Tabernas to Órgiva

‘Are you camping?’ asks a slightly older man who sit in the front passengers seat of an overland vehicle, cranking his body forward, shining with anticipation. ‘Yes, I am,’ is my reply and the man, who has hired a female tour guide with jeep to drive through the canyons of Tabernas is beaming, as if he much rather want to camp too, instead sits in a car. ‘Oh, that is fantastic’, he bounces back. ´It is!´ I reply in a high pitched voice. The driver guide isn’t upbeat with my answer and has a look on her face as if she just swallowed a green plum. Camping is not allowed, really, and earlier she’d threatened Alex (the homeless camper I bumped into when stealth camping) with police because he was openly making a camp fire to cook.

Just look at that spot, where my tent is, utterly incredible to my eyes!

Like Órgiva, this town hosts some marginalized guys too, one of them made suspiciously many compliments about my trailer. But unlike Órgiva, Tabernas is far from a spoiled town filled up with rif raf or genuine hippies. I make sure to trespass and be out of view of any one else (except the original habitants).

From a distance I hear the gunshots from Fort Brava, where actors replay the Wild West for tourists, but only when the wind blows a certain direction. When I hear music and walk over to the edge of the canyon wall I am camping on I see it is Alex who washes himself in the minuscule stream passing through the riverbed.

From the ocean clouds drift in front of the sun, giving the morning fire more use than brewing tea only. Beneath me the Rambla is clear, where I sit it is sandy like ash. No shadow from no high bushes has me creatively searching for some shadow: February and it is surprisingly hot in the desert.

The soil eroding, the wood gnarled, the animal droppings of rabbits and foxes plenty. Two mountain goats jump not far from me, almost over me, leaving me in wondrous awe. A few moments later three neat yet stray dogs walk past, upon noticing me they turn around, as if it was their plan already, and in procession walk quickly back over barren sand, neatly behind each other, in their ever being on a mission.

Every time I walk to town I bump into Alex, which seems normal in a small village setting but when I notice him some distance behind me in the Rambla (the route between the canyons) where I try to find a spot, I think how odd this is, until I realize the Rambla is a sort of highway. I have come to feel more at ease about Alex but make sure he doesn’t accidentally roam into my camp. I pick my spots carefully.

Camping at level ground is as interesting as sleeping at home, I need height to see the sweeping endlessness weaving below me. The barren, or so it may seem, emptiness over which my eyes travel. To camp in higher places is all about beauty, what my senses need to soak in. Therefor, I am off to the opposite mountain (where I have been with Geo in our Iveco truck some years ago).

Walking short distances is all I do now because the muscle in my back is still painfull. I have the suspicion that with getting older, the body has it’s own idea about what it can and can not. I also notice the mind wants to get on further and further as there is not very much challenge in walking from the same town into a radius around it. Each time I come back to Tabernas I accidentally meet Alex, clean as ever, just having had a hair wash at a public water tap. The same where I wash my laundry. ‘Keeping clean is most important, so other people won’t see I am homeless,’ he says. It is a pleasure to talk to someone native in English. As both being a camper we have some overlaps, though the reasons so different.

Spot the tent!

The new camp spot is ridiculously marvelous with far reaching views and this being another national park, it has a totally different look, even though I am still close to town. Everywhere are signs not to camp, not to trespass and it seems a hunters paradise. In ecstasy I trudge around my tent from all angles and when darkness falls, somewhere near I hear heavy artillery as if there’s a practice for war going on. Is Spain actively involved in someone else’s war (something Europe is so fond of these days)? Right now, rocket launchers and sounds like automatic AK’s are the crickets of my dusk.

To get here took me some willpower as it was a climb past several hunting spots. The final part had such a steep incline it could have pulled me back, sliding down the hill with trailer attached. With a latissimus injury this isn’t easy (the big muscle in the back that makes you able to pull).

‘I walked 40 kilometer, it was so beautiful’, says Alex when he calls out my name when I enter Tabernas for the final time. I feel as if I have made a friend and it feels okay, something that has turned out near to impossible in rural Hungary. He tells me he is bored, that life on the street is dull and that he has not really anything to do. He keeps clean and searches for work and in between he sits at churches and places where tourists are eager to give him money.

I gave Alex quite some thoughts and it seems terrible to me to not being able to eat what you want nor to drink what you feel like. To beg without asking and to eat what is given. I aks whether he wants some money as it is difficult for me too, to just hand over even a small amount. There’s a humiliation also for me.

It is only 7 AM when I see adult men playing on slot machines and seeing their money going into such or the cigarette machine. Or in alcohol, little glasses of liqueur to start the day. Sitting in a cafe cum bar after having spend the night in a proper hotel room to fetch the bus back to Órgiva is a whole different ballgame than camping in the desert.

Spanish Slate is ready to be send out to you, if you fancy this remarkable design (I do).

A lot of nurses dot Tabernas, all are overweight. Sunday is a busy day at the cafe I am. Tapas coming from plastic buckets are eaten as if they are homemade delicacies. Alongside the national dish of every European country: French fries. Hypernervous from so much sounds, there’s a child sitting behind me that comes with a voice resembling a siren. I plonk myself on the only bench that isn’t reserved, next to a homeless drunkard, until I can’t stand it any longer. It truly is impossibe to sit with undisturbed nerves at a terrace in Spain, so I move.

Traveling by Alsa bus is straight forward. Having bought the ticket online, the trailer is placed by myself into the luggage compartment (gone are the times that the driver did this). Three connections, with time in between sitting in a side street comfortably picnicking. I am shocked by the ocean front: a plastic nightmarish mayhem of ‘greenhouses’.

As far as the hills allows, plastic attaches itself and swallows cities and once lone bungalows at once the empty sea front. Dark Africans in down jackets move about on electric footbikes, where working hands are needed. Would these guys be the one who earlier arrived in a dhow? Would they even appreciate where they are now: a plastic shanty town?

When I met Geo in Paraguay he came there with the romantic idea to built fences. That’s why he went to this ranch to work in exchange for a bed and food, and get a feel for the country. He never got to built fences, instead did some minor repairs here and there. Now he sort of has the same intention, with the main difference that he is truly getting the job he aimed at: cutting huge eucalyptus trees.

There is a high excitement attached to huge trees being felled, not only to Geo, to me as well. The sound and trembling of the soil when the tree falls, the angle to where it falls and the total destruction of it all. Geo is good at this job: the tree falls exactly where he aims! This was a command of the municipality, to be done by the owner of the land.

Being in Órgiva means my energy level is not used up and soon I feel frustrated, as if exploding. I need to soar high, remember, and see from above the beauty around and below me. I want to see what the wild goat sees, to experience what the eagle is about to fly over. Just by a slow pace but not by merely looking at it. In nature is where the life unfold.

Well, Órgiva has lot of life too, with so much more people around than I am used to. Our host Maria keeps mostly to herself after realizing most ‘hippies’ allow to be helped but not to be converted to Christianity. Maria, the Good Samaritan, uses the word ‘hippie’ where I would use the word addicts. Órgiva is full with ‘hippies’ and I feel very comfortable among them for they are confident, brimming with awareness and taking care of themselves. Mustachioed dads chosing to be dressed in seventies style, moms wearing long skirts and headcloths not unlike mine. Bundles of dreadlocks are tied up for others. Most wear barefeet shoes and clothes in hand-dyed colors. I see no plastic surgery and hardly any make-up among ‘hippies’ as they are beautiful from within. Lots of alternative leaning toward grunge, became drunk beggars at the supermarket. Bare basics comes with lean. Subtile goes hand in hand with awareness for those who run a small something.

Órgiva, it has to be said, has an equal amount of active substance users, mentally ill and angry-at- the-world kind of people. I saw a huge Hitler flag in someone’s window, another screaming loudly while holding a heavy tool above his head to swing on a head, imaginative or real? Walking into the (in)famous ‘beneficio’, a piece of land once belonging to a farmer and sold to a guy who wanted to built a community, is still that in part but also heavily used by people rejecting society as it is. Flimsy Decathlon tents rotting away in the sun, self built yurts and structures made by people who aren’t good at building. Lots of extreme wrinkly, toothless and thin people, always accompanied by a dog, dot the area, always friendly and forthcoming, upbeat or sad, clearly rejected or mad. I would not want to erect my tent there and Maria wouldn’t do so either but Geo is cut from another wood and full with enthusiasm takes us along. Maria’s dog China comes with us and since all have a dog, all want to mount China. Our walk becomes a disgusting parade of sniffing, licking and scratching. Pooping, pissing, equipment out, stuff potruding, discharge: the full range of being put off while walking a dog.

With getting older, the younger folks feel fresh and adding spice to the palate of my eyes. Mimi cutting the olive trees at Maria’s was a pleasure to see, slim and beautiful, agile and motivated. Or, when a door opens, the entire tattooed faces of the young chubby, self-made ‘priests’ from an unidentified place but, obviously, connected to India, busying themselves with a purification rite or homage to some goddess feels bubbly and alive. Their guest, or hosts, or something else, an extreme beautiful Uzbeki girl with Parvati stickers pasted on her face was as if looking straight at the sun, so radiating! Not that I want to join their party, smoldered in Indian incense smoke, they are clearly from another generation: but it is their own; they formed it. Maria, rejecting such unbiblical actions, was quick to peek inside their home when we got a chance. Indeed, Geo and I went over to ask which brand of incense they were burning as the sweet smell reached me from afar. The youngsters spoke a German dialect and had created a thing unknown to us. They handed us a whole package of incense and were all smiles and chubby tattoed cheeked respected manners.

That late afternoon I didn’t see addicts struggling in their head with demons or bliss. I saw people with dogs only, wanting a different sort of life, away from society, in a commune-like set-up that reminded me of a camping from the ‘80. An outhouse used by a sickly skinny guy who undressed the lower half completely before squatting over the hole. Once inside the outhouse he was loudly moaning, just before he clearly made a general request for donation to us. For sure, there are many nutcases, angry guys, tough hardened women, fully tattooed faces and heads, something I can’t get used to, but in between are the beautiful, smooth and different thinking people.

The views from Maria’s porch can not be enjoyed by merely watching them. With a week of heavy rainfall, which I knew would soak me throughout, I walked. It seems to me walking is the only way to be truly in nature.

Realizing to have the ability to get over the smallest paths is what beckons me more than anything. It’ll take me months more to realize that I need to get lighter gear. Now, on this walk with temperatures below minus I cover the air mattress with the down jacket and woolen pullover to keep the cold air from entering. Sleeping in a closed sleeping bag, with a design that isn’t good to keep down in place when open, remains suffocating and a trailer with the amount of stuff I haul… I guess I could do with less. Can I really go without being loaded on food?