Sunday,
18. April 2004
Two Islands
The first thing you see when your plane
reaches Mallorca is a long coast, followed by endless fields that are guarded
by old windmills. They even stand next to the airfield.
There
is something about those windmills, an air of timelessness, as if they were oblivious
to those big birds that cut the air with their roaring engines, with their red
and yellow and blue wings. Or maybe they just found a way to ignore them.
On
the other side of the airfield: hotels. Airport hotels you might think at first,
but no. These are holiday hotels, or rather: bed towers. The ones that made Mallorca
famous in the sixties, made it to one of the main package tourist destinations
of Europe. It still is, and the number of towers has only grown since then. El
Arenal, Palma, Ballermann, these are the places you mostly see in TV when there
is a documentation about this Mediterranean island. They are only a small part
of it, though.
Just
behind the Playa de Palma, you can find another island, a quiet one, an unknown
one, made of orchards and mountains and villages and country roads. That's the
island we are headed to. We, that is Ronnie and me - and our two bikes.
Part 2: Unfielded Nature
