You're only allowed to stay for 30 minutes in the palace, but it's small enough that that's sufficient. Strangely, the sultan built his summer palace a mere five minutes away from the main royal palace, so he must have been very sensitive to miniscule changes in temperature. Anyway, we walked over to his summer palace, but weren't sufficiently sensitive to notice any climate change. The building itself doesn't have much going for it architecturally, but the garden is elaborate and fun to explore for a while. After that we headed home in the dark. After an hour of driving, Catherine, who was driving, informed us that she can't see in the dark, so we thought it might be a good idea to bring in a relief driver who could actually see. Somchai to the rescue!

These photos are of the inner sanctum, where the sultan held court and he and his harem lived. There are only a few rooms, but every square inch is covered with intricate carvings. A big bonus for coming so late is there were relatively few people there when we were visiting, and the setting sun lit the hundreds of pillars beautifully.

68. Granada

Thursday was our other big group trip, to Granada. Granada is still in Andalucia but away from the Costa del Sol, and ranks with Sevilla and Cordoba as the must see cities of Andalucia. Unlike the other two, however, Granada is really a one-hit wonder, as the home of the world famous and extremely popular Moorish palace of Alhambra. The popularity is important, because we drove a couple of hours to get here, got lost in the big, pretty non-descript city to arrive at the Alhambra gate around 10 am. We managed to snag almost the last tickets of the day, but the downside is we weren't allowed in until 6 pm.