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.