After Poi Love Camp finished up I ended up travelling around Costa Rica for a while with a guy I'll just call 'T', together with a friend of his from France who I'll just call 'A'. We headed up to San Jose to meet up with 'A' at the airport, then got a very long bus all the way down to the south eastern end of the country to Golfito, where we stayed a night before getting a ferry over to Puerto Jiminez the next day. The ferry was actually a cramped tiny little boat, with so little room that our bags just got put up on the roof with no rope to tie them down or railings to keep them up there. I was very pleased there were still there when we reached the other side.

Poi Love Camp was an 11 day retreat focused on becoming better poi spinners, held in Costa Rica, and run by Nick Woolsey, the man behindPlayPoi. Also teaching there was one of the spinners who has inspired me the most: Jonathan Alvarez, and also the mind-bendingly talented Alien Jon.

The retreat had been on my radar for a little while, but it wasn't until a few days before Christmas when I decided that I really wanted to get out of the European winter that I started seriously thought about going. A day later I had bought flights and tickets to what ended up being one of the most fun fortnights I've ever had. Impulsive travel planning at it's best.

For Christmas 2013, My Melbourne friends Leigh and Nicolette who currently live in Edinburgh kindly offered to have myself and our English mate Matty P come stay with them, so I had sorted out my flight from Spain to go straight there.

Next stop in Andalusia was a town named Córdoba that's claim to fame is the Mezquita, a Mosque-Cathedral. I arrived in the evening and explored around a bit, finding the town to be almost completely deserted but did take some nice photos of this Roman era bridge and tower.

From Barcelona I caught the overnight train to Granada. It left fairly late in the evening and arrived in Granada at about 9am the next morning. I had some sleeping pills and slept as well as is possible on a train, but was still exhausted when I arrived.

I headed straight to a hostel that I'd looked up online beforehand and checked that they had a bed for me. It was too early to check in but they let me lock up my bags in their storage room and allowed me to take advantage of their breakfast buffet.