Peace in the Hills, Sunny Side Up and Facebook No More

Ayup folks! Beautifully represented in the extended version ‘ayup me duck’, this wee word’s a part of my local dialect back home in Nottinghamshire. When I say ‘my’, I don’t think I’ve ever managed to say it, but my dad surely has, and plenty of other words and phrases no student of the Queen’s English would stand a chance recognising (example: scraytin: crying). Not speaking more than a few words of Spanish (Ju is continuing to learn, I need to get my act together), we’ve not witnessed much of this, although we have noticed locals often greet us (and each other) with bon dia instead of the Castilian buenos dias. A lucky spot in the campsite book swap pile got me thinking about this some more, David Baird’s Sunny Side Up, which I’ll ramble a bit about, along with a few other topics below, if I may.

Sunny Side Up

Some of the best travel advice I’ve ever had was to try and find a book about the area you’re travelling through. Not just the Lonely Planet/Rough Guide type books, but one written by someone intimate with the place, who understands its quirks, its history, the way people think and act. I can’t say I’ve always taken the advice up, but where I have I’ve gained a lot from it, from books like Venice by Jan Morris, The Dark Heart of Italy by Tobias Jones and The Almost Nearly Perfect People by Michael Booth.

The other day Ju was rummaging through the campsite book swap pile and came across Sunny Side Up, subtitled ‘The 21st century hits a Spanish village’. Sounded a goer, so she picked it up. I’m very glad she did, although David only refers to said village as the pueblo, we believe he’s lived in nearby Frigiliana for the past 50-odd years, having bought his house back in 1971, and the book is packed with anecdotes from his time there. I don’t know why he doesn’t name the village, but leaves clues inside, like the name of the street he lives on in the old part of town, the Calle Amargura, the Street of Bitterness. His road’s steep enough he refers to it as the “South face of the Eiger”, as are many of the stepped, cobbled streets through the whitewashed village.

The book had me in mind of Chris Stewart’s Driving Over Lemons, written about life on a remote farm in the Alpujarra hills and villages south of the Sierra Nevada, an hour’s drive east of us. David has a similar subtle humour to Chris, but his story goes much further back, and he’s able to relay how Frigiliana transitioned from dictatorship after Franco’s death into democracy (with much confusion from the sounds of things). He also carefully reveals something of the village’s violent past when the Spanish Civil War ripped through this area, and guerilla fighters took to the mountains behind the villages after the war (his book Between Two Fires delves deeper into this subject).

David brings us forwards through the decades with anecdotes, describing with kindness the poverty they encountered when they first moved here, with the sounds of mule hoofs on cobbles acting as their alarm clock, and when a visiting tooth puller was the closest thing to a dentist. A brief note about the swathes of avocado trees around us indicates they replaced the previous vines some decades ago, presumably having proven to a more profitable crop.

The cost of David’s house is perhaps some indication of the changes in the village. £1,700 in 1971 would be roughly £25,000 in today’s money (with average inflation of 5.6%). Eyeballing the local estate agent’s windows, or a vicarious rummage through rightmove, you’d be struggling to get a two bed townhouse up there for less than roughly ten times that amount these days. Towards the end of the book David reflects on the latest fate of the village, as a tourist attraction, and where his Street of Bitterness is becoming the Street of Ghosts, as houses are bought up by foreigners and distant Spanish as second homes.

The village is close enough to the Costa del Sol and the new A-7 autovía (finished in 2015) to attract tour buses, dropping enough day-trippers into the (very beautiful) streets the locals can hardly get their doors open. In among some gentle moaning about the lost past, David relays a conversation with a local who points out the village has never had it so good, reminding us all how the inhabitants used to have to lug water from wells and cook on wood fires. Ying and yang: something we’ve seen every place we’ve been which has courted the tourist dollar and been overwhelmed with the response. The ‘authentic’ culture and ambience is harder and harder to experience, but it looks much easier to earn a crust driving tourists around on a little road train than being bent over picking stones from the earth under a burning sun.

Facebook No More

Why is it that I can see 99 positive, or at least neutral comments, on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or news articles, but the 1% of negative, ill-informed, spiteful, representing-dubious-opinion-as-hard-fact ones glue themselves to my mind? It could even be 1 in 1000, that one irritating fact-less, throw-away comment rattles around my head for weeks sometimes. Throw in enough of them and something in me gradually starts to break down. My chest tightens. A sensation like pins and needles spreads across my chest and upper back. I find it harder to breathe. Since hitting peak pain about a decade ago I’ve come to understand this is what anxiety feels like to me, and for whatever reason I seem pretty susceptible to it.

It’s not all bad, this susceptibility to anxiety. In working to evade the pain it causes me, we’ve experienced an enormous amount of freedom these past ten years, travelling widely and enjoying a low-stress existence. When the pains resurfaced three years ago, they catalysed another lifestyle change for me, I lost around 20kg in weight and built up to running ultra-marathon distances.

The pains are back again, relatively mild, but growing. My feeling is the main source of this is self-induced, a habit I’ve built up of picking my phone up from the moment I wake to just before I head to bed, browsing through the same series of websites and apps: Facebook, Twitter, the BBC News, the Guardian, the worldometers.info and sometimes YouTube. Almost every time I do this, I come across something which tightens my chest. The more I’ve done this senseless scrolling, the less I’m seeing the beauty in the real world around me. I was starting to close down, to decay, so I’m cutting myself off from the majority of social media for the rest of 2021 at least. Ju’s hardier than me and will keep a track on anything I might genuinely be interested in or need to know, and she’ll still put out blog updates to Facebook and Twitter, but I won’t read or reply to any comments (apart from those directly on this blog) for at least the next 11 months. I’m two days in to this new habit, and I feel better already.

Heebie-Jeebies on the Acequia de Lizar

Chatting with fellow campsiter Mark about the walk up to El Fuerte, he asked if we’d been along the waterway above Frigiliana. Nope, never heard of it. We accidentally ended up on one of the acequias last year, a concrete channel carrying water from the Chillar river down the side of the valley, with sides just about wide enough to walk along. The problem we found was if your feet didn’t stick to the channel, they’d find themselves in thin air, with the rest of you following suit shortly afterwards. Some of the drop-offs were quite a few metres, and taking flight off the edge would result in a bad day indeed. After a short section of that particular acequia we found a path up the valley side and escaped.

Mark described how the Acequia de Lizar has been made safe with fences and walkways, like the Caminito del Rey gorge path west of Antequera, and when I found myself in a funk one morning, Ju suggested I nip up the hill and have a look at it, which I did. The waterway has existed since Moorish times, taking water from the Higuerón River a few miles north of the town in the Sierra de Almijara, and keeping it high on the side of the valley, so it could be used to drive mills and irrigate crops in and around Frigiliana without needing to be pumped up the hillside (at a time when pumps didn’t exist).

The acequia arrives in Frigiliana at the Lizar Reservoir, alongside what used to be a flour mill. Behind the mill a few small steps, with no signage suggesting what lies beyond, bring you onto a gentle, but still quite spectacular section of the waterway. For a few hundred meters fences and walkways allow you to walk against the flow of the water with fabulous views of the natural park to the east and the Med a few miles down to the south. After that things get a little wild. In normal times I’d have probably turned around, but the virtual world has instilled so much fear and anxiety in me these past few months, I found myself relishing the real fear I felt as I edged along some of the more precipitous sections of the waterway.

The route goes on for some 4 miles, drawn like a contour line along the scrubby hillside ahead, and several times I almost bottled it and turned around. Only later when I retrospectively looked up the walk did I come across a recommendation to avoid it unless suitably experienced, and to walk in the channel itself on the more frightening parts. I cut together a short video here to give you an idea of the hike (I spotted a small Cabra Montés at one point, an Iberian Ibex, but it was faster than my camera).

As the video shows, a cliff cuts off the acequia just before it reaches the level of the Higuerón. Having done no research (I know, I know, I’m an idiot), I didn’t know the only way through is to crawl in the water under the cliff. In January the water was high enough I’d have been well soaked anyway, possibly being completely covered in water, but I managed to backtrack and find somewhere I could scrabble through the bushes down to the riverbed.

At this point the Higuerón is wide and pretty much dry, just a spread of white stones in the valley. If I’d turned left and continued north into the mountains the river narrows until eventually it flows through a series of narrow gorges and waterfalls, with ropes placed to help you haul yourself up some of them. This is the highlight of that section of river – maybe one for another day for me. I was pretty tired and relieved to have gotten off the acequia in one piece, so just made my way south for a few miles, quickly giving up on trying to keep my feet dry as the water resurfaced and, in places, filled the ‘path’.

El Cielo and the Mile(ish) High Club

I’ve been meaning to get myself back up El Cielo, the 1,508m peak inland from Nerja and Maro here in the eastern Costa del Sol. The weather’s given me an excuse to avoid it these past few weeks, first covering the top in snow and ice and later in cloud. Recently the wind has died down and clear blue skies have removed that excuse, the peak just visible above the campsite fence from Zagan’s door step, so yesterday I headed up there.

It’s a 20 mile round trip, and since we’re practically at sea level down here, almost a mile of ascent, so it’s a decent effort but the views, the sense of serenity and achievement are well worth the effort. The mountain is in the municipality of Nerja, so even if the authorities close the municipality border (which they haven’t yet after re-opening it last December) I’m still able to legally climb it, unless a new stay-at-home order is declared in Spain.

I saw a few forestry workers and three other hikers on the route, and spent 20 minutes on the peak alone, peering across to the mountains of Morocco and down at the tiny Spanish world below. Looking at the world like this loosens my chest, peering the tiny lorries on the A-7 viaduct north of Almuñécar, which I later read collapsed during construction in 2005, killing six workers. I’d seen three groups of Cabra Montés on the way up, including a tribe of them dramatically silhouetted above a cliff face, and disturbed another tribe on the peak, which scattered off down the precipitous-looking rock face below me.

I carried a fully charged mobile with an offline map (maps.me – which I’ve needed every time I’ve been up there, losing the path around 1,300m up on the way down), water, food, a small first aid kit, a jacket, gloves, a whistle and a headtorch, and I wear grippy trail shoes for the loose and smooth rock on the upper parts of the mountain. I run the lower parts on road and 4×4 tracks, but I walk and take my time higher up, turning an ankle or breaking a leg up there would be a serious pain for everyone involved. Ju knows my route too and rough expected time home, and there’s a mobile signal even at the very top. Hiking poles would come in useful too, I might invest in some folding ones at some point. Here are a few more photos from the hike:

In Other News

Miguel, the Molar from Málaga has been successfully installed! This concludes ten weeks of thrilling, if sporadic tooth-related content on the blog, you’ll be relieved to read. The tooth fits perfectly and despite being a dishwater sort of brown, matches my other teeth perfectly! I’ve no pain and although I’ve been advised to avoid chewing gum and toffee, the left side of my mouth is back in munching action and nuts are back on the agenda, huzzah!

Ju deserves a big shout out too, in building up to her 20 mile virtual Ashby 20 race in March she’s running the longest distances she’s ever done – well over the half marathon distance now. The aches and pains are many, as are the voices inside the old noggin demanding she stop all this nonsense, but she’s ploughing on. Big respect.

And finally the final proof our latest book The 200 has arrived and we’re chuffed with it. Typos remain, and Ju is methodically hunting them down one by one, relentless, like a sort of female Liam Neeson. Once she’s spotted ’em I’ll get in there and erase the blighters and boom, we’re off to press! Exciting times (hey, for us they are)!

Right, time to get outside. It’s about 19°C at the moment and wall to wall blue sky. The tropical plants and trees around us are ablaze in green and orange and the Med’s calm and calling for a few skimmers. Catch you later folks, be good to one another, Jay