Nicole schreibt...

Mallorca 2005

I did it! I returned to Germany's favourite holiday spot: Mallorca, the biggest of the Balearic Islands in the Mediterranean Sea. I had been here as a child with my parents, but have only very few and blurred memories of it. Back then we stayed in Ca'n Pastilla, the western end of the Playa de Palma, which, over the years, emerged as the major hot spot for German tourists with German restaurants and beergarden lining the promenade all the way to Arenal on the eastern end of the Playa de Palma. As I grew up and grew interested in travelling (as opposed to "holiday-making") I also grew to despise this certain kind of package tourist whose only ever holiday consists of three weeks on the beach with German food, beer and newspapers, totally ignorant of the country they're staying in and not at all interested in the host country's history, language or culture. Nowhere was this more visible than on Mallorca where people actually bought holiday houses and complained that the paperwork was in Spanish!

The lowest point in my esteem of Mallorca and German tourism there was reached in the mid 90's when the "Ballermann" craze broke out. The Playa de Palma is dotted with "beach huts" offering snacks, cold drinks and toilets, known as "Balnearios 1-20" It was Balneario 6, roughly where Arenal begins, that emerged as the center of German mayhem and got nicknamed Ballermann for no German couldn't wrap their tongues around the word Balneario, certainly not after all those beers and sangrias. What we saw on TV and in magazines were all sorts of clubs and groups descending on Arenal with nothing on their minds but to get leglessly drunk for some days. Sangria was drunk from big buckets and clapped-out German singers whose careers had long been dead here, went to Mallorca where they suddenly reached new cult status among the drunk hordes. I was appalled by all this and the way how Mallorca was more and more treated like a German colony and not a Spanish island where tourists from everywhere came. But you know, when you nurse such a prejudice for some years, you begin to think that instead of just ranting about it, you should go and see for yourself. So after my trips to Andalusia and Barcelona I decided that my next Spanish destination would not be Madrid as planned, but Mallorca. With so many trips planned this year and all that flying I thought it would be less stressful to pack two trips into one and flew straight from London to Mallorca, my Welsh friend Rob in tow.

I didn't want to do a traditional package tour but rather keep myself at a distance from the package tour mob, so I had booked a room at the lovely Araxa Hotel at the outskirts of Palma, the capital of Mallorca. We got there in the afternoon and spent some time at the swimming pool first before we headed into Palma in search of dinner. It's a pleasant town with the famous cathedral overlooking the harbour and many old-fashioned buildings that were a joy to see for a history freak like me. Monday became a rather long, stressful day. Since Mallorca is so popular with German tourists, it's not very surprising to run into people you know, but even so it was a big chance that my cousin Katja was there at the same time with her husband Klaus and their kid Noah, who's also my godson. They were departing Monday noon, so we hired a car for a day and went to Peguera first-thing after breakfast to say hello. After some frantic mobile phone-calls and detours around Peguera we finally found the Club Europe outside of the actual town, had a drink and a family photo :) When they were being picked up for airport transfer, Rob and I went down to the beach but I found Peguera extremely comatose and exactly the place I wouldn't ever want to spend my holiday in - full of German pensioners and the main street was lined with pubs called "Rosi's Kneipe" and stalls selling "Echte Thüringer Bratwurst".

Making use of the car we went on for a drive along the scenic south-west coast of Mallorca, which is still completely unspoilt by mass tourism and I hope that it will remain that way. Passing Andratx, where celebs like Claudia Schiffer and Michael Douglas have their fincas, we finally reached Valldemossa, which is mainly famous for it's ancient monastry. French writer George Sand (who was actually a she, the Baroness Amandine Dupin, who used a pseudonym for her writing) and Polish composer Frédéric Chopin spent a miserable cold winter there between loving and fighting, which resulted in him composing melancholy préludes on the piano seen below and her venting her anger in the book "A winter on Mallorca".

From Valldemossa we went on to Sollér, a charming little town in the mountains which is connected to Palma by an ancient tram dating from early 20th century. This was true Spain and the perfect place for some tapas. We returned to Palma then for a break and then left again - this time for Magaluf, another resort town on the southern coast, which has become the centre of British mass tourism. I normally wouldn't set foot into this, for when it comes to cheap booze tourism, you can trust the British lager louts to lower the tone just this one note more and passing through Magalluf by bus, everything looked indeed cheap and tacky, the street lined with British pubs, gambling halls and clubs. Our destination was the Pirates Adventures show, which I had been keen to see. It's a circus-like show with some great acrobatic offerings and a flimsy storyline about the rivalry between English pirate captain Henry Morgan and his French nemesis Jean Lafitte. Had it all been a bit more stylish, it would have been a fabulous night out, but the promised "Food and Drinks Included!" turned out to be a meal consisting of a hot dog, a handful of fries and half a corn and some gooey red drink labelled "Pirate Punch", while everything else had to be paid for. In English panto-style the audience was encouraged to shout and sing along with the pirates and the volume of the noise gave me a headache. And don't make me mention what some of the audience members got up at the end of the show.

So after a evening among English lager louts, it was time for my own big challenge: On the next morning we were off to the Playa de Palma and the infamous Ballermann. And shall I tell you something? I had a damn good time. First of all, unlike Peguera or Magaluf, the Playa de Palma is really a gorgeous long stretch of golden beach with crystal clear water to swim in and since it's about six kilometres long, it's not crowded. We settled down in sun chairs near Balneario 7 where we also had lunch and only in the evening walked on, past Balneario 6 (Ballermann) in search for a nice restaurant - and what's wrong with the thought to introduce a foreigner to German food here, seeing as people go and have Chinese in New York's China Town or Turkish food in Paris's Little Turkey, too? Passing the MegaPark, one of the big booze pubs around Ballermann, I saw that the football match Germany vs Argentina would be shown live on a big screen that evening, so decided to stay. And hell, it was a great evening, watching the match with a few hundred other German football lovers, singing familiar football songs and feeling very much like in the stadium at home. I saw many young kids around, most of them 19-20 year old students on their post-graduation trip and I realized two things: a) There is absolutey nothing wrong with going to Mallorca for a few days of partying and having fun with your friends as long as you also go on "proper" trips to other countries and don't make it a rule to spend your annual summer vacation there, never seeing anything else, not caring for other countries at all, and b) that this is a new generation that does exactly this: Go out on a party trip with friends where all they want from Spain is the good weather and the odd bucket of Sangria, but these kids also go to other countries and generally are well-informed and educated about the world. This is not the older package tour-generation of my parents with their infamous fat, moustachioed Germans in checkpants and white socks in sandals, who plod about totally ignorant and not caring either. And another thing I know now: If I would go to Mallorca again one day for a week of beach holiday, I'd go to Playa de Palma.

On the next and last morning we went for a sweat-inducing walk uphill to visit Castel de Bellver, located on a hill above Palma, which was built by the first Majorcan king Jaume I in 13th century and now offers a great view all around. Then I just spent the rest of the day at the hotel pool until it was time to go home. Okay, so I have to eat my words, hat and whatever else, but I had a great time on Mallorca and particularly on the football evening at the Ballermann. But it only proves once more that the only way to fight your own prejudices and check on your own conceptions of a place is to go there and take a look for yourself.