Walking Back To Happiness

"I love to go a-wandering ..."

Personally, anyone who wants to go a-wandering or a-hiking or a-anything that requires placing one foot in front of the other for further than it takes to get from the beach-bar to the sea when it's this damn hot needs, I feel, the attention of those who study the brain. But there are those who have a macho and indeed masochistic desire to go a-yomping through the mountain greenery when most sane people are a-floating on a lilo. A whole bunch of them did so just the other day in order to inaugurate the new wandering route that starts from Alcúdia, goes by Coll Baix and then on and past La Victoria. 20 kilometres in all. Insane.

Not that the route is insane as such, just doing it at this time of the year is. Anyway, this new route, with its guiding posts and maps and what have you, has been created at a cost of some 45,000 euros. From now on, in honour of the apparent monthly earnings of a lucky-lucky man along The Mile, this equates to a mere 18 Luckies. Sounds pretty good value to me. It's all part of a programme called "Camina per Mallorca", and so no doubt there will be some promotion at some point that seeks to attract hordes of hikers and ramblers to the island, and to Alcúdia in particular. Not a bad idea - but not for the summer tourist, bar those with an especially hearty bent.

And the attraction of non-summer tourists, or more specifically the need to attract non-summer tourists is aired yet again, this time by ACOTUR, the ones who have started the anti-lucky-lucky men campaign. This tourist businesses organisation reckons that up to 50% of businesses in certain areas of the island are up for sale, the consequence of, you've guessed it, lower spend, all-inclusives, the euro-pound situation and a shortening summer season. ACOTUR's spokesperson pointed to all these factors as being harmful to its members' interests, though he did not wish to sound alarmist. Why not? Some bugger should be standing on top of the local hillside and clanging that alarm bell day and night, except of course he would have the Noise Patrol swoop and check his sound limiter. And talking of which, the Delfin Azul hotel fell foul of the patrol, but are now a-noising again. But this is beside the point. What is, is that business organisations like ACOTUR are just the ones who should be kicking up a hell of a stink, be it lucky-lucky men or the state of the tourism industry, as the latter - and expect this to last certainly into next year - is not a state of happiness.


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - James Brown. Today's title - who? Clue: she was a one-time, long-ago teen sensation who then found religion.

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