Gappers, Storms, Books and Teeth, Early 2021 in Nerja

Hi folks, greetings from Team Zagan, hope you’re keeping sane and healthy wherever you are in the world. Here’s a rambling update from our view of the world on the Costa del Sol in Spain.

Pandemic Nerja

Life down here on the Med’s very quiet, at least it is if you ignore the barks and howls of the local dogs, that braying donkey which is tethered outside the campsite from time to time, the 3am cockerels and the site owner’s parrot squawking ¡hola! whenever anyone walks past. The guys strapping giant fans on their backs and flying above the beach have disappeared for the past few days though, but Storm Filomena’s kept the place wet and windy for six days, so that’s no surprise.

Nerja’s towards the eastern end of Andalusia, one of Spain’s autonomous communities. A little like the UK, government is decentralised here and each community is able to make its own decisions over managing the pandemic. Since the 11 January Andalusia has closed its perimeter again after Xmas and Three Kings Day (Epiphany), and there are restrictions for entering and leaving the Campo de Gibraltar area. Other than that we can drive (legally) around the community, an area of nearly 34,000 square miles (Wales is around 8,000 square miles in comparison). Ju and I have opted to stay put here in Nerja though, a purely personal choice as we feel safe, are able to easily isolate, can continue my dental treatment (thrilling update below), like the campsite and pitch we’re on and, frankly, we’ve spent years touring and have seen many of Andalusia’s ‘big sights’. Now feels like a good time to sit tight and wait – there’s a short video showing our home for the next couple of months below.

The town itself has very few people in it at the moment. Most of the restaurants, hotels and bars are closed, although there are enough open to give it some sense of being alive, lethargic rather than dead. Shops and cafes can stay open until 8pm, places selling alcohol have to close at 6pm, and there’s a night curfew from 10pm until 6am. Everyone has to wear a mask when they’re out of their homes, and by and large folks comply, there are masked faces everywhere and seeing folks walking the UK streets on the TV with ‘naked faces’ now looks weird to us.

When we drove here in October infection rates were still fairly low everywhere and we’d no idea what was about to happen to them. That said, after the harsh first lockdown here in Spain we came here half expecting to be confined to the campsite, or even to our pitch or just the interior of the van at some point. We feel very fortunate none of this has happened yet. I speak with my Dad daily, who’s gone back into shielding again, and I know how hard the UK lockdown is. The freedom of being able to walk and run for miles outside, to sit outside a restaurant and eat or go and skim stones on the sea is something which feels like a magnificent luxury rather than a basic right.

In terms of infection rates, Nerja had 14 cases confirmed in the past week, a rate of 66 per 100,000, which compares with a UK average of 531 per 100,000. There’s a ton of stuff in these numbers I don’t understand, like how much testing each location does, so I’ve no idea in reality how comparable they are but it feels safer here to us, possibly because everyone is wearing masks, or maybe because the good weather means we can do so many more things outside. Spain as a whole has also seen cases crank up again after Xmas/NYE/3 Kings, so tighter restrictions could well be on their way, we’ll see.

Storm Filomena

You might have seen mention of this on the news back home, we were surprised to see it make the front page of the BBC News website. The storm itself wasn’t bad down here on the coast at Nerja, although it dumped a ton of snow across Spain, media articles saying it was the worst snowstorm in 50 years with half a metre of the stuff bringing Madrid to a halt. Ju watched a roadmap of Spain gradually filling with symbols showing where roads were blocked or snow chains required, including the motorway route north from here up to Santander.

The closest white stuff here is lying up on the sierras above us, giving the mountains a dramatic tint like the Pyrenees. Unless we climb 1,500m up El Cielo we can’t see the Sierra Nevada from here, but websites show it’s got plenty of snow, and the ski resort up there is open, with restricted capacity on some lifts and, I assume, not much après ski this winter.

There has been some flooding in other areas of the Costa del Sol but the worst we saw in Nerja was some overflowing drains, which have since been cleaned up. The Chillar River which runs down from the mountains to the sea on the western edge of town stayed pretty much dry, nothing more than a trickle in the centre of the huge flood channel built for it. The Rio Seco next to the campsite picked up a little more water, but’s just a stream really and didn’t fill much more than the river bed. We got off lightly.

Book Stuff

Back in 2018 we wrote The Motorhome Touring Handbook and self-published it through Amazon. We tried to fill it with all the stuff we’d learned (often the hard way) in a decade’s campervan and motorhome holidays and long-term tours, we’ve had some great feedback on it and we’re really pleased to be able to help so many more people beyond those who read our blog. Another plus side is that it also generates some income for us, and along with our other books it brought in a good percentage of our income last year. If you’ve read some of the money pages of our blog, then you’ll know that we love ‘residual income’ and this is a prime example of it. Instead of swapping our time for money (like in a ‘normal’ job), we do the work upfront and then get paid over the weeks, months or years to come. If we added up all the hours we spend writing, rewriting, proof reading (yes, hard to believe that we do it sometimes!), rewriting again etc, I’m pretty sure we’d be earning pence per hour, book writing is so much harder than we ever thought it would be, so it’s a good job we aren’t doing it for the money.

After updating the book back in 2020, we were very surprised to find how well it sold during the pandemic. At the start of the first lockdown we’d assumed that interest in motorhome travel would drop to nothing, but the exact opposite happened as the year progressed. You can see this on Google Trends too – searches for the words ‘campervan’ and ‘motorhome’ always peak each year in August, but in 2020 were far higher than normal:

Anyway, we always planned to update the handbook once Brexit was complete and the impact was better known. We’ve done that now (the final push being helped by Storm Filomena stopping us from leaving Zagan), and the complete refresh includes changes to internet SIMs, the 90-in-180-days Schengen Area rule, the changes to Pet Passports/AHCs, EHIC/GHIC health cards, changes to European toll systems for >3.5 tonne motorhomes, changes to LEZs, COVID-19 and lots of other bits and bobs which have moved on in the past 12 months. We’ve also suggested a few long-term touring routes that can still be done within the 90 in 180 day rule, for those who have been saving up for a year-long dream tour. The new version’s now published and is available as a paperback and eBook (click here to see inside it on Amazon).

We’ve also been working on a new book which should go hand-in-hand with the Touring Handbook for anyone thinking of a continental tour in Europe and North Africa. It’s called The 200 and lists 200 of the most varied and interesting places we’ve been able to stay in our campervan and motorhomes, from Norway’s North Cape down to the edge of the Sahara in Morocco and Tunisia. It’s very much a personal list of course, everyone’s idea of a great stopover will be different, but we’ve tried to give a flavour of each place and country we’ve visited from a moho tourer perspective, plus a broad representation of the types of stop available, campsites, aires, wild camps, business stopovers and your good old honest-to-goodness car park. We’ve a few more weeks of proofing and editing to do on it (work will slow down now the sun’s back out!), but hopefully it’ll be out in February.

Teeth!

As I type one of my molars aches! I snapped part of the tooth off back in October and a visit to a dentist in Nerja revealed I needed root canal treatment and a crown fitting. Another 5 or 6 or so appointments were needed, but after mum’s death we needed to head home in November, so I’ve only just been able to get back to the dentist to continue the work. We’d been back here for three weeks before my appointment, so any viral infection we may have picked up on the journey would have gone. It’s unlikely we’d have been infected on the trip back anyway, as we’d both negative PCR tests before we flew (as had everyone else on the plane), stayed away from others after the test, and flying itself is roughly the same risk as a visit to the supermarket.

You never know though, and of course we could have gotten the virus here in Spain, but it put my mind at ease a little to know I was less likely to infect the staff at the dentists. Before arriving for each appointment Brigitte, the English-speaking receptionist, sends me a WhatsApp to ask if I’ve had any contact with COVID or have symptoms. When I arrive she checks my temperature and asks me to sanitise my hands. It’s a small private surgery and I’m usually alone with the staff, no other customers. I arrive in a mask (of course) and keep it on until in the chair. The waiting room has a balcony so I can be stood in fresh air if I need to wait. Once in the chair they have a special mouthwash solution which I have to swill around for 30s to kill any virus in my mouth. The staff are head-to-toe in PPE, I doubt I’d recognise them in the street without their masks, shields, hairnets, gloves and aprons. Other than not treat people at all, I’m not sure what else they could do to ensure everyone’s safety. I’m very grateful they are still working though – it must have been grim for folks with tooth ache in the early lockdown in the UK when everything closed.

Dentists in Spain aren’t state-operated, so there is no opportunity for reduced-cost EHIC/GHIC treatment and the crown and other work will cost about £600 compared with £282 in the UK on the NHS. So far I’ve had an x ray, the original filling drilled out and the root canals treated and cleaned, a temporary filling fitted and later drilled out and a permanent filling done so I could go home. That filling was again drilled out yesterday, a mould taken for the crown and a big shiny temporary crown fitted. I’ve another appointment on Monday for some kind of test (Brigitte is very nice and as I said she speaks English but she’s German, I think, and some information is lost in translation since my Spanish and German are both rubbish), and then a final appointment for the permanent crown a week later. For an extra €90 I chose a tooth-coloured one rather than a metal-surfaced one, so I don’t look too much like Jaws. I’ve not been able to eat anything hard now for 2 months so I’m looking forward to having a new tooth-coloured robo-molar to munch on some mixed nuts!

The Grey Gappers

We’ve been lucky that two motorhoming couples who we know, were travelling through Nerja and separately popped in, giving us a few hours out and about, walking the town and even eating out. Everything’s done outdoors here, it’s still warm enough for that even in January, we’re all masked up unless we’re sat down and we do our best to keep our distance (I’ve been sober for over 2 years now so no poor sod gets a drunken hug from me these days!).

We’d already met Wayne and Angie when we wrote our previous post, but since then David and Karen of The Grey Gappers have been through the town. They were in Turkey heading for Azerbaijan (as you do!) when the pandemic struck and have had an interesting time these past few months, as you might imagine. It was fascinating to chat with them and get a first-hand/non-media-hyped view of what Asian Turkey and Eastern Europe was like in a motorhome in 2020. They’re a positive couple and have ploughed on through all kinds of problems, very uplifting to chat with them.

Chocolate Wheel Bearings? Check!

Zagan’s wheel bearings have been replaced, again! We found a local English speaking mechanic and he showed us the old ones with discoloured grease which could have indicated they were failing, or maybe not. We’ve had lots of suggestions about the hub being damaged or spacers being missing/not installed correctly so we relayed this to David (the mechanic) who checked and assured us all was good. The only issue we have is the job was far too cheap! It wasn’t much more than £100 including labour (it was five times that amount at an Iveco garage in France) so relatively cheap (possibly Spanish standard) bearings have been installed again (we call them ‘chocolate bearings’ after our last cheap set collapsed after under 3000km). There’s a kind of ‘wobbly’ noise coming from the wheel too – which has been there for a while but our garage back home couldn’t find anything wrong. My thinking is there is still an underlying issue and this is again a temporary fix, hopefully enough to get us across Spain to Santander in March and back to the UK, fingers-crossed. After we’ve quarantined we’ll head to our own trusted garage and talk the problem through/replace whatever might need replacing.

We’re not driving anywhere at the moment, so after collecting the van from the garage we took the opportunity to drive to Torrox Costa along the coast to visit the Lidl and stock up (the Lidl in Nerja is closed for renovation). Ju’s since compared prices with the Mercadona in Nerja and Lidl isn’t any cheaper, so we probably won’t bother driving back down there, but we did spot these Lidl-branded trainers while we were there – funky no?

The 2021 Plan As It Stands

There are a few British full-timers here on the site and conversation often revolves around what everyone will do come the end of March when our new post-Brexit 90 day limit comes into force. One couple has gone for Spanish residency and is in the process of importing their motorhome/getting residency cards/replacing their driving licenses. Another has opted to head for Portugal and gain residency there. One lady lives here full time in her caravan alone after her husband passed away, and has also applied for Spanish residency. Another couple plans to wait and see whether new information emerges around Spanish long-stay visas.

We’ve discussed residency between ourselves a lot, and last year decided not to apply for residency outside the UK last year, so we’ll head back home in March. We know we need a negative test to travel back to England now, but that aside we’ve no idea what the world back home will look like by then. We’ll get to do our third lot of quarantine in the Cooler and then likely stay there for a while, spend time with our families and friends (if we can) and try and get an idea when the vaccine might be available to us (we’re under 50, so likely not until the autumn of 2021 I guess). By the end of June we’ll have our 90 days available again so, depending on travel restrictions, we could potentially head back to Europe or maybe we’ll stick to the UK or maybe Ireland this year, we’ve no idea at this point.

Cheers, Jay