Like most things are meant to do, Nathan and I have changed our plans to stay on the farm until May. We left abruptly on Monday after deciding only on Saturday evening that we were going to leave. We´re both really excited to be off the farm (YEAH NO WORK!!!)… we just aren´t excited about the month that will put a good toll on our wallets… especially since we´re in Europe where the current exchange is somthing like 1.39… OUCH!
We are definitely making the best of it being here. We left for Málaga yesterday without knowing where we were going to stay and ended up at the Downtown Hostel. The accomodations here are nice (the free breakfast sold us really… even if it was just some bread and ceral) and like most of Spain the clientel aren´t in bed until after 2am… but they certainly are interesting. We met a bunch of Scandanavians who all speak practically perfect English and shared some chocolate with us. They offered other things but Nathan and I said no thank you! They also took us to a bar that was featuring a really cool band with an amazing guitarist and an electric violin. They played some really upbeat dancy music while Nathan and I sipped our 2€ zumo de piña… wicked fun!
We did end up getting a couchsurfing reponse from someone in Málaga for this evening so we won´t have to stay at the hostel another night… our wallets are thanking us. We´re both excited to meet a local and speak some more spanish. Excitingly enough we´ve been told by a bunch of people that our spanish is actually good!!! (I think that´s because I let Nathan speak more than I let myself speak :P)
For our next plan we´re headed to Tarifa with a stop near Gibralter. Eventually we´re thinking of heading to Cadiz to spend a week there before heading back to Seville and Madrid. Soon enough we´ll be off to Turkey and Ireland and back home to visit our friends and family we´ve missed tons!!! We´re both excited about our travels, but I can´t wait for all the hugs when I get back!!!
My good friend Brett Rutherford wrote this poem in response to a gloomy end-of-the-world poem written by a friend of his. I hope you find it as beautiful as I do. Thank you Brett for letting me post this.
I have heard the shrill call of your prophet bird.
Night and the moon have brought me out
to the sea shore to hear its funereal song.
I will not weep, cannot despair.
I stand on this storm-blown, sea-rising
drought-ridden planet, yet my heart
is not sinking, even as maniacs
wild-eyed and waving Kalashnikovs & holybooks
explode themselves and bring carnage around them,
even as I consider Europe a vast boneyard,
the Middle East a trashheap of uncivilizations
piled high since the first silt of Nile & Tigris
gave idle kings & priests the criminal idea
that they, or their supernatural betters
had dominion over everything, and for all time.
What creatures! Fashion a stylus or a horn of brass,
and then a scimitar. Invent polyphony,
then make for Torquemada
an exquisite device for torture.
Should such vile animals,
with the table manners of Harpies,
be written off by the Animal Kingdom,
turned out by thorn and briar by the Plants,
poisoned to extinction by acrid Minerals,
blotted by the very sun and stars?
I answer only that Beauty redeems everything.
Even the tiger, when it is not hungry,
looks on the bounding gazelle
as a thing of wonder.
For the line of one neck and shoulder
on a Phidean marble,
one phrase of Handel or Mozart,
one heart-stopping dab of paint on canvas,
we are forgiven much. We share with life,
from pseudopod to mammoth,
from the most delicate tendril
to the great bulk of whale-flesh,
the way the all-too-familiar disk
of the sun-faced daisy might see us,
the fascinated horror we feel
as we regard the self-
illuminating eye of the giant squid —
all monstrous to all, all beautiful to all
as long as life goes drunk on self-delight
and aches for the touch of its kind,
as long as we know that all life enjoys
the benediction of earth-turn and sunrise
that the first word the Universe uttered
was Surprise!
Another human chapter is ending.
It is not the end of everything
(only the thin-lipped prophets
with their dry-leaf Bibles
believe that everything will end).
The story is not over.
It will never be over.
Walls and guard towers have fallen,
death camps and prison camps closed.
All this is good. That some mass murderers
sleep in their pensioned beds disturbs me.
That new Lenins and Berias and Stalins
are waiting to be born, disturbs me.
But life itself has something in store for us.
We will star-leap if we must to another Earth
if we cannot learn from this one.
The air, yes, is a different color now.
Trees on the mountaintops brown in its acid.
If elm, beech and chestnut
possessed a smiting god to call upon
the green world would rise and smother us.
Full half of the cause of the harm we do
is that we live so briefly,
so little time for giving and healing
after so much seizing and taking.
So let us live longer, not less,
let us become old-timers, undying,
cyborgs if we must —
if all the great men and women past were there for us,
even if only as their brains afloat in a tank
in squawk-voice semblance of living,
still they would come to us
the way the ghost-Athena seized
the sword-hand of Achilleus,
saying to him, Don’t do that
It is because we die
that we make Earth an ashtray,
choke ocean with petrol and styrofoam.
I do not worry much about banks, and mortgages.
Things fall apart, and pass away.
Their place will be taken by other things.
I would welcome the end of six-lane highways,
the tic-tac-toe of airplanes across the sky.
I see a different millennium unfolding
not of steel girders and oil derricks.
So long as we escape the total madness
of mouth-foaming God-told-me-so
hand-on-Apocalypse men,
so long as our better natures prevail
I will live to see every book ever written
available free to everyone on earth,
Beethoven free, Homer and Virgil and Dante,
Shelley and Poe and Whitman for everyone,
a never-closing museum that all may walk
alone or in the best of company —
Your prophet bird
would sing disaster,
minor in downward scale —
my bird, the melody inverts,
beaking the flats away,
my scale ascending.
So all the while living on the coast of the Mediterranean Nathan and I have been eying the mountain summit across the valley seen from our home/camper. Yesterday was the day we decided to make the climb. And what a climb it was.
We packed three meals (for two), fruit and tortillas and 2.5 liters of water along with a tent and some other stuff and made our way to the trailhead. It took us about two hours to walk to the “trailhead” which wasn’t an actual route that anyone in their right mind would climb. We found a road that had a sign for hikers and for the natural park around the mountain. Little did we know that it wasn’t a path to the mountain, so we did what goats had been doing for years and followed the remnance of their passages up to the top. The climb was straight up and fast. It only took us a couple hours to get to the summit from the closest road. We were really tired when we got to the top and very thankful we weren’t about to go back down until today.
We watched the sunset and then this morning the sunrise. We spent our first night in our tent. It was nice to be away from the farm for a night… even though the ground was not the best to sleep on and Nathan complained I pushed him into our backpacks all night. Either way we left around 9am in the same direction we were originally headed to descend the ridge of the mountain where a nice beaten path was waiting for us. The path took us straight to Frigiliana and to the restaurant Splash where we ate to our hearts content… which meant an appetizer, two main plates, and three desserts… Yes, three… Mmm, caramel bread pudding… The owner (Gary) was nice enough to drive us all the way back home too… which saved us over an hour’s worth of walking.
Here are some pictures of the hike and a couple of videos of the summit.
This is mine and Nathan’s friend Chelsea singing Sarah Mclachlan’s “The Answer”…
The title of this post says it all. Check her out! We also did a song together named “In Your Arms” that for some reason isn’t on my blog but you can find it on Chelsea’s MySpace:
By chance/luck/coincidence the day after needing a place to go, Nathan and I found a request for WWOOFers in the mountains of Málaga. We jumped on the opportunity to experience a new place and we were greatly surprised. Sevilla was beautiful but where we are now is just stunning.
Our trip started on a Monday morning by bus to the city of Málaga. From Málaga we made our way further south east along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea to a town known as Torrox. From there we were picked up by our host José Luis and brought to our new temporary home in the mountains. It was light when we arrived and we were just blown away by the views. My first thought was “This can’t be real!”. The road kept winding upward into the mountains and always overlooking the valley and sea below. Small white villas dotted the landscape that was completely filled with a variety of trees. It was difficult the focus on our conversation because it was so amazing.
When we turned sharply down a side road I knew we were getting close. As the road sloped downward the view to the valley opened up again and the car stopped in front of the first house we came to. When we got out of the car José Luis immediately started to show us around our new surroundings. He introduced us to Laura and their two-year-old daughter Abril. Then he proceeded to take us to the fields. We walked about a couple hundred yards away from the house down a dirt path that came to a little blue camper… our new home!!!
We were very pleased with our accommodations especially our new teepee toilet down the hill. We then took the next path down the incline to the fields that are located about 100 feet from out camper. There are two of them that are one on top of the other and surrounded by sugar cane to protect the young plants from high velocity winds and cold.
We spent our first night enjoying a meal of lentils and potatoes by candlelight thinking how lucky we were to be in paradise.
It’s been over two weeks and life couldn’t get better. We spend a lot of our time weeding and recently have been planting and putting up bamboo poles for the peas. We get up at dawn, just before the sun comes up over the other side of the valley. Since we have no clock we begin work after a cup of hot mint tea. After working for a few hours we take a break to have a small breakfast and continue working until 3pm when it’s time for lunch. We share this meal together, and I’ve been welcomed to cook a few times now, the first being only the second day on the farm. Nathan and I keep ourselves busy. We like to spend time running around looking for fruit that’s dropped from the trees (avocados and oranges). But in the evening we return to our cozy home and cook a fabulous dinner. I’ve started experimenting making tortillas and for dessert I like to make typical American fried dough with cinnamon sugar. (Tonight I’m making my first attempt at preparing a real Spanish tortilla de patatas.) We have all the vegetables of the garden at our disposal as well as bean and rice (and basically anything else we would ask for). We’re in heaven.
We’ve decided to stay here for the remainder of our time in Spain. We’re currently looking at intentional farming communities in South and Central America as well as Portland, Oregon. That’s right; we’re movin’ west. Sad to say for all my friends in the east, but it’s been a dream of mine for a while. If Nathan and I are going to start a life together somewhere we might as well try someplace we’ve never been. Our hopes are high for a home with space for an intensive garden to experiment with and jobs to pay off our college debt.
We’re very excited about taking our next step, but we do really love it here on the farm. José Luis and Laura have been extremely welcoming; it’s more than we could have ever asked for. Conversation isn’t a breeze because of language but they’re always patient and great at repeating themselves. Abril is so cute and inquisitive. She affectionately calls us “Los Chicos,” and she’s warming up to us after initial shyness. If/when we come to Spain again, we’ll surely be back to visit this wonderful family.
They also took us to a bar that was featuring a really cool band with an amazing guitarist and an electric violin. They played some really upbeat dancy music while Nathan and I sipped our 2€ zumo de piña… wicked fun!
