Rough Ride in a Stroller

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We don't yet have bus tickets to get from Ronda to our next destination, which is Seville. We tried to book these on-line before we left home, but the system told us we were trying to do this too far in advance. I make the long trek to the bus station, and ask the man at the ticket window in my very best and politest Spanish whether he speaks English. He says "no" very aggressively. I then try to explain to him in pidgin Spanish that I want to buy two tickets to Seville. He suddenly gets very angry. He yells "Los Amarillos" and points heatedly to the ticket window next door. It seems that "Los Amarillos" is the name of a different bus company, and I'm starting to suspect that it might be a fierce rival of angry man's company. I'm not sure why; they seem to cover different routes, so they're not even really in competition. Maybe the angry man's just having a bad day. I go to the Los Amarillos window, but it's closed, and a sign on the window says that it's open all day except between 10.30am and 11.30am. I look at my watch; it's now 10.45am. I wonder why they'd be open all day except between 10.30am and 11.30am. It seems a little early to be having a siesta. I suspect that maybe they're open all day, except for a quarter of an hour before and three quarters of an hour after whatever time the Sheehans turn up wanting to buy tickets. I trudge dejectedly back to the hotel.

Our first tourist stop for the day is the bull ring, which is right next to the hotel. We were very pleased to learn while we were in Barcelona that bull fighting has now been banned, and the Ronda bull ring certainly wouldn't have been on our itinerary if it was still being used for such an inhumane "sport". We hear that this bull ring was built in the late 1700s and is one of the largest and oldest in Spain. The complex includes a horse riding school which is still in use, the area where they used to hold the bulls before the fights, the bull ring itself, a bull fighting museum, and a small chapel. We hear that only one matador was ever killed here, but we suspect that most of the bulls weren't so lucky. We also suspect that they probably weren't allowed to use the chapel.

Next on the itinerary are the Arab baths. We can see where these are on the map, but what the map doesn't tell us is that they're right down near the bottom of the gorge. The views of the gorge and bridges on the way down are very good, but it's going to be long and strenuous hike back up again. The baths are remains from the Moorish period. They're much better preserved and more complete than the Arab baths we visited in Cordoba, and two of the three original rooms are more or less fully intact. Water was pumped up to the baths from the river and the pump was powered by donkeys walking round and round in circles. We feel very sorry for the donkeys. Issy says that she's sure they would have changed them over quite regularly, but I've got a nasty suspicion that death might have been the only escape for these unfortunate creatures.

We trudge very slowly back up the hill again, and stop for lunch in a square overlooking the gorge. The local cats must have heard that we're messy eaters and three of them take up residence under our table. We've found the alleyways and squares in Ronda to be very hard our our feet. They're paved with roundish cobbles a few centimetres long with mortar between them, and the cobbles stick up well above the mortar, so that they dig into our feet. As we eat, we watch an English father push his daughter quite quickly across the square in a stroller. When he first comes into view she's asleep, and for the first few metres she seems to stay that way. This is a minor miracle. The stroller's being thrown all over the shop by the cobbles which is making the girl look like she's sitting in a blender. She soon wakes up, and I don't think she's overly pleased with Dad. She tries to get out of the stroller, but she's finding it a bit of a struggle with her arms and legs flying everywhere. Dad's oblivious to all of this and keeps pushing on at full pace. We can't stop laughing, but I'm not sure that the little girl thinks it's quite so funny.

We finish lunch and walk around the corner to the Mondragon Palace which is a museum in an old Moorish style house. It has the usual Moorish courtyards and fountains, and a nice garden with views over the gorge. It houses a range of displays showing what life might have been like in this area in prehistoric and Roman times. Issy walks into a room displaying cave living. It's almost pitch black, and too dark for her to notice that a man has walked into the room at almost exactly the same time as she has. Her movement triggers a switch and the lights come on, and she suddenly realises she's not alone. She screams. All I can do is laugh, which doesn't seem to be entirely appreciated.

We move on to an Italianate style house called Casa don Bosco, which has a very large Italian style garden overlooking the gorge and providing excellent views of the Puente Nuevo.

I start blogging. I wasn't paying too much attention to the audio guide at the bull ring this morning, so I Google it. It seems that we've been misled. Bull fighting is now illegal in Barcelona as we'd thought, and also in the rest of Catalonia, but it seems it's still very legal and regularly practised in virtually every other part of Spain. It's apparently even "protected by law" in about half the country, whatever that might mean. We're not very happy about this. We briefly consider going back to the bull ring and asking for a refund because we don't approve of bull fighting, but we're not entirely sure we want to run the risk of getting deported just yet.

I don't want to trek back to the bus station, so we decide that we'll try to buy our tickets to Seville on line. We go down to reception and ask the receptionist if there's a computer and printer we can use. She tells us that we can use the computer behind the counter. Everything on the computer is in Spanish, even the error messages, and I think I'd rather not know what I've agreed to by pushing "si" every time a message comes up. It seems that to buy the bus tickets we need to provide our passport numbers. This seems a bit extreme. I'm pretty sure I didn't need to show anyone my passport the last time I caught a bus from our home in suburban Essendon into the middle of Melbourne. I send Issy up to the room to get our passports, but by the time she gets back the receptionist has told me that I need to get off the computer because she needs to use it. She says we'll need to book the tickets on our own computer and then email them to her to print off. We seem to have spent a lot of time and effort today just to buy a couple of bus tickets, and we still haven't got them yet.

We have a very pleasant dinner on a terrace at a restaurant hanging over the edge of the gorge. We decide that we'll get ice creams for dessert from the shop we went to last night, but when we get there it's closed. There's a McDonald's right next to the hotel so we go there instead. It smells like any other McDonald's, but some of the menu items look a bit different. It seems that the Spanish equivalent of a Big Mac is "Le Grande McExtreme de McDonald's". I think that the Spanish word for big is "grande", so I wonder why they don't just call it a Grande Mac, which would seem to be a whole lot less of a mouthful.

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Photos

Relaxing, Ronda
There's a 100 metre deep gorge between Issy and the background.

Comments

[COG]

Granada and Ronda look lovely...