My very good friend, Di, had organised our cruise from Barcelona to Cape Town and I was looking forward to this, for me, novel adventure. Di and I have been friends since the early 1960s when we played competitive tennis at our club of Broxbourne in Hertfordshire. We had also represented Hertfordshire together. Di and Mal married at the end of May 1971, two years after Ken and I married. I had been their matron of honour and Di is godmother to our son, Adam. We have met many times over the years, including in Singapore when we visited Adam together.

Early on 7 November, I flew into Barcelona, well-known as the Mecca of Gaudi modernism. The first human settlements in Barcelona date back to Neolithic times. The city itself was founded by the Romans who set up a colony called Barcino at the end of the 1st century BC. 

The fruitful medieval period established Barcelona's position as the economic and political centre of the Western Mediterranean. It is one of the best-preserved medieval cities in Europe. Its Gothic Quarter bears witness to the splendour enjoyed by the city from the 13th to the 15th centuries. It is said that Barcelona was built with Egyptian sand. It is also said that Christopher Columbus chose Barcelona as his first port-of-call.

It is the largest city on the Mediterranean Sea and the second largest city in Spain. It is home to nine UNESCO World Heritage sites. It was the capital city of Spain from 1937 to 1939. Today, it remains the capital of the region of Catalonia. It has been voted the “Best Beach City” in the world although its beaches are artificial.

When I arrived, there was no hint of the rain which had apparently been falling for several days so that was a relief. I didn’t do much on my first evening as it was late in the day when I reached the hotel, and Di, her sister, Penny, Penny’s husband, Barry, and their daughter Emily (who has visited me in NZ!) were already there and we went out to a lovely taco dinner close by.

We all had plans for the next day, Friday 8 November, my only full day in the city. Mine were fairly extensive and probably a few steps too far, exploring the Gothic Basilica of Montserrat, Park Guell (Gwey), and the Sagrada Familia all in one day! 

Montserrat is a Benedictine Monk retreat and sits high in the mountains, providing spectacular views over a large area of Catalonia. Friends had strongly recommended a visit there but I confess that I was a little disappointed. It didn’t help that the day was cloudy and we were above the clouds so that there was little to see from the top. It might have also have been that we had only just arrived at the Basilica when we were told that a service was about to start and we would either have to leave or stay through the whole service. Added to that, the world-famous Montserrat Choir Boy performance would not take place while we were there.

We had barely begun to explore the interior, which was spectacular and felt very spiritual, so felt obliged to leave, only to find that there wasn’t much else to explore without going on one of the walking trails or taking one of the two funiculars even higher up the mountain. For those of us in our group, we reached the base of the funiculars only to find that groups from other tours had got there first and the queues were too long for us to complete the ascent before we had to return to our bus. 

Returning to the city, our guide led us over part of Park Guell which was built at the beginning of the 20th century and officially opened as a park in 1926. UNESCO declared the park a World Heritage Site under ‘works of Antoni Gaudi’ and his influence could be felt on all sides. The concept that Count Eusebi Guell had in mind when he commissioned Gaudi to design it, was urbanisation, but this never materialised. They had imagined that the park would contain high-quality homes but there are, in fact, only a very few as the park is not situated close enough to the city to make the daily commute attractive. So it is that the park is now a municipal garden and it has many attractive features, strongly exhibiting Gaudi’s style. 

By the time we had finished walking around the park, it was time for the tour guide to leave us outside the Sagrada Familia which was definitely the highlight of my day. Sagrada Familia is the largest unfinished Catholic church in the world, designed once again by Gaudi and also a World Heritage Site. Work began in 1882 and although work has continued ever since, it is still incomplete. Gaudi’s original design called for a total of eighteen spires. As of 2023, thirteen have been completed and work continues on the others. The completion of the Jesus Christ spire will make Sagrada Familia the tallest church building in the world. 

It was unfortunate that I was so tired by this time that I couldn’t really linger as long as I would otherwise have liked. The beauty of the interior took my breath away and I would highly recommend this as a ‘must see’ for anyone visiting Barcelona. 
 
Exhausted, but full of a multitude of marvellous sights and sounds, I returned to the hotel to find that Di and her family had been exploring on the Hop on, Hop off buses. We all enjoyed a lovely dinner on our last night in Barcelona.  

We still had one morning left on Saturday 9 November before we had to board the Azamara Quest so we all walked to a nearby food market where we enjoyed some of the wonderful displays of food on offer. The presentations were extraordinary and very tempting especially when I spied one of my favourites - fudge!

And then it was time for Di and I to taxi to the ship and for Penny and her family to go to the airport. We’d had a great reunion.

Cruising has never been on my bucket list and I confess that it took some persuasion by Di to put my toe in the water! I have only ever ‘cruised’ on a small boat with 70 others for five days on the Irawaddy River in 2014 and I certainly enjoyed that enormously. However, the prospect of visiting fourteen destinations that I had never been to before was certainly appealing and Di assured me that the Azamara Quest was a ‘small’ cruise liner compared with many others with only about 650 passengers and about 480 crew. 

So it was that we presented ourselves at the appropriate place and all went according to plan until we were asked for our Yellow Fever vaccination certificates. We were speechless. We had no idea that these were a requirement. To cut a very long story short, we were allowed to board but told somewhat sternly that we would have to be vaccinated before we started on the African leg of the cruise, or we would be left in Gran Canaria. This was a shock for both of us and caused a great deal of unnecessary stress for the first five days of our journey as the ship’s doctor tried to find a Medical Facility with the appropriate vaccine at one of the ports we would be visiting. We were assured that they had sent us an email two weeks earlier, explaining that this was a necessity but no such email had materialised so we were ignorant of this necessity. I immediately wrote to my doctor, after scouring the CDC website and, reading that the vaccination was inadvisable for anyone of our age, asked if he could send me an exemption certificate if he thought that would be appropriate. He very kindly did this but when I presented it at Guest Relations I was asked for the original – what a silly idea – and told that a copy might not be accepted in Africa. So, the stress continued until we docked in Gibraltar, but that’s a story for another day.

So, somewhat crushed, we settled into our tiny cabin and prepared to make the most of the experience. We studied our route which would take us from Barcelona to Valencia, Cartagena, across to Melilla (just north of Nador in North Africa on the map), back to Malaga, Gibraltar and Cadiz before heading over to the Canary Islands. And at 8.00 pm, we set off.