The Honeymoon is Over (pt 2: food)

Aaagh yes, food. Spain, Portugal and France not being famous for the veggie-friendliness of their cuisine. Although OA and I are not currently the most observant of veggies and have been known to lapse into what OA refers to an fish-n-chipocrisy.
Actually, almost any decent-sized city in any of these countries shouldn't present too much of a problem (although I wouldn't fancy trying to be vegan on a trip like this). Granted, we ate quite a lot of felafel. And granted, most of it wasn't particularly great felafel, particularly the undercooked monstrosity served by a sniggering would-be thief at a place called something like Asteria on the tourist-trap Rue de la Huchette in Paris, and that at Al-Andalus in Granada, where the felafels were re-heated in a microwave and where the guy putting the pitas together said, when I pointed out that he'd just ladled mayonaise sauce instead of humus all over everything, "I'm just a waiter not a chef." Which raises the questions of a) why he was doing the cooking then and b) why this place is recommended in the Lonely Planet guide - the answer to that being the Granada and Cordoba sections of the Lonely Planet guide to Andalucia are bobbins...
But when we weren't eating cheap on dodgy felafel or on various types of cheese and/or spinach pastries in various bakeries, we had some lovely food and drink in various small restaurants along the way.
First up was Restaurante Arrayanes in Granada, just off the main street of teashops in the touristy bit of the picturesque old quarter of the Albayzin. Run by a Moroccan Berber called Mustafa who seems to switch between half a dozen different languages with no visible effort, it has a small veggie offering, but the vegetarian cous cous and the Middle Eastern starters were superb (as were the fish kebabs, for the sinners amongst us).
Another good place to eat in Granada, whose name I unfortunately failed to take down, was the first bar/restaurant on the Campo del Principe in the Realejo if you are coming up from Calle Molinos. A number of eateries in Granada do a bizarre but lovely dish consisting of tempura-style slices of aubergine, crisp-fried and then drizzled with dark honey or something like pomegranate molasses. This place also did a great, if slightly weird, spinach pie with pineapple in it.
Restaurante Ruta del Azafran also did some great salads, as well as offering a great view of the Alhambra from its position as one of a row of tapas bars and restaurants on the Paseo de los Tristes. But more importantly for me (sinning again) it introduced me to the lovely Granada wines of the Bodega Barranco Oscuro - gorgeous rich ripe reds which unfortunately I have yet to find a UK stockist for. If I'd known that I'd have lugged more than one measly bottle home with me (or made OA lug a couple instead).
On to Cordoba, which was frankly and depressingly a bit of a tourist trap despite the breathtaking beauty of the Mesquita (as long as you go first thing in the morning when it's free and tour groups aren't allowed in - but the rubbish Lonely Planet won't tell you that, or not anywhere you'd notice it) but where there were lots of places selling tortilla de patatas - Spanish omelette - to keep any empty corners of stomach well filled.
Seville, however, was just great. I could stay there for weeks and just eat. And the writer of this section of the guidebook did seem to have actually visited some of the places she was talking about so some of the recommendations actually existed/bore some resemblance to the descriptions.
Firstly, for bog-standard but filling pizza in a touristy but very charming setting (a renovated hammam) was Restaurante San Marco, in the heart of the tourist district of Barrio de Santa Cruz. For excellent pizza and pasta but lousy (rude, by turns brusque and slow) service, Ristorante Cosa Nostra on Calle del Betis, a picturesque street with a number of bars where you can have a pre- or post- dinner drink watching the bats catching midges over the mighty river Guadalquivir.
And for fab Cuban food with delightful service, Habanita, on a tiny side street called Callejon Golfo on the Centro area of town. This place knows its vegan from its vegetarian and needy vegans could indeed eat different and very reasonably-priced and delicious things there every meal for about a week, if they needed. The most interesting bit of the menu was the Cuban food, which included standards like fried yucca and (very good) black beans with rice, but also featured some fantastic savoury banana balls in tomato sauce (we ordered a second dish of these, and got an extra one for our enthusiasm). But un-Latino-mooded veggies could go for a range of tofu, vegetable or seitan casseroles, pies and bakes.
And now I've run out of steam, so I'll do Lisbon, Madrid and Paris another day...

The Honeymoon is Over (pt 1: transport)

Well, the attempt at a (reasonably) low-impact honeymoon is done, with varying degrees of success.
My number one Top Tip for trans-European train travel is now Break The Journey Each Way. Ie, if you don't leave in the south of England and therefore can't hop on a morning Eurostar, leaving lots of time to catch your sleeper on to Italy, Spain etc, then the precariousness of train times can make it well worthwhile factoring some extra give into your itineraries, whether it's a night in London or Paris.
The sorry tale behind this bitter comment is partly due to the Eurotunnel fire in September, which is of course a pretty extraordinary circumstance. Also, being a Strange Person who started off her honeymoon sans new husband and with a friend, going on a writing course, I was tied into more pressing timetables than on most holidays. But when someone decided to end their life by jumping onto the fast live rail between Watford and Harrow & Wealdstone stations, holding us up for two hours, I was somewhat split between sorrow that somebody needed to finish it this way, pity for the poor train drivers who have to live with their memories of suicides, and cuticle-chewing, hair-pulling stress at the knowledge that we were going to miss not only our Eurostar to Paris but also the connecting sleeper down to Madrid. And that waiting for a train to Madrid next morning was going to mean that we missed the start of the writing course. And the Eurostar staff at St Pancras could have more polite and helpful too...
So, ashamed and angry as I am to admit it, we ended up on plane to Malaga next morning, followed by a bus up to Granada. And I promised myself that I will never put myself in that situation again.
Getting around Andalucia by coach and train was a joy, and an illustration of how punctual and comfortable well-run public transport can be. The train system, in particular, was a delight, especially the contrast between the amount of legroom available on Spanish trains compared with the battery-chicken conditions of the vile Virgin Pendolino. Booking coaches from the UK via Alsa, a subsidiary of National Express, was a doddle, and the advance-purchase machines for their tickets in most Spanish coach stations were also easy to use. Renfe, the Spanish train network, was less user-friendly for advance purchases, but helpful advice is available on www.seat61.com.
The overnight coach from Lisbon to Madrid, booked via Eurolines, was ok and surprisingly comfortable. And the sleeper from Madrid up to Paris, with tickets bought direct from SNCF after RailEurope's website decided to be awkward, was extremely comfortable for short-arsed me, although OA's height was a bit much for the berths. We met a great family from Aberdeen who were doing the through journey from the south of Spain to the north of Scotland in one go, and having done a similar trek between Aberdeen and Italy the previous year were impressively sanguine about it - and gave two fingers to people who claim that distance train travel with kids is impossible. Although obviously it helps when your son is happy to sit and read or actually have conversations with people around him, rather than drive fellow passengers up the wall with nasty noisy bits of technology. Fortunately we'd got a couple of days in Paris on the way home, so there were no nail-biting moments about whether we'd catch our trains (just horror at the continued inadequacy of the facilities and staffing at the Eurostar terminal at Gare du Nord, where the vast queues nearly left OA standing on the platform watching the train vanish England-wards).

Interview with Rebecca & Hugo Whately

Here is the first of my interview posts - conversations with people who've had green or ethical weddings and who have ideas and tips for those of use still in the planning phases!

Rebecca and Hugo Whately

We decided to get married about 18 months before the wedding and we really struggled about how to do it. We didn't know how we wanted to get married – we knew we didn't want to get married in a church and we were quite put off by a lot of things that we traditional about the traditional wedding and wedding industry, so it took us about 6 months of thinking about how to do it – whether we wanted a big wedding and lots of people.

And one of our concerns about having a big wedding was the environmental impact of having that many people travel and huge amounts of food. Coincidentally, Hugo found Daphne and Penrhos on the internet, and my family already knew about Penrhos, so it seemed an ideal place for us to get married. We met Daphne and really liked her and we really like the kind of thing she did at Penrhos [Penrhos is a converted mediaeval manor farm in the Welsh Borders, with a pioneering organic restaurant and interests local food. They offer a full range of wedding facilities and help with planning green weddings.]

For both of us food is really important, we're both really appreciate good food but also food that's sourced locally and organically and seasonally, which Daphne does.

So that was a brilliant start really, and once we'd decided to have it at Penrhos we pretty much just trusted Daphne, because I didn't have any clear ideas the way some people do of how I wanted it to be, so we trusted her to sort it out. I didn't have an image in my head of some huge day – my partner Hugo actually did more organisation than I did, I'm usually really put off by big events and that meant that I wasn't the middle of organising it all so I could actually be quite calm and had an amazing day.

So Daphne sorted out a lot of it, like the food, and it was really nice because everyone could stay at Penrhos – we had about a hundred people with all our families and Daphne was really flexible and sorted it out with the local farmer so that people who weren't staying in the building could camp in one of his fields next door, which was great.

She was really brilliant at really taking on as much as we wanted her to take on but being flexible on things like having lots of our friends camping in the field next door.

We also made the invitations ourselves and wrote them out.

Ethical dresses, suits and rings?

For the clothing it was really amazing, once of my friends offered to make my dress. The material wasn't sourced really environmentally, I suppose – it came from a fabric shop on the Edgeware Road in London, and my friend over the year made my dress with the added challenge that over the year it had to change shape because during the year I became pregnant so the design needed to be changed for that.

And Hugo had a pair of linen trousers from years ago and he got a waistcoat and shirt from Green Fibres.

The rings – Daphne did a printout of things like local bands and local jewellers and flowers and we used that a lot – so actually we used a local jeweller in Worcestershire, we went for a weekend with him up there and made our own rings and he was this incredible character and had this incredible studio in the countryside which looked over the countryside, and he was there to make sure there weren't any disasters and to make sure we ended up with a ring each! And he sourced the white gold for us in the jewellery quarter in Birmingham.

Weddings lists

We ummed and aaahed about the idea of a wedding list. We didn't particularly like the idea of a wedding list and the over-consumption of the whole wedding industry and the wastefulness of it in some ways and going with the usual rituals just for the sake of it, so we tried to be a bit... [Hugo in background – 'spending for spending's sake'] so in the end we had a wedding list with Green Fibres and got some bedding from there, and then there's a little traditional shop round the corner from us which is run by a couple and does kitchenware and garden things, and they were great, so it was just those two things.

Local flowers

And then flowers- a friend of Daphne's tries to do flowers in a more ethical, local way and grows a lot in her garden and grows wild flowers and herbs and we didn't get any of the flowers from abroad, it was all flowers grown locally. and a friend of mine made my bouquet from her garden.

Cost?

It cost less than £10,000 for a hundred people and that included paying for people to stay the night at Penrhos and for people to camp, and we paid for all the drinks in the evening, and that included everyone staying overnight in the building or camping and then having a big breakfast the next day together. It was really lovely – having been someone who was quite phobic of big parties and bringing all these different people together it actually turned out to be a really incredible day.

Mum and Dad made the wedding cake and Hugo's brothers did the music – basically Daphne did everything we wanted her to and then we could add things on like that.

And the food was incredible – I think people sometimes have the idea that if it's going to be organic food it's going to be a bit bleurgh, but it was really beautifully cooked and delicious.

Advice?

I think it's quite good at each step to think about how to do it and thinking about whether there's an alternative way. So we didn't really sit down and plan it but because we were engaged well before we got married we had plenty of time to think about it, so we could do the invitations and you can easily do those yourself, and thinking about everything from flowers to wedding lists. Particularly now it's not so difficult, there are lots of people who offer alternative services and also i think people who are coming to the wedding like friends and family, we didn't want to be really sanctimonious about it, not everyone agrees with us completely, so it was about having a really incredible day without trying to push a particular political or ethical stance, but at the same time it just had that feel to it.

Hugo: we wanted to get married but we didn't like weddings!

A lot of people find finding the venue difficult, so finding a venue where everything was like that was great and they could organise so much of it and then we could just do the bits we wanted – that was perfect. People who usually go to church weddings said they were surprised by how moving the ceremony could be without being in a church – we passed the rings round, we got married inside this tiny little room and then went outside and passed the rings round to everyone held them and it kind of included everyone in the ceremony.

Honeymoon

And then we went for our honeymoon on an eco-retreat in Wales, in this incredibly luxurious blissful teepee with a fire and lots of rugs, outside Machynlleth, four miles down a dirt track.

Green honeymoons

This beautiful cold, clear winter weather may be lovely but it's getting a bit nippy, and my thoughts are turning to contemplating our honeymoon as a means of escaping whatever weather next autumn chooses to throw at Manchester.

This being an eco-wedding, flying will not be an option. Although some environmental writers – like my friend and colleague Simon Birch - argue that the benefits of eco-tourism to some countries makes flying there justifiable, the threat of climate change is just too big a shadow for OA and I to be comfortable with hopping on a plane for pleasure.

If we were being really good, of course, we'd be staying in the UK. I've visited some wonderful parts of Britain, with the beautiful southern coast of Dumfries and Galloway really standing out as somewhere with spectacular scenery, lovely picturesque towns like Kirkcudbright and Wigtown, affordable accommodation and (vitally important if you're me) great food like the organic, fair trade ice-cream at Cream O'Galloway, bread and cakes from Wigwam Bakery, amazing hot-smoked, locally-caught salmon at Marrbury Smokehouse and whisky from Scotland's most southerly distillery at Bladnoch.

But the move of Eurostar to St Pancras makes getting to Europe and beyond without flying so much easier. Not that the journey down from Euston to Waterloo was a massive trial (except when the Tube screwed up YET AGAIN), but just popping down the road to the very splendid new St Pancras International is such a doddle. It's great! And at some point I do want to try that enormous champagne bar by the Eurostar terminal, even if that makes me a vain and shallow human being.

Anyway, OA and I did a trial trip to Italy by train last spring, and somewhat caught the bug. I had a bit more luxury when it came to time, but OA had s standard public-sector two week holiday to take. We got the Eurostar to Paris, spent an overnight there to break the trip, and then caught a sleeper to Venice. Drawing into S Lucia station on the bridge over the lagoon in the morning sun was a truly resplendent way to arrive in such a beautiful city. Three days there, and then another train – a mid-afternoon hop – down to Florence for another four days, then an hour or so back up to Bologna for another couple of days.

Train travel, apart from the environmental benefits, is immeasurably more relaxed than flying, and with the masses of advice, experience, itineraries and timetables available from the lovely Mark Smith of Seat61.com, it's now pretty easy.

So, honeymoon time. We're off to Morocco. Primarily by train, although this grand plan will involve me having to get on a ferry from Spain. This doesn't make me very happy, big water-wuss that I am, but can't really be helped if I want to get to all those wonderful places and their magical names... I shall, of course, be using Seat61 for my travel advice and bookings. Finding places to stay will be the next bit of this project; some of the little independent guesthouses listed on Responsibletravel.com look pretty wonderful, as do some of the hiking and biking tours, but if anyone out there has recommendations they will be gratefully received...