The Perils of the Great Outdoors

The first time Abel decided to take himself off camping, things took a polemic and bellicose turn.

We’d had a particularly bad month money-wise: scraping  to the end of it with our tummy buttons cleaved to our backbones and the final reminders stacking up on the coffee table, so when his allowance finally arrived there were certain obvious priorities to be taken care of: paying the bills and purchasing some sort of calorific sustenance to name but a couple.

So when I arrived home to find the flat full of brand new camping equipment and nutritionally dubious supplies of ‘camping’ food, I quite understandably (I thought) hit the roof.

Perhaps this is simply a disagreement that comes to a stumbling halt when asked to cross the male/female divide in a rationally comprehensive way, because Abel apparently didn’t feel for an instant that he had behaved at all inappropriately.

As far as he could see, he’d had a rotten time of it and deserved a little pick-him-up. So what if he had blown over half his monthly allowance on one paltry weekend camping trip with his friends? Life was for living. I was just being difficult because I hadn’t been invited.

Luckily for him my self-respect was as yet un-honed by age or experience, so despite the rage rumbling silently somewhere south of my breastbone and searing the backs of my eyeballs, that particular time I let him get away with it.

But the next time the subject of sleeping under canvas arose, I was privileged enough to be included. It was springtime, so it was decided that we would get the bus to the Sierra Nevada ski station and make our way down the mountainside to the Camping Ruta del Purche, in the municipality of Monachil; a half-way point between the Sierra Nevada and Granada.

The 80km of the Sierra Nevada mountain range offers much more than just skiing (I have been given to understand that the ski station is not one for serious skiers, more a novelty because of its proximity to the coast) another, and perhaps more famous of is its attractions being the ‘pueblos blancos’ of Las Alpujarras – a region also, and perhaps more correctly referred to as La Alpujarra.

It is thought that the name originally derives from the Arabic al-bugsharra whose meaning roughly translates as ”sierra of pastures”. The work of terracing and irrigating the Alta Alpujarra hillsides was undertaken by the Berbers who moved there after the initial Moorish invasion of 711 AD. Across the hillsides they built villages reminiscent of those they had left behind in North Africa – small houses with flat roofs built around a network of narrow winding streets.

It is undoubtedly a very beautiful area. The warm southerly climate and reliable sources of water for irrigation from the rivers running off the Sierra Nevada make the valleys some of the most fertile in the country.

Some of the best-known villages in La Alpujarra are Lanjarón – the picturesque spot from which Andalucía’s favourite bottled mineral water is sourced, Trevélez – recognized as the highest town in Spain and most recently joining their ranks is Júzcar – now less of a pueblo blanco and more of a pueblo azúl thanks to the intervention of Hollywood and the continuing, if perplexing, public fascination with fictional blue creatures in white hats.

So off we set, with the sun on our faces and a spring in our step. Having completed both my bronze and silver Duke of Edinburgh awards, I was serene in my confidence that I would be able to navigate us down the mountain. We would fill our water bottles in the little rushing streams that we encountered along the way, and my innate sense of direction that had been finely tuned by no less than four D of E group marches across the Lake District would ensure our arrival at the designated spot before nightfall, regardless of our lack of map.

For no, we did not have a map: Ordinance Survey being apparently an unknown quantity in Spain, or perhaps my inability to run one to earth being a worrying portent of things to come…

Now you probably already think you know where I am going with this, but I can assure you that you don’t.

The truth is infinitely more mortifying than getting lost in the wilds of an Andalucian mountain range would have been.

No, the truth is that we couldn’t even find a path to lead us off the road and into the wilderness, and as there were six-foot fences liberally crisscrossing the Sierra for as far as the eye could see, after a while  we gave up even trying.

So with rucksacks jangling merrily, we went for a twenty kilometre walk down the side of a main road.

After what seemed like weeks and weeks of monotonous tramping, we finally spotted the campsite in the distance and dragged our poor tarmac-battered feet into it, wincing with every step: my own particular miseries intensified by the fact that my weedy English complexion has undergone trial by solar rays and was now a bright shade of vermilion from alarmingly spinning head to painfully inflamed bunions.

Even a dip in the campsite pool underneath a sky of elegantly swooping swallows did nothing to ease my discomfort, and after an excruciating night spent tossing and turning on the lumpy ground, we did what any sensible people would do: we hitched a lift back to the Granada with the campsite cook.

Job done.

During my various educational activities, I never stopped beavering away at that most frustrating of missions: the job hunt.

My Curriculum vitae was prepared in the most impeccable Spanish I could muster; the descriptions of my previous employment experiences jazzed up into something marginally more alluring than the reality but whilst still steering clear of the barefaced lie.

Thus I trekked the streets of Granada for hours each day; dropping my rather unimpressive life story and accompanying begging letters into the post box of every business, language school, hotel, restaurant and shop I came across.

Nothing, not even a tentative phone call resulted from the exercise.

At the business school they had intimated that by the end of the course local businesses would be beating down the doors to get first dibs on all the newly qualified students, but as the final weeks of study drew near, with no door-beating in sight, I began to suspect that might just have been a line to get their hands on our pesetas.

And I was not alone – as far as I was aware, not one of my fellow trainee administrators had been approached by a slavering CEO with a hankering for newly qualified Excel handlers.

So with the appropriately ripped-out pages of the local Páginas Amarillas in my handbag, I decided to puff my way up the Cuesta de Gomérez and track down those businesses and hotels to be found around the walls of the Alhambra.

Much to my astonishment, and almost two months since starting the seemingly fruitless search, I struck lucky…

Hotel América was the absolute last word in eccentricity. Owned by Rafael and his feisty wife, Maribel (María Isabel) it was nestled within the stately walls of the Alhambra, within sight of the gates into the Generalife gardens.

Rafael was one of the few people left who could lay claim to having been born in that most unique of settings – the last palatial bastion of the Moors in Spain. There had previously been quite a little community along the stretch from the Alcazaba to the gardens of the Generalife, until the ever-turning cogs of tourism had displaced the families one by one.

All, that is, except for Rafael who had the good fortune to be able to turn his childhood home into the quaintest little hotel I had ever seen.

If Maribel was the brains of the entire operation, and the ruthless driving force behind the hotel’s continuing financial success; Rafael was most certainly the heart and soul.

Having been cruelly struck down by polio as a child, he was forced to use sticks to get around, but that didn’t dim his endless cheer and enthusiasm for life. A well-educated man (primarily self-educated, I believe), he had managed to master English, French, German, Dutch, Italian and even a couple of the Scandinavian tongues almost to perfection as well as being able to hold forth on all things cultural, musical and geographical.

To begin with, I was only offered the Saturday receptionist job. I made sure I always had a good book to hand as an entire day spent behind the reception of a tiny thirteen-room hotel can drag a little. More often than not I found myself alone, as the tiny restaurant did not open its doors over the weekends and the family frequently took the opportunity to vacate, usually to their little property in La Herradura (the horseshoe) on Granada’s Costa Tropical.

Another way I found to pass the endless hours of solitude was in the perusal of Maribel’s extensive collection of antiques. The entrance hall, the tiny sitting room, the corridors and all the rooms were beautifully decorated with the regalia of centuries-passed, which only served to heighten the experience of being in a place so steeped in history.

But my favourite part of every Saturday came late in the evening, when I had at last finished my shift and had time to kill before meeting Abel in Plaza Nueva for our Saturday treat of a couple of cañas and a delicious lamb shawarma in the tiny Al Andalús restaurant.

The tourists having long since made their bustling way down to the delights of the city’s restaurants – leaving the shops, cafés and the Alhambra tourist office to close their doors until the following day – I could almost believe that I had the place to myself.

And so I wandered, taking my time, down the road towards the Alcazaba; passing the Baños Arabes, La Iglesia de Santa María de la Alhambra and the Palacio de Carlos V before turning right and walking up to the low wall that overlooked the Patio de Machuca.

Here was the perfect spot to just sit and contemplate: the two towers, Torre de la Gallinas and Torre de los Puñales were the only things standing between me, the curve of the valley and the glorious view of the Albaicín on the other side.

I could even glimpse the cameras flashing in the dusky light, as the last tourists tried in vain to capture the might of the Alhambra for posterity (or maybe just to tick it off their lists of ‘sights seen’) from the vantage point directly opposite from mine – the Mirador San Nicolas.

The only sounds were the swifts settling down for the night, and the rhythmic croaking of dozens of Bufo bufo, filling the air with the strains of their amphibious romances.

 The privilege of my situation never struck me quite so deeply as during those hours of solitude.