Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category

The rolling green fields that you see as the plane comes in to land are the first indication that this isn’t the Spain of the costas.

The coastline is quite different from that of the southern costas. Whereas Marbella is nothing like the small port that it grew out of, the port of A Coruna is still very much the centre of activities of the town. Yes, developments have more or less swamped the small old town but they are developments for a thriving town and not the wall to wall hotels and apartments of one of the costa ports.

Towns like Santiago do get their fair share of tourists but even there the tourists are confined to quite small sections of the town. Move outside those and you’ll find a real town.

So, no, this isn’t the tourist Spain that you probably already know. It’s an altogether different place.

It’s different in other respects too. For one thing, this is one of the areas of Spain that was never conquered by the Arabs so along with the other northern coastal provinces is one of those that has always been Spain.

The impact of that is most evident in the culture of the area. It has a very celtic undertone to it all with bagpipes (albeit without tartan designs) being almost as commonplace as they are in Edinburgh. In fact, in many respects Santiago feels like a smaller and warmer version of Edinburgh. Strangely though, the local language (Gallego/Gallician) isn’t a celtic based one.

Would you like to go there though? If you’re just aiming to lay on the beach and get a tan, probably not as all that green scenery is indicative of a good deal of rainfall. On the other hand, if you’re looking for a part of Spain with more culture than you’ll find in Marbella and less people than you find in Seville then it’s a good choice.

If I’ve convinced you then there are a growing number of transport options available to you with flights to Santiago and A Coruna in Galicia and others further east in Asturias plus the port of Santander just a few hours drive further on. These are all bookable via the links at the right. There aren’t massive quantities of tourist accommodation but you’ll find sufficient if you book ahead.

Arnold

Is the Camino de Santiago a real pilgrimage these days? I had the chance to visit the city numerous times over the course of last week and the area in and around the cathedral was constantly thronged with people and even more so on Sunday.

Does that mean that they are real’ pilgrims though? Well, I suspect that the majority are, at least in part, for when we went outside the central part of the old town we found virtually no tourists at all. In fact in the new town I don’t think that there were any. That in itself is quite unusual as you would normally see some tourist overspill’ into the non-touristy sections of any town.

In tourist terms, there seems to be next to nothing touristy’ about the place on the whole. Yes, it certainly has the ancient building around the centre, but it doesn’t have the tourist shops in anything like the numbers that you’d expect given the number of visitors which implies that a fair number are pilgrims rather than tourists. It certainly does have loads of restaurants but even pilgrims have to eat so that’s not something that says tourist’. And at night, it is very lively with street theatre all around the central section and spilling out into the park but, again, even pilgrims do things at night.

However, I wouldn’t say that all of the pilgrims are quite in the mould of pilgrims of old. The pilgrim who looked haggard from his/her walk along the camino was very rare and most arrived in pretty good shape with modern day backpacks in place of the cloth bag or whatever passed for the equivalent in days of old. Considerable numbers come on bicycles too as evidenced by the number of bikes being packed in the airport. Actually the airport is something of an indication of pilgrimage activity with a massive list of destinations for such a small airport.

One rather major thing that makes life as a pilgrim somewhat easier these days is that you now only have to walk 100km to get your Compostela (200km on a bicycle) which seems like nothing in comparison to those who walked goodness knows how many miles down France and across Spain to get it not so long ago. Let’s face it: 100km is nothing. Even I would consider doing that!

Overall, I’d say that there is, if not a majority, then a sizeable minority of proper’ pilgrims. It’s just that these days, the route isn’t nearly so hard going as it was in olden days. Things have changed considerably when you see credit card’ listed as one of the essential items to take on your pilgrimage.

Arnold

Happy Halloween!

October was relatively quiet on the hotel front ’til this weekend which is a holiday in both France & Spain so we were completely full from Friday to Sunday night.

I’ve been tidying up the various websites that we run and improving their search rankings. The combination of improvements on the main hotel page (www.mascamps.com) has given us a 10 fold increase in the number of hits so far. The equivalent changes are in the works for www.ourinns.org which is already moving up the rankings and we’re making about $50 a month now on the advertising on it and the related www.chambre-dhote.org (in French) and the self-catering equivalent, www.ourgites.org .

Separately from those developments, I thought I’d see if we could more directly make a few bob on the transport arrangements people make and registered www.perpignanflightsandcarhire.com which is starting to get a sensible search engine ranking though it’s got a long way to go. If you’re booking any travel yourself, you’ll find the cheapest car hire in the Perpignan area (no, reallY: I checked them all) and, I think, in Europe, worldwide flights on discount and normal airlines, the Heathrow & Stansted express tickets and even ferries. We’ve already made about half the start-up costs of this in commissions which is pretty good going I think.

More as somewhere to hang our affiliate links than anything else at present, we’ve also got www.personallychosen.com which has quite an assortment of things on it. All the above travel things but also some financial links and even La Senza. In due course, we’re planning to use it to sell some of the photos that we’ve taken for the website as prints and for a few other items that people have asked us about. Basically, it’s intended to be our main non-mascamps website. If you buy any stuff online, let me know where from and I’ll see if we can get a link for it (if you ask nicely, I will probably split the commission with you).

Started experimenting again with e-bay which is a dead cheap way to advertise. Costs just 15p for 10 days which has picked up around 40 views on average although no direct sales. We’re not that bothered about the direct sales this tiME: last year we had one, slightly lossmaking, direct sale but pulled in getting on for EUR 1000 in indirect bookings over the following 9 months attracted by our ebay ads.

We’re getting back to “normal” now after the rush of Summer business. The French tourists stop coming the weekend of August 20th but they all come that weekend so we’d to turn heaps of them away that Saturday as we were full with the wedding. Next day, none and it was back to our more normal UK bias on the bookings.

The Visa pour l’Image photojournalism festival is always a busy week for us. All the accommodation in Perpignan and for miles around is completely full that week with journalists, photographers and editors from around the world. That week we had two editors from Forward Publishing in London (the folk who do Tesco magazine) and Isaac Hernandez from Santa Barbara (who’s a travel photographer published in National Geographic etc.). Isaac was planning on doing a photoshoot of Queribus Castle but left it ’til his last day so, of course, it was shrouded in cloud.

Would you believe that we’ve STILL no bookings from Expedia? No, neither would I. Can’t understand it myself.

Over the year we’re averaging just under three times the occupancy of 12 months earlier which is pretty good going. This month (October) is the reference month that we used last year for our occupancy forecast so we’re back in the dark again as to how it’ll pan out over the next 12 months. Overall it seems to have been a very mixed year in France with quite a few people running almost empty whilst others were full.

There’s been a big increase in foreigners buying houses here this year. Whilst last year we witnessed the appearance of “British aisles” in even the smallest supermarkets, this year the most noticeable thing is that people are much more willing to try out their English plus the appearance of English papers in the village for the first time.

Anyway, as we edge into “Winter Mode”, ’tis time for us to make a start on the website refresh for the coming year. We’re planning to retain the overall look and feel of the existing site but are tightening up on the keyword lists (working on those now) and rewriting some of the text to incorporate them more completely. So, I’d welcome your thoughts on the change from www.mascamps.com/hotel/en.htm (the existing version) to Mas Camps hotel . One change that’s still to come is the separation off of the reservations section to its own page.

Also still to come is the complete winery/vineyard pages but the second versions are at Mas Camps winery and Mas Camps vineyard (and in French too). Definitely still in draft, but of interest to David I’m sure, is Mas Camps wines (haven’t done the translation of that yet as I’m waiting for the neighbours to check it).

The ongoing development of the regional guide at www.mascamps.com/region/en.htm continues and we’ve added Mas Camps tours which we tried out in paper form from August with considerable success in terms of stays being extended and sales of tickets.

Last, but not least, we’re still plugging away at trying to sell our walking tours on Ryanair. So far, no sales but ourselves and the guy doing the tours are very keen on it and the tours look excellent too I think.

Yes, folks it is now one year since we arrived here. Well, one year and a bit as we arrived at 7pm local time.

A year ago, we’d no reservations in the book and didn’t know that our first customers would be turning up in a few days time. Now we’ve a smattering of reservations right through to September. A year ago we managed one nights occupancy over Easter; this year 38.

A year ago, we’d hardly any furniture for our own rooms. And we still haven’t!

A year ago, we’d just missed appearing on Living the Dream. Now we don’t know yet if we’ll be in the No Going Back series.

A year ago, I was getting into the shorts & sandles “uniform” that I’d keep up ’til November. Yup, just broke out the “uniform” a few days ago… 32C in the shade this afternoon and I’m a bit sunburnt.

A year ago, I was pretty sure that I’d fail the French diploma. Now I’ve got Dip French after my name and am making a respectable start on the Dip Spanish.

A year ago, ‘yall said you’d be here… and none of you have arrived yet! No, Dorothy, I haven’t forgotten your reservation in September.

A year ago, we didn’t know how quickly we could get to the clinic. We found out on August 29th when John decided that he’d had enough. Or was it Wendy?

A year ago, we thought we were crazy to have bought a hotel in France. Now we’re even crazier and have started looking for the next place!

A year ago, we were wondering if the French bureaucracy was as bad as everyone made it out to be. Now we know that it’s even worse than that.

A year ago, we didn’t know that we’d be having to make over 300 beds over the following 12 months. Now we’re looking forward to making over 500 in the next 12 months.

Just got our car back from the garage. It packed in on the way to Spain on Monday so we’ve been walking everywhere this week. All being well, we’ll be attempting the run to Spain again on Monday.

Now that we’ve hit the anniversary, we are getting going on selling the house in Holywood. So, if you want an immaculate, spacious two bedroom house with newly fitted luxury bathroom, cabled for BT, NTL and Sky, near to all local amenities and with excellent transport links, you know where to look.