14/2003 - Parking the Lorry
26th February 2004 - Orgiva
¡Hola Otra Vez!
The question we left you with at the end of the last Bulletin was - do you reckon we could manage to squeeze the 3 metre wide, 8 metre long Lorry onto the lovely level terrace with the amazing views in order to Get To Work? We apologise for keeping you waiting for the answer - life has been just SO hectic, you can hardly imagine - !! Well, by our recent standards it certainly has been busy.
To give you some context for the audacious attempt to lever the Lorry onto the aforementioned terrace, we probably need to take you with us out to where Star lives - winding, winding out of Orgiva across a dry river bed, round a few bends (road narrows substantially), past a few houses, along past some terraces of olives (road disappears in a crumble on the right hand edge), winding winding a bit more ... and a bit more (oops, couple of decidedly hairy bends there) ... a few more houses on either side ... a little gulley in the road where water gushes down ... oh, rocky bit there, mind your backside ... plunging down a bit whilst simultaneously looping round a difficult bend ... and so on for a few more kilometres. (Those of you who have read 'Driving Over Lemons' will have been down this route before - it's the very road where Christ Stewart first drove over lemons - so Dave effected a bit of a swerve and emulated the more famous author, squashing not only a couple of lemons, but at least one orange and many more olives. Not sure that's pithy [urgh!] enough for a book title though, do you?)
So you get the picture - it's a way out of town and you'd not find as much as a bakers between Orgiva and there, let alone a 24 hour Mercadona! Your only retail therapy opportunities are the 2 euro sacks of oranges or lemons at people's gates. The village actually doesn't have a postal address since its one road doesn't have a name and most of the houses have neither names nor numbers. The postie works on the principle of 'the house of the brother-in-law of Pedro, next to the house of the first cousin once removed of Maria' - you get the idea?
We've been out to Star's house on previous visits to the area, so knew that even the road itself would be a bit of a challenge in VeeJay, but feasible. On this, our assessment excursion that day in Star's car, our primary concern was would we manage to squeeze up the stony track between Star's sister's (SS's) house (on which Dave would be working) and the neighbour's place? Said track leads up to the series of terraces which are carved out onto the hillside, some of which belong to SS's house, a couple to another neighbour, Sebastian y Severine, and on the other side to Carlos y Carmen, the people on the right hand side with the big old family house and land.
Yes, Dave reckoned as we stood at the bottom and gazed up, it would be possible. Tight, yes, but we'd do it. He grew more and more confident. We'd have to go up front-ways because we've got a long overhang (!) behind the rear axle which would 'ground' on the steep path if we tried to reverse up, but no problem, we'd drive up, overshoot the terrace onto the even rockier, steeper bit, then swing the back end round, carefully avoiding Carlos' neat rows of lettuce and spring garlic with the front wheels and skirting the olive tree with the front bumper. No worries! (Jeni, for the first time in her life, took up fingernail-chewing at around this point. Her mouth was a bit too dry to articulate the slight [??] anxiety she felt, and she didn't want to show herself up by squeaking out any reservations at this stage, so she simply stared, wide-eyed, shaking her head.)
The tumbledown outhouse on one side of the terrace did have electricity, so once on the terrace, we'd be able to plug in there, use other facilities in SS's house if we wanted, and lo! There we'd be - high on a hill, without a lonely goatherd, but surrounded by orange trees that we could probably reach from the window without getting out of bed! And what a view! Perfect. Provided we could get up there.
As we were coming back down the track, Carlos y Carmen (and a brace of barking dogs) emerged from their house and Star effected the introductions. They proclaimed themselves delighted to meet such illustrious friends of the lovely Estrella (Star's Spanish translation), and, in the same breath, would we perhaps like to buy their house? They're getting on in years and ever since Carlos got knocked into an adjacent field by a (local) yoof on a speeding motocicleta - which accident happened not long after his falling out of an olive tree whilst pruning - his mobility is really too poor to carry on living out in this remote part. They plan to buy a nice little flat in Orgiva, so we are just in time to take up this marvellous opportunity to buy their house and all the land. Star, as she translates, all smiles, adds comments like 'You won't get a bargain from this bloke', so we get the picture. We assure him that we're definitely not of the rich northern European variety of visitor, and sadly must decline his kind offer, even though it looks like a wonderful place, and how honoured we feel to have been given such a chance etc. So that's Carlos next door - we reckoned he must have read the Spanish translation of 'Driving Over Lemons' or maybe he's a friend of the guy who sold the house to Chris Stewart!
Star's next door neighbour, Paco, on the other hand is a very different basket of olives. At 82, he's lived in the hamlet all his life, has fields down in the valley which he still works every day with his ancient mule and helps Star up their almost vertical access track (well, certainly it's a 60 degree angle - no kidding) with her 20 kg gas bottles (as well as carrying his own up on his shoulder). He and the mule toil back up there every evening after a hard day's work - and we should tell you, that even us spritely young Fruitbats have to pause two or three times (to admire the view, you understand) on the way up the incredible slope.
Having checked out the track and the terrace, we went along the road a bit to Star's own house, which is when we were first introduced to Paco. Then, out of the stable-door gate leapt Henry, Star's Great Dane x Boxer, which bonded deeply and significantly with Dave last time we were here. Henry, barrelling down the path whimpering joyously, was closely followed by Daisy, a more recently acquired junior mutt with a bit of everything canine in her and a face like a bat wearing a bigger bat's bottom dentures. It would be more accurate to say that she acquired Star and her daughter one day as they drove along a remote road - the puppy had obviously been dumped - and as Star's daughter had always wanted a Rottweiler called Daisy, Star reckoned being adopted by this adoring little mongrel would be getting off quite lightly - so Daisy it was! Six voluble cats followed down the slope to welcome us as well, tails held high - what a crowd!
Over a cup of tea, we sorted the arrangements for leaving the Camping tomorrow and heading on over with the Lorry. The list of jobs for Dave and the toolboxes was long, so it was definitely time to Get To Work. Dave's been excited about the project for ages and was keen to start his tasks. We were both really thrilled to see Star again - she's one of those special folk who has a gift for making people feel like they're the most loved and valued creatures in the universe, and is a fount of both wisdom and mischief. Everyone should have such a Star in their lives!
So it was back to the Camping to make our preparations to leave. Jeni only had one anxiety dream that night, about the Lorry rolling over and over down a stony mountain goat track, but she nervously laughed it off in the morning. We did our email address exchanges with our very pleasant Dutch neighbours, a couple from East Anglia and some other folk who live on the other side of Malaga; we packed the windbreak, the washing line and the rainbow windsox, bid farewell and headed on up the hill to take the road out of Orgiva towards Tijola.
Somehow the route didn't seem too bad in the Lorry - we were so big we knew that any other vehicle we met would have to be the one to back up to a passing place (on a Sunday we didn't anticipate meeting the odd gravel wagon which might wend its way along here and up into the hills beyond). We ran the gauntlet of all the dogs roaming lose along the way, without causing injury to VeeJay or them (why bother to keep the dog inside your own perimeter fence when it can be taking itself for a walk with all the other neighbourhood dogs and hurling itself at passing vehicles?!). There was no earthly way that Jeni would attempt to drive on this manoeuvre, so she leapt out of the Lorry to puff her way up the path to collect Star, while Trucker Dave carried on down another half a kilometre to the only feasible turning spot, to get the optimum approach for the assault.
How can the next hour be described without you thinking that we specialise in hyperbole? (As if you didn't think that already ... ) Dave tried every which way to get that Lorry up that slope - forwards, backwards, from one direction then the other, then the first again just in case. But no way José! That back end was just too long. The road in front of the track is very narrow, and falls away abruptly several feet down onto another path below (no scope for error there then), so it made the manipulation of the vehicle even more complicated. There's a big locked garage on the other side of the road opposite Carlos y Carmen's house, but even if we'd had the key to that (which Star tried to get from the owner) it wouldn't have helped much because at 3 metres high, rising to 3.5 metres at our top box, we couldn't even have used that space to reverse into as we were too tall. No - short of taking a chunk out of next door's side wall, we were seriously stuffed.
That doesn't do the scene justice of course. Imagine, if you will, a goodly gaggle of neighbours out, shouting encouragement and creating confusion by much handwaving (easy to misinterpret in the wing mirrors as 'yes, plenty of room - back, back!'); loud conversations standing at crucial points in the road; Jeni - white faced (even with the sun-kissed skin) but trying hard to be brave - assessing how many millimetres Dave could reverse before the awful graunch of chassis on stone, bumper on cement or back end on concrete, or how many more millimetres she could let him go forward before her beloved (and Dave - whoops, sorry!) plunged over the precipicette in front. Then the inevitable - cars came along in both directions simultaneously when VeeJay was almost wedged solid across the road, half her backside slewed up the start of the track.
During these proceedings, if you can believe it, Carlos is anxious that Star should tell us he's got a nice little bit of land we could buy further along the valley if we're sure we don't want his house. 'Ideal for parking that big camping car every time they come to visit you, and maybe they could build a small house on it too?' Once again, we get the asides from a smiling Star 'you haven't got a hope in hell of getting planning permission to build anything on that or even take services to it' - it seemed like he'd try to sell a dead donkey to his granny, probably when she was trying to effect a delicate manoeuvre with a vaulting pole!
So the whole neighbourhood was open mouthed at Dave's Lorry-driving skills - he was dancing it by centimetres on its tippy-toe wheels and if there'd been any way at all to get it round into that space, he'd have done it [to save Dave's blushes, a similarly awed Jeni takes full responsibility for that assessment]. But it was not to be. Yog the Yurt up on the higher terrace would be a dream-come-true in the warmer-nights season (at the moment the cicadas are in thermal PJs after dark), but alas, this was not to be the place for VeeJay.
Back to the drawing board. Well not quite, our collective brains sorted it out in no time. Back to the idyllic Camping, organise a small car and potter back and forth each day. At Star's suggestion, we could have stayed in the little upper flat of the house, but we're Grey Nomads, devoted to life in the Lorry, so declined the kind offer and reverted to Plan B, subsection 2. Best of all worlds we reckoned and so indeed it has proved.
There was some surprise from our fellows back at the Camping at our return (though Jeni had, she thought in jest, quipped 'See you in a couple of hours!' as we left earlier in the day). Happily the pitch we'd been on was still free - great, as it was a big one in a perfect spot. We just rang the changes a bit by turning VeeJay round the other way (a) so we didn't overlook Gertrude and Jacques, our Dutch neighbours, so much (sometimes we wondered if they felt we were peering down into the plates on their outdoor breakfast table from our slightly elevated adjacent pitch!), and (b) so we had a new view of the world.
We had a couple of days to wait for the car (this is small-town Spain you remember), so had a chance to chill out, toil back up to town a couple of times and do some chores. We found the back-path route up to Orgiva which saved dicing with death as cars and trucks hurled themselves up and down the road (though taking this route deprived the men-on-the-wall their amusement as we slogged up and whizzed back down by road). This back way to Orgiva was a lovely old unsurfaced road past a few houses, many small-holdings and groves of trees. Jeni, pausing frequently to admire the views (it was, after all, uphill on the way to town, albeit a gentle slope!); Dave pausing even more frequently to exclaim at such picturesque features as an external electric junction box without its cover (thus enabling scrutiny of contents), the traditional Andalucian roof construction revealed in semi-ruined buildings (rough beams, bamboo canes, topped with hard baked mud and gravel), the intricacies and practicalities of the 'acequia' irrigation system - only Dave!
We spent some time with other people on the Camping as well whilst waiting for the car, and had one particularly memorable conversation with Jacques and Betty where we were talking about food (favourite topic too!). Betty, who's from Scotland, and Jacques, from Holland, ended up trying to out-gross each other in their descriptions of traditional national dishes. Jacques found the concept of using a sheep's stomach for haggis too awful, while Betty was struggling with the raw herring and raw chopped onion, straight down the throat, that Jacques was extolling the virtues of!
Eventually it was time to go back and see the luscious Pedro, who was arranging our special offer car hire. Jeni had been wondering if it would be okay to pop into the travel agents every day to see Pedro and let him know how the miniscule Daewoo Matiz he'd got for us was doing once we'd picked it up. Unaccountably, Dave assured her that this would not be necessary. Disappointing, really (at least for Jeni!).
Talk about a contrast! From the 8 metre long 2.8 litre turbo diesel engined, right hand drive VeeJay we found ourselves driving the tiniest little car you can imagine - left hand drive naturellemente. Bizarre! But it was just the ticket for the narrow roads and squeezing through tiny gaps and passages, so we were delighted.
And once again, ready to Get To Work. Excuse us, then, we've loads to do and we'll catch up again soon.
Love to all,
Jeni y Dave
xxx