My last post was rushed and quote vapid and awful all round. I´d delete it, but whats the point, you´ve all read it!
The last few days have been spent in Granada, which is a fair sized city sitting at the base of the Spanish Sierra Nevada. It´s very much a city unlike Cordoba which retains, in the old town at least, a very charming small town feeling.
Being a city isn´t a bad thing for Granada, because it does it well. We arrived by bus from Cordoba, a three and a bit hour trip through rolling hills and jagged and sharply erroded mountains. There was barely anything but olive trees along the entire road. This got a little boring.
The Spanish of yesteryear must have had a particular fetish for rocky outcrops, because it seems that every rocky hill or mountain side had a castle, or the ruins of one, clinging to it. The towns are all whitewashed, with a church and tiny winding streets. And they all sit sprawl around the bottom of the hill which the castle is atop.
But back to Granada. As a city it shows what I get is a general sense about what I´ve seen of Spain so far; the very old and the very new all mixed up together. The outskirts of Granada are like any medium sized city, ugly industrial complexes with those enormous concrete warehouses that can be built in a weekend. Bland rows of apartment block towers. The occasional abandoned railyard, and so on.
We took a taxi from the bus station with a young taxi driver who we felt was going to be a pleasure to drive with after seeing him help an older lady out of his taxi. Unfortunately, despite all his good maners, he was inexperienced and had no idea how to find our hostel, and so -with meter running- he went off to ask another taxi driver. This isn´t so bad, because it´s pretty cheap anyway. He almost crushed a few people on the drive, but I´m not certain this was his fault as the Vesper-Scooter-Moped drivers are all quite insane, as I was to discover for myself later.
By the time we arrived at our hostel I was incredibly glum. The part of the city we were in seemed to be Craptown. But my mood lifted after a nap and then later seeing the city a little more. That was a lesson learnt! Around our quite and somewhat seedy backalley was a wonderful city - sudden market squares appearing out of the maze of backstreets, streets lined with fountains and palms. And enough fountains to satisfy anyones desire to see falling water. Part of my mistake was to incorrectly interpret Anti-Fascist graffiti as Pro-Fascist. That makes a big difference!
On our first full day in Granada we went to The Alhambra, which is an ancient Islamic fortress on the top of a hill (again with the castles on hills). It is infact more than just a fortress, it is mosque, palace, gardens, merchant quarter and then some more gardens. We´ve got a lot of photo´s which we´ll be posting soon to show this place off. But neither word nor photo can really do it justice. We took the entire day to explore the place, including four hours of a cold cold morning standing in line to get in. If ever a miserable four hour queue was worth the wait, it was for this. You might think that waiting for four hours at Australia´s Wonderland to get a go in those big rotating tea-cups is time well spent, but sunshine let me tell you this; teacups ain´t worth shit!
On the second and third days at Granada we hired a car and ventured into the Spanish Countryside which was thankfully, for the most part, devoid of Olive trees. The experience of driving in a semi-medieval town wasn´t nearly as bad as I had expected, except for the Moped drivers, who have a nasty habit of going nuts and weaving around your car like some kind of insane two wheeled weaving machine. Once we left the city we headed around to the other side of the Sierra to a town called Gaudix. Gaudix is noted as the most dense population of cave dwellers in Europe. It´s basically your typical Spanish town (that is, white wash houses, a castle, a cathedral and tiny streets) but on top of the hills the town rests on is a suburb of homes built into the rock. It´s more or less Hobbittown. We got a tour of the Cave House Museum for .75euro each. It was pretty, but I wasn´t blown away. After Guadix we headed further east around the mountains to Baza, a town where nothing seemed interesting, so we attempted to drive to a nearby lake. We didn´t find the lake after a couple of hours of driving, though we did find a number of out of the way villages in the semi-desert terrain. The area here reminded me very much of New Mexico and parts of Arizona and Nevada. Endless hills and roughly cut canyons with intermittant balls of vegetation covering the bare ground. After a while we got sick of looking for this fabled lake and we took the highway back to Granada.
The highways in Spain are wonderful, and apparently all very new. It´s dual-carriageway heaven, and a sign of what I mentioned before, the old and new. Everywhere we´ve been in Spain there´s been castles and Roman ruins and so on, but also an incredible amount of new construction, even in the small villages we came across there would be cranes at work building new structures. Everywhere new bridges, new roads, dams and apartment blocks were all being built.
The second day driving took us into the Sierra Nevada, through hours of winding roads, barely wide enough for cars to pass by each other. The roads were of course in excellent condition, but narrow and jammed between rocky mountain side and sheer drops into deep valleys. I love this kind of driving, even though there is little time to take in the views. As we climbed higher into the mountains the landscape changed into wonderful alpine wilderness like that in places like the Snowy Mountains Nation Park in Australia or the Sierra Nevada in California. Again, words can only tell a little of the story, pictures only a little more.
The purpose of this drive was to visit the famous(?) Las Alpujarras, which are a series of villages high up in the mountains. They were truely wonderful places. These villages are built on the sides of incredibly steep mountains, and so they have very little horizontal building room, which means they are built vertically up and down the mountain from the main road. Often the houses, restaurants, farms and hotels hang on the edge of dramatic cliff faces ready to collapse and take many unfortunate guests with them. But I guess they never do. Or at least infrequently enough so as not to deter foolish tourists like us. After several hours of driving on the edge of a thousand foot drops we headed south to the coast and took the coastal highway home.
If anyone has taken Highway 1 california between San Francisco and Los Angeles you know what kind of fun coastal roads can be. This road kicked all kinds of ass over Highway 1 and is undoubtedly the best coastal road I´ve driven on. Perhaps here more than anywhere else the gap between old Spain and new Spain is evident. Many of the towns we past by had a kind of Gold Coast style beachside commericialism, yet they were all overlooked by a ruined castle here, an old stone bridge there, a crumbling Roman tower and so on. The highway we were on was in the process of being replaced by a larger highway, and in Spain they replace highways the American way, not the Australian way. In Australia existing roads are often expanded as much as possible before any real new construction is made. In America it seems like they just forget the old highway and build a whole new one. One which smashes through mountains sides instead of winding around them and builds enormous bridges over canyons instead of twisting down to the bottom and then back up the other side. Both ways have their merits, but in this part of Spain it seems like the past is at real risk of being taken away. This is of course unfortunate for the tourist, but probably good for the Spanish.
Oh, the topic of this post was about Jamon. I unfortunately had to break my vegetarianism a little because the ¨Sauted Mushroom and Wild Asparagus¨ dish in the highest of the mountain villages contained as much Ham as it did mushroom and asparagus. I tried my best to avoid the ham, not only because of vegetarianism, but because I dislike ham at the best of times, but I think a few pieces made their way into my guts. It´s a shame I didn´t like it, because one of the things these villages are famous for is their cured hams. Aired in the fresh cold Sierra air, no less. I don´t know what that does for the hams, but the Americans at Granada airport today were so impressed by pure water from the Sierra Nevada that they had decided to keep a little in a bottle as a momento.
Finally, today on the walk from the Hostel to the Railway station where our rental car was parked (we had to drive it to the Airport to drop it off) it rained on us, umbrella-less backpackers. Wonderful. I loved every cold wet drop of it.
24 °C
