Back on the road - Marrakesh, Morocco

With four words of Arabic and the tiny remnants of high school french we landed in the pink city of Marrakesh. Morocco is well touristed and a little expensive but gave us a taste of the sand dunes, nomads, oases, kasbahs, mountains, and coast as well as the arabic culture with minarets rising from every village (and the 4am call to prayer). Anyway we had one night booked in a riad, our lonely planet and no idea.

Djemaa el-Fna or La Place is the central square in the walled medina of Marrakesh and can only be described as a spectacle. The myriad of souqs surrounding the square sell everything...antiques, carpets, silver, lamps, spices and each is affronted by a morrocan very keen to show you his wares. Very keen. "Please just one look, inshallah"

As dusk settled in we primed ourselves with a fresh squeezed orange juice from stall 42 and started to wander. The Djemaa el-Fna ramps up several more notches at nightfall when the smoke starts pouring from the rows of open air foodstalls selling everything from tajine to enormous piles of snails in their own juice.

Elsewhere snake charmers, storytellers, medicine men, acrobats, jugglers, musicians and women doing henna tattoos fill the spare spaces each surrounded by jostling crowds of onlookers. Interestingly though there are lots of tourists the overwhelming majority of people looking on are moroccan. The sound of drums was almost hypnotic and came from every direction, somehow all in rhythm, almost obscuring the whispers of hasssshhhh coming from the dark faces in the crowd . It is a spectacle. Incredible really.

Two days is enough...

Adios Orgiva

The last couple of weeks in Orgiva were spent trying to stop time. Leaving was becoming a reality, it seemed that only moments ago the whole trip was just words and plane tickets - and now we were packing. We had a frenzy of catch ups, dinners and bar nights with our multifarious group of friends - I have since thought of how integral all these people are to the memory of our time in the Alpujaurra's...whereas we have been a momentary fragment of their lives in this wonderful place - time and place are indeed strange things.

Me, well I had a little lump in my throat as I pushed the boys on our swings in front of the house for the last time. We had landed in the perfect place and a sliver of us will stay in the olive trees and the mountains. For Amber and me it will always be remembered as a time we spent together as a family and for the boys, who knows...but somewhere inside part of the people they will become has been shaped by this adventure.

Was it luck we landed here or would have any place done? - we will never know, but fortuna has smiled upon us.

We stood by the non accumulation pact and left with our original four bags, everything else we had bought from rastros (garage sales) or one euro shops - and that went back to whence it came.

So with heavy hearts we said goodbye and left for our 1000km drive back to Barcelona.

I cannot finish this post without thanking friends for making our time so memorable - Bernie and Kay, Sven and Nadine, Mike and Grecha and Georgie, Diet and Piluka, the olive crew, los alemanes, and of course Gabi who embraced our family, befriended us and helped us so much during our stay. We will miss you all.

Ye Old Country

A 1c flight from Malaga got us to England's sunny shores for a week with the Price family in Quy, a pub and post office village just outside Cambridge. We were met by Bryn the Bernese Mountain dog, Gareth, Jane, Tom and Andy. We were very excited about visiting, especially Angus who was hoping to pop in for a tea with David Attenborough - after all he is from England!

So the agenda was a long weekend in the Lakes district and a lot of tequila. Apparently there was hope of a repeat performance of my infamous (accidental) tequila inhalation trick which left me gasping on the floor (dont try this at home!) Gareth had assembled 16 of his friends to join us. Last time I was here with Gareth was 20 years ago -ouch! - but who's counting.

We headed to the dogfree Cockermouth waterwheel YHA and shown around by Ray the caretaker, who was subsequently introduced to Bryn - 'I don't see a dog' - so all was cool. Phew!

The next morning the fog was thick and it was cold so we drove out along the hedge lined lanes to find a nice fell walk. As we drove up a pass the sky turned purple then brilliant blue as we emerged through the fog. Apparently it was the first sunny day since Christmas...

Now thats a bit of luck!

The climb up was great, all 21 of us got to the first peak and the view across the heather covered hills was stunning. Its really beautiful. The kids had great fun hiding under ridges and rolling down the steep grassy slopes (Andy Price was presumed dead by Archie and Angus for some time though his twin brother Arthur made a mysterious appearance)

The stone walls, hedges and narrow winding roads made it feel like we were really in England (a far cry from the M1 in a peasouper - fun....not)

We got back down for a walk around the lake and a homemade icecream. The boys thought that was good reward for getting to the top. We on the other hand got back to HQ had a few 'slammers' and followed by some limbo variants and charades. Some ripped pants and pulled muscles from the oldies put us out of contention pretty quickly - the winner was Tom Price!

Next we ducked into Cambridge for the afternoon one day, it is nice to finally see the things that I had heard of so much - the Cam and the punts and of course the colleges and bikes. Archie consigned his future to ANU after having a wobbly at of the sign in front of Kings College - 'Please respect the people who study and work here by being quiet'! I suspect Angus wont get into the Kings College choir either if he inherits any of our singing talent. But nice to look anyway.

The Almond Harvest

The boys love harvesting almonds from the trees around the house so we made a little movie...from tree to stomach. Click twice on the play button. There is sound too. Hasta Luego.

A Sojourn

It was a spur of the moment decision to take a trip down to Tarifa, a small town right at the bottom of Spain on the Atlantic. 'So you're going on holiday?' asked our neighbour. !!!

Driving down the Costa del Sol is a clear indication of what uncontrolled development does to a coastline - incredible really. Thousands of cloned half completed condos competing for views of the Mediterranean or one of the multitude of golf courses. I wonder who buys them?

Tarifa was in a condo free enclave and surrounded by lush hillsides and grazing cattle. The tops of the hills were dotted with wind-turbines, hundreds of them, catching Tarifa's famous winds. The beach is clean, white and huge and is world renown for windsurfing and kiteboarding. The town has a prominent surf culture evident with the multitude of surf shops and hip cafes. Nice...

Our first day was windless so we managed our first swim in the Atlantic...brrr - a little chilly, but it was the best beach we had been to in southern Spain and great to get into the water.

Looking across the ocean Africa loomed close. The Rif mountains are only 14km away and the fast ferry beckoned us. So the next day we hopped on the boat for our first taste of Northern Africa - Tangiers. As warned we were surrounded by faux guides the moment we got off - right pesky and I fear there was almost a brawl between drivers at the taxi stop to get our business. Funny really because we later found we only had to travel 500m to the medina! Anyway that was it for the hassling, the rest was a captivating wander through the muddle of narrow streets and lanes of the souks. It is lucky we have no room in the bags, Amber was in agony as we passed lamps, jewellery, carpets and leather - it was a treasure chest of knick knacks...

But she had a camel ride instead, much to the boys amusement!

Naturally we stopped for a sweet mint tea on a little terrace to soak up the atmosphere, and decided that Morocco needed more time. Unamimous vote. Next stop Marrakesh and the Atlas mountains in a few weeks time.

Driving home we passed Gibraltar and mere mention of the word 'monkey' has the boys pleading to visit. So after passport control there were round red letter boxes, bobbies and lots of '£' signs - and corresponding prices!

The rock however is quite a sight, the surrounding land is almost flat and it rises 426 metres out of the ocean. It is apparently one of the most densely populated territories in the world and had traffic to match. However it was monkeys we were looking for and that meant a 16 quid trip (ouch!) to the top of the cablecar. Sure enough there they were, Barbary Macaques Angus informed us.

Are we bored?

I'd like a dollar for the number of times I have been asked that. The answer, no - not resoundingly as there were moments after we first got here that we were a little friendless and a tad lonely. The kids, especially Angus, would charge up to people on the first hint of an english word, and it often was a good icebreaker - particularly the one day that he started chatting to a rather attractive bikini clad English woman on the beach. He was far more interested in her gorgeous blonde 5 year old daughter but as they say 'thats my boy!'

Nowadays time rushes past, our friends are from a potpourri of backgrounds and cultures. What actually led us here I don't know but our story is not uncommon...people just seem to land here and not leave - the town is universally acknowledged as grotty but the magnetism is undeniable.

People talk of 'energy' - we have never been in touch with things that way, maybe there is something in it...I'm not sure but every passing day leads me to wonder. The most interesting thing of all is that there are many searchers - a term I have heard here more than once. I am not sure anything is actually found, but the searching is universal and gives people a belief...it is not a utopian thing I am talking about, the highs and lows, heartbreak and ecstacy still fills lives but there is a reality here and its palpable. Somehow you get embrioled in people lives and that takes you to unexpected places. Yeah, yeah you say, has he lost the plot or been smoking Morroco's most lucrative export? - no I just think that we landed right in the midst of such a breadth of people that the days bring something new and let us see a rawer side of humanity....and that is interesting so we don't get bored. Oh and as an aside, and beer and wine are rather inexpensive here too. Salut!

Olives

At the heart of Orgiva lies la acietuna (the olive). The town is set in a valley besieged by olive trees, not the short stumpy mechanically harvested olives that are further north, but the ancient olives with thick knarly trunks and high branches. So at this time of year the valley reverberates with the sound of bamboo sticks smacking branches and olives raining down into tarps. Its been done this way a long time.

So I got an invite from Piluka, our Spanish teacher, to help her partner and his friends harvest olives for the organic mill. Sounded like fun. I met them and was quickly armed with a bamboo pole and started bashing the high branches. Incidentally, I recommend sunglasses for beginners as its hard to dodge the 500 olives plummeting down from directly above. So we started at 9.30am, sticks down for the first refreshment at 10 - and a carton of beer came out. The frequency remained metronomic throughout the day and I came home very pleased with my first day - apparently.

The team consisted of a Basque, German, Dutchman, Belgian, Spaniard and myself (Amber and the boys did some stick work as well)...so it was truly multinational. Conversation was in a mixture of Spanish, Flemish and English, sentences often containing all three. Anyway it was great practice for our Spanish which, though not brilliant, is progressing.

After a week we went into the mill (molina) run by a guy known locally as 'once huevos' pronounced onsay hwayvos (11 eggs) ...for obvious reasons!

There were celebrations aplenty and an afternoon bar session when we got 250 litres of golden oil (aciete) out of our tonne of olives. So I learned a whole lot about olives and oil...extra virgin is not necessarily green, colour doesn't necessarily imply flavour and I can strongly recommend drinking organic oil after seeing what goes into the standard oil! I also found that Spanish families consume at least 60 litres a year, one I heard drank 250 litres...and there are plenty of oldies about!

Travelling with the kids

I guess one of the concerns when we were planning this trip was how the kids would cope on the road, the general consensus seemed to be that structure meant happiness...and that structure was just about to be shattered. The early part of the trip was in and out of hotels, bungalows, cabins and aside from Thailand lots of time in the car. We have done 12500 kms since September, 12499 accompanied by the 17 tracks of ABC kids (subsequently destroyed). I have to admit that I (Andrew) got a little (Amber would say a lot) unnerved at times by driving through town and cities, the street are incredibly narrow and parking very limited - and trying to stop beside hotels to check for accommodation often meant driving around trying to navigate back whilst Amber checked the pad. Fifty five million people means a lot of traffic and ye olde cities mean narrow unidirectional streets.

The kids learned to swear.

Thankfully Ambers calm demeanour saved us mostly and we got settled into our new 'home' as the kids called it. Often there were only 2 beds, or one room, or noisy neighbours or bread for dinner (as dinner doesn't get going until at least 8pm) but incredibly the kids just adapted. So in a nutshell all they needed was us.

It took all this for us to discover this simple thing.

This is us on a certain bridge mentioned in a book some may have read, and below is a little movie that Archie and I made the other day

Fiesta de Los Reyes

The big day of Christmas here is on the 5th of January when three of the council trucks are decorated with balloons and streamers, filled with caramellos (sweets), local kids and one of the three kings. The procession comes up the hill to Orgiva to the masses of kids and parents waiting with open bags. Kids scramble everywhere to collect the mélange of confectionary and the procession grows to thousands before reaching the town hall. Never have I seen such excitment. The boys did fairly well in the scrounge and ended with at least 100 caramellos, a packet of chips and about 20 balloons. The caramellos are now sitting on a high shelf (despite numerous scaling attempts) and are prime bribe material.

It was great to see everybody out and about, these community gatherings are something that the Spanish people seem to do well and do often.

I can't help thinking that maybe we should do more of this at home.

A Spanish Christmas

Christmas started with our friends knocking on the door and wondering why weren't at the dinner that we'd been invited to...'but it's not Christmas!' Whoops! We were running a day late...Christmas dinner is on the 24th here. Anyway after getting the boys up again and shod then whipping up a quick entree and desert ( as promised) we dashed down the road and were shortly tucking into some rum cocktails (of Cuban origin). As they say 'no pasa nada'... it doesn't matter here in Andalucia.

The pièce de résistance was a suckling pig, some may have been put off by the tiny cryovac'd pig, pink and perfect in the foetal position, but 2 hours in the oven and the transmogrification was complete! It's uncanny.

Oink!

A fine meal with great company and nice wine, maybe too much of the latter as there was dull pain for the Christmas early wakeup. The combination of kids and presents doesn't seem to lend itself to sleepins - should know that by now. We have a little tree, slightly frumpy as compared to our plastic $20 flashin' good guys jobbie back home, but it was real - harvested on a sneaky run up a canyon near our house. Angus and Archie made some decorations de casero and in the end it looked pretty christmassy.

Archie wasn't too flash as he had spend the previous night with his head in a basin but promise of an excavadora will drag even the sickest from their bed.

BEST of all we got to throw some snowballs. The snow in the mountains just behind us had come down low enough so we all piled into the car and headed up. We had sort of promised the boys snow at Christmas and it felt good to deliver. As we meandered into the pine forests there was great excitement in the back seat as we firstly saw small patches of snow, ever increasing until we hit solid white at the end of the road. Eat your heart out Bing!

So with Christmas out of the way we are straight into little Arch's 3rd birthday. We are all excited and when we asked him what he wanted to eat it was PORK (and a white cake with pink icing) and where does he want to go....the SNOW!
Groundhog day.

Mountains

Travelling seems to take us to mountains, I have been wondering why over the last little while.

Living in Orgiva we are nested in a depression between two mountain ranges, from the roof terrace we look up the Sierra Nevada and Mulhacén on one side and 2000m up the Sierra de Lujar on the other. The view is everchanging depending on light, shadow, time of year and weather - whenever you look there is something else exposed or a cleft that we haven't noticed before. The best time of day is in the afternoon when the sun casts an orange glow on the earth of the mountains (it is essentially deviod of trees) and the cracks and crevaces cast their long shadows. It is always a challenge getting places, the roads are slow and windy and walking is always up or down and the people here move in a measured and deliberate way. Best of all it is quiet, for some reason the sounds that we are used to hearing are absorbed by the landscape. It lets you think. In the morning we rush out to see if any snow has come down during the night, when it has it looks even better. It makes a good start to the day.

So why...well I really can't explain. Lo siento, maybe it's just a little madness...

Ike Tan..help?

Market Day

Every Thursday is market day in Orgiva. It is a mish mash of spanish locals, hippies, moroccans, africans, europeans and of course the everpresent english who have moved to warmer climes.

It is the place where people meet, talk and shop and gives a great insight into the Alpujarran community - the jigsaw of people, culture and the soul that eminates is engrossing. Just about everything is for sale - kitchen odds and ends, clothes, shoes, vegetables, plants, jewelery and bric a brac. We go every week to get our fruit and veg and wander around to see the show. We know enough people now to stop and chat ourselves. Archie loves a visit to the chicken man as he has developed a fondness for barbequed chook (in particular the skin) and Angus leads us straight to the caramello man (takes after his mum).

After shopping we settle into Cafe Baraka for a coffee or hot chocolate - the latter is a great favourite and we have wondered whether it might indeed provide all the food groups and we could live on them alone. Below is Archie going for the chocolate calliente at the speed of sound.

A brief apolitical comment...

It appears that Europe is celebrating the demise of the Australian conservative government and indeed the downfall of Johnnie. Apparently it was front page news in several countries including Spain and Germany. The main reasons - Kyoto, human rights and our relationship with the 'shrub'. I think the close proximity of so many nations and people puts a stronger emphasis on society, people and environment and we have perhaps been more than preoccupied with matters economic (at least from a governmental viewpoint). It appears that we have been sheltered from our international reputation and it has been disappointing, though not altogether unexpected, to hear the feelings about Australia that have been expressed to us here. Our reputation as people is cast by the same mould as defines the policies of our government...I guess that's democracy. So what happened? - were we being misrepresented, not heard or just messed up? The good news is that the signing of Kyoto by Australia has been celebrated by the whole of Europe and hopefully signals the beginning of the rebuilding of our international reputation from the pile of crap that it is now.

One of the many wind farms we have seen during our travels...(no evidence of dead birds, deafening noise or palls of smoke)

Interested in Climate Change? see Clean Energy for Eternity there ya go Matthew!

My one and only comment...back to a travel blog!

Hasta luego to the grandparents

It is amazing how time flies sometimes. All of a sudden Kay and Neils last day was approaching so we did a few things like build a set of swings for the kids, duck down to the beach, head back up the mountain to see the new snow and visit the Alhambra.

The swing construction team

Happy grandkids!

Kays worst nightmare!

Kay, Neil and Becks in Granada

I guess Neil will miss the dollar beers but apparently he is going to be put on a diet on return - oh and Neil I heard that 'roid' cream sets off the metal detector at the airport! Hope the seats were comfy! Adios

Gladdy Pops in...

and he's ready to play cricket!

There is a rush on tracksuits in Corto Inglese after Gladdy (aka Papa Smurf) popped in looking like he had just warmed down from his last Real Madrid game. I just managed to extract him from the scuffle of fans at the airport and quickly whisked him away to his hotel where he changed to jeans and shirt and was able to re-emerge into the streets of Granada in cognito.

It was bloody good to see him!


Gaz was fresh from a world tour and keen to taste a little Spain. We had travelled together before in Europe though I had erased the images of him silhouetted nude against a Parisian hotel window at 2 am from my mind. Thankfully I wasn't wearing my glasses at the time. Funnily enough I travel with earplugs and he with an airline eye mask - after this I had always intended to carry both. Unfortunately I'd forgotten my mask!

So straight to a Granada tapas bar for a 'selection de tapas' and 'vino rojo' or two. Then the hazy walk home at 2am after a few war stories. A good night out.

We did a walk up to the old mines on the mountain in front of our house then down through a deep canyon reminiscent of the 1970's spaghetti westerns. The next day we were a little uncomfortable in the calves though Gladdy thought the exercise would give him another 5km per hour bowling pace for the next match. I have heard that in his absence the super subs have been doing just fine and he may be relegated to the bench. Time will tell. He looks pretty fit to me!

We also did some trips up the mountain to the villages and one a little further to look at the snow. The photo below is the mountain behind our house.

and this Gaz is what I reckon was your best photo from your day at the Alhambra...

A little ripper!

Hasta luego y gracias por tu visita. Chau! Thanks for coming to see us.

PS the boys want you to come back, you were a bit of a hit!