September 5 2010 / Cadiz, Spain

The last blog entry was supposed to have been dated as the 4th of September—many apologies.  Also, I’m sorry that I haven’t been spacing between paragraphs, for some reason I thought that it was doing it automatically.  Anyway, for the 5th, I had a hike in Grazalema Natural Park planned.  Unfortunately, due to the late night and the incredible ability to hit alarms in my sleep, when I woke up it was 8:45am—I had fifteen minutes before the bus would leave.  I sprinted into the bathroom, throwing on a tanktop and shorts haphazardly.  I couldn’t figure out what I was missing, so I hoped for the best, grabbing my backpack and my water bottle.  I hopped on the bus just in time—and it was only when we were driving away and I was shivering in the air conditioning, that I looked down and saw my feet. 

Flipflops. 

I couldn’t have felt like more of an idiot, and I tried to think of every conceivable way to remedy the situation, but there was really nothing to do—we were already driving out of the city.  I tried to make light of it to Josh, Meredith and Steven, who were sitting nearby, but I knew I was totally screwed.  I just tried to think as positively as I could, which was tough.  Everyone was pretty exhausted, so I did my best to doze off and abruptly woke up in the mountains.  It was beautiful, almost like the Yosemite, with great big stone mountains.  It was also far more green than most of Spain that I had seen.  The bus we were on kept slamming on its breaks because the roads were so narrow and cars were just barely squeezing by us on these winding mountain roads.  We passed many “white towns,” which is where towns are painted entirely white to prevent it from getting ridiculously hot inside. 

Finally we found our way to parking inside Grazalema at the head of one of the trails, and I unenthusiastically bit into my lunch, which was a dreadful sandwich with meat of unfamiliar origins, a hardboiled egg, some chicken (???), a Capri Sun, an apple, and some Oreos.   I would have killed for a PB&J.  We would be walking for four miles, and I tried to ignore the fact that I was the only person without hiking shoes on.  We met our guides, Petro, and Anna, who was bilingual and translated for Pedro. 

The trail was rocky, and I spent much of my time hiking uphill with my eyes directly on my feet.  Occasionally when we stopped, people would ask how I was holding up, which I would respond to as cheerily as possible.  No one likes a whiner, especially when it was my own fault.  Every half hour or so our guides would stop to explain something—for example, wasps lay their eggs on the leaves of a tree.  The tree thinks it’s being attacked so it creates a tumor over that leave, creating a little brown ball.  Our guides found one on the ground and cracked it open—you could see the egg and the tunnel that the wasp had burrowed to get out inside!  It was pretty neat.  They also identified toxic plants that native women would use for abortions many years ago.

Reaching the highest point felt like quite an accomplishment—I hadn’t rolled my ankle, though at that point I had run completely out of water.  Below us there was a valley stretched out, with mountains looming all around.  Past the mountains you could see land stretching out as far as the eye could see, with a couple of white cities speckled here and there.  The heat wasn’t as bothersome as it had been the day before, as it felt more dry than the heat of Cadiz.  A little further down the path, they identified a couple of plants which were fatal if introduced into the bloodstream (one of them looked suspiciously like marijuana, and Pedro, seeing us look at it, said “no ai marijuana,” which made us all laugh).  A couple of people decided to go back at that point, but because I will not be a gigantic loser who gives up just because she decided to climb a mountain in flipflops, I kept trekking on.  We finally found what we had come to see—the endangered Spanish firs, many of which were over 500 years old.  They looked almost like Christmas trees, except the pine needles pointed the opposite way, and Pedro showed us how to identify how old the tree was by counting its branches’ growth.  By then we were all out of water, which quickly became miserable as we started hiking back up to descend back down the mountain. 

I was very proud of how I did on the hike—coming back I was near the front of the line, and I had not tripped and fallen, or rolled my ankle.  My knees, however, were definitely shaking as I got on the bus, and my vision was making things expand and contract.  Dehydration for the lose.  I was happy when we went to a town twenty minutes down the road so that I could buy myself a couple bottles of water that were quickly sucked down.  Steven and I talked on the way back about green energy and about some of the SAS trips that we’re going to take in the future (we are going to explore the Berber villages together).  Because I actually stayed awake for the ride back, I saw all sorts of windmills (Spain is powered by 50% renewable energy) and dead sunflower fields.  Steven wanted me to go with him to Catedral where there is free wifi, but there was no way.  Once we got back I showered and flopped into bed for a nap.  Around 10ish, I went upstairs to see what was going on, and saw Nathalie in the lounge, who was quickly joined by Jared, Julie, and Lorelei.  I decided to join them for tapas, and we went to a bar area where we ate croquetas caseras de jamon serrano (fried cheesey potato things), pulpo con emulsion de patatas al aceite de olive y pimaiton (octopus with a creamy mashed potato, with everything doused in olive oil), cana de lomo, Sierra de Sevilla (I think this was slices of lamb, but I can’t remember), and flan casero.  Because I hadn’t really eaten anything all day, I pointed to something random on the menu, choco de trasmallo frito, which turned out to be fried barnacles, which is a delicacy of Cadiz.  I LOVED the croquetas and the lamb.  The octopus was strange because you could still see the suckers and everything, but in the end it tasted like a chewy, fishy chicken.  The fried barnacles were actually really good (but then, everything fried is good), except the couple of end pieces I had had a bit of sand in there. 

Then we decided to wander around, looking into shop windows and talking absently.  There are a lot of dress stores with beautiful dresses in the front windows, which was exciting.  We got out to the Iglesia de San Francisco (Church of San Francisco) and got gelato from a stand that was open.  I had kinder flavor, which is apparently a kind of candy.  Eventually we wandered back to the ship, and I wrote blogs until I finally fell asleep.