Fear Facing Almendrón, The Final 200 Push and the Itch

Hi folks, it’s been a couple of weeks since we did a blog post about what’s happening here in Nerja (Ju has just done a round-up post for 2020), just about enough time for us to actually do something to write about! Thankfully life’s being good to us, our friends and family are in good health and each day the winter sun’s arcing slowly across a pale blue sky above the ancient Axarquía. It’s about as good as it’s likely to get in these COVID times. This is what’s been going on in our wee part of the world.

Pandemic Nerja

It seems the tide’s turned in our little corner of Spain. A peak in cases following Xmas/New Year/3 Kings holidays has subsided and the threat of municipality border closure has drifted away. A couple of the surrounding towns briefly exceeded the 500-in-100,000-cases-in-14-days limit which triggered their borders to close for a fortnight, but they’ve since dropped right down and are again accessible to us. This includes Torrox with its Lidl (which if I’m honest we’re not really missing) and it’s miles-long paths and boardwalk (which is handy for long flattish coastal runs).

No region in Spain has yet gone back into a full stay-at-home order, and with any luck it’ll stay that way. Different communities are still following their own rules, and here in Andalucía a nightime curfew (10pm to 6am) remains in place. Indoor and outdoor meetings of more than 4 non-co-habitants are banned. Shops, bars and restaurants have to close at 6pm. The running track, some children’s play areas and the Pinarillo picnic area in the forest behind Maro appear to have closed for the duration. The borders between provinces are still closed, so we can’t legally drive into Granada province a few miles east, unless we were heading back to the UK.

The town has, we hope, just about bottomed out in terms of businesses being closed. All the hotels are shut (a few roaming motorhomes are using their empty car parks for a night or two), as are most of the more-touristy restaurants. The beaches are almost empty except at the weekends when kite surfers appear, some with boards underslung with aero foils so they ‘fly’ above the waves, quite a sight, tiny in the distance as they’re hauled off towards Morocco. This is such a massive contrast to this time last year when we were here for Carnaval – the town was packed. Fingers crossed all of Spain (all of Europe, the World maybe) is well on the way out of this thing now.

Fear Facing Almendrón

El Almendrón is a 1514m mountain set about 6 miles inland from the coast in the Sierra de Almijara. It’s been on my ‘to do’ list since about this time last year. From the campsite it’s a 7 mile uphill jog to the start of the hike, a 6 mile round trip hike and a 7 mile jog home. Not an easy effort, but health and fitness is fleeting folks, like life itself, and I was keen to have a go while I can. I’ve ‘done’ the other ‘nearby’ 1500m peak, El Cielo, three times now, so it was time to try something new.

I’ve been putting Almendrón off as I’m scared of it, having read some reviews containing lines like ‘be careful where you put your foot in case you fall into the abyss’. I’m OK fitness-wise, but not OK vertigo/climbing wise, but after doing some more research it seemed the trail itself is pretty safe, but the peak of Almendrón is the problem/challenge, requiring some skill/nerve to get to from the trail, which I was happy to avoid.

The photos above were the end of the hike for me though, I bottled it at this point at about 1260m. Hiking alone, I’d the GPS route in my watch and phone, but the trails up here aren’t marked other than with cairns and yellow paint. The rocks are covered in mountain plants, and everywhere starts to look like the trail to the untrained (my) eye. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was a few metres off the trail when I checked my GPS track later on, which explained why I couldn’t see how to descend a steep drop-off at the start of the saddle. I quickly decided to turn around when the sheer scale of the landscape overwhelmed me, sat and had a bite to eat watching/being watched by a couple of Iberian Ibex, then started the miles-long scrabble back to the 4×4 track and back down to Maro on the coast.

What these pictures don’t get across it how epic the landscape is up there. It’s Norway-level epic-ness folks, absolutely magnificent. The canyons to the east and west are huge, with giant cliff faces diving down, tweaking my vertigo, a source of delight and terror. As a kid I once got stuck a few metres up a rock face, too afraid to either climb or descend. I’m not sure that moment’s ever left me and although Ju had the GPS track of the route I planned to follow, being in a similar position up here wouldn’t have been good, a rescue almost a mile high in the sky would be awkward and phone signal was intermittent. Back at base I spotted my mistake and could see how the path heads down below the base of that massive grey rock, the Almendrillo, so I might have another go at the full loop (without the climb to the peak) before we head back to the UK.

The Final 200 Push

Since my last update we’ve published our latest book The 200 (more info here). As we work through Amazon’s self-publishing system, we don’t actually hold a stock of books, take payments or post them out, they take care of all of that for us, pretty cool really. We upload the manuscript and the cover, they do their quality checks and KABOOM, the book’s available to buy pretty much worldwide. Quite bonkers what’s possible these days.

We’ve really enjoyed writing The 200 as it was a right-old blast from the past going through all those wonderful places we’ve been able to stay in our motorhome over the years – up volcanoes, by iconic cities, next to Roman ruins, by beautiful unspoiled beaches, high in the Arctic forests, you name it. The final few days of book publishing isn’t fun though, spotting errors in work we’ve both proof-read multiple times is just terrifying. We don’t outsource copy editing, proof reading, cover design or promotion, as, well, we’d be selling our books at a loss if we did. However, it also means we have full control on the content, and can write in our own ‘voice’, rather than a ‘cleaned up’ corporate style of writing, which we really enjoy.

Making the book live is a moment of mixed emotion. Relief that months of work is complete. Nerves that the audience might either not exist, or not like the finished product. Amazon provide a ‘dashboard’ website where we can see sales. Reviews left by readers appear on their usual sales websites (amazon.co.uk, amazon.com etc) at the same time everyone else sees them. We check these sites every few hours waiting for feedback to come in.

So far, so good (phew!), we’ve had a really lovely 5 star review (thank you for taking the time to leave it Iain, very much appreciated) and sales are exceeding any expectations we might have had (which is usually just a handful of copies, we don’t set our sights high). We’re hopeful the book itself will offer some hope and inspiration to those of you desperate to get motorhome touring adventures underway again.

Just after hitting the ‘Publish’ button I said to Ju: never again! No more books! They’re soooooooo much harder to write than blog posts and the final few weeks get a bit stressful, especially as it leaves one of us sat in front of a laptop for hours a day while it’s sunny outside, and the other having to find something to do alone. Within a few hours of publishing the pressure is off though. While out for a run that afternoon, the old mind was already starting to ponder what we could write about next. One benefit of my goldfish memory: I tend to forget pain quickly! (apparently the goldfish thing is a fallacy by the way: they can remember stuff for months, much longer than me, I’d kill for a goldfish’s brain).

The Itch

I must be mad writing this, to an audience enduring months more of stay-at-home lockdown constraints in a cold and rainy UK, but it feels like we’re starting to develop the ‘itch’ out here. We’re practically in paradise, able to go and eat/drink out, bathed in sunshine, beaches and mountains in easy reach. And yet, after months stood, we’re getting a slight itch for a change of scene, I think, it’s becoming a tad Groundhog Day.

Yes, we do appreciate what we have, but we’re only human, and humans get used to whatever level of luxury we have, it’s called Hedonic Adaption. Someone with several mansions, a couple of private jets, and a large staff serving their every need will get used to it all, sooner or later, and it’ll just feel ‘normal’, leaving them chasing the next big thing. On the flip side, if we can deliberately worsen our conditions (which society at large perceives as madness), we quickly get used to those conditions too (like living in a small studio and a 20 year old motorhome for example). This can be a huge, huge boon, especially if we can maintain our level of income, as it creates a giant opportunity to build wealth, freedom and happiness.

Anyway, back on topic, we’ve no plan to leave the campsite until towards the end of March when we near our post-Brexit 90 day limit. We’ll cross Spain in a couple of days, get COVID-tested at Santander, head across the Bay of Biscay, directly home across the UK, pop the van in storage and go back into quarantine, undergoing more COVID testing in the Cooler as per the new rules. That’s assuming the rules don’t change or Spain doesn’t become a ‘red country’ before then, in which case we’d need to go into hotel quarantine. At the moment that’s only available at a handful of airports, so if arrivals from sea ports were also included we might need to rethink our return journey home. If Dover is the only available sea port with hotel quarantine for example, we’d need to double our driving distance home. It would be 2,500km if we drove all the way through France, but it’s about half that on the Spain-UK ferry, so much faster.

Signing Off

OK, I’ll leave it there folks. I hope you’re well, and are keeping mentally and physically healthy. I’ve put on a couple of kilograms since mum died, which I aim to get burned off before we hit quarantine again. Ju’s knees are getting better after her fall a couple of weeks ago, and she’s up to running 10 miles now, so back on track to do her first 20 miler in March. We’ve started some motorhome-specific video stuff, which we aim to publish in the coming weeks (post-production takes a while, so we might film some of it and do the final cuts while we’re in quarantine at home).

Look after yourselves and each other, cheers folks, Jay