Spring Water and Lemons

Day two dawned bright and just a bit too early.  We hung around for the "early" breakfast at 9.30 and then headed off to Lidl to buy some food and water for the day ahead.  By about 11.00, we were looking for parking in Frigiliana, the quaint touristy mountain village of this particular region.  Like Nerja, parking was a problem and we ended up finding a place at the bottom of the village.

I love my iPhone and especially love my new iPhone 6 with the slightly bigger screen, as opposed to the 6+ which is just an iPad Mini with a phone.  Actually, the phone seems to be going the way of the old transistor wireless, some of these monster phones are making the old Motorola Brick I had back in the late 80s look tiny.  I swear I saw a kid in Nerja with a 32" TV stuck to the side of his head and he chatting away to someone it.  Reminded me of the old Ghetto Blaster.

Anyhow, distractions aside and back to my toy.  For this walk I used an app called Wikiloc.  The previous night's surfing on the web led me to it and a most appealing looking route.  The app showed a route "Frigiliana to El Fuerte".  It was showing just 6.5km and 558m of ascent.  I was pretty confident I could handle that.

It turned out to be nice that we had parked at the bottom of the village and had to climb up through it to get to the start of the route. Frigiliana is a beautiful village and our leisurely warm-up through it's cobbled streets was a pleasure.  At the top of the village, we came across a lovely restaurant with beautifully tiled tables, that just had to be photographed.

However, when we eventually emerged on the upper side of the village, we struggled to find the start of the walk.  A German couple informed us that you could not walk from where we were to that summit you could see in the distance, because there was another valley in between.  It sounded a bit like that old Irish line of "if I was going to there, I wouldn't start from here".

By this time I had Wikiloc sorted and running and it was pointing me toward a starting point. Unfortunately I couldn't download enough detail to see tracks and trails, because my roaming data wasn't working properly.  However, by using my innate navigational skills I brought the start point to within 50m of me, but by now we were already on the route, only it didn't look quite right and seemed to be heading through someone's private property.

We came across three people doing something to the local water supply and asked them for directions.  Yep, we were on the track alright, "No problem", we were told, "carry on.  It is our property, but we allow access to the Parc National, by the way, would you like some lemons, we have loads of them".

We thanked them for their kindness and said we didn't need any lemons at the moment, but we might see them on our descent.

We headed out into the sparsely wooded hillside and what passed for a forest in Spain.  Our Irish forests must seem like jungles to the Spanish whenever they come here.  Apparently it is the rainfall that makes the difference.  But if you ask me the only difference the rainfall makes is that the ground is softer here in Ireland.  Within moments, even in the depths of the forests, we were creating our own dust storms.

The German tourists of earlier had been anything but Germanic in their planning, or they were deliberately trying to put us off the trail.  There was no intervening valley.  Indeed there was no respite from the continuous climb.  It was around this point that I began to think in Metres as opposed to Feet and finally got a sense of what lay ahead of me.  I was about to climb a Spanish mountain on the same scale as Carrantuohill.  El Fuerte was just 50m lower than Ireland's highest mountain.

To add to my anxiety, I realised that by parking at the bottom of the village and taking that leisurely stroll up its streets, I had added another 200m to the advertised height of the climb and another 3km each way to the walk.  This was becoming a challenge.

Up and up we went.  It wasn't mad steep, it was just steady and sustained.  But the going underfoot, while dusty, was also easy and well maintained.  There was ample evidence all along the route, that this was a well managed and cared for area.  The trail was well used but the only litter we came across were the peelings of a single orange under the pine tree where we stopped for lunch.

The walk also brought out the latent botanist and hidden chef in me as I tried to identify the many aromatic herbs we encountered.  We came across Rosemary, Sage, Juniper, Alyssum and many more. All we were missing was a bit of parsley.  The smells were gorgeous and many of them were in bloom.  This was their wet season.

I also wondered about this thing.  It looked like a kind of rolled up cobweb and I wondered what kind of monster had created that.  It was only after posting the photos of the caterpillar train on my Facebook page that I was informed that those very same caterpillars had built them.  Funny thing that, because I did see one of these nests with a big juicy caterpillar embedded in it.  I thought to myself, should I rescue it?  Good thing I didn't, as Ben tells me that their hairs are poisoned and can kill a dog or make an adult quite ill.  I'll come back to this later in the week in a subsequent post.

Up and up we went.  As I mentioned, we had lunch in the shade of a small clump of pine trees.  One of the pleasant things about this walk was that we were walking along the crest of a ridge and pretty much any breath of wind wafted over us keeping us slightly cooled.

You soon began to appreciate the benefit of being slightly cooler, whenever the crest climbed above the trail and robbed us of that slight draft we were quickly roasted alive.

During lunch, we entertained ourselves, or at least I did, by watching the ants making off with the crumbs we dropped. Ants are something Spain does really well.  They come in all kinds of shapes and sizes and deliver stings or bites of varying intensity from mildly irritating to bloody painful.  It serves you well to check carefully where you plan on sitting and to move your derrier occasionally lest they take you for a large incubator and begin laying eggs in your pockets.

Spanish ants make Spanish bulls look playful.

It turned out to be about a two hour tramp to the summit overall.  Arriving at the top felt like an achievement.  I was happy to be there and loved the fine views up and down the mountain range.

It is sobering to reflect on the history of this summit.  There was once a fort on the summit, I noticed some walls as I approached it.  In 1569 the last of the Moors were defeated and the Moorish women are said to have thrown themselves to their deaths from the cliffs at the top of this mountain, rather than submit to the Roman Catholic victors.

Such was the cruelty of the conquering Christians of that time and their insistence that the Moors convert to Christianity and give up their culture and traditions, that many chose death.  There are harrowing parallels today in another part of this small world of ours, only the roles are reversed.

On a more pleasant note, because I didn't know the bloody history until later, the return trip was a good one, back down the way we had come up.  As I descended further, I began to slow.  The climb had taken a lot out of me and unbeknownst to myself, I had become quite dehydrated.  The last 20 minutes to catch up with Caroline proved to be quite painful.  I hobbled down the steps beside the house of the lemons to join Caro where she sat perched on a wall, playing Candy Crush.

I leaned on the wall for balance, afraid that if I sat, I might never get up again.  Caro drew my attention to the house behind the high gates.  It was beautiful and as we stared at it, its owner emerged like a vision and invited us in to view his home.

Dr. Peter Peeters, a physicist, and his wife Claire Van Velsen had retired here about 15 years earlier and renovated this old Molino into a place of beauty. They had constructed an organic garden and wildlife refuge on the edge of the Parc where they frequently encountered wild mountain goats and boar on and around their patio.

I was pleased to hear that there were wild boar on the mountain, as on the ascent, I had seen what I suspected were signs of their rooting and their spoor.  I recognised this from a trip in the Sierra de Cazorla further to the north many years back, where we had seen a family of wild boar, mammy, daddy and a string of piglets, who passed us by, during the night as we camped out under the stars.

Peter had taken to writing to fill in time and has had a number of books published, which Caroline and I will read over the coming months.  I'm looking forward to the upcoming release of his most recent work, "A Journey through time and Africa", a recounting of a life changing trip they made in the 1980s.  We were shown the draft and it looks riveting.

It was here that we spent our last hour on the mountain in pleasant conversation, sipping delicious, cool spring water into which had been squeezed fresh organic lemon. For the way I was feeling right then, this is what I imagine heaven must taste like after emerging from the furnaces of hell.

We said goodbye to our hosts and their lovely cat and descended the last 200m to the car, rejuvenated. However, I was very much aware that all was not well with me from the waist down.  My legs didn't always feel like they were part of me and at times we seemed to have a divergent agenda.  It was a strange sensation walking on legs that had so obviously had been drinking heavily, while the top half of me was sober as a Judge.

On our return to our apartment at the top of the hotel, Caroline took pity on me and cooked a dinner so I wouldn't have to walk anywhere.  Bed-time couldn't come fast enough.  It was weird, I had thoroughly enjoyed the walk and the day, but all I wanted to do was sleep.  Even drink couldn't entice me to move, besides, my legs were already drunk and I was sure they would have a really bad hangover in the morning.  No point in my head joining them.  Anyhow, tomorrow is to be a rest day, so I wanted to get in a bit of practice for it, or that is my excuse.

The Details
The Summit of El Fuerte stands at 988m according to my tracker, while the map gives a spot height of 1007m, just 37m short of Ireland's highest peak.  The tracker gave us a starting altitude of 288m or a rough ascent of 700m, though the actual worked out at about 150m more when you took the rolling nature of the ridge into account.  Our total walking distance that day came to about 14km.

Since my return from Spain I have received the Bad Elf GPS Logger I had hoped to bring with me for greater accuracy.  It seems I will just have to make another trip out there to test it properly, though I did purchase the tracker for sailing purposes, you can't really test for altitude when you are supposed to be sailing at sea-level all of the time.