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The best thing to do on the day you're due to fly home is drive to distant mountains and so we motored for a few hours until we reached Órgiva which is on the edge of the Sierra Nevada National Park. From here it was upwards and upwards, past suffering cyclists and maniac motorbikes. The roadsigns promised large rocks plopping down the steep inclines onto your head on the left and sheer drops to your right so that you could join the rocks with a death roll onto traffic below. Very picturesque though and snow was visible on the mountaintops.
We headed to the villages of the High Apujarras, because going high always seems to be the more interesting option. We pulled up at Fuente Agria which consisted of a small road side church, a few stalls selling earrings and food plus some New Age Traveller types playing Spanish Ska. I'd read that in Órgiva they have a teepee village just above the town which is home to various European New Age Travellers who live under canvas through the baking hot summers and sub-zero winters. Glyn bought some green beans to eat raw and throw out of the car window
claiming to be growing beanstalks. I bought some earrings.
A coach-load of socks and sandals wearing type tourists turned up and headed down a narrow path, so we followed. A small rusty brown spring was flowing out of the wall and they were filling water bottles and drinking it. I wasn't tempted but I read later it was naturally carbonated. Still not tempted, I had a nice bottle of tepid almost flat fizzy water in the car already.
As luck wouldn't have it, we managed to set out seconds after the coach and ended up following it at a snails pace for too many miles. Eventually we arrived in Trevélez which is around 1400 metres above sea level making it Spain's highest conurbation. Like all the villages around here all the buildings are white and the backstreets are incredibly narrow (to keep the streets shady in summer), non residents are banned from driving down them and I couldn't be more grateful for that. We wandered around as locals held very loud conversations way above our heads from balconies up and down the street - no phones needed here. I found my first cat, sitting in a ground floor
room with some chickens. They seemed to get on ok. Glyn spotted a ginger cat but I didn't catch up in time to meet it before it headed on with it's business.
Trevélez is known for it's cured ham and there's dead pig legs hanging everywhere you turn. They even have a huge statue of one.
We went for something to eat, Glyn had various bits of dead things and I ordered a roll with cheese, lettuce and egg. They couldn't get a veggie sandwich any more wrong than they did, it was full of at least three types of dead animal. So Glyn got to eat some of that too. I thought sod it, I'll get an ice cream instead later on.
We continued on driving around, stopping to take photos and swap drivers (With each other, we didn't grab random people). At one point my heart stopped when an oncoming motorbike came straight up at me on the wrong side of the road around a hairpin bend. He narrowly missed us at the last fraction of a second and I might have sworn a little....
Time was getting on and we didn't trust our
maps or satnav to get us back on time, so we left early. This was a good plan as our satnav expected me to drive at 56mph on roads that curled around the mountains like tight springs with sheer drops and not many barriers.
We got back to the car hire place good and early. The car which was brand new when we got it now had almost 700 miles on the clock. Nicely done!
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