Bayacas

We have been here at Kate's in Bayacas for nearly two weeks now. Here is a list.

1. The Land. The land here is amazing, Kate owns pretty much a whole valley to herself. There are about a 1000 olive trees here for harvesting and two of my favorite fruits grow wild here, pomegranates and avocados... heavenly. There are countless veg patches and most of our food comes from them. There is a mountain path that separates us from Bayacas, the nearest village, that we can take to Orgiva, the nearest town of any significant size. At the bottom of the valley is a river and a small dam built by the Moors, all of the irrigation channels and olive trees were planted by the Moors as well around 500 years ago. There is running water here, but no power but solar, which means you only get 12 volts, we use a solar shower and compost toilets and all that other rustic eco friendly good stuff. We heat our little place with a wood stove (which hasn't been necessary yet, except to roast chestnuts and dry clothes). Our little house is a restored ruin and we have our own room with a common area and kitchen powered by gas. It´s gorgeous here.

2. The People. There are eight of us here now, including Teagan and me, here are the others:

1. Kate owns the land. Teagan and I didn't quite know what to think of her at first, thinking she was a little cold and distant. There wasn't much of a warm welcome towards us on her part. But as we have gotten to know her she's warmed up to us and is quite nice, just perhaps a bit socially awkward or uncaring towards the obligatory small talk social customs that we generally don't give a second thought about. She is a British expat, I'd say in her 40s. Unlike most of the British expats we've met around here she is fluent in Spanish, it is important to her to take part in the community she lives in. She is in the process of starting a sort of foundation to protect the valley. There is little of the valley she doesn´t own, and she is slowly buying the rest little by little.
2. Ruben lives permanently on the land with Kate in his own separate house. I think his story is that he was a WWOOFer once and chose to stay around 4 or 5 years ago. He is originally from the Basque country and speaks hardly any English but wants to learn, but I don't think Kate will be of any help as she only speaks Spanish to him. He works on the land and manages the WWOOFers. He is probably in his early 30s.
3. Andrea is a WWOOFer who has fallen in as Ruben's lover. She has been here a little over a month and looks like she has done manual labor her whole life, she is very strong and a damn hard worker. Her and Ruben are in that new couple stage and she's just moved into Ruben's house, out of the WWOOFer house that Teagan and I occupy. She is Argentinian and speaks English pretty much fluently. She and Ruben uncannily have the same beautiful green eyes.
4. Linden is a 19 year old from Sweden. She's pretty much our best friend here so far. She's sassy witty and not a bad artist. We all like to play dominoes, cards, and question games together.
5. Carl is only here for a couple of weeks to help build the yurt. Another British expat, he lives in the Pyrenees on the French side of the border with his partner. He met Kate about five years ago when he was WWOOFing and returned to help build the various structures on the property. He is mainly a builder but knows loads of other stuff as well. He is the president of WWOOF Spain and has done tons of traveling. He lives in a small hamlet in a very radical valley, where apparently they voted 95% socialist in the last election. He was born in Malaysia because his father was in the army and grew up in England.
6. Fabien just got here day before yesterday. A 19 year old German, this is his first time WWOOFing, he likes to smoke hash and drink wine and isn't a very hard worker. After finishing school he has just been traveling around for about a year and has lived in Barcelona for about 9 months so he is pretty much fluent in Spanish. He is much younger than Linden, despite their same age.

3. The Animals
1. Burra is a 25 or 35 year old donkey. She doesn't do any work, and we could have used it in carrying loads of stuff down for the building project. She just trims the grass and guffaws into the air at no one in particular. She makes it difficult to walk with her as she always stops to chomp some vegetation she particularly fancies. She's alright.
2. There are two chickens, they're new. I helped put the finishing touches on their roof before they arrived. There will soon be more.
3. There are quite a lot of cats on the property. Legal, semilegal, and illegal. There are only two legal ones. Pequenita is Kate's cat and Menina, who is a kitten that belongs to Ruben. Then there is Ursula, the eternal mama cat, who we named Ursula for the mother in One Hundred Years of Solitude. She is Pequenita's mother and, I think, Menina's grandmother because the look so much alike, but I"m not sure. She is semilegal because Kate feels sorry for her because thinks she thinks she is dying of cancer because of a lump on her chest, so we can let her in our house and give her some scraps of food. She is very sweet and likes to cuddle, Teagan and I have semi-adopted this semilegal cat for our stay here. Then there are the illegals: a mangy white mother and her four kittens of about four to five weeks of age. We're not allowed to feed them or let them in because it will just encourage them and they'll tell all their kitten friends and then it would just be cat madness... like my parent's house. Just last night we left a window open and they stole our last three muffins. And earlier today, I witnessed the cream colored kitten get shocked by the electric fence surrounding the veg patch; it screamed and ran a couple of meters away, its fur all frazzled... it was kind of funny and kind of sad at the same time. Just a little while ago there was one distracting me because it was meowing from being separated from the rest of the litter, but they came trouncing down the hill to its rescue after a while. Its a little hard for me to not let them in and feed them, but they seem to do ok by thieving and hunting little critters, so its bearable.
4. There are tree frogs, we hear them but we don´t see them. I´m training Menina the cat to hunt them, so I can sell them at the market in Orgiva.
5. There are wild board, we hear about them but we don´t see them. Except once, when we saw a dead boar on the back of a hunter´s car in front of a bar.
6. There are regular frogs too, we see them but they jump into the water when we get close. They hang out on a little floating piece of wood that Linden put in the reservoir connected to our house.
7. There are geckos. One lives in our house and another lives in the compost toilet.

4. The Work. We are building a yurt, well, not so much a yurt, but reputting together a terribly constructed (it was held together previously solely by brackets...) round house. By far the most difficult part was carrying down all the ridiculously awkward heavy and large pieces down the valley, through the twists and turns, hanging prickly branches, ups and downs finally into the building site. It's fun work and very rewarding being able to see the progress day by day. Plus, Carl has improved the structural framework by putting in actual joints.

5. Fruit. As I said, avocados and pomegranates grow on the land, but there are also pears, lemons, and persimmons. We've also discovered an amazing fruit that's new to us, though doesn't grow on our land. Chiri moyes, or in English, custard apples. The English name is pretty right on, a juicy sweet custardy pulp under a textured green skin. They're about the size of a melon maybe a little smaller and have black almond sized seeds inside them. They're glorious and I want to send a thousand home.

6. And last but certainly not least. Las Alpujarras is the hippy capital of Southern Europe, maybe all of Europe. They're everywhere. A main reason being Beneficio. It's about an hour walk from Kate's near the village of Canar. It's one of the biggest and well known hippy squats, probaably in the whole world. It's nestled in a valley and it's hard to say how many people live there, but the self proclaimed welcoming committee, a Dutch guy named Stephan said about 200 to 300 in the summer and 400 to 500 in the winter. Teagan, Linden, and I went there on Saturday. You descend into the valley on a dirt track and come upon a carpark that is not officially Beneficio, so the cops can kick them out any time but never bother. It is full of itinerant vans and cars, some more permanent than others with patios and the like. After the carpark, you walk through a eucalyptus forest and come into the official Beneficio (it belongs to them because they squatted there long enough that they are due rights to the land by law). The first part is a flat open area where more transient people, just passersby, can pitch tents and stay a few days. There is also a community teepee. As you venture further in, there are more permanent structures for people that have lived there longer. We had community dinner in the community teepee, of course after the community hippie drum circle and community hippie dance... ugh. The dinner was decent vegan food, pretty much shit thrown into a pot and cooked. Dinner was followed by the obvious and obligatory singing of songs, drum circles, didgeridoos, and of course, loads of hash and marijuana. At any given moment there were at least three to five joints being rolled. I couldn't help but intellectualize the whole thing as I sat there taking part in what I would call a static movement. All these people with so much potential getting extraordinarily stoned and singing songs about peace and love and the moon and flowers and mother earth while the only veg patch I saw in the place was going to complete shit. Thinking they're living outside the system but still buying most of their food and drink (and drugs) in the nearest town, Orgiva. It's the most extreme end of the hippie lifestyle I've encountered, and as expected I didn't like it. I couldn't get out of there fast enough. Dream catchers, the yin yang symbol, and prayer flags are fine and all... on their own, but not when the yin-yang symbol is tie-dyed and they're all hanging in the same teepee with forty hippies singing about singing together in love. No thanks. Though, a great thing about the place was the plethora of nationalities that were present there, there were at the very least 15 or 20 nationalities present in one small confined place... and the didgeridoo player could actually really rip it up, and I usually hate didjeridoos.

Departing Steve

We´ve been here at Steve´s, the mad Brit´s, for about two weeks now and we´re definitely ready to go. Just a few days ago, he apologized for his odd behaviour and confessed that he and his girlfriend had just split up on the day we had arrived. Bad timing. After this confession, he has been a lot better, but he´s still a manic, arrogant, lecturing pain in the ass sometimes. Not to say he doesn´t have his charms, he´s been very kind opening up his house, showing us some great cooking, we just hit him at a bad week, we´ll miss him in a way, but it´s definitely time to go. He very kindly gave each of us a hat. Me, a nice Panama hat and Teagan, a sort of Spanish cowboy hat, they look very flash. (Note: the photo shoot in the slide show is of Simon´s hats, our fancy new hats have not been recorded to the digital world yet.)

Teagan and I have just finished today putting charging bulls on the wall above his barbecue, and it´s turned out looking beautiful. We also laid stones to make a walkway to his pool.

The other day we went to Steve´s friend, Simon´s, house to help him make wine. He has many vines on each side of his property. And his property was something else indeed. It´s like a James Bond villain´s headquarters complete with winding corridors to get lost in and a helipad. I guess it´s not so much like a Bond villain´s headquarters, perhaps I just say that because apparently he was in some old Bond film that neither Teagan nor I can remember the name of. His full name is Simon Munro Kerr, and he is the epitome of posh. Literally, his parents owned one of the shipping freight lines that went from Britain to India. Posh, incidentally, means acronymically (we learned this from Bob Dylan´s Theme Time Radio Hour) port out starboard home, that is, on the shady side of the ship when going from England to India and back- P.O.S.H. would be stamped on your ticket. Simon is trying to start up a business at his place, a retreat of sorts, the website just got up and running at www.lajarilla.net, go to the gallery to behold its splendor. The real posh shit is in Simon´s living room, which isn´t in the gallery and I, unfortunately, didn´t get any pictures of, but lets just say he likes his dead animal heads. He also had loads of fancy hats, so we had a little photo shoot.

The making of the wine was great fun. We picked them, then put them through a machine that cleverly de-stems them, then pressed them and pumped them into the vats where they will distill. Teagan and I wanted to smash them with our feet, but sadly the old ways are dying out.

I have decided to read One Hundred Years of Solitude, my favorite novel, in Spanish, or Cien Anos de Soledad, if you will. This is partly for to help my spanish and partly just to soak up the beauty of the language. Yes, I know it seems like a back-asswards approach to learning a new language: with very rusty old rudimentary basics of Spanish (about three years in middle school and high school... that´s over ten years ago...) and jumping into a highly advanced verbose and labyrinthine novel, not the best way of going about things. I read about a page in half an hour and don´t understand most of it, but I´m enjoying it and pick up little tidbits along the way. It helps, though, that I´ve read the book twice, the second time a mere three or so weeks ago, so it´s pretty fresh in my memory. I´m expanding my vocabulary loads, but I don´t know if I´ll get a chance to use alchemical laboratory in a sentence any time soon. Just you wait, I´ll be a master soon.

A short entry, but we´re on to our next adventure tomorrow, where I´m sure we´ll be working hard as there´s olive harvesting, fence building, donkey tending, and a myriad other jobs to do.

Dublin to Barcelona to the middle of nowhere...

It´s been a while and we´re a long way from Carraig Dulra now. We are now staying in a georgeous finca in the middle of nowhere in Spain. It is situated near Orgiva, which is about an hour or two out of Granada. A mad Brit named Steve is living here with his three dogs, Patches, Zaphyra, and Rocky. Teagan and I have our own room separate from the house with its own bathroom en-suite. The house overlooks a huge valley with desert like mountains on either side and at the end you can see the Mediteranean. On a very clear day, supposedly you can see Africa, but while the weather has been beautiful, we haven´t been able to see that distant coast. This helpstay is actually a happy accident because of a little dose of miscommunication with the host we had originally intended to stay with in this area. We needed to kill a week or two before going to this other finca and already had a night train from Barcelona booked to Granada with nowhere to stay. We scrambled to find another host and Steve was the first person we called.

We stayed in Dublin for only two nights and had a pretty relaxing time. Seeing as how we were only going to be in non English speaking countries after Dublin we decided to seize our last chance at seeing a movie in English and saw the Goofy Pineapple Express. The next and last night in Dublin we went to an improv comedy open mic night, which was, in all honesty, pretty terrible, but fun nonetheless. Teagan and I did some heckling and played the dumb Americans (Europeans like it when you do that sometimes, its endearing). After the show we messed with the heads of some silly Finnish tourists (what isteen spirit...?). We also did some museums, a W.B. Yeats exhibit being a highlight, art hanging on walls, all that good stuff. The Jameson distillery tour was another big highlight.

Dublin was fun and we could have spent a lot more time there, but the country of Ireland is not easy on the pocketbook by a long shot and the weather was beginning to short circuit our brains so the next day we booked it to Barcelona. Teagan almost didn´t get let on the plane due to her not having any ticket to prove she was going to leave the country after 90 days so we had to rush over to the ticket booking stand for Iberia airlines where she bought the same ticket to Casablanca that I booked for those exact reasons.

We arrived in Barcelona at around 930 at night feeling pretty tired. To make matters worse, my backpack was somehow the only piece of luggage misplaced on the flight, so after giving the luggage people all the pertinent information for its return, trying to figure out trains and subways that weren´t running, and ending up taking a taxi, we got to Marc´s (our couchsurfing host) at around 1130. The airline delivered the backpack about 24 hours later to Marc´s apartment... damn... if they had taken any longer I could have bought some flashy new Spanish clothes on the airline´s dime. The rest of our time in Barcelona we just did a lot of walking around. The Gaudi park up in the hills, went and saw about five minutes of a jazz session before it ended as we arrived too late, just walking around soaking the sights, sounds, smells, Tapas, and everything else in. We went to Figueres on the train for the Dali museum there, which was pretty spectacular. After a while of traveling for a while, being from Seattle and so used to having a good dose of rock n´ roll every now and then, both Teagan and I were feeling a bit sluggish and the Pharmacy (a Seattle band, go figure) came to our rescue and reinvigorated both of us. Teagan´s friend Alex is roadying for them, so we had a heads up on the show. We went and saw another band the night before, which was Spanish and whose name we didn´t catch, but it really didn´t do it for us. I know I generalize, but I don´t think Spain knows how to rock n´ roll. Sorry, Spain. Our last day in Barcelona we decided to just shlaze it on the beach until we had to catch our overnight train to Granada. When we got to the train station about a half hour before departure, we realized that we were at the wrong station and the right one was on the other side of town. We were informed if we hurried and took a cab we would make it. A few frantic dozen minutes later, we were on the train, hearts steadily slowing down from the near panic of hitting every. single. stoplight. red. I´m pretty sure it´s completely impossible to drive through a large metropolitan Spanish city without hitting at least 85% of the lights red. And there are a lot of stoplights. Once again, I know I generalize.

We got to Granada in the morning, and near panic hits me once again when a cop stops me at the station and asks to see my passport for a random check. I had to wait outside the police station while they ran my information, then they sent me on my way. We stayed and napped for a few hours at some couchsurfer´s apartment and caught a bus to Orgiva. Upon getting off the bus we met Geraldine, a 20 year old Belgian girl, who was just going to Orgiva from Granada to kill some time before she started a two week Spanish course in Granada, but didn´t have a place to stay. She went on her way right before Steve, our host, pulled up in his jeep. He gathered us and we went and searched for her, finding her we discovered she had already payed for a hostel, but she decided she´d try to hitchhike to Steve´s the next day. ¨Not a chance, I live in the middle of nowhere¨ he says. The next day we get a call from someone who had picked up Geraldine. She had hitched the wrong way. We went and picked her up in the middle of a drunken haze of a day, in which we had tried to work on his fountain, but Steve started feeding us beer at 11 in the morning, took us to the bar about an hour later and that´s where we got the call from Geraldine. It´s rather like resort-help-x-ing here, with pretty lush surroundings and accomodations, beer flowing fairly freely, and a host that ¨really just wants us to enjoy ourselves¨. Steve is a great guy, really really likes to take the piss, chain smoke and drink. He´s very intelligent and does work for OXFAM in Africa, but mostly likes to work on his finca out here in Spain. There is already a pool, but he has plans to heat it solarly, put a sauna and a jacuzzi in and basically all around pimp out an already pimped out little spot. We set stones into cement into a Moorish pattern as a walkway down to his pool that water will run over, and I must say it looks pretty flash. Next we´ll be making a fountain outside his kitchen window and setting a mosaic of bulls into the wall above his barbecue. Steve is also an excellent cook and almost every night shows us how to make food the ´right´ way, as he would say (he´s always right). My favorite being Chicken Tikka Masala.



We are here for about a week longer and Geraldine left for Granada yesterday. It is just Steve, Teagan and me. We are actually the first helpxers that he has had. Steve is not quite used to having other people around but it´s all running fairly smoothly and, I think, helping Steve in a lot of ways with different points of view and just all around good company.