Pumpkin Spice? That Doesn’t Sound Nice

Some people just live for Autumn. Skiers and snowboarders can see the snows a’comin’ and lovers can get back to a non-stick snuggle routine. In the United States, where they call it “Fall”, the people seem to find solace in the arrival of something called Pumpkin Spice Latte, which quite frankly sounds terrible. Pumpkin plus spice is already a no-no, and then to put it in a coffee! Get real.

From Stoke Travel’s perspective, Autumn is a time to briefly dry out after a very soggy summer, and then to launch into our don’t-you-dare-call-it-the-off-season season. We will miss the summer, but the Autumn gives us a chance to explore London and Barcelona, our home cities, and go on adventures to exotic locales.


Here’s a little rundown on what’s on our immediate horizon while the leaves shimmy their way down from their summertime perches, and baristas seek to infuse coffee with goddamn pumpkin.

Halloween

Something that was popularised in the North American Fall that we can get behind, unlike pumpkin coffee drinks. Halloween is scary, it’s sexy, it’s fun and full of candy. We spend our Halloweens here in Barcelona, exploring the old gothic part of town with our treasure hunt, touching on the ghostly and ghastly history of the city and drinking plenty of shots in the process. Will you be around Barcelona for this one? Want to get completely goblinned with us?

The All Blacks Vs Wales

It’s rugby, dummy, and only half as painful as drinking a pumpkin spiced latte (srsly so gross). The All Blacks are the world’s greatest rugby team and probably New Zealand’s greatest anything, the Welsh are no slouches, and their supporters are renowned for passion and banter. Also, there are over nine million sheep in Wales and we all know what they say about Kiwis and sheep…

… that they are proud about their wool industry and perhaps have a keen interest in sheep farming around the world. They also say that Kiwis and Welsh people like to love sheep, so maybe they’ll play out a bizarre love triangle in front of almost 100,000 horny spectators. Join us for fun, football and being facetious about fornicating with fauna.

Morocco Surf House

You want to get some more Morroc and Roll in your life? Is it time to get your motion in the North Atlantic Ocean? Autumn is THE SEASON to surf in Morocco. There are some slamming swells hitting the coast right now, the sun is still shining hot and bright (highs in the 30s this week), and the water is bikini and boardshort-able. For those of you who don’t know, Morocco is a completely safe kingdom in North Africa, it’s beaches are famed, it’s lifestyle fabled and the food fantastic. It’s a short hop from Europe, a little longer from not-Europe, our house is magnificent (jacuzzi on the roof, sunsets over the Atlantic Ocean). You want to be there, and Autumn is a perfect time to do it. Just jump on one of the many budget birds that fly down there and wash away your sins in Morocco’s perfect point breaks. You want it, you’ll  love it, you’re going to need it.

Oh, and there’s not a pumpkin spice latte in sight!

That’s our Autumn. Is it going to be yours too? We really hope so!

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Puro loggin Luso Ricardo Almeida. Filmaker Joel Reis

En Hangten somos fans de la nueva hornada de surfers lusos que eligen el camino del SURFING clásico, en nuestros viajes por Portugal, conocimos en persona al surfer protagonista de esta maravillosa peli del Filmaker y fotógrafo Joel Reis (Endless Fun) , se trata de Ricardo Almeida rider de BLOODBROTHERS y local de COSTA CAPARICA, un tío afable, que […]
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Weirdest Halloween traditions and festivities in Europe

ANGEL RAMSEY

From ancient origins to trick or treating, Halloween is a festival steeped in in the bizarre. Creep with us through some of Europe’s strangest celebrations, and get your fangs into the wildest Halloween tradition with our very own Barcelona Ghost Hunt.

It’s that time of year again when for reasons long forgotten people all over the world dress up in costumes and pursue all things creepy and haunting. It’s believed that the origins of Halloween come from a 2,000 year old Celtic festival, Samhain, which celebrated the end of the harvest season and the start of a new year. The Celts believed that on the night before the new year the dead were able to return to earth as ghosts. They wanted to appease the ghosts because ghosts are scary, so the smart people would leave food and wine on their doorsteps because food and wine keeps everyone happy. They would also disguise themselves as ghosts when leaving the house during Samhain in order to ensure no harm would come to them should they encounter any unhappy spirits without food and/or wine. Yes Halloween is a weird holiday, so let’s check out the weirdest ways this weird holiday is celebrated throughout Europe today.  

Hiding of the knives in Germany

Going along with the belief that dead relatives visit on Halloween, many Germans will hide all the knives in their homes to make sure the ghosts don’t hurt themselves. Or maybe they’re actually afraid that said dead relative is holding a grudge and would use the knives against them if presented with the opportunity? I prefer to believe the latter.

Night of the Pumpkins in Northern Spain

October 31st is the Night of the Pumpkins for Spaniards in the Galician region. On this night, they carve pumpkins, have costume parties, bonfires and trick-or-treating. Nothing really weird about that so far. The weird part comes with the customary alcoholic drink they make, quemada, which they drink out of pumpkins after reciting a spell, esconxuro, that’s supposed to offer protection against evil. Expecto patronum!

Fave dei Morti in Italy

Literally translated to “beans of the dead”, fave dei morti is just a morbid name for seemingly delicious fava bean-shaped sugar cookies consumed during the Italian Day of the Dead. The significance being due to the ancient belief that souls of the dead resided in fava beans, which allowed for a connection between the worlds of the living and the dead. So eat cookies and be able to talk to the dead, that’s not weird at all.

La Castañada in Catalunya

La Castañada (the chestnut) is a traditional festival celebrated in the Catalan region of Spain on October 31st. Festivities feature the likes of roasted chestnuts, sweet potatoes, and small almond ball cakes called panellets, all accompanied by the sweet traditional wine, moscatell. This tradition seems to come from bell ringers in the past supposedly staying up all night ringing bells to commemorate the dead while friends and relatives brought them these foods for sustenance. Yum!

Ghost Scavenger Hunt in Barcelona

It’s no secret that Barcelona’s history is rife with mysteries and haunted sites. What better way to explore these local legends than with a weird and wild scavenger hunt through the haunted streets of Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter?! On October 31st, weirdos and freaks from around the world flock to Barcelona to partake in the mission of unlocking the creepy secrets of Barcelona’s past (and win awesome prizes along the way!) with maps, clues, costumes, face-painting, and copious amounts of liquid courage (read beer and sangria) to fuel through the night. It’s believed that the origin of this festivity stems from a few curious Barcelonians with a reckless yearning to uncover the truths behind Barcelona’s spooky legends.

Feeling brave? Join Stoke’s Ghost Hunt for the weirdest Halloween of your life!

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Maestro y alumno. Olas Mediterráneas.

Hace unos días por el Mediterráneo, entró un  pequeño swell limpio y del que sacaron partido dos generaciones de longboarders Malagueños, Miguel Sampalo “Miguelito” ya sobradamente conocido entre todos nosotros, por su explosivo surfing y un chavalín de Benalmádena que está cogiéndole gusto a esto de surfear con longboard, tiene 14 años y su nombre […]
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Marcus Paladino. El fotógrafo del surf invernal.

Surfear en las aguas gélidas de la costa Oeste Canadiense debe ser toda  una experiencia, allí vive y tira fotos Marcus Paladino un genial cazador de instantáneas. Acostumbrado a los rigores climáticos de su país, sus fotos nos trasladan a un lugar frío y remoto, pero con una naturaleza y unas olas increíbles, ese lugar es […]
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The Stages Of Returning Home

The Summer’s over, many of you are returning home after a long, fruitful spell in Europe. The journey is a bittersweet one, bitter in that all the good times and random pleasures of a European summer are over, sweet because all the good times and random pleasures have given you bottomless bragging fodder to unfurl on your friends at home.

But what will your glorious return actually be like? Well unfortunately it’s not all beer, skittles, rainbows and handjobs. Returning to the known world after running wild with the savages is a tough job, and the stages of returning home very closely mimic the stages of grief. It’s a sad process, but one you’ll get through soon enough if you follow this step-by-step guide.

 

Stage One: Denial

When the traveller returns home denial often manifests itself as delusion. You will be in denial about what life awaits you when you return, you’ll mentally give yourself a plethora of dream jobs that will be offered to you at home, jobs that will be pleasurable extensions of your time travelling. You imagine well-paid days in the sun, being paid to eat and drink and meet new people and lay with exotic strangers. Going home won’t be too bad, you tell yourself, I’ll probably just pick up work as a gigolo, or a socialite, or a surf instructor, or a tour guide, or a tv star, or something that is a far cry from the part-time gig you’ll pick up serving tepid pints to toothless ashtrays at a dive pub on the soggy side of the tracks. Seems the glaring, vino-soaked hole in your CV isn’t exactly what employers were looking for.

Stage Two: Anger

At everyone. At your family for being so dang annoying. At your friends for not caring about your travelling stories. At people still travelling for posting Instagrams that are giving you FOMO (FOMO giving should be your job!). At your new job for paying so little, while being so boring and allowing so little time for fun. At home life for being a limp imitation of your European lifestyle. At the restaurants for charging half a week’s wage for glorified gruel. At bars and nightclubs for not letting you in/get drunk/have fun/dance like nobody’s watching. At your plans for not working out. At yourself for ever leaving. At the world for being so unkind.

Stage Three: Bargaining

“Ok, look, here’s the thing. I’ll knuckle down and work hard. I’ll stop complaining and I’ll be happy for what I’ve got. I’ll stop spending all my money on partying. I’ll start living the life my friends live, the life my parents want me to live. I’ll save up some money and I’ll put a deposit on a house. I’ll go on dates and I’ll meet someone who takes life seriously. I’ll learn from them and complement them. We can move in together, get engaged, get married and have kids. I’ll do all of these things and conform to life at home, if it will make me happy. It’s what everybody else is doing and they seem happy, so surely it will work for me.”

Stage Four: Depression

None of those things make you any happier, not once you’ve had a taste of the good life. Working hard and saving money just makes you sad if you can’t party and travel. Dating people who ask you about your five-year plan is about as miserable as it gets and will probably lead to a lifetime of monthly missionary sex. All the houses in the places you want to live are oppressively expensive, and everything in your price range is pathetic and in the middle of nowhere. You can’t lock into the next 20 years paying off a shitty house in a crappy place eking out a worthless existence. You’re a wild horse and you need to run free; all this attempt at taming just makes you bummed out. There’s only one thing for it…

Stage Five: Acceptance

You’re home now and you know what you want. The nine-to-five isn’t interesting to you yet and you aren’t really sure who you are, let alone what you want to do. Alls you know is that travelling makes you happy. So you accept that, and you do whatever it takes to get you travelling again. You realise that your job is your means to again frolicking on foreign shores. You see each and every shift as being equal to this much time in Italy, that much wine in Spain. This realisation sees you attack each working day with a renewed vigor. You stop telling your friends stories about your adventures and start trying to include them in future ones. Your family might not appear happy with your decision to take more time off from the real world, but that’s just how they have to be. Deep down they wish they were the ones planning to take off again, living for nothing but fun. The restrictive and mundane nature of socialising at home suddenly becomes a blessing. You don’t want to go out and party, because the parties are lame compared to what you’ll be doing next summer in Europe. You’re saving money and gaining health, two things that you’ll need to have reserves of when you take on another backpacking mission. You’ve accepted that going home is an integral part of travelling, and that it by no means has to be permanent. You’ve accepted that once the bug bites, you’re hooked. You’ve accepted that as soon as possible, you’ll be back.

Are you ready for your next European summer mission? Then check out our passport, for the best way to stretch your travelling buck, our backpackers’ guide, for advice on every stage of the journey, or if you want to work to play and maybe never leave, maybe one of our writing internships is up your alley. Here’s to a life on the road!

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Caras del Quasimoto 2017

El alma de cualquier festival, son las personas que participan en el evento, hoy algunos rostros del pasado QUASIMOTO 2017     
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Stoke Travel’s Content and Travel Writing Internships: Some Details

Hey, thanks a lot for showing your interest, it’s nice to see people take a shot at something according to their passions. Working for Stoke Travel, and writing travel related content in general, isn’t going to make any of us a million bucks, but it will relentlessly take us out of our comfort zones, deliver us to fantastical situations and repeatedly provide the times of our lives. The experiences gathered and the skills learned will be called upon regularly throughout your lives and career paths whether they feature content creation, or travel writing, or not.

The Internship

You can start whenever you like and intern for as long as you like, though we do prefer a three-month minimum. We are very flexible with hours, days off, etc, but generally ask interns to be in our Barcelona office from 11am until 6pm. You will be working with the content team, in an office that can have up to 50 full-time staff and interns working on any given day. You will be working with our content manager on a number of different projects for both our own content portals and for third-party agents at the marketing department’s request.

At Stoke we create content that ranges from straightforward travel narratives, to informative articles regarding the trips we do, honest accounts of the travelling/backpacking/study abroad lifestyle, listicles, SEO content, interviews and vox pop, guidebooks, web pages and personal blog entries. Our tone is irreverent, humorous and well-informed; as a medium-sized brand we aren’t restricted in our content – we can be crass, vulgar, rude, so long as it’s honest and inoffensive. It’s as if Contiki downsized and took on a content strategy that was part Lonely Planet and part Vice, when both were still cool, obviously.

We will be relying on, and fostering, your ideas for content. We don’t want to sit you down and have you robotically typing the words that we want to see, we want to encourage your creativity and see your voice sing across our platforms. We will regularly hold brainstorming sessions where we throw around article ideas relating to our content needs and your mentor will identify those with the most promise. Then we expand on those ideas and you turn them into published articles, once they’ve passed by the editor’s red pen.

At the start of the internship we will help you to set up your own blog. Maintaining the blog will be a regular part of your time with us, and your way to get paid. We will create the blog in a way that is true to you and your experiences so the entries come easily and honestly, then we will promote your blog posts to Stoke Travel’s large social media audience. You will be give a unique promo code and special deals to offer to your audience, and you will receive a commision every time somebody takes advantage of your offer. This is more of a way to make pocket money, than to pay off a mortgage, and your success is dictated by how readily the audience takes to your content.

Throughout this internship we’ll be asking you to produce at least one piece of content per day. This level of output should well prepare you for any career in commercial content creation. We will give you a schedule that includes posts for Stokepedia (our content portal) and your blog (where you can promote products with your promo code). We envisage that over a five-day split you would be producing three articles for Stoke and two for your blog (once these targets are met you can post to your blog as often as you like, the idea being that you develop a following outside of the Stoke Travel network).

The internship will require you to spend at least one day a week out in Barcelona exploring the city, its people, and contributing to our online guidebook project. On weekends the staff organise daytrips in the immediate area, and there is opportunity to travel with Stoke to our destinations when there are trips on. Through our Barcelona partners we offer party nights almost every night, plenty of local activities and a lot of opportunity for group drinks and dinners.

We will provide you with shared accommodation in our often-crazy staff house. Everyone who works for Stoke is honest and diligent and diligently and honestly apply themselves to partying whenever they can. This is a place to get to know new people, an exciting city, and to get out of your comfort zone, not a place to grow daisies and raise a family. Our staff all work office hours and so the parties usually don’t go all night. Usually.

Your mentors

The Stoke Team is young, creativity and always up for a challenge. We like to look forward with our content and will constantly be relying on your knowledge to augment our own. You’ll be working not only with the content team, but with marketing, media and the directors.

The content team is headed by Gravy, a 12-year veteran of Stoke Travel. During his tenure with Stoke Travel Gravy has taken hiatuses to improve his skill-set and experience in content creation, journalism and writing, taking the editor’s role at Surfing Life magazine for a spell, as well as acting as a mentor on the Global Hobo writing workshops. Gravy has had work published across a number of titles, platforms and genres and uses his experience to help drive and manage Stoke Travel’s content output.

Stoke also has a dedicated media wing that produces all kinds of video content to promote our products, as well as travel documentaries and just about anything really. Check out our 50 Fiestas project on Facebook to see the kind of thing we’re producing. We also provide copywriting, content, social media and basic web services to other brands as a content agency, something that you will also be able to contribute to if you take up the internship.

If you’re still interested then please contact gravy@stoketravel.com to let him know you’re keen, and while you’re there you can ask any specific questions that you may still have.

 

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¡WE’RE LOOKING FOR YOU!

Travel for free, get to know beautiful Barcelona, take steps towards being a professional writer and maybe make some pocket money. Stoke Travel is building its writing internship program and we’re looking for travel freaks like YOU.

As the sun sets on another gangbusting summer of Stoke we’re setting our sights on building up our content team and putting ourselves on track for travel industry/world domination.

We are a young company based in Spain dedicated to giving individuals creative space to grow, both on our trips and in our offices. We’re flexible in our approach and seek to nurture your ideas rather than force ours onto you, especially in terms of content creation and copywriting. We are Europe’s number one festival travel company and growing, each and every year putting tens of thousands of young travellers into the times of their lives, due in part to our progressive content strategy. We are constantly evolving and growing our destinations, team and approach.

Stoke Travel believes in creating content that exists to entertain and engage the audience more than simply hawk our once-in-a-lifetime experiences. Our Stokepedia blog offers travellers practical advice as well as intrepid anecdotes, drawing on current affairs and personal experience. As a young, creative company we strive to be on the vanguard of content strategy, putting quality of content above everything, while implementing strategies that play to evolving SEO, new journalism and social media trends. We believe that everything and anything published through our portals must offer the audience something more than sterile product descriptions and pushy promotions; we employ classic storytelling, satire, brutal honesty, and unashamedly playing to people’s wanderlust to tell our brand’s stories.

But enough about us, let’s talk about you.

You are a literate travel addict, someone more interested in accumulating stamps in your passport than shekels in your money bag and way more interested in the value of good times than passport stamps. You want to spend a while, a few months, years, decades, working and travelling, travelling while working, honing your writing skills and becoming familiar with the machinations of writing for profit from industry professionals. You read widely, are actively engaged with social media trends and can regale your friends at home with a well-spun travel tale. You’re open minded, easy going and will drop everything when a good time presents itself. Bonus points if you have a blog and/or skills behind the lens.

We can offer you an environment to grow not only your writing style, but your skill set. If you need to complete an internship for your undergraduate degree, we can sign off on that. We offer a bed in our Barcelona staff house, travel around Spain and Europe when trips are underway, and parties every dang night in Barcelona. We offer you mentors with the experience and ideas needed to take you closer to your writing career. We guarantee you the time of your life with your Stoke Travel family.

We don’t offer paid internships, but… we do have a commissions system that could see you earn more than enough to sustain your stay and perhaps do some travel afterwards. Through our affiliated blogger program you’d be given your own promo code and we’d help you set up and maintain your own blog through which you’d have no shortage of events and trips to promote and collect commissions on. Your internship with Stoke would require you to write for our blog and your own, and we would provide all the assistance you need to make it financially worthwhile to you.

Is this the opportunity you’ve been looking for? Perhaps it seems perfect for a friend. To find out more about Stoke Travel, check out our website and explore our blog. Send expressions of interest to gravy@stoketravel.com. Tell us what you’ve been reading and the last place you travelled to. Sign up to the best time of your life.

 

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Rock & long 2017 fotos y vídeo.

La playa de Montalvo está en el corazón de las rías Baixas gallega, y otro año mas allí nos desplazamos a disfrutar de un evento tan especial,  el ROCK&LONG, como su nombre indica todo gira alrededor del surfing y de la música pero el alma de este “FESTI” es el Kannion bar, un lugar regentado […]
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