Another Week of Campsite Life at the Aula de Naturaleza, Nerja
The days are ticking by folks, mostly accompanied by sunshine and blue skies down here in Nerja but today, shock, horror, it’s gonna rain for a few hours! The chairs are tucked under the van, all our bits and bobs airing on the washing line have been retrieved and the bike cover is, once again, covering the bikes, awaiting The Big Wet. With no sun to warm us we’ve retreated inside and I’m taking the opportunity to write a quick update on our campsite life in Spain.
Up to El Fuerte
El Fuerte is a 936m peak about 6 miles inland from the campsite, with a hiking trail right to the top and magnificent views along the route. The trail is in another municipality to Nerja here in Málaga province, and the Andalusian Junta closed the municipality borders before Christmas in a bid to keep COVID-19 cases down, making it illegal for us to hike up there. The municipal borders opened up again in time for Christmas, but with a new announcement planned we decided to hike up there while we could (asa it turned out we still can – more below). Apart from the famous white town of Frigiliana, we hardly saw a soul, and even there the streets were almost empty. Here’s a video we took on the way up to give you an idea what the Axarquía (the area east of Málaga) looks like, using our two new bits of kit:
- DJI Osmo Mobile (a smartphone gimbal which smooths out motion)
- RØDE Microphones VideoMic Me (a directional mic for smartphones – we used this with the ‘dead cat’ windshield at the top of the mountain)
Pandemic in Nerja
There have been 31 new cases in Nerja this past week, bringing the town up to 247 cases per 100,000 people over the past 14 days. Andalusia is now using this measure to automatically amend the restrictions in place – if it goes over 500 then the municipal border closes (no hiking to Frigiliana) and if it goes over 1,000 shops, bars and restaurants close too (they’re currently open until 6pm). No more than 4 people from separate households can now meet, and there’s restricted movement between regions, so we can’t drive to Granada for example (unless we’re heading home to the UK). The Junta also wants to bring the night curfew to 8pm (rather than 10pm) and to allow a stay-at-home order to be issued to towns with very high infection rates, but these needs central government approval from Madrid, which it hasn’t given. It seems Spain very much wants to avoid the strict national lockdown it endured in the spring of 2020, and is trying all kinds of other restrictions first.
The Junta de Andalucía Facebook page is kept up-to-date with all the latest restrictions, we can check the stats for Nerja here and confirm the restrictions which apply to us on this interactive map. For Ju and I all these restrictions don’t have a huge affect on our day-to-day lives. We very rarely go out in the evenings, so the curfew’s not an issue. We opted to stay put here in Nerja rather than tour around (we’ve seen many of the ‘big sights’ in this regional already) so the wider border closures aren’t a problem. Like most people in the world who are able to, we’re keeping our physical distance from others, which is the biggest personal impact I think (other than worrying about our families at home). We’re not able to simply sit and chat with people, not even sat outside with our neighbours on the campsite, at least not while feeling at ease.
The impact on the town itself looks pretty bad. Most of the hotels (if not all of them) are closed, with sun loungers, chairs and tables put away. The nightclubs are closed, as are most of the bars. Some restaurants and cafes are open during the day, but in general they’re very quiet. That said, we passed one on Saturday afternoon which was packed, with everyone sat inside (it’s warm enough for us to sit outside here at lunchtime if the terrace is in the sun). Some shops are open, but again there are no customers. The beaches are almost completely empty all the time, and the local council are making good use of this by getting building projects and fence painting done. My hope is the town will bounce back as the months pass, but some individuals will have lost their businesses, their lifetime’s work, a huge tragedy for them.
Closer to COVID
I guess everyone knows someone now who’s had COVID, and a few among you will have lost someone to it, maybe had it yourself or seen a loved one made ill by the virus. We’ve been lucky in this respect. My mum died of a stroke in November last year, which obviously had a huge impact on the family. The loss was worsened by COVID, in that we weren’t able to visit her in hospital or to meet up with or hug family members, only being allowed a small funeral and no wake to talk things through afterwards. Friends in our running club have had the virus, all recovering OK thankfully. We read this morning of one fellow traveller’s brother dying of the disease, dreadful news. Otherwise, we’ve not actually been directly exposed to the thing.
We got word last week that my sister, who works in a care home, was getting her first vaccination shot the following day. I was elated, and all went well, but at the same time COVID was detected in one of the staff and a resident. After all those months keeping it out, this felt a cruel blow for them all, just as hope had arrived. More tests found more cases. My sister’s now waiting to see if her test comes back negative (update: it has, she is OK). All the residents are confined to their rooms for a few days, the ones with COVID for longer, which I’m told is a very difficult situation to manage. With one staff member down, and having to work in full PPE in the elevated temperatures of a care home, the remaining staff are under huge pressure.
I’m very proud of my sister for doing what she does, even more so under these circumstances. I think of her constantly. She’s in her early 50s so hopefully would fight the virus off, and with each passing day that first dose of the vaccine hopefully makes her stronger, but it’s a worry. On the plus side, Ju’s dad is in his 80s and has his first jab lined up for this weekend, with the second appointment already made for April.
Ju and I are 48, so we won’t be offered a vaccination until the autumn, I guess. We’re coming back to the UK at the end of March so we don’t overstay the Schengen restrictions. Before we leave Spain we need to have a negative COVID test, and on arrival in the UK we’ll need to quarantine (again – this will be our third time!). I hope (for the sake of everyone back home) the UK lockdown will be eased before we arrive in England, but widespread travel bans/mandatory COVID tests/quarantine/foreign office advice against travel and restricted travel insurance will (I guess) remain into the summer, adding to the new Schengen Area restrictions. So, I suspect we’ll stay at home for the foreseeable future. The world seems to reverse its spin every few months at the moment though, so who knows what 2021 will actually bring. We’ll see.
A Day in the Campsite Life of OurTour
Most days are sunny here, even in January, with average daytime highs of 17°C and some days up to 22°C. We tend to wake up with the sun, about 8:30am, swinging our legs out from the overcab bed and turning the electric fan heater up. One of us might lie in a little, and we’ve both the bad habit of picking up our phones first thing and checking all the usual stuff: text messages, email, the BBC news, Facebook, the weather. Rarely does this reveal good news.
Our electric kettle died a few months ago so we’ve been using our gas kettle on an electric hotplate. It takes a while to boil (and has been making some funny noises recently!) but we’re in no hurry. Eventually the whistle screams and the hot water’s poured onto porridge oats and into our Aeropress (a real coffee maker which makes the grounds easy to pop in the bin – have a shufty at them on Amazon – I love ours and use it every day).
Ju prefers running in the morning, and is working her way through a training plan for a 20 mile run in March, the longest she’ll have ever done. I’m joining her on the long runs, but otherwise she heads out from the site on her own, wearing a mask until she’s beyond the gates and whenever she passes people. I’ve a hilly running route which passes very few people, has no savage dogs trying to eat me through the fence (a common occurrence in rural Spain) and is wide enough I can easily avoid anyone I do come across.
We’re using our own loo in the van, something we’re very much used to, but we’re using the campsite facilities to take a shower. The block’s a little antiquated, but with the outside doors constantly propped open and a large hole in the plastic on the opposite wall, there’s good air flow through it and hand sanitiser by the door for use on entry and exit. With no heating, daytime showers involve less shivering than the evening. The water temperature itself is something of a Russian Roulette gamble, anything from egg cooking to cryogenic freezing but usually somewhere in between. The site’s very quiet, maybe only 30% full, everyone wears a mask when off their pitch and very often we have the block and its temperamental water supply to ourselves, it feels safe.
Running aside, mornings are sometimes taken up with writing or cutting together a video, while the sun warms the Earth. I took 200 clips for the video above, slowly working my way through them afterwards, adding captions and graphics and rendering/fixing and re-rendering took about seven hours. YouTube will pay us for the adverts on the videos but, being frank, it’ll earn pence, we do it because we enjoy it (here are all of our video clips taken over the years). Same goes for blog posts. Writing books is more profitable (here are the ones we written so far), but again, a minimum wage job would outstrip our earnings hour-for-hour (but with far less flexibility over where and when we work of course). Our main source of income are rental houses/a small shop/shares – all described in The Non-Trepreneurs.
We often take a walk into town in the afternoon, covering between 3 to 5 miles, usually along the beach and promenades, hunting out flatter stones and skimming a few, the number of hops largely determined by how windy it is and thus how bumpy the surface of the Med is. On blustier days kite surfers skip across the surface, and we pull jumpers tighter, cold even in the full sun. Much to Ju’s delight, the Albi cafes have stayed open, and she can indulge in a €2 doble, a double-topped cone with a range of really delicious gelato flavours.
Infrequently we’ll sit outside somewhere and eat lunch – sometimes at the chiringuito a short walk from the campsite, a relaxed, informal (scruffy) affair with spaced-apart tables looking across a dirt road onto the sea. They cook some of the menu outside on smouldering wood fires, a huge paella on Sundays and fish impaled on sticks on others. How they manage it without smoking out the whole place is beyond my amateur BBQ knowledge. When back at base, we’ll knock up a salad for lunch, and a slowly-expanding range of one-pot dishes feature for dinner (we’ve no oven fitted to the van, but do have a Remoska which we use a lot when on hook-up for roasting and baking).
Evenings are always spent on our pitch at the campsite. We sit outside while it’s warm enough, listening to the radio of our Spanish neighbours in the villa the other side of the cane fence. Children shout and scream in Spanish, far enough away not to be a nuisance, loud enough to give us some sense of contact with humanity. I call my dad each day for a catch up with news back home, and Ju often chats with her parents over WhatsApp. We read. I’ve just finished The Tattooist of Auschwitz, a moving, grounding true story.
Come night, we fire up the TV, our internet-based system (described here) allows us to watch Netflix, All 4 and iPlayer, among other channels, so we’ve plenty to get through. Eventually we’ll scroll through the internet once more before pulling the bed back down, turning the fan heater lower and hitting the sack, anywhere from 9pm to midnight, depending on how tired we feel. We usually head to bed at the same time, although occasionally one of us will stay up and read.
The following day we start again, throwing in a few variations here and there like the hike to El Fuerte, a dentist appointment or a walk to the veg stall up the road or the supermarket. Life’s pretty slow and simple at the moment, a pretty great existence in such difficult times, one we’re very grateful for I must add.
Cheers, Jay
Your kettle is probably building up limescale common with bottled water just give it a boil dry when you hear the crackling just rinse out the bits. We are only slightly jealous as you are doing what we intended but our lockdowns upnorth never allowed us to break out.
Thanks John. We have noticed how quickly the kettle is getting limescales, and are keeping on top of it with lemon juice – boiling dry sounds a bit scary! Cheers Julie
You might find the base of the gas kettle does not make much contact with an electric hot plate – possibly just a ridge around the edge. Try using a saucepan with a nice flat bottom instead.
I hhope, that ‘Manuel the molar’ will be hard enough to be able to crack all the tough nuts waiting for you in lovely England! regards Heide
Haha! I had to call him Miguel, as Manuel has too much association with Fawlty Towers and hilarious as it is, I don’t want a xenophobic tooth! Ah, in many ways England is lovely, very lovely, in some ways not so much but no tooth is tough enough to crack those nuts – I’ll stick to the softer stuff, life is too short for constantly breaking teeth! Cheers, Jay
Nice to read what a normal day looks like…. and going through similar denture work at the mo, need to think of a name… maybe Myfanwy Molar (we currently renovating a house in north wales!)….. we finished last one, now rented out… this one will be sold and then we plan to travel (not until autumn we think). Quick question on TV, has the brexit changed any viewing for you.. read about some programmes not being able to be shown any more etc… take & stay safe Glen &co.
Hi Glen
The SIM we have (Superdrug Mobile) appears to be in the UK, so nothing changed for us on 1 Jan 2021, our TV system has continued as before. Best of luck with the tooth, renovation and future travels.
Cheers, Jay
Finally got around to catching up on blogs. Great to hear life is settling down to a nice gentle pace. My belated condolences on the loss of your mum Jay. I lost mine to COPD/pneumonia (a hospital acquired infection while she was being investigated for other issues) in Sep 2019. I miss her, but I also am glad she isn’t having to live through this pandemic and restrictions. Her poor mental health meant that she would not have coped.
I have really enjoyed your couple of recent YouTube blogs. We ditched our TV licence in 2014 and don’t miss it. Our daily ritual now includes popping YouTube up on the TV when we sit with dinner on our laps and catching up on our subscribed channels. We make a point of letting the adverts play all the way through for our favourites, so I hope you’ll do more videos, and we will happily play full ads to contribute. :) Maybe a fortnightly catch up?
Looking forward to the new book. We sold our B544 at the back end of last summer as we just took on a shop premises for our pottery and knew we weren’t going to have time to tour. Your books will keep us going for a while till we can do our micro camper conversion on our Ford Tourneo Connect and sneak away fir the odd overnight within Perthshire.
Hope you continue to enjoy your slow, warm days. Stay Well.
I’m missing Spain …on a cold dreary day here in Pembrokeshire I’ve just watched your hike up the mountain …loved it 😊wish I was there but at times i was watching and thinking…”which way does the path go”! …. frigliana looked lovely and I’ll add it to my post lockdown list 👍
Thanks Tina. I was thinking the same about the path in places 😂 luckily Jay had got lost up there a few times before, so I just followed him! Ju x
Hi, glad to hear what things are like in One of my favourite municipalities, we have been wondering.
I say we, I’ve been ‘trapped’ on a campsite in the Algarve since November, so why do people ask me “what’s it like in
Spain?”
The rules and regulations are confusing as everywhere else it seems, but here now, it is illegal to park overnight in car parks or unofficial areas , between 2100 and 0700, with fines upto €600.
There are worse places to be ‘stuck’ and my bike give me the freedom my sanity requires.
I’ve enjoyed your blog and not just for the factual content, (unlike a lot of opinionated and speculative social media), but for the insight and smile it give to us. Thank you.
Greetings Portugal! Hi Russ – we’ve heard wild camping’s been clamped down on over there. There are still a few motorhomes free-camping in and around Nerja but a tiny fraction of the number in Feb last year. I took the decision yesterday to stop looking at social media until 2022. It was making me ill. There’s such a huge mass of insightful, thoughtful, factful books, podcasts and video lectures available – I’ll let them consume my screentime instead.
Take it easy over there, thanks for writing, much appreciated. Cheers, Jay
Hi J & J – very jealous at the moment as we are very cold here in Norfolk. This will be the 3rd year our European travels have been abandoned, first to cancer and then to covid19. We are hoping to travel in the UK this year if some of the lockdown measures are lifted (slim hope). Will you fly back home as you did recently or drive?
It’s great that you are able to get some English TV as All4 has been particularly good this week with the release of ‘It’s A SIn’ – a fantastic watch with a box of tissues!!
Keep safe and good luck with your dental work. from Gill, Mark & Archie
Hi Gilian
Sorry to hear about your health issues, fingers crossed you’re able to travel at some point in 2021, hard to know how things will pan out but I’m hopeful the virus will be brought under a great enough degree of control to enable it. Thanks for the TV hint – appreciated – we’ve plenty tissues at the ready.
We’ll drive back home in March. Without residency in an EU country we’re unable to return for at least 3 months anyway, maybe much longer, and although I try to kid myself I’m OK leaving the van uninsured in Spain, I’d much prefer it to be covered. We’ve a ferry booked for the end of March, so just need to do the 2 day trip across Spain to Santander, get negative COVID tests, sail across the Bay of Biscay, drive to Nottingham and do whatever quarantine is needed once back home.
Miguel the Molar from Málaga has been fitted and is in full-on chewing action, thank you, I can keep up eating with Ju now! I was taken aback when they showed me the crown – I never realised how off-white my teeth are (aka, brown) but it matches my others very well and fits perfectly. The service wasn’t cheap but was top-notch and I’ve dropped a line to the receptionist to say how thankful I am for their bravery (lots of aerosols involved in all that drilling), professionalism (tons of COVID security, WhatsApp updates and reminders and expert dental work itself) and kindness (I was mourning mum’s illness and death during the treatment and they were very patient and sympathetic, with me sat in tears in the chair).
Cheers guys, look after each other, Jay