035 - Vegetarian Roadkill
Andalucia, España - 18th March 2005
¡Hola todo el mundo!
Dave had a New Year's treat for Jeni when she returned from her brief, Soz-depositing, family-inspecting trip to yUK in early January. He led her by the hand into The Lorry, promising her a great thrill … well, anyone would be delighted wouldn't they?! '¡O, marido querido!' ('Dear husband!') she purred, expectantly ...
No it's okay, this doesn't turn into a Blue Bulletin at this point, nor was it a repeat performance of the Christmas light extravaganza that he had surprised her with last year, it was just that Dave was anxious to show Jeni that, in her few days absence, he had fixed up the laptop so that we could access the free, wireless, broadband internet facility that Camping Orgiva now offers! However, it must be said that Jeni did generate many moans of pleasure as she logged on, splattered out a brace of emails and had a dandle on the WWW, so a passing fellow camper might be forgiven for thinking that an ecstatic reunion of another kind was in progress!
Busy, busy, busy ...
How can we possibly encapsulate the rest of our three months at Orgiva? You'll probably realise from our inability to keep the website fully up to date during that time, that it was a great whirlwind of activity. One of the things that strikes us, particularly as various travelling friends and family dropped in to see us, either staying on the Camping in their vans or the cabins or in flats nearby, is how different our experience of being here is compared to when we are travelling elsewhere. We met even more local people this year than last, and made some fabulous new friends of a variety of nationalities, so had a different insight into the life of this unique community. We were constantly welcomed into people's homes, fed, watered and shown tremendous hospitality. Which, of course, is why we stayed so long!
In return for people's warmth and generosity we were often able to do things for them - Dave and his toolboxes performed a number of miracles, we were able to use our hire car for ferrying people and things around, logs got chopped, sick computers got ministered unto, more parabolicas (satellite dishes) got erected even, and suchlike Assistances. Where Dave was doing more substantial jobs for people and didn't want to be paid in dinero, we often received payment in kind - huge bags of fruit and vegetables, eggs, necessary household items and so forth. We're just having a bit of a problem now that we're on the road again with the consequences of this otherwise very satisfactory reciprocal, no-cash arrangement. Trouble is, some of the Campings want to charge an extra pitch fee for the goat and the mule - outrageous!
Aerial Acrobatics
There are a couple of the more memorable instances of Helping Out which we'll relate for your amusement.
Our lovely new friend Meg (whose beautiful website gets an honourable mention in our Links section) lives in an isolated village in a dramatic valley-setting between the Alpujarras and the Sierra Contraviesa. We were over visiting her quite a lot during our stay, and on one occasion she asked if Dave could help some of her elderly neighbours who were having trouble with their TV aerial - the picture had gone all 'watery' they said. Meg introduced us to Augustia and we agreed that we would see her in about an hour, after we had taken Chip for a walk down into the Magic Valley next to Meg's house, and the said neighbours had had their fried breadcrumb (migas) lunch (which they cordially invited us to share with them - shame we had already eaten!).
Thus, an hour or so later we climbed back up the goat track from a stunning walk and exploration of a ruined cortijo down by the stream in the Magic Valley. There, sitting on Meg's doorstep, was Augustia, not instantly recognisable, as she'd removed her usual headscarf and nylon work-pinny and had her voluminous pink dressing gown tightly wrapped around her against what she felt as the cold (a warm spring afternoon to us Northern Europeans!). She had a ladder already propped against the roof nearby, ready for Dave to climb up and inspect the aerial. Now this isn't quite as alarming as it sounds, since the house is down on a slightly lower path than Meg's so it was only about a metre and a half up onto the typically Andalucian-construction flat roof. Nonetheless, it wasn't without hazard, since the stony path was very uneven and quite steeply sloping which made it hard to get a safe foothold for the escalera (ladder).
The ensuing half hour had to be experienced to be believed really … Jeni's Spanish just wasn't up to the job of communicating effectively and accurately with the delightful Augustia's heavy accent, and every so often Meg's assistance was urgently sought as a go-between and we developed a voice relay from their living room up the path to Dave on the roof. Augustia's husband, stationed in front of the telly, would shout (in his own special strong Andalucian accent of course) 'No, there's more water! Lots of ripples! Worse!' or 'About the same as before!' or 'Yes! Yes! Stop, that's a bit better! There!' as Dave fiddled about with various components of the aerial. It was only after some time that we realised that most of the 'No! No! More water!' exclamations happened when he had turned the TV over to the station which never got good reception anyway, and that this phrase 'There's more water!' meant the picture was more distorted! However, his judgements got passed up the line from Meg to the still be-dressing-gowned Augustia to Jeni to Dave (via a couple of mules, a dozen cats and half the village dogs, judging by the effect of the message by the time it reached Dave).
Oh, this was all punctuated by a frenzied Chip doing periodic, enthusiastic cat-chases and hurtling full tilt down the stony track, rounding the feral cats back into their sanctuary in the disused chicken shed below. And sometime in the middle of all this, a couple of mules came back from their working day to be tethered and fed adjacent to the precariously propped ladder, and at one point one of them looked like it fancied the ladder as a bum-scratching post. You couldn't make it up really!
Reluctantly, Dave had to conclude that the TV man from Orgiva was going to have to be called if the neighbours wanted completely ripple-free viewing, since the aerial was very old and a lot of the connections were corroded beyond redemption. It was going to be a rather more substantial job than just re-positioning the aerial. However, at least he'd tried and the picture, thankfully, wasn't any worse after the chaotic episode than it had been at the start.
Jeni faithfully promised to Augustia that when we return in the autumn her Spanish will be 'mucho mejor', much better - a rash promise which she has made to a number of people locally in recent weeks. (The fact that she promised the same on Dave's behalf didn't go unnoticed by the alarmed Señor Fruitbat!) Jeni's made great progress with her Spanish speaking and understanding over the winter, but declares herself at that frustrating stage where she's ready to get into more in-depth conversations but lacks some of the key components to get there - 'It's my verbs, my bloomin' verbs!' she's often heard to mutter after a particularly ignominious conversational failure. Dave on the other hand, is pleased that he's picked up the Spanish for many more nouns - and his challenge is that he now needs to know how to string them together into sentences!
Oh, and before we leave Augustia, we subsequently discovered by close observation of local women, that wearing the dressing gown over the clothes is rather common, especially among the older generation. It seems that because winters are usually relatively mild in the area, many women don't have a thick outer coat - it's just layer upon layer of cardigans, in general. The dressing gown therefore doubles up as an emergency warmth layer in the event of a colder snap ... ! Why not indeed?! And we won't mention the effect that the pinnies have on Dave now that he's reached a certain age!
Beware Below!
Going back to our other Helping Out story. On another occasion, Dave participated in a very Andalucian demolition job. Naturally, we must anonymise the following to protect the innocent and prevent anyone who just might live locally from being Denounced.
Our friend X's property is made up of several different bits, scattered up a steep hillside. A section of wall, part of an old, unused building at the top of her land, had been looking very dodgy for some time, and she was afraid that it would come crashing down onto her roof, taking the local electricity line with it. Quite simply, it needed to come down. What was less simple was that it needed to be done without the knowledge of One Particular Neighbour, further along the hill. Not that it was her wall or anything like that, just - to cut a very long story very short - she was a bit of a self appointed, Spanish version of a Neighbourhood Watch snoop and something of a thorn in everyone's sides if she got into a strop about something going on in the village. Although she too was worried about the wobbly wall crashing into the electricity supply line (since it fed her house as well), she felt it all needed doing the other way round. This would mean getting the town hall/electricity company/anyone else who might be vaguely interested to re-site the cables before anything as perilous as bringing down a couple of tons of stones and concrete should be attempted. That, of course, could take forever.
Thus the story goes: the eight days of continuous rain in March have made the wall apparently more unstable, and its demolition is now urgent. Fruitbats get emergency call to say that One Particular Neighbour is out for the day in the village for the fiesta, and there is some extra help available that day, so could we bring the crow bar and lump hammers over pronto? We rush off with same, in convoy with a couple of new friends we have made at the Camping who quite fancy a role in the demolition team - Sarah's a farmer and Alexis is a plumber so both Good Strong Women. We arrive up the track to discover that the three key members of the Gang - Father, aged 84; Brother, aged 77 and Son, precise age unknown but probably around his mid 40s - have now gone for the sacrosanct Spanish lunch, it being nearly 2pm. Ah. Immovable force. We therefore go for a spot of collective lunch too, courtesy of Friend X, and await our summons around 3.15pm when The Gang are ready. Father, Brother and Son, long ladder in hand, leap nimbly up the tracks like a trio of mountain goats, with us plodding and wheezing up behind. First things first. All women, strong and practical or not, are banished back down the track to the house level and are told in no uncertain terms this is a job for The Men. Quietly steaming, the womenfolk stamp back down the track and get a good vantage point. Our role, we are told, is to watch out and holler if anything untoward happens and any of The Gang is in danger (which presumably also means an unscheduled return by One Particular Neighbour). Jeni, Sarah and Alexis quickly check out with Friend X the correct Spanish for 'Mind your head, there's a bloody great lump of concrete coming towards you!', 'The top rung of the ladder is about to collapse, jump now!', 'He's dropped the crowbar, stand clear below!' and other such pithy, and potentially necessary, phrases.
And yes, the wall - or rather the precarious lump of it - did, with quite a bit of persuasion, come tumbling down, together with a few huge chestnut beams which were resting on it. And no, no-one was mortally wounded, the electricity cable - held neatly out of the way on a long olive-tree-beating stick - was not damaged and One Particular Neighbour didn't return in the middle of it all. Phew! Father, clearly in the role of Project Manager, stood on an adjacent rooftop to call out instructions (having shinned elegantly up through the inside of the partly ruined building), Son was up the top of the ladder as his proxy with crowbar and lump hammer, whilst Dave was accorded the considerable honour of being ladder-holder-in-chief and first-assistant-prodder-and-leverer-of-wall, having been furnished with another huge pole. Brother leapt nimbly around fulfilling a range of different bit-parts. What a team! Any resemblance in cartoons to real persons is entirely coincidental, by the way, and in any related photos please note that All Parts Are Played By Actors! The Innocent must be protected.
Hamming it up
It wasn't all escapades with ladders and lump-hammers. We took the opportunity of exploring the area more while we had the hire car - off we tootled out to the Eastern Alpujarras through the hills around Torvizcon, out towards Cadiar and Ugijar, over the river, winding up the mountains to Trevelez (arguably the highest permanently inhabited village in Spain, and mecca of the speciality dried hams - this latter fact keeping us amused for hours with terrible puns about ham; you know the sort of thing, Jeni feeling 'hambivalent' due to her vegetarianism and Dave deciding that there were probably some 'hambidextrous' 'hamsters' living in this particular 'hamlet' [groan!]). These meanders also took us out around some off-the-beaten tracks places in the mountains, with wonderful views, sightings of ibex and huge silences broken only by the sounds of birds, the wind in the trees and the occasional indignant honking of a mule going about its work.
Alhambra Do-it-all
In contrast, we also went down to the coast to Salobreña and Almuñecar numerous times, and visited some interesting nooks and crannies in between. Granada was also on the itinerary, this time not to see the fabulous sights of the Alhambra or the historic parts of that lovely city as we did last year, but on a couple of trips to a good and enormous DIY outlet (we know how to live, eh?!) in search of a wider choice of materiales de construcción for cupboards, shelves, plumbing and various other practical projects for friends. As Dave was slavering over the range of goods in AKI, Jeni was waxing lyrical about the incongruity of coming out of a retail superstore to a spectacular view of the high peaks of the Sierra Nevada, all snow-covered (and Chip was having a good bimble round the car park, enthusing in a canine way about the urban smells and tastes therein, in contrast to his usual rural sensory experiences).
Ah well, each Fruitbat to their own!
Car Pound (or Euro?!)
Another bizarre destination on our visit itinerary was Almuñecar Municipal Car Pound, surely a must-see for the jaded tourist who has done everything?! No, we didn't make a parking faux-pas and have to extricate either the hire car or The Lorry. What happened was that a friend of Star's told her that she had a small car which she didn't need any more and wondered if we would like it for pottering around while we were in the area now and in the future. The drawback was that she had lent it to another friend who, after a while, hadn't been able to afford to insure it, had left it on the street and it eventually got taken to the car pound. Star's friend knew that it had been in quite good condition and had been told it had only just been hoiked off to the pound, so for the €50 release fee and the insurance, she felt we'd have a decent little run-around. Sounded ideal for budget-conscious Fruitbats.
Well, we could go into the palaver of first of all finding the pound in the back streets of Almuñecar (closed and locked up of course); going to the Policia Local to find out when it was open; having a strange encounter with an officer with one eye which wandered around constantly and independently when he talked (subsequently known to us as Juan Ojo Loco - Mad Eye John); sitting in a café adjacent the pound waiting for Juan Ojo Loco's mate to turn up and let us see the car, only to have him nearly lock up again and leave because the woman in the café couldn't find the right change for our coffees when we came to try and pay quickly … we could go into all that.
Suffice to say, however, that we did get in and found the car in a remote and dingy corner of the underground car pound. It had two very flat and damaged tyres, we had a key that didn't fit the ignition (though one door was open so Dave could get in) and the car looked like it had been there for months. The battery was also dead. Hmm. Suddenly it didn't seem such a good idea after all! It was a really kind thought of Star's friend, but we decided it could be a waste of money to get it insured (which would have to happen before they would release it from the pound), get it out of there (presumably on the back of a pick-up since it wasn't about to spring into life) and get it road-worthy again - shame! But a good adventure anyway, and it also gave us the chance to wander round the streets of Old Almuñecar and have lunch in the square, so who's complaining? Oh, and Juan Ojo Loco's mate was deliciously handsome (say Jeni and Star), totally charming, witty and sported a fetching green jumper with 'Policia' cutely embroidered in yellow thread across the roll-neck. It was all Dave could do to stop Jeni and Star going back for second and third looks at the Officer, er, sorry, second and third looks at the car on subsequent days!
Of Vegetarian Road-Kill and Vibrators
Even in these so-called winter months there's a lot going on in this agricultural area. Of course it's orange and lemon time and the trees are still absolutely laden. We've had the benefit of an unending supply of fabulous oranges from Mary's terraces since we've been in Orgiva. These, we learn from Sebastian and Severine, the lovely French neighbours who are horticulturalists, are Washington Navels (yes, the best ones that those of you in yUK may well be paying 20p to 30p each for … it's criminal!). And Paco, Star's neighbour whose produce is always the best of the best, brings us bags too. None are wasted and most days we eat 2 or 3 oranges each - true Fruitbats. And of course the lemons have a smell from heaven when you've picked them straight from the tree. Yes, on Shrove Tuesday we did have pancakes with sugar and oodles of fabulously flavoursome fresh lemon, picked just an hour earlier, didn't we just?!
You might remember, those of you who have read the more famous book and/or last year's Bulletins, that our familiar road across to Tijola where a number of our friends live, is the 'Driving Over Lemons' road which Chris Stewart's book describes. With the lemons, oranges, olives, prickly pears and the last of the, now largely bird-scavenged, pomegranates and even persimmons, it's less Driving Over Lemons, more a question of Juice Your Own Fruit Cocktail As You Drive. Happily there aren't many small furry creatures squashed on these roads - but there's certainly plenty of vegetarian road-kill!
For a few weeks, while olive harvesting was in full swing, we had to drive particularly carefully round the corners and bends, even in town - the chances were there would be nets out on the road with two or three people squatting down sifting the falling olives and putting them into sacks or baskets, or sweeping the olives off the road into piles to collect. At least one person would be underneath the tree, or somewhere up in the branches, bashing the olive tree with long poles to bring down the ripe olives, sometimes hanging precariously high in the tree to get those last few. It becomes a bit of an obsession to get them all down! Relatively few people in this area have enough olives to own a mechanical vibrator (!) which most of the more commercial-sized growers have. Around where Mark and Becky live, further North West, a lot of people have many acres of trees, so the mechanical tree-shakers, or vibrators make harvesting faster. (Don't worry Becky, we won't show the cartoon that Dave cheekily drew of you!) It's still arduous work, though, and much of the collecting still has to be done by hand, so it's pretty labour-intensive still. Here when families harvest their own few trees, they often make a social occasion of it at weekends, and it turns into a chance to catch up with the gossip as they sit around picking up and sorting the fruit.
Some people winnow their own olives to separate them from small stones, leaves, twigs and other detritus. At least one of the three local olive mills has a mechanised winnowing process now, so some people just take the lot and let the mill do it. Mostly what happens is that your olives get winnowed and weighed and you get a ticket for the amount of oil you want back for yourself, and get paid for whatever you don't want to take back as oil. Then your olives go into the mill's processes as it were. If you want to have only your own oil, unmixed with that of half the rest of the community, you make a special arrangement, pay a bit more and your olives go through the process on their own.
Well, we hope you're getting the flavour (talking as we were of food! ha ha!) of our stay in our Alpujarran idyll. There's still things to update you about, like las olas de frio (Weather, friends, Weather!), visitors, wild fiesta-ings, celtic capers and some great fellow alcampistas on the Camping. All this before we managed to tear ourselves away … but we'll let you know about those in our next.
In the meantime, we hope that Spring is springing wherever you are.
Keep well and keep eating the fruit!
Hasta la proxima!
Dave y Jeni
xxx
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