Tribal travel

Spain, South Africa and the world's best hotels

Photo by Marten Bjork on Unsplash

Let’s start with the Tribe stuff. It seems to be quite a new term in the world of travel if not in other contexts. In life and family and friendship we often use the word tribe to describe our innermost core of people or at the very least PLU ‘people like us’. It’s certainly a better word than group I guess and this is the word that was once used to describe mass travel. Perhaps originally it was charter flights and package holidays that defined Tribe but then the latter only came about as a means to get away for  a week in the sun in the summer when Spain opened up during the dark days of Franco and could see its economic future in mass tourism.

This tribal travel then spread to other sunny corners of Europe all looking to attract the UV deprived northern Europeans with the lure of guaranteed sunshine and endless cheap booze. This was certainly a theme of my first overseas holiday with my parents to Lloret de Mar. Gin was cheaper than water back then and far more reliable as my parents joyfully discovered in our full board hotel. It certainly felt like a jolly tribe in downtown Lloret with PLU everywhere and a sense of excitement if not discovery at being overseas in the sunshine of the Costa Brava. Probably not helped by the middle of the night flights that meant the whole week felt like a state of permanent jet lag. Next up the following year was Majorca and that felt even more foreign with the occasional visit to a cave or a pearl factory. OK Magaluf still exists and is apparently a lot of fun if thats what you want.

My last trip to Magaluf some years ago was actually a business trip to meet with the possible suppliers of an online booking engine (you know, that booking.com thing) - the huge tribal travel group Melia. They put me in their chic branded hotel on the edge of town, only 20 minutes by cab from downtown Palma where our meetings were held. Despite being late September it poured with rain all day and this meant the tribe from northern Britain who were there for guaranteed sunshine had to forsake that plan and go for the cheap booze all day. I got back to the hotel around 6pm in the evening thinking I might go out for a sherry (!) and was astonished to see the antics going on in the bars on the way into the centre of town. Yes that cheap gin had started to kick in around 11am in the morning so some 7 hours later you could not believe some of the sights in the bars. So much so that as I walked along the street looking into one bar I walked straight into a lamppost and almost knocked myself out. Cue even further merriment as you might imagine. There was no sign of any sherry, just English beer, so I admitted defeat and headed back to my hotel which is never a very Bold move. Even when travelling alone on business.

Majorca was originally the first step on the road to the creation of our book SpainChic back in the 2007. My new colleague Ines and I decided to meet in Palma and spend a few days touring the island seeking out chic hotels that might be worthy of inclusion in the project. We soon ruled out any hotels that had flagpoles outside - quite rightly. Why do hotels do this? But we did find many chic hotels on that trip and our few days on the island led to many other trips around Spain and in the end a great book featuring some 60 beautiful, small, hotels.

I had found another collaborator for the Spain project on a trip to South Africa whilst working on southafricachic. Gary was a journalist based in Seville, escaping his native Canada it seemed and working for a local radio station whilst freelancing in the world of travel writing. He was also dining alone in the hotel (Phantom Forest - now closed I believe) along the Garden Route outside Knysna and we struck up a conversation which led to me seeing him some days later in Johannesburg. He had somehow made connections with Nelson Mandela’s office and seemed to know everyone there was to know so I thought it would be worth working with him - at least it would be a lot of fun. Gary suggested we go and see a witch doctor he knew in Soweto who of course also worked with Mandela. There was a queue that snaked twice around this very modest house but Gary was having none of that and we were fast tracked into the lounge. There is a ritual known as ‘throwing the bones’ where the doctor would take a look at you whilst you chatted and then reach for a small bag of bones and other trinkets which he would then theatrically throw on the floor in front of you then proceed to ‘read’ the bones and in so doing be able to tell you where your future was heading or, as for many of the people waiting patiently outside, to let you know whether your illness was serious or not. And so he threw the bones for me and then looked at them for what seemed like rather too long I thought. He then said something like ‘That doesn’t look too good - let’s try again!’ This of course had me wondering about the whole process and just how bad the original throw of the dice/bones had really been. Maybe the first throw had clearly predicted that Gary was going to work with me in Spain and that it was going to be a complete disaster! In which case he was quite accurate. The state railway in Spain, Renfe, were a sponsor of spainchic but rather than pay cash they gave us a credit card loaded with €15,000 worth of rail travel. As Gary was based in Seville he suggested he look after the card. I haven’t seen him since funnily enough..

And so spainchic and southafricachic became intertwined in a coincidental sort of a way and you couldn’t find 2 more different countries in which to do business. In South Africa yes means yes and no means no. There’s no maybe about it - which really helps when you are trying to get a project off the ground. There is no time wasted at all. In Spain there is no such word for Yes or even No. They are always preceded by the word ‘pues’ (roughly translates as ‘well…’) which means lets have lunch or better still dinner and discuss this some more. But it doesn’t matter because Spain and pretty much everyone in Spain is lovely and you can forgive them anything.

Next week I am doing a Bolder trip through Spain with Kate on the back of our motorbike. First stop Haro in the Rioja region (wonder why) then Toledo then Cordoba, Jimena La Frontera, Granada, Valencia, Pamplona and home across the Pyrenees. It may not be luxury or indeed chic but there is nothing like the freedom of being on a motorbike with only Airbnb and booking.com to help you decide where to stay that night.

So I am going to list some hotels and lodges which I think are the best in both Spain and South Africa even if I might be a little out of date some 15 years on from both Chic Collection projects. I do this because we have recently had yet another Worlds Best list come out - this time 50 hotels. I’ve stayed at 15 of their top 50 which isn’t a bad return I’d say and again the problem is that these lists don’t compare like with like. How to compare the Mandarin Oriental Bangkok (yes still the best for me) with Soneva Fushi in the Maldives or Claridges London with Nihi Sumba off Indonesia? Completely different concepts I would suggest and completely different trips but we all love a list and a ranking - and better still an industry event for the Tribe.

SOUTH AFRICA - A Bolder list