I am back to my blog finally after two years. This time I want to share an interesting traveling experience with one of my close friends. It was summer of 2016. Yes, I know it feels like a long time back. But, the memories from that trip is still fresh in my mind.
We always dreamt of going to Valencia for Tomatina. This time, we finally made a plan. Since Tomatina takes place on Wednesday every year, we had to book our vacation for five days. Besides Tomatina we had four more days for exploration. Then began our adventures in Albarracin.
Since we didn’t go to Valencia by car or rent one, we were traveling by train. When we looked at train schedules from Valencia to Albarracin, we found out that we have to go to Cella first. From there we had to book a car from there which would take us roughly 30-45 minutes from Cella to Albarracin. On that morning, we started our journey from Valencia.
Upon reaching Cella after around three hours, we were completely shocked at what we saw. Actually, we didn’t even see a single living soul there. Forget about a cafe or any other shops. And, guess what? We hadn’t booked taxi from Cella to Albarracin in advance. So, both of us had no idea about what we were going to do. Not knowing what to do, we were looking around at advertisements on the train station. Luckily, we saw a phone number for taxi. When we called the taxi, he couldn’t speak English and we couldn’t speak Spanish, but somehow we managed to tell him that we wanted to go to Albarracin from Cella (thanks to google translator). He was a very nice and also took us to Albarracin within a reasonable price (unfortunately, since it was a long time back, I don’t remember exactly how much.) If you want to book his taxi from Cella to Albarracin, please find his contact details on the image below.
When we reached Albarracin, we were so happy but we did not know what to expect. Usually when we travel, we just look at some images and go. We decided to follow people and were wandering around. It is very lovely and small place. The rooftops were thatched, which reminded me of my hometown, Kathmandu. After walking for sometime, we started to get hungry and decided to go to whichever restaurant we found. I don’t know if we were too hungry or the food there was really good.
After eating, we continued with our exploration. We saw that there was a wall on the top of hill. So we followed our instincts and walked towards the wall. I must say that, we were really unprepared for it, I was wearing sneakers and the friend of mine was wearing slippers. Nonetheless, we reached at the top to the amazing view. This city was in the middle of nowhere. Everywhere we looked, there was nothing else than just hills. It was breathtaking.
After visiting this beautiful city, it was time to return to Valencia. Nonetheless, our adventure were not finished. We called the same taxi that took us to Albarracin to go back to Cella. Later we learned, that are only three or four trains from Valencia to Cella and the same vice versa. We realized that we were waiting for the last train in the middle of nowhere. Luckily, we were two hours early to the train station but unluckily with nothing to do rather than make more photos of this nowhere place and look at clouds (I was seriously looking at the changing shapes of clouds and trying to imagine what image they are of). Furthermore, we did not have any idea in which platform the train was coming. So we thought that we will wait for the train in two different platforms and as the train comes near, we will go to the correct platform. You might think, that is crazy, but at that time that seemed like a good option. However, we did not have to do that, because the last train came from Valencia and we knew in which platform will our train arrive.
All in all, it was an adventurous trip with a very nice view and good memories. I would like to go there once again and this time I would like to stay overnight and admire this beautiful city at night.