Squid Ink: The Book of Costa Blanca – a Spanish travelogue

Curso Uno

Mallorca, My first time

What I view out the plastic window of our Iberian plane on the decent are strange broken windmills and an airport that looks like a remote airstrip in some drug infested country instead of cultured, postcard Europe. On our first trip, three flights from Denver, we land on a Spanish island far from the hot paradise of a pacific winter vacation and without the glamour of Charles de Gaulle. I chose the warm island, and he chose the perfectly bolted sport climbing on Mallorca. Choices around the world for a combo of sun and rock climbing are rather limited, so we land in the Balearics in November where it rains the same as England only warmer. Large palm trees bend and wave in a Mediterranean winter breeze, which I interpret like a stiff cold wind, as we make our debut party in Spain. Palm trees always signal good things for me.

This first trip to Spain remains dreamlike, but it gave me distinct memories that now melt into our later trips to Iberia. My son was only five at the time and we traveled with friends. My time was either dictated by baby sitting or by following our friend's rigid climbing schedule. It rained a lot and we spent a lot of time playing under the cliff walls at old quarries like Ses Tret, in the dirt and out of the relentless mistral like wind. I remember lots of sheep and a constant background noise of bells clanging like the distinct ringing bells of Swiss cows, only these bells were on Spanish sheep. The sheep loitered around every corner and in every town we traveled on the island. The limestone sparkled on the rolling hills where the sheep tore at their grass and wild blue rosemary bushes flashed on top of stunning roadside drop offs on the island's seaside edge.

We landed on the island thanks to the ease of Orbitz.com and the cheap flights that fly constantly to Palma de Mallorca, the capital of the Balearic Islands. The ease and beauty of Orbitz means the luggage gets automatically changed through from flight to flight and you don't have to schlep it through airport security lines. (Remember, this was my idealic first trip, lost luggage would come later.) Less luggage is a true bonus when you are hauling climbing gear and extra child gear. From London, Frankfurt, Geneva, Madrid, the cheapest place to fly to always comes up Palma. If it sounds too good to be true…then it is. While climbing on Mallorca is world renowned, in November the Mediterranean island and most of its limestone cliffs seep with wetness and holds can be slippery like a wriggling fish.

Of course there were the fleeting flashes of warm sun to lure us to outdoor Spanish cafés, but the clouds hang over the Serra de Tramuntana surrounding the Soller Valley where we are staying and make it too cold to sit outside for long enough to finish a drink. The writer George Sands and I would have been great friends. She came to winter on Mallorca with Frederic Chopin in the lovely seaside town of Valledemossa in 1838 and the story goes that the monastery where they stayed was so cold and wet that Chopin almost died. No wonder the British like it here, it's just like home. The wet seemed deathly cold to me too in only the way old Europe can feel damp and cold in the winter. It's the cold that gets to your core and makes your fingers too cold to climb.

We came in November because the weather turns wicked cold in Colorado and we thought it would be contrastingly fun. But on our first day out, the spastic walking habits of a five year old boy frightened my mom sense of reality and I watched the pebbles we kicked falling down a single track trail go straight off of a thousand foot drop into the sea. Big, noisy waves crashed at the bottom of the drop where hundreds of seagulls circled like vultures waiting for a little corpse to tumble. There are no dolphins in this Mediterranean sea, no jumping fish, no whale spouts, none of the vivid sea life of the pacific paradises I am used to. I would spend a lot of time that trip minding that my little dude did not join that illusive sea life.

I know there is something in the turquoise water besides trash, which is all I notice, because the national food in Spain is squid. Paella de negro, a signature dish, is black rice made from squid ink with a few octopus legs and mussels thrown in to add to the slime factor. Mediterranean sea life is an integral part of Spanish life wound around the soul through food and culture. We will eat squid in all its variations bite by bite, trip by trip.

The climbing wall at Port Soller was spectacularly good for a day out on Spanish rock, even as it rested over the crashing sea. Climbers happily climb at the sea cliffs despite the jack hammering and bulldozing noise from the construction site on the dramatic hill top. The cliffs face west to the sparkling sea and the wind is broken by furry pine trees, thus it is the perfect spot to build seaside blight as well as to climb. Rows of white stucco apartments are drilled right into the hillside to keep watch over the Port de Soller and to accommodate the masses of Germans who search for southern sun on Mallorca.

The signs leading up to the cliffs warn us to stay off the trails because of the construction. When you are searching for routes highly recommended in some British climbing guide book, there comes a decisive moment you must interpret whether the word peligroso spray painted on white signs really mean it is illegal to trespass because it is indeed dangerous or whether it's just some sign put up to keep the tourists out. My small boy herding instincts leaned toward turning around. My climbing obsessed husband once got beat up in a campground in south France for walking past a verboten sign when he was trying to get to a route he had to climb. The French cliff itself was not illegal, just that particular path to it and being that we didn't read French or German, well, we just didn't get it.

Verboten is a universal word that is quite claro to me now, but peligroso sounds like a pretty word in Spanish. It sounds like the way you should play a classical musical instrument or the name of a local bird habitat. It's easy to get hung up on what you think a word might mean when you really have no idea what the sign actually says and somehow those words go missing in those small travel dictionaries that I collect. Peligroso means dangerous.

In these first trips to Mallorca I struggle with the language and discover I can think in French easier then in Spanish. The words and phrases of Mallorquin Spanish seem more similar to French and my Spanish tends to be more similar to spring break Mexican Spanish. I learned how to say buenos dias and dos cervezas in Mexico, therefore speaking quite fluently by American tourism standards.

On Mallorca, when a little old Spanish man passes by on the street, he says, "bon dia" which mostly comes out like a gruff "bon di." Spaniards in the Balearic Isles speak a dialect of Catalan and each island has its own dialect. Cervezas are pronounced more like tharbaythas and they drink beer for lunch and mid day fluid replacement and not really for dinner.

I did manage to make a few memories that first trip and we fell in love with the staircase to the moon. One day when the climbers went climbing, my son and I went to the small town of Fornalutx, near Soller, and found a steep cobblestone staircase called the Carrer de le Luna. The streets were only as wide as sidewalks and they wove between high stucco village house walls covered with hanging ivy and wild bougainvillea. Potted ferns, succulents and gardenias cover the walls and doorways of the village. Giant Tucson-like cactus stuck out the front of thick wood doors in small alleys. The stray feral cats nest in the sun under the cactus and pottery vases hang with huge aloe vera over blue doors.

After climbing hundreds of steps, quite a feat for short legs, we stop to rest on a stone bench chiseled into the structure of a building. I look up and discover that we are sitting in front of a little church built in 1624. Next to the metal cross and the date is a weathered sun dial. That is my postcard Europe moment. Every once in while, as a middle age, middle class American, I just have to gasp at the history that embodies every step in Europe and marvel at its old, damp stories.

When we peek past the heavy wood doors in the preserved village of Fornalutx into open courtyards, we discover small boutique hostals or rather fancy looking agrotourisme hotels with equally fancy nightly prices. Lots of European tourists have discovered the charms of this small village already, despite the fact that there is only one lovely café in the square by the water trough and only one bakery that is not open.

In Fornalutx, like other parts of Spain, the pottery is thick and old and the wood of the doors and windows look polished like a rustic Spanish treasure in a museum. From the terraced hillside, the river Torrent runs with water filled with trash from the rain. Here is a quick glimpse of the crash of Spanish culture meeting mass tourism. How difficult it must be in the midst of startlingly white sun and pristine tile to talk about trash control. Here flashes an inkling into my Spanish future. In Spain, there looms a nagging clash between the rustic and the startling modernization of the country. Think trash in historic wilderness. This visit to Spain is before the introduction of the Euro and before the Spanish entrance into the European Union.

What I discover that day on the old cobble steps in Fornalutx I later came to recognize as typical Spanish style. I learn to love real, creamy café con leche on our first trip and I discover that bowls of snails take longer to learn to love. A hot mug of frothy coffee with thick milk tastes just as good on a cold damp trip as on a sunny hot trip when you are in Spain. The climbing on Mallorca is steep and perfect at every grade and each crag is like its own little Euro climbing area with distinct features and particular routes that stand out as the best we could ever climb anywhere. All the doors, garage doors and front doors, appear grandly thick and old.

As for the snails, well that was a mistaken order at a taverna on a mountain top. We drove the rental car up a steep tarmacked mountain road past a town called Alaro until the road turned to dirt and the ride got bumpy and rutted. Since it was a rental car, we kept on going past herds of happy sheep and up a steeper and steeper track until we just couldn't drive the car anymore. Of course, right where the road ends and the mountain trails begin, there just happened to be a stone taverna that looked like an old stucco barn. Europeans always manage to put refreshments right where you need them. I remember running on a mountain trail high in the Dolomites one year and running into a restaurant after several hours on the trail in the middle of the mountains. I had seen no people and had no money and right at the mountain's edge, just when you would want a coke or a sandwhich, sat the perfect little refugio.

From the taverna we hiked up the forested mountainside to a huge cliff under the Castillo d'Alaro. The Castillo Wall is directly underneath a 15-century castle that sits like a king on a mountaintop facing west into the warm sun towards Palma. Just like in Italy or Switzerland, large families of hikers trek to the old castle for pictures and picnics. It was a Sunday, a family holiday, and they pointed and stepped over our ropes, while we climb a red wall marked by horizontal bands of gold rock called tufas.

Once the sun went behind the sea, we walked back down to the taverna, but by this time all the grandmas who had hiked in their Sunday church clothes and patent high heeled shoes, had beat us down the mountain and into the restaurant. The windowless building was packed with Mallorquin families pulled up to long wooden tables eating things from flaming bowls that kept arriving at the long wooden tables while several parrots in oversized cages squawked over the party noise. A deep fire roared near the kitchen and we luckily found a table downstairs by a storage room. When you happen into a Spanish restaurant in the forest it always seems like you have just walked into a raucous festival of some sort, but really it's just Sunday lunch.

My son, having spied the cute band of sheep in the back of the taverna, ordered lamb and French fries from an overworked waiter who had no time for English. We managed to order beers and vino tinto as Americans never fail to learn the foreign words for alcohol and then the bowls of flaming snails arrived. One mispronunciation from an over confident Spanish speaker and five tired and hungry climbers were left with a couple of plates of lamb and frites and an earthenware bowl full of hot snails in toasty shimmering shells. Dios Mio.

We did have another memorable meal on another day in Port Soller where the specialty is squid everything. I think it was Thanksgiving in US time. Restaurants and cafes line the boardwalk of Port Soller with its small fishing boats and small lake-like marina. No time to dabble and play at the seaside as the cold wind feels like a quick slap across the face in November.

An ancient trolley runs between Soller and Port Soller not for effect, but because there is no place to park. The town is a dead end at the sea, but everyone wants to go there. The aqua water lapping the rocky shore is brilliant and I suppose the shore is full of Spanish and German sunbathers when the sun bursts out. Some of the local Crianza has a higher alcohol content and I've decided that must be to withstand the wet, cold Mallorquin winter-and to help swallow the squid.

If you can get over the fact that you're eating squid, it can be delectable. Eating stuffed squid gives you the same sensation as eating a fabulous chili rellenos in Sante Fe. You kind of bite into something squishy and crunchy at the same time, like peanut butter in the middle of rich chocolate. New sensations and new destinations make me an insatiable traveler. Even if you have a bad trip and are ready to go home, you take with you the new smells and the sea air. Somehow the new sensations creep into your brain and become a part of a memory that is easily and happily triggered.