Benidorm...not!

We decide to see what Benidorm is really like. We've just heard vague stories, enough to give it an iffy reputation. So we drive the 40 or so kilometres. We meet the first traffic jams of our holiday as too many cars attempt to fit along a narrow highway. Elderly people carrying plastic bags walk dourely past the queue of cars, coming home from market somehwere.

Driving into Benidorm is hectic, a crazy jostle of vehicles even though it is mid winter. What must it be like in the summer? Eventually, more by luck than judgement, we find a parking space not far from the seafront. We walk away from the concrete towers towards the old town. "The Old Town" —it must be our type of place, surely? Everyone we pass is English. The old town is a disppointment. Perhaps it was once a pleeasant place, but now it is merely a tourist feeding trough, with every second buiilding a bar or restaurant designed to serve the English or the German or the Dutch or whatever group is available. We grow hungry, but none of the restaurants can feed us. The one vegetarian restaurant we've been given no longer exists. We try an English-style bar just to see. It is full of smoke and old people who stare at us as if we are from Alpha Centauri. We use the loos and exit fast. In the end we eat chips and i drink a bottle of beer and we watch our flabby, noisy compatriots waddling past on fat legs and my snobbery rises up like nausea and we decide to make our retreat...it is just too horrible!

From here you can't see the people.... Benidorm looking northwards