around two hours to spare before we were due to catch a bus to the town of Algeciras, further west along the coast. I'd deliberately left us a big margin in case we ended up queuing at the airport for hours! That meant we had some time to walk around Malaga, which was nice, as the weather was incredible.

Look how blue the sky was!

It feels like we haven't seen a sky like this in the UK for a very long time! It was also pretty warm - definitely low 20s. I had been debating whether leaving our coats at home was really a good idea, but it turned out that it probably was.

We first came to Malaga back in November 2021, in what was our first foreign holiday after the pandemic. I remember being pleasantly surprised by how nice it was, as it definitely wasn't a place that had ever been on my bucket list.

If anything, it was even warmer and sunnier today in February than it had been that November, and we had a lovely time strolling under the palm trees...

...and through the various parks.

Eventually we came to a view of the Alcazaba, which we'd climbed all the way up to on our previous visit.

We didn't have time for that today, but it was still cool to see

We turned around at this point and set off back in the general direction of the bus station.

Walking through the park felt almost tropical. There were bright orange flowers...

...and these trees which reminded us of ones we'd seen in Tanzania.

We found a really nice cafe near the bus station and had some coffee to help us stay awake after the early start. It was one of those places like in Italy, where an Americano comes as an espresso with a little jug of hot water.

The bus to Algeciras departed at 13.15 and took just over two hours to make its way along the coast, stopping en route at places like Marbella (which doesn't look particularly attractive, from its bus station at least!). The hotel we're staying at in Algeciras for the next three nights is a couple of kilometres away from the bus station, so we then had a short walk to find it.

We passed through the main square, which was really beautiful.

These colourful tiles were very reminiscent of Seville.

The hotel itself is quite basic, but good value for money; I had some credit to use up on hotels.com after our USA trip last autumn, so this has worked out at less than £50/night.

It was about 5pm by this point, which is far too early to consider getting dinner in southern Spain. We decided to have a nap instead and wake up at a more suitable time to go out in search of food.