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Top tip when in Oliva - don’t take the piss out of the naff 70’s ceiling in the place you are staying for a week…the has-been Spanish style gods will strike you down and force you to spend at least 2 days flat on your back (if you can bear it) looking at and appreciating their greatest works. I thought this was but just another urban myth from our friends in the lonely planet, but I can now attest to its authenticity and its absolute ferocity.
But given our time is limited here I decided to take matters into my own hands (mixing over strength beer and over strength pain killers) and pulled myself up and told the Spanish gods of 70’s style that I will not lie down that easily - in fact it was impossible to lie down, to lie up, sit down, to stand, to do anything. Word to the wise - take care of your backs!
We are in the kitchen in our villa, I’m not incapacitated enough to stop me from sitting and enjoying a beer as Sarah conjures up a perfect paella (we even have the right rice!). Our major dilemma for the
evening is trying to work out the lyrics to Michael Jackson’s “You gotta be startin’ somethin” - we’re finding it hard to believe that we are right when we sing (in the privacy of someone else’s home of course):
“You’re a vegetable, you’re a vegetable…etc etc
…mama say,
mama sa,
mama
ma coo sa,
mama say
mama sa
mama
ma coo sa”
(repeat to fade)
But, after checking several internet oracles it appears we are right (or as right as anyone else who is wrong), and this song doesn’t appear in the almanac of misheard lyrics at www.kissthisguy.com. So, as you were.
Given I was semi able bodied today - that is, I could put one foot in front of the other but I was not to lift anything except “a towel and clean pyjamas” we decided to go for a drive inland and take in some Spanish countryside at less than 150km/hr (after all Sarah was driving).
We didn’t have to go far to rejuvenate our enthusiasm for Spain (the last couple of days sitting inside in pain or with a cold has not been fun). Our route took us through the Spain that
we had pictured before getting here…a rugged hilly countryside that looked like it had been ripped in two by millennia of seismic activity, and yet covered by determined farmers in precariously terraced plantations of olives, oranges, cherries, apricots, almonds, lemons, grapefruits, dates and figs. The land, no matter how vertical, has been planted almost everywhere, not too dissimilar to the tea plantations of Sri Lanka.
What did surprise us was that in between all of this there was a mix of pine trees, gorse, cacti, and the odd shepherd herding his flock (how very biblical). And all of this on top of a bed of rock! There was no water to be seen. All the river beds wee dry, and looked like they’d been dry for decades. And the rock was quite intriguing - white (dolomite), red (clay), blue (magnesium) yellow (calcium carbonate) - here endeth the geology lesson.
We stopped (often because we realised our car would not fit any further down the main street) in several of the dozen or so towns that we passed through on our tiki tour. They were more or less all asleep (just when we think we’ve got the hours of
siesta sorted, they seem to have a local variation), but then most of the towns we passed through where so small that there’s probably little reason to get up at anytime of the day.
The highlight of the day was meandering through “la canya” and “l’infern” to discover La Cueva del Rull…a natural underground cave discovered by a farmer about 90 years ago. The cave was enormous but the walk through it only took 15 minutes, guided by a lovely Spanish lady who pointed out some of the biggest stalagmites and stalactites you’d ever see (some over 3 meters long), in crazy colours, and lit in such a way as to reveal, in her own words, “fantasy characters” such as santa claus, a turbin-clad arab, a navity scene (I think I mentioned, they are crazy about Catholicism here), T-rex, and finally Disney castle. Massive stalactites (they are the hanging ones) lay where they had fallen in the last major earthquake and major ruptures can be seen all around the cave from the same event. We became a little nervous when Kaspar started “discovering his voice” again, but the nice Spanish lady assured us it was OK (or at least
we think that was what she was saying).
It was hugely disappointing that we couldn’t take photos inside the cave - not sure it would’ve done any more damage than Kaspar’s yodelling - so we had to settle for buying a couple of postcards and taking a pic of the display board outside (which doesn’t do it any justice, but may give you an idea of the scale of the place).
The day ended with a crawl back through the town of Oliva discussing our plans for tomorrow - we’re assuming that tomorrow’s going to be the next sunny day (they are disappointingly few and far between at the moment).
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