(CANARY ISLANDS AND MOROCCO)
We won this holiday (or should I say Liz did, through Take A Break magazine!). It was a seven day cruise through the following ports; Gran Canaria, Madeira, Casablanca, Agadir, Lanzarote, Tenerife, and back to Gran Canaria. It was a totally new experience for both of us as we are both used to beach holidays where you simply sunbathe by day then drink by night. I must point out that we still managed to do this throughout the trip to some degree and the only reason we failed to fulfill it totally was that the weather was a bit dodgy early on.
The cruise was all-inclusive yet this didn't mean that we didn't spend anything. For a start there was a casino onboard! Liz particularly enjoyed this and tried to spend all our holiday money at every opportunity (I made up for this later on!) The food on board was excellent, with either a buffet type place or a really top notch al a carte restaurant available. Entertainment was really good, better than we've experienced in many years of holidaying. Did I mention the bingo? no well put it this way we spent £20 a night on this and loved it. Honest! It was great fun. Even as I type it I mean it, you should try it sometime.
The ports of call were pretty varied. Gran Canaria we didn't see much of as it was a start/finish point for the holiday, Madeira was very pretty and we'd have liked to spend more time there, Casablanca was a shithole and that's being polite. A 30 foot wall surrounding a population of 5 million people and judging by the hassle we got I'd say 50% of these were street vendors! It was a place I'm glad I've experienced but also a place I was glad to get away from. Perhaps there's a better side to it? There's got to be! Anyway, from there we went on to Agadir which is also in Morocco and is basically a resort built specifically for tourism and is therefore not a good representation of Morocco, which considering what Casablanca was like is no bad thing! After the Africa ports we headed off to Lanzarote and decided it was time for a beach and a bit of sunbathing, however we had to get past the shops first! 3 hours later we settled down with...a sony minidisk, a cd walkman, a camcorder lens, about 1000 cigarettes, t-shirts and more. We got about 1 hour in the sun! The following and final day was spent in Tenerife and we headed for a lovely beach which was only habited by locals. Obviously they don't mind sand, as 5 minutes lying down and you were completely covered with sand due to the wind. The locals didn't seem to mind and must have developed some kind of immunity to it as we were the only ones on the beach who were constantly brushing it off and shouting in pain as a particularly strong gust came along.
Well, that was it, it was fun and something we'd do again, and also something we were thankful that we (Liz) had won as we'd never have done it otherwise. That's it now for holidays as the next time we go abroad will be to get married, and we can hardly wait!
See the photographs