On the train ride to Granada the surrounding landscape became particularly dry and red, olive trees covering many areas.Highly recommended by Michael 'Mystery' Taylor, Granada turned out to be another of the great stops on the trip. This was because a lot of the variables with backpacking fell in our favour in Granada, those being we had great weather, a nice hostel with friendly staff, and even better roommates and fellow guests.Our new friends included studen...

Ambitiously, we aimed to cross the border back to Spain and another beachy spot in Cadiz. From Lagos this involved about 9 hours in buses, but with the laptop armed with four seasons of Entourage episodes the time flew by and we made it without a hassle.While georgraphically it a cool spot (more or less an island) Cadiz was nice enough without being particularly good for any reason. It had some fairly pedestrian buildings and monuments to see, lots of little ou...

After a couple of rickety train rides we had arrived in Lagos, which as far as we knew, was a popular beach town which more or less marked the south-west corner of Europe. Walking through the town to our accommodation we quickly found, by listening to the accents, it also marked ground zero for hoards of English and Aussie tourists. It wouldn't surprise us if they actually outnumbered the locals.We scored on the accommodation front, a large dirt-cheap room with...

With as much sleep as can be expected when sitting upright on a train, we arrived in Lisbon, with many people having raved to us about their adventures to Portugal. Now that we've done it, we certainly don't disagree.Our hostel was similarly hyped, having won awards for best hostel in Europe in the past few years. After checking in, we took a look around the centre of town and its unique tiled streets before venturing up the hill to the city's castle. This are...

With the big red tourist buses pulled up outside of the train station at Toledo, it was all too easy to pay and jump on one for a look around and save us walking into town. The bus started by going up around the hills surrounding the city, giving us a great view and some photo opps to start the visit. http://www.offexploring.com/barack/albums/madrid-and-toledo/8108978It was stinking hot and there wasn't much respite given it was a largely stone dominated, walled...