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Glyn woke with a scream this morning. I meant to wake him gently with a hug but accidentally pulled the covers off him instead. It's easy to get those two confused. Anyway, as a result, we got up at 7am as planned. It wasn't raining at this point, but there was a lot of evidence to prove it hadn't long stopped.
Our first stop of the day was the caves at Nerja. These caves do have paintings that are thought be be 20,000 years old, but those parts probably will never be open to tourists. We were given handsets with monotone commentary on the caves, highlighting everything that is boring about them; I did want to know about the caves but didn't want to risk slipping into a coma as I walked around the dark cathedral sized caverns. If you've seen the early scenes of The Hobbit where the dwarves are all full of themselves living in vast caves with sky high ceilings, that is how big these caves were. Almost. Sort of. They were big. The stalactites and mites were huge and had there been an actual guide there who did anything apart from whistle at stragglers (usually me)
they might have told me I was in the presence of the world record breaking longest stalactite in the world at a STAGGERING 32 metres.
When we got outside it was raining, so we left, heading to Granada in the hope of stalling our sloth-like Toyato a-no-go on a few hills on the way. We briefly stopped at a Mercadona Superstore for drinks and snacks for later. Glyn gets so excited about these places but it turned my stomach that they sell entire legs of pigs, complete with trotters on. They weren't cheap either.
Granada is a pretty big town and not a joy to drive around when you have no map, satnav so out of date that many roads shouldn't exist and you're in a sloth vehicle that needs to drop a gear to go up an incline of one degree. The roads made no sense and I had such a laugh struggling up steep hills with hairpin bends. The worst point was when there was a red light and I crapped myself at the idea of the car attempting a hill start, with a van behind waiting for me to roll back into it. As the
light turned green, Glyn told me to go, not realising I'd totally floored the accelerator and was actually going! The little car chugged forward painfully in first gear for some time before it could handle second gear. Deep joy.
We queued up for Alhambra which is the tourist must-see of the area. After hanging around for a while, lamenting the lack of information, we found out that we should have pre-booked as it was sold out for the day. We were annoyed because there's nothing telling you this, and no warning in guidebooks. It is surprising that it was sold out on a Monday in May. We were directed to the 'free' area which is actually code for "go walk around the perimeter wall and have a long hard think about why you didn't pre-book". If we want to try again tomorrow, we must turn up at 5.30am. Fat chance. Saved ourselves €14 each, so there.
The perimeter wall was on a super steep downhill and I led Glyn around a labyrinth of narrow alleyways looking for cats, so we ended up in a quaint cobbled area that had a lot of Moroccan shops and cafes. Some poseur
hipster type was strutting about with a parrot on his shoulder, as though it was a normal thing to do, except he knew it wasn't. No cats though.
The walk back up to the car was ridiculously steep, but walking up was less agonising than driving in the sloth.
The next destination to drag Glyn to was Alhama de Granada, a 'charming, small town balanced above a gorge'. Now most people are happy with buildings along the edge of a gorge, with plenty of ruined mills and houses at the bottom (photographer's heaven that is - crumbly abandoned buildings) but Glyn was unimpressed. He wanted his buildings to be teetering at the top. And they weren't teetering nearly enough for Glyn. Even though I pointed out that anything dropped out of the windows was lost for ever.
Plus side number one: I saw my first cat of the holiday, a black and white one staring at me from under a gate. Plus side number two: the climb out of the gorge was so steep we must have been at 45 degrees to the path. This worked in my favour as Glyn found me a lovely young grey
Bidet issue
Spot the taps at the top of the photocat at an allotment under a rock and Glyn was happy to have the excuse to stop whilst I fussed and photographed the cat. Now I can't speak much Spanish, but I know enough to understand that the two old guys at the allotment were most bemused at me photographing the cat.
At the top of the hill, we came upon a square where old men walked endlessly up and down, like lengths in a pool. There were four of them at first but their numbers soon swelled to five. Glyn led me up and down some hills to find a place for tapas which was very nice and quite cheap.
Passing the square on the way to the car, there were now around nine old men walking up and down, things were certainly getting lively in these parts. The satnav had more laughs at my expense by leading me down a warren of steep streets that funnelled down until it was almost impossible to get through. I was nervous, the car hire people have my credit card details in case of mishaps.....
I decided I couldn't have all the fun and let Glyn drive.... And funny
it wasn't my turn again until we were on a massive road to Malaga! Glyn did get to drive through dark and moody roads with mystical clouds and eerie scenery, so I did him a favour really.
We didn't get back until 10pm and never mind that, there were two cats right outside our apartment.
Now it is so late and I've left a million things out, but I have to mention the bidet again, after my rant of yesterday. When I was showering this morning, my level of sight was raised so that I noticed the bidet taps were so high above the bidet, I would not be able to reach them. What is the point of this? Are people meant to stand when using the bidet? Makes no sense as this model of bidet has no up-squirt so what is going on? I've taken a photo and will add to the bottom of this blog, such is my concern.
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cabochick
Andrea
WTF?
That makes no sense!!! But I'm loving your confusion over bidet issues. I never thought I'd like a drop toilet until I tried one, now I love them, hate our conventional toilets, especially in public restrooms.