Galivanting in Granada

Two travel posts in a row ! Busy, busy...

Busy indeed. Immediately on returning from Cardiff my entire time was taken up for the next fortnight or so with admin duties. My Master's student has successfully transmuted into a PhD student (hooray !) which requires not only a bunch of direct logistics (where shall be his office ? whence his key ?) but also grant applications. And for myself, it became extremely urgent to actually book my next trip, a back-to-back conference jaunt. Which I managed, thankfully, just as the hotels were beginning to be really snapped up quickly.

The first destination was somewhere I've been once before and never got around to blogging : Granada. So to give y'all two for the price of one, I'll be interspersing this one with some recollections and photos from that trip too.

Granada And Environs

Happening right in between several major flooding incidents, this was not a good time to visit southern Spain. But we got lucky – very lucky. Flying from Prague to Malaga and thence by bus to Granada, neither the destinations nor the routes were in any way affected by the floods at all. Even luckier for us, writing this up a couple of days after getting back, Malaga is now in a different situation. Maybe blogging the experience of an actual disaster (as opposed to a faux hurricane) would be a better way to generate web traffic but I don't think I need that kind of stress.

Anyway, the ALMA "All Hands" is a travelling circus annual meeting for ALMA support astronomers which I've mentioned before. It's useful way of keeping abreast of the latest developments, but it's mainly about admin rather than science. There's little enough to interest the great unwashed general public so I'll concentrate on the travelling.

The four of us coming from Prague decided not to book the bus from Malaga in advance, not knowing how fast we'd be able to exit the airport or if the flight would be delayed. Which it was, though only by half an hour or so. Actually catching the bus was a little... chaotic would be too strong a word, but it was certainly confusing. The bus was showing as fully booked online, a little worrying because there weren't many other buses running that evening, but the bus driver sold us tickets anyway. We had to pay cash. In Malaga city centre the driver called out (in Spanish of course) for people going to Granada, a bunch got off, but we stayed put. Fortunately the very nice young man ahead of us explained that the bus had been over-sold so they'd have to transfer to another one, but assured us we could stay put. So we did. Then pretty much all the would-be-transfers got back on again a long with a lot more people.

It certainly felt chaotic, but it wasn't really. It only seemed so because I have absolutely no clue what the system is (that and some very loud Spanish people and the really rather small seats with very little legroom compared to most other coaches in Europe). I'm guessing that they keep some seats reserved from the app so that people can still walk up and buy tickets on the spot, but I really don't know.

Anyway, a two-hour, rather cramped bus journey got us to Granada's main station, and a short local bus took us to the hotel. As usual with these events, we're all put in somewhere nice so we don't feel tempted to wander off. Which is quite substantial consolation after a ~10 hour trip.

The traditionally-late Spanish eating hours served us especially well the first night, arriving as we did at around 10pm.

I have to say that this was actually a better arrival experience than my first visit. Seven years ago I came by myself for an observing run (we'll get to the telescope later). Flying into Granada airport (probably via Madrid, I think), getting to the city was much easier. But the IRAM guest house where observers stay before heading up to the telescope is uniquely difficult to find. Here's what I wrote in the post I drafted but never finished :

I'd been warned about this, but still... come on. Arriving "after hours" (meaning after 3pm, bizarrely) means you have to get the key from a guard in the adjacent car park. The guard knows what's going on, but speaks no English and fervently believes that SPEAKING LOUDLY AND SLOWLY WILL SUFFICE. It took about 10 minutes of LOUD, SLOW EXPLANATIONS before he let me go away with the key and find my room.

This was completely unsuccessful, for the residencia is contained within a gated complex of other buildings which isn't well-lit and not at all easy to navigate at night. There are no signs or maps telling you where each building is - you just have to go around checking for the one you want. The IRAM key was contained within an envelope, on which was written the room number and contained internet access instructions but didn't have the building number written anywhere. 

So, I wandered around – dragging my heavy suitcase the whole time, wearing my warm winter coat in 18 C conditions - looking at each and every building (there's around 30 of them), carefully checking for the IRAM sign. I couldn't see it anywhere. I couldn't face talking to the guard by myself again so in desperation I asked some wandering people if they could help me. They could. 15 more minutes of talking to the guard, who I was rapidly beginning to dislike (because how long does it take to say, "it's over there, oh, actually, I'll go with you it'll take 35 seconds" ?), with translation, finally found me at the door of the building. It was number 21. There was a sign, but it was tiny and hidden in deep shadow. I could've been wandering around for another hour and not spotted it.

The tiny sign underneath the 21 does have the IRAM logo, but in the dark this is near-invisible. The 21 would have been relatively easy to spot, if someone had only told me the frickin' number.

None of that this time ! I have to say the whole travel experience did get me rather stressed-out, what with the floods, the last-minute booking, the complexity of the travel and whatnot (I've had too many bad experiences with aircraft delays and suchlike), but in the end, absolutely everything went according to plan.

I didn't see much of Granada itself this time, but I liked it.

That leaves the social events of the conference. On my previous visit I went to the Alhambra, as everyone does, but I think I had a more limited, cheaper ticket*. I don't think I saw half of what I did this time. Previously I have to say I went away thinking, ho hum, yes, very nice, but not quite the wonder of the world I was expecting. This time I was considerably more impressed. 

* They also didn't require ID at the entrance. Google reveals that this is indeed a recent change designed to prevent resale of tickets at inflated prices, a thoroughly sensible decision.

I arrived early so I wandered on a bit further. From this rather pleasant little park, you can just see the already snow-covered mountains in the distance. More of them later.

The guide explained that the walls would have been just as bare when first constructed, the intention with the ornate details around the doors being to draw the focus of the viewer.

It also helped that we had a good tour guide. Rather cleverly, they give you wireless devices with a single, large headphone that sort of hangs over your ear instead of in it. This means the guide speaks to you in a normal voice from a distance and you can still hear everything around you perfectly well. I normally hate using a single headphone but it works extremely well here.

The level of detail is so intricate it makes "baroque" look like finger painting. Often my camera was simply inadequate to the task.

Something about that orderly line of cypress trees strongly reminded me of Villeneuve's Dune.

For instance, those cypress trees. We had a running joke that we had to believe anything the guide said, so when someone asked how old they were, he said something like "seventy years" with mock confidence, which someone else – who wasn't in on the joke – took for an actual answer. With impeccable timing, another tour guide happened a moment later to announce to another group that the trees are, in fact, six hundred years old. Well, who am I to doubt them ? 

The second social event, which actually happened right after the conference, was a visit to the IRAM 30m telescope. I don't remember the trip up having quite such a suicidal bus driver, so noting this for future reference : the road is long and extremely windy. You get fantastic views, but quite often I repressed the urge to yell out "SLOW THE FUCK DOWN MAN !" if only to avoid distracting the already obviously-insane driver.

When I arrived last time it was a month later in the year, and it started snowing for the first time that season, quite literally, about twenty minutes after I got inside. This time there had already been a snowfall but it had partly melted, so probably you can't infer anything about climate change from these two data points. Temperature was about zero; last time it quickly dropped to about -10 C.

The telescope is one of my favourite observatories. The cafeteria does excellent food and it's quite an experience to have seafood and wine while on top of a snow-covered mountain and being watched by the local foxes and mountain ponies. One feels distinctly like a Bond villain.

From the observatory cafeteria in 2017. They come right up to the glass, apparently used to astronomers. The telescope is right next to a ski slope so I suppose they've seen weirder.

Ponies from 2017. There was a lot more snow around when it fell, but the cutoff down the mountain was still very sharp.

This time we could simply drive back down again. Last time the snow was by then thick on the ground so the only way was by a combination of cable car (the telescope is right next to ski slope, and do I mean right next – you can watch skiers going past from the control room) and snowcat. It was a really fun way to travel on both counts. One particularly enduring memory is watching the snow blowers from the cable car, backlit by the sun – this is industrial-scale skiing that looks like something out of Blade Runner. These final shots are all from 2017, when I had the time to take more photographs and the weather was more photogenic.

My phone has a good wide-angle lens but my camera had a much better zoom function.

Snowcats are the only way to travel !

You have to remember that this carries on for several miles up the mountain. The scale of the operation to allow people to slide down a hill is massive.

And that was that. The next day at 6am, an unbelievably prompt taxi took me to the bus station and a bus (booked immediately after arriving in the hotel) brought me back to the airport, bang-on time. So off I went to Malta, but I think that'll have to be yet another post, you lucky people.