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

Curso Cinco

En Malaga

There are several different Spanish verbs for existing—ser and estar. Ser is used to describe persons like I’m a student and class is now and she is blonde. Estar is used to say where someone is or how you are feeling. Like I am tired or I am here. And then if you have hunger or luck you have to use the verb tenir. So you have hunger instead of being hungry in the same way that you have a hangover, which lots of the kids at school get after trying to stay out until the Spanish night ends. The Spanish use more words for simply being. After half a dozen trips to Spain, I believe Spaniards live much more in the present and relish their state of being in contrast to drive-up Americans. They are masters of existing and being.

I am diagnosed with breast cancer for the first time shortly after our Easter visit to Spain. My immediate response is to quit traveling as I am afraid to leave my surgeon and afraid of lots of normal things. But what you learn from getting a life altering illness is that time is short. You learn to live for the present, like a Spaniard does naturally and enjoy each day and each meal. I am learning to be a master of being.

I made a short list of things I wanted to do that next year, in my selfish quest for mastery, which included running a marathon and learning a foreign language. Isn’t that always one of life’s regrets—not learning a foreign language and traveling to an exotic far-away place? If we were going to buy a house in Spain, somebody had to learn to speak Spanish, that was my rationale, and so I decided there was no time to dally. I also needed a running goal as it was getting much harder for me to run after each surgery. I booked a trip to both run a marathon and to go to Spanish school. Buying a house in Spain was a part of the bigger plan.

I traveled to Switzerland with my best friend and we ran the Jungfrau marathon. The race scenery proved indescribable beautifully. It was the picturesque Switzerland of Heidi books and Riccola cough drop commercials where men in Swiss knickers blow those really long mountain horns. Those mountain horn guys were there to serenade our running race. The mountains were gorgeously steep and green and large dairy cows with big bells lined the well marked trails of the Bernese Oberland like cheerleaders. Switzerland wins my clean green award as every hotel and restaurant put off an air of friendly and spotless despite its age. We fell asleep to rain on the windows with their perfect Swiss flowerboxes under fluffy down comforters and we woke to steaming mugs of tea, coffee and a breakfast spread to make marathon recovery fast. Whole grain rolls, muesli and fresh yogurt, croissants, lovely cheeses and meats were laid out for us, just as you would expect in a fairy land. After a stop in Lausanne to visit a friend, I left on my own trip to Spanish school in Malaga in Southern Spain. Returning to Spain proved to be a grand contrast to the clean, fresh and happy of Switzerland.

Malaga lies on the south west tip of Spain just 60 miles from Gibraltar on the Costa del Sol and is not a tourist town, but a port town established by Phoenicians in 100 B.C. I took a scary taxi ride from the airport to Pedregalejo, an old fishing village on the outer edge of Malaga. The ride appeared scary to my travel weary nerves because it was dark and I felt like I was being driven into the Italian countryside to be robbed and dumped, and scary because the driver went mach speed on the dark A7. ¬Es normal. Once I arrived, I lugged my baggage up three flights of marble stairs, not an easy activity a year after four chest surgeries, into a pleasant little marbled hostal a block from my school. I ignored the cockroach cucaracha behind the door as I was familiar with the little buggers from trips to Port au Prince and Waikiki. I was scheduled to move into a student flat after class the next day, so I decided to let the little things go and went to sleep after shaking out the sheets to check for other Spanish creatures.

I was tardy the first day of school because I couldn’t find the building. I knew it was as close as the beach and only a few blocks away, but every time I said the name of the school to a shopkeeper or hotel owner, no one understood what I was saying. It became painful trying to have a conversation knowing about 12 words of Spanish. It seems the American name and the Spanish name for la escuela de idioma in Malaga are completely different. I did find it two blocks from my hostal, after walking up and down the blocks of the town for a sweaty hour. I arrived red faced and eager as I do love going to school. However, all that bunk about it taking longer to learn things as you age is unnervingly true. Luckily, unraveling Spanish is like untangling a big book of beginner’s brain teasers. For me, it feels fun to make my brain work, fun like running a Swiss marathon.

Another bit of unnerving truth is the social life at a Spanish language school. The twenty something students appear young and blonde in their swingy skirts and minimalist tank tops. They were German, Finnish, Swedish and Dutch. The textbook translated into German and English from Spanish. The boys studied quietly and at break time they rushed to check football scores and to get photos of their girlfriends back home. The angel skinned girls were learning a third, fourth or fifth language and were doing courses for their PR firms back in Germany or as a way to pass a semester break. Student life included beach volleyball in the afternoon and long nights of Sangria drinking after dark, because that’s what you do in a Spanish beach town to learn the culture.

After my first class, I checked out the student flat I was suppose to sleep in and found it not so different than a college dorm with empty pizza boxes and a sink full of dishes. I was a fair age from having to tolerate dirty room mates and knew the difference between limpio and sucio. However, I also didn’t want to stay at the hostal on account of the cockroach encounter.

The coackroach I had left sleeping behind the door had turned aggressive. This was clearly its room and walking to the bathroom became a sort of battle. If I made a move towards the cockroach, which was about six inches long and two inches high, the beast would parlay towards me in its most threatening maneuver. When I later told a Spanish teacher about this, she laughed and said proudly that yes the cockroaches in Malaga were bold and brave like no where else in Spain. Maybe that’s why the only universally recognized Spanish song is the la cucaracha, la cucaracha, dada, dada, dada, da son.

I checked myself into a lovely old beach hotel and lead a peaceful week under the same several grass umbrellas watching German sun bathers get stung by jellyfish. Medusas make their annual appearance in the Mediterranean Sea every fall when the water temperatures are like bath water. The hotel was called the ¬Cohiba and once I left, it dawned on me that there was a lot more being smoked at the hotel restaurant than cigars. But the young, hip hotel staff was very nice to me and I actually learned the word for breakfast, desayuno, because they brought a tray of awesome coffee and bread to my room every morning. How indulgent is that? Not only was I living the wish to go to Spanish immersion school, but somebody was bringing me great coffee so I could read in bed in the morning.

I was too busy tasting vino tinto, reading great Spanish books on the beach and discovering all the ways to taste Gambas pil pil (fresh shrimp drenched in oil and spicy seasonings) at sunny beach restaurants to pay much attention to the night life at the Cohiba anyway. The food at each of the white table clothed beach restaurants on my stretch of salty sea tasted like a recipe from Gourmet magazine’s Spanish special edition. The Spanish crusty, white bread tastes a little bland, until I realize it was meant to soak up things—especially spicy olive oil. These beaches used to be old fishing villages and are famous for the seafood restaurants in both Pedregalejo and nearby El Palo. I love watching the waiters work their magic at a crowded dinner and I love watching huge Spanish families eat dinner in the sandy floored restaurants. There were always lots of kids running around and Spanish men talking rapidly on cell phones and a grandma dressed up in heels while bottles of wine and water piled up on the table.

I felt like the lonely traveler experiencing Malaga. Every time I tried to use my Spanish, I stuttered and tripped trying to say just the right thing. It got exhausting trying to navigate my way through dinner, lunches and trying to buy anything at any store. Malaga is not a tourist city and Malagans (or Malagites?) did not need to pander to an English speaker. It was even worse if I got self conscious talking like a middle aged American woman alone on a party beach in South Spain.

One day, I took a train trip into the countryside and discovered the gorges and limestone cliffs of El Chorro. I was searching for a place outside the city to run on trails. I navigated Malaga’s bus system, then took a commuter train to Alora, the nearest town to El Chorro. Since I was determined to get to the town of El Chorro and the climber’s refugio, Finca La Campana, I had to take a taxi the next 10k. El Chorro is a magnificent place to climb and mountain bike during the winter months when it is not so hot. I managed to find a crazy Scottish guy who was taking a rest day from climbing to show me some of the amazing trails in the area. We ran through the olive groves on little goat trails to get to the wider trails under the pine trees and when he could no longer keep up with me, I was left to find my own way back to the finca. I left the next morning as I was out of food and the weather was terrifically hot. I was still tired after running my marathon and navigating outside Malaga on my own left me frustrated with my lousy Spanish. In hindsight, I was tired from the marathon and the hot weather. This could be classified as a travel syndrome, like overtraining, you can over travel. Maybe I should have sat by the Med with an umbrella drink, but that’s not my style.

Later that week, I took the afternoon hiking trip with school mates up one of the mountainous dry hills behind the town of Pedregalejo, but we lost the trail and I ended up on a scary scramble with a German girl from my Spanish class. My Spanish was halting and her English was halting, so we were not a perfect pair of communicators. I think at that point I had hit some physical limit that brought my mental capacity to a halt too and then I just happened to be in a city where I could not speak the language. We did manage to agree on the post hiking beers. I think if you have a traveling companion, it’s much easier to shrug off your inability to communicate. You can talk about how chatty the grocery store clerk was or how catty a waiter is when you mispronounce something. When you face it alone, unless you have all the confidence of an 18-year old boy with sufficient levels of testosterone, you walk away questioning how stupid you must have sounded. I was done with Malaga and the city life. It was classic over travel syndrome.

So, my husband rode his white horse to my rescue and picked me up in Malaga in a rental car. We drove away from the oppressive grey heat of Malaga to Alicante and back to the cool mountain air of Finestrat. At that point, I wouldn’t even try and use the Spanish I had spent a week immersing myself in and diligently studying. It was tiring and besides, they speak English in Benidorm and Finestrat. They serve Guinness and chips and cater to tourists.

It was still hot in Alicante, which is not unusual for late September. Like most temperate places in the world in September it can either be summer hot or pleasantly cool, like fall, and foggy by the sea. It was hot this time. We looked for climbing areas with shade, but found it too hot to climb for too many hours. We went to Echo Valley, which had some short hard sort of slabby routes and we found the area pleasant with no people and amazing flowering sage and lavender growing on the hillsides. We got into a fight driving the rental car too close to the edge of an old cliff road looking for the routes at Toix. Half the fun of Spanish climbing is navigating some strange road to find the cliff that is actually in the guidebook. We went to Salinas, just past the town of Sax, because it was in a natural protected area and because the ridge climbing in the shade made the breezes a little cooler. Salinas is next to the salt flats, so you drive across this wide expanse of desert-like white dirt to some small hills with rocks all over them. As soon as you hit the hills, the landscape turns to mountain pine forest. The breezes were cool in the pine forest despite the long walk up a rutted dirt road. The walk would have been shorter had I not forbid my husband to wreck the rental car driving up the bad road.

At this point, I must digress and talk about the approach to climbing areas. I liken it to a snipe hunt. At some point, you have to let go and enjoy the search. I will quote from the Costa Blanca Rockfax guide: “After the small village of Salinas, drive straight through it. After you leave town, continue for 1.5k then turn right. At this point the ridge or the crag can be seen ahead. Ignore the first dirt track on the left and on the next bend continue straight onto a wide dirt track. Turn left off this onto another dirt track and follow it towards the crag past two sets of buildings. Keep left at the first branch and right at the second, etc.” The guide then tells you to get out of the car unless you want to puncture the fuel tank. So naturally, I want to get out of the car. This argument follows several previous discussions about whether we had taken the first or the second right and whether we were on a wide track or a hiking trail and whether a lean-to with a bamboo roof qualified as one of the buildings. The easy part of Salinas is that you can actually sight the crag and steer for it.

Anyway, the lack of perfect climbing temperatures left ample time to explore new beaches and to try new Spanish ingredients for dinner, something we had rarely taken the time to do before. My husband took me to another pizzeria on the main street of Finestrat where he had been with some climbers on a previous trip. Ooh La La is run by a French woman and the thin crust pizzas and big salads are fresca and taste great. She sometimes makes curry specials and she lets me attempt to speak bad French to her which is still better than my even worse Spanish. I like to drink wine at her big barrel tables outside so we can watch the village dogs stake out territory.

It also left time to tour houses and properties for sale. I said I really never wanted to live in Spain after trying to live my one week of school in a very Spanish city, but that didn’t stop my husband. He just switched the gears in his property hunting manual and said maybe a house in town would be a better investment.

Buying a house in town meant that it would already be built, have no property or groves of olive trees to maintain, and would be easily rentable to other outdoor enthusiasts. To a Brit, this would mean buying a white villa in one of the new urbanizations built by the sea, but to us, buying a house in town meant in the town of Finestrat, and a house meant a village house or a casa de pueblo. I stayed by the pool at the Orange House, safe with a supply of Coca Cola Light, while my husband spent several half days looking through ruins in the village. Sometimes, if he took too long, I walked to the Moli Dos for my afternoon beer and peanuts. I was happy to sit and watch the street action but it was weird to think that people might be watching us as strangers who were looking for an old house to buy in the village. I should have had my photo taken under the fake guillotine at that town birthday party on the last trip.

The lower levels of the village houses were built as storage and stables for donkeys and other animals in the early 1200s. The houses were built narrow and tall so that the living was on three or four levels with rooftops for drying laundry or eating outside. Some of the lower levels I peak into look like garages for Mini Coopers. You can barely drive a car up or down the narrow cobblestone streets, but where there is a will there is a way to get your car into a garage. Some lower levels house motorcycles or artist’s studios. It is fun to watch a car whip around the tight corners or to watch a city construction truck scratch against the side of a village house. Small Spanish dogs always manage to hop up on the curb of these narrow streets at the last minute, a remarkable feat considering an American dog would end up under the wheel. Darwin at work.

The newer village houses, casa de pueblos, in Finestrat are painted in Mediterranean colors like Colorado red, azul and antique yellow. They are small and narrow, sometimes with indoor courtyards. Photos of saints and the Virgin Mary are etched or painted onto the stucco walls and the windows are framed by iron bars. The doors are made of the thickest, most solid wood from the oldest of pine trees that you can no longer buy. The doors on each village house are works of art with floral carvings or elaborate metal door knockers and clay pots are hung on the outside walls of the house or on freshly swept marble doorsteps.

We walk through the village in the evening after tapas or dinner and I would get a tour of the houses my husband had looked through. His real estate agent was born and raised in the town and knew lots of tidbits about each house and its owner, so he had stories to tell about each house. I made it clear that it was entertaining, but I had no interest in ever living in one of them. He glowed over number 33, a redone house on the main street. It was way more than we would ever spend on a house in Spain, but it showed how one of the old village houses could be renovated and rebuilt in traditional Spanish style. It looked grand with sweeping marble stairways and doors that threw open to a spectacular mountain or sea view. The way he talked about the houses and the thought of buying a house made him giddy—really happy. It’s hard to reason why people want to buy vacation houses anywhere, especially in a town so Spanish and so remote, but I had to realize that despite my bad experiences, he still wanted a house in Spain. The climbing had taken a hold of his heart and something in this region, a mujera or something intangible, had him smitten over every aspect of the country and the little town of Finestrat.

We discover a beach called Cala Moraig, the first beach that I actually want to hang out at. The limestone cliffs extend all the way to the sea which makes it one of the premier spots for deep water soloing and there are no hotels or high rises. Deep water soloing is where climbers climb a route without ropes and if you miss a hold, you jump, or fall into the sea—sometimes with rock shoes and all. It is bouldering by the sea. I was leery of the water after watching tourists get stung in Malaga, but the jellyfish infestation had not hit that part of the Costa Blanca or the Costa Brava yet. Apparently a jellyfish invasion—they call it the mauve stinger or pelegia noctiluca-- took place that summer from the Costa del Sol to France and all the way over to Sicily. They say it’s because of global warming. The Mediterranean Sea is getting warmer and less fresh water is coming into the sea.

I finally get in the water after spending weeks by the beach, and just splash around instead of swim in case the jellyfish are lying in wait. A nice beach bar serves all the Coca Cola Lights a girl could want, con hielo (with ice), and the restaurant serves super good boccadillos and fresh seafood salads. We realize how fun it would be to have a kayak to explore all the coves and beaches along this coast. When I look out to the sea, I spy sail boats and fishing boats. Unlike tourist spots in Florida or California, there are not a lot of loud motor boats and jet skis. I started thinking that if we had a boat, maybe I would actually have a clean place to sleep.

I had to fly back to the US out of Malaga, so we took our time to drive back to Malaga from Finestrat. The driving still seems fast and furious on the Spanish highways. Spanish economy rental cars are really tiny and the small car bodies sort of lean and wobble driving in the left lane of the toll roads. It can get a little exhausting, but the rest stops are worthy of a look anyway. They used to just wig me out because they always seemed kind of sketchy, like some low life drug dealer or ax murderer should be hanging out there, but now I realize they are just a Spanish version of a Midwest truck stop, like an old red roofed Stuckeys on the Kansas interstate. Each rest stop usually has a restaurant and a gas station. Some rest stops have hotels and parks too. There could easily still be drug dealers hanging out at the rest stops, but ignorance is bliss and I would never know. We need to stop at dark and we are only about half way between Alicante and Malaga near a mountainous region called the Sierra de Orihuela and so we inadvertantly discover the Arab city of Murcia. That’s sort of how I discover anything I like, it’s by mistake or when I’m having a really bad day and need to get off the highway, NOW.

My husband is not afraid to drive anywhere in Europe and so he drives right off the hectic rush hour toll road into the chaotic old part of Murcia on one way roads and crazy narrow streets. We check into one of those classic European business hotels, a Silken, all glass and black tile, because it comes with free underground parking and because we are starting to drive in a big loop.

Then, unexpectedly, we spend a spectacular summer like night walking through the old town and shopping in the Spanish stores. Murcia is an old Moorish city between two mountain ranges. The Christians destroyed all the old mosques when they took over and built some amazing cathedrals, including the stunning 15th century Cathedral de Santa Maria. The streets in the old quarter of Murcia are called Plateria, Traperia and Vidrieros after the original silversmiths, rags and glass makers that kept their shops. I love the selection of Spanish shoe shops sandwiched between stark colored ice cream shops and there are funky old casinos with shiny marble floors and crystal chandeliers. We eat a fantastic dinner outside in the Plaza de Santo Domingo in the shadow of another amazing Spanish cathedral and by the time we finish our bottle of Jumilla wine, made in the Murcia region, it is close to midnight. As if on cue, the fireworks start over the square. I am clearly beginning to adjust to Spanish time because I am in no hurry to sleep.

After I am back in Boulder and thinking about my trip, the pleasant blue light of Cala Moraig triggers some sort of happiness and when I let myself think about it, I really want to go back and explore Murcia. The old town was one of the most interesting Spanish cities I had visited yet and there was an intriguing coastline to explore before the town of Nerja.

Even though it is frustratingly foreign sometimes, Spain has become my respite from doctor’s visits and looming medical check ups. When I am in Spain, I easily adopt the Spanish day and stay present in the moment, versus feigning a happy survivor face at home. There are so many places still left to explore and discover in Spain that I find myself researching places that we only drove through to see what we missed.

After my husband drops me off at the Pablo Ruiz Picasso Aeropuerto in Malaga, he meets up with a German buddy and they climb and surf their way around the south eastern tip of Spain into Portugal. He comes home with photos and happy tales of long sand beaches and fantastic little fishing villages turned surfer cool. After that, it only takes six months for me to go back. It takes my husband half that time.