For a Few Dollars More(Theme song from the movie of the same name) - From Granada through the desert to Mojacar - 2nd May 2016

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Camp dwellers tend to be up and about early as they get the first use of the communal showers although we didn’t have to worry about queuing up as we had our own shower in the bungalow.

But we had a reasonable distance to travel today and we want to make as much time enjoying the facilities at our overnight stop in Mojacar which should include a terrace with a sea view.

However, we could tell something was wrong with the camp water supply as we turned on the shower and only a dribble of water emerged and then nothing! Was it just our bungalow or was it the whole camp?

We had breakfast and wandered down to the office which opened at 9am to see if the water problem was just us or the whole camp.

The line of people, many of them with towels and washing gear, at the office door at 9.10am was looking edgy and we wondered if they would turn into a lynch mob when the office person finally opened the door.

It turned out it was a whole camp problem but things would be back to normal ‘shortly’.

We thought that by the time we checked our emails and got back to the bungalow perhaps the water would be back on.

But no! And so for the second time on the BBA V3 we had to leave our accommodation unwashed or showered. At least it was only going to be the two of us in the car.

The road to the coast, the A92, would take us along the base of the Sierra Nevada’s and then up and over a pass between the Nevada and Baza ranges into an area of Spain that is about as dry and barren as this country gets.

The A92 was a double laned 120kph highway and we made good progress even though it was a steady climb to the summit of the road at 1380 metres above sea level.

For a holiday there was only light traffic and almost no trucks on this road although with the double lane they would not have caused us any delays by getting stuck behind them.

We took a stop at Guadix,a ‘dusty ‘looking town just off the A92.The travel guide book we have had an entry showing the attractions of the town which included a troglodyte quarter with over 2000 caves in which people still lived in today.

The main street of the town was quiet and we easily found a car park and walked towards the cathedral which dominated the town square. Here was another cathedral that took many, many years to complete having been started in 1594 and officially finished between 1701 and 1796.Why no one recorded a finish date a little more precisely we are unsure.

We couldn’t find a tourist office but there was plenty of information to guide us to the cave dwellers and it seemed a straight forward route which would also enable us to take in the Moorish,Alcazaba,as we walked.

The troglodyte quarter was very interesting with stone chimneys painted white popping up above the ground all over the place and giving a good idea as to just how far back into the hillside the houses went. All of the houses we passed had a white washed stone facade that faced the street but that and the chimney was all you could see of the house as the rest was underground.

It was quite a unique housing situation and although we are sure there are others like it in other parts of the world it was interesting to see it here with the houses also having all the modern things of life such as TV aerials poking up on or near the chimney and a car parked at or near the front door. The whole scene looked even more dramatic against the backdrop of barren hills behind.

We had been to a similar place in southern Italy on the BBA V3 but there the caves were no longer being permanently lived in but were more of a tourist attraction. Here people were going about their normal lives with outsiders, like us, staring at their property and trying to appreciate their living arrangement. They were obviously used to their little corner of the town

being a tourist attraction.

The best view of the Alcazaba was from a distance and it wasn’t possible to go inside the walled fort as part of it had been redeveloped for apartments and people were living there.

Panderia are open 7 days a week which was a blessing and we were able to get a couple of pastry items for lunch later on the road.

As we walked back to the car having done the circuit of the small town we noticed a hot air balloon being filled in the dry river bed just below the town square and a lot of people had gathered to watch not only the sight of the tethered balloon but also attend a ceremony of some sort that had some armed forces people in attendance plus a band that we hoped might strike up with some music while we watched the hot air balloon.

The speeches went on and on and in the end we headed away to continue our journey to the coast as we still had a reasonable distance to go.

After lunch in the car park of a petrol station with a couple of local cats in attendance(it is amazing how we seem to attract cats from nowhere)we continued on through dry,desertlike land where irrigation had been installed to allow fruit trees to survive and produce.

We turned off the A92 with probably only a further 30km to the coast and headed in a more northerly direction on the N340A through the town of Tabernas which was where the ‘spaghetti western’ was born and filmed.

The days of Clint Eastwood chewing on a cigar and shooting ‘gringo’s’ to get his way out of trouble are long gone but even today there are still a couple of tourist attractions that can give tourist who stop by the taste of what those days of ‘westerns’ being filmed in Spain instead of the USA.

The surrounding hills are very dry with foliage almost non exisitant.We drove on through an area where someone had tried to grow fruit trees but all that was left were died up stumps of the trees and branches with no leaves.

As the A340 took us towards the coast and our destination we passed through a gorge where although there had been farms and orchards as some time in the past all the houses and land had been abandoned making it look like a wasteland.

A couple of the annual weather stats for Mojacar on the coast tell the story of why this piece of Spain is so dry.Mojocar has over 3000 hours of annual sunshine and an annual average rainfall of less than 200mm.There is little in the way of weather systems that arrive on this piece of the coast and so things remain pretty well much the same all year round.

We emerged onto the coast and we were please to see the blue of the Mediterean after having just the stark dry landscape to look at t=for the last hour or so.

Our apartment was towards the southern and quieter end of the long beach and we found it with relative ease.

There has been a settlement in Mojacar since 2000BC and had seen all the various conquests until the Christians took back over control of Spain. In more recent history it had fallen on hard times after several severe droughts until in the 1960’s when tourism took off and today the town that runs along the strip of beach is full of all types of low rise accommodations, restaurants and bars.

We had decided we needed to have paella before our time in Spain came to an end so after unpacking we took a walk along the road with restaurants lining both sides to sort out the best priced paella on a menu.

Initially we had a bit of a set back as two or three of the restaurants were not serving dinner tonight as it was a public holiday which we found odd considering there seemed to be a lot of people around who would need feeding tonight.

We made an arrangement with a restaurant to come at 7pm and headed back to the apartment to sit on the terrace, have a drink or two and watch the world go by along the main road that ran parallel to the beach.

Across the road at the Malibu Restaurant we watched a guy who looked like he had come from a very dark part of Africa, probably the Ivory Coast or thereabouts, go about his tasks of taking the rubbish from the storeroom behind the restaurant in a supermarket trolley about 100 metres down to the communal rubbish bins that seem to be on every street in Spain. What trivial things one can do when one doesn’t have a lot else to do!

7pm arrived and we made our way across to the restaurant we had made an arrangement with and sat down only to be told that’sorry,we cannot do a paella for you’. Presumably the chef was having the public holiday dinner time off and it was only the easy stuff on the menu for his/her deputy to put together.

We knew there were other restaurants that were still open closer back to our apartment so we too said ‘sorry, but it has to be paella tonight’ and left the restaurant which dumbfounded the waiter a bit.

Along the road we went into the Aurora a revamped restaurant and were shown to a table with a view out over the beach to the sea. The restaurant was actually on the beach and we couldn’t have got a better place.

The seafood paella was delicious, very creamy with just the right amount of saffron to give a subtle but intense flavour and there was plenty of seafood from prawns to squid pieces. It arrived in the pan it had been cooked in piping hot.

We walked the short distance home very satisfied with our choice of restaurant and dinner dish.

Tomorrow we continue our trek north to Torrevieja just a little south of Alicante.

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