My name is Razzbuffnik and I’m a colour-aholic

I admit it, I need help.

Why only today, I arrived in Madrid in the afternoon after driving all day and when I went to a park near to where we’re staying to unwind, I saw the scene below.

Now I know, there is no honour in taking photos of sunsets and even though I keep promising myself not to take them, my weakness for intense colours takes over and before I know it I’ve taken way too many shots yet again.

I feel so ashamed and dirty.

As penance, I’m going to the Prado tomorrow.

Whilst visiting the Roman ruins at Acinipo a donkey came up to my wife and I as we stood near an old carved block of stone.

Over the years I found that the equine species are a curious lot, and if you stand or sit still in a field for a while, they will, unbidden, come up to you. Which is something that those of you who wish to bridle a horse, that has been left alone in a paddock for a while, would do well to take note of.

The donkey was probably looking to be fed but we had no oats or grass to give it so it contented itself with a few pats, strokes and scratches. The old stone block we were standing by, had a few lines carved in its side and had perhaps at some time been the corner of a structure.

As I looked at the donkey and the stone I was reminded of something that I read once, “both monkeys and humans see the stars but only humans regard them”.

Looking into the donkey’s eyes I wondered what ideas, if any, rattled around in its head.

Eat,
sleep,
mate,
piss and shit.

Perhaps?

Of course the donkey didn’t know it grazed over an old Roman settlement that was created for retired soldiers who fought for Julius Caesar against the army of Pompeis’  sons or that the stone it stood next to was shaped by human hands two thousand years ago.

About 30 years ago I read “Fatu Hiva back to nature” by Thor Heyerdahl and I was struck by how he was a thinker who didn’t just look at things and walk on by.

In the early eighties I saw Thor Heyerdahl give a talk about his books and theories. Although some of Thor’s ideas have been shown to be wrong, I have an overwhelming respect for the man as a thinker and human being. I love the way how he spent his life and the way how he looked at things.

After the great man gave his talk I went to a bar with a friend and I can still remember all these years later, how I was struck by the scene that I was presented with as I walked in. In the darkened boozer I could see various guys with arms folded, beer in one hand leaning against the walls with a uniform countenance that seemed to bespeak, “come, let me fuck you”.

Eat,
sleep,
mate,
piss and shit.

As my step father Manfred would say, “sex and alcohol are a small man’s sunshine”.

Some people are like the monkeys that see the stars but don’t regard them. Monkeys skip over the ruins of great civilizations without giving the slightest thought about what they are passing over. It’s not that the stones of the ruins are human fashioned, it’s that to a monkey, all stones are more or less the same.

Monkeys, or donkeys for that matter, through no fault of their own, don’t know or even care where they are in the world or where they fit in. They just are, and from a Buddhist perspective that’s pretty close to being materially unattached and very much in the moment.

Those of you who have read this blog for a while will have probably realized that I’m very pro, “be here now”, but I’d like to clarify my stance and say that a life lived without regarding what is around us, is a life that’s half lived. It’s almost a waste of being human.

Sentinil is a little town that is famous for the fact some of its houses that are built under overhangs,

but I think its real charm is how the rest of the buildings are crowded up the hills that surround them.

Both my wife and I are quite interested in European pre-history.  Me, because I feel genetically and culturally adrift in Australia, knowing that I wasn’t really designed for where I live.  The aborigines can claim to truly come from Australia but I know my roots are in Europe.  Engogirl, on the other hand, is fascinated by early forms of technology.

Antequera in Andalucia has some of the best preserved and largest dolmens in all of Europe, so we decided to go there.  About 20 or 30 kms before we reached Antequera, I noticed a very interesting geological formation that I later found out is called La Peña de los Enamorados (“The lover’s leap” based on an old story of a Christian boy and Moslem girl who throw themselves to death because of family disapproval).  Coming from Granada, the formation looked a bit like a high saddle with two limestone peaks and an alpine meadow in-between. 

It just stood out in the landscape, and when I saw it I asked Engogirl “how far are we from the dolmens?” 

She replied, “we’ve still got some way to go”. 

I then said, “I bet that place has a lot of local cultural significance, it just stands out as being important”.  

As we drove along and got closer to Antequera, we swung around the peak, Engogirl said “you know, that looks like a face”.

After a nightmare time fumbling our way through a small Spanish town with very thin streets, many of which were under reconstruction, we finally made our way to the Archaeological Park of Cueva de Menga, which houses two excavated dolmens, the best preserved of which is the Menga dolmen.

The dolmens in this area of Spain are thought to have been constructed about 5,000 years ago.  The stones used in their construction are massive (the biggest being 180 tonnes), and thanks to a very informative video in the reception centre it was explained how they were put into place. 

As informative as I found the video, Engogirl with a much more educated eye than mine about such things had problems with how they came to their conclusions as they didn’t offer any evidence for their suggested methods, although the hypothesis seemed reasonable.

It’s not really known what the dolmens were used for (Wikipedia, bless them, do have a bit more to say on the matter but of they aren’t all that rigorous so I won’t quote them on this matter), but the openings face La Peña de los Enamorados, which looks like a giant person’s face staring up into the sky.

On such a cold and moody day as today, it wasn’t  hard to imagine such an amazing sight having an effect on a person’s mind.

In the reception centre is an enigmatic carving that the archaeological student serving time at the counter suggested was thought to be an idol. 

Unfortunately we couldn’t have much of a discussion because of language difficulties, but I tried to explain to him that it looked like a butterfly or moth chrysalis to me, and since the insect’s metamorphosis would have seemed quite magical to a stone-age person, I think it would be reasonable to think that perhaps a chrysalis might represent rebirth.

If I had anything to do with the research into the “idol” I’d be contacting biologists specialising in butterflies and moths and asking them to identify the species.

On a side note, the bogong moth in Australia was an important seasonal food for the Aboriginals.

As the cave paintings at Lascaux in France have shown, although prehistoric people didn’t have the advanced technology we do, they did have an intimate knowledge about the pyshical appearance of the world around them. Many people think that Stone Age people weren’t very smart, but by evolutionary standards they”evolved” as us and were just as smart, and therefore fully able to represent the world around them in either drawn or sculpted form.

So you heard it here first folks.  If you come across a paper that some professor has written about their discovery of the meaning of the ‘idol’ at Antequera being that of a chrysalis and rebirth, they stole the idea from me…

Back in 1982 I was in such a hurry to get to Morocco that I just went past Granada without stopping. Over the years people have told me about the Alhambra and how it’s such an amazing place.

Well, today, many years later I finally visited the much lauded Alhambra and I have very mixed feelings about the experience.

Firstly the Alhambra is one of those very famous places that so many people from all around the world want to visit. Even though it’s autumn and the off season, there large crowds of people waiting to get into the place and as I’ve said before, I’m no fan of crowds.

 The Alhambra gets so many visitors that the custodians limit visits to either the morning, afternoon or night and control the numbers that can enter for each time. This all means lines and waiting around. A word of advice to anyone thinking about visiting at this time of year, don’t bother ordering your tickets through the internet, as you have to go through the rigmarole of retrieving your tickets from machines that take longer to operate that buying the tickets from the ticket office.

 Now that I’ve had my little bitch about the crowds, onto the main event.

From my experience in Morocco years ago I can tell you that the Moors aren’t that into creating beautiful exteriors, as most of their structures I’ve seen, tend to be high walled boxes. What the Moors excel at is interiors and the decoration of surfaces.

 Sure the Alhambra has some gardens with water features,

or reflecting pools, but to my mind they aren’t all that interesting.

I heard a guide telling a group nearby that the moors used the water features as a method of cooling down the buildings during the hotter months. To me, all the water on show also seemed to be a dessert people’s way of displaying wealth.

Over the last couple of months, here in Europe I’ve developed a real dislike for palaces. I always thought that the old TV show, “Lives of the rich and famous” was a sad indictment of the consumerist society in which I live. I hated the idea that there were so many people who wanted to vicariously live a life of so much conspicuous consumption the result of which was an ostentatious and vulgar display of wealth. It really sickens me to think of how these old rulers lived in relation to their subjects. The only thing that helps me get over my revulsion at their greed and insensitivity is the fact that all these great piles of hubris manifest, provided employment for many skilled people that would not have had an outlet for their talents anywhere else.

Although the Moslems are prohibited from creating depictions of animals or humans they make up for that with their calligraphy and patterns.

Just about the whole of the palace is covered with carved plaster and stone.

There were signs asking people not to touch anything but that didn’t stop many thoughtless people from pawing the walls. It never ceases to amaze me how selfish some people can be and how much damage they do. 

Where there aren’t carved surfaces, there are tiles.

 For me the Alhambra got more interesting as I walked through the archways into the rooms inside.

The walls were covered with patterns and prayers but it was the ceilings that really sang. Sometimes looking up was like being in a stylized cave

 and other times it was like peering up at a bejewelled night sky.

Of course the Christians finally won back their lands and the Alhambra with them. Surprisingly much of the Islamic decoration was left intact but the new rulers did do a bit of redecoration in their own much heavier and cruder style as in the ceiling shown below.

As sublime as some of what we saw in the Alhambra was, both Engogirl and I felt it was all too much of the same kind of thing and both felt that perhaps the magpie tastes displayed at Randolph Hearst’s much critisized folly, “La Cuesta Encantada” weren’t so off, after all.

On our drive to Granada today we crossed over an unusual bridge so we decided to have a picnic near it with the bread and dried chorizo that was kindly given to us by staff from the El Curro hotel in Burunchel.

We had driven this way because of suggestions made by Maria del Mar, an extraordinarily nice woman who worked in the El Curro. It’s always great to make connections with locals and find the paths less travelled (by tourists like ourselves).

Sometimes travelling can feel a bit like being a slot-car that just follows a well worn rut. So sitting out in what seemed like the middle of nowhere in Spain, eating some delicious sausage looking at an incredible landscape with my wife the engineer seemed to be close to perfect.

To paraphrase my old friend Omar Khayyam

 Here with a loaf of bread some chorizo,
 a bottle of water, a bridge and thou
 Beside me chatting in the wilderness
 and wilderness is paradise now.

As we ate, we discussed the bridge and its design while bearded vultures soared far above us on the thermals over the surrounding hills.

I’ve learnt so much about concrete and how it’s used since I’ve known Engogirl. The bridge we were looking at was quite unusual in that its vertical members looked very slender with only thin horizontal members with no diagonal bracing to stop them warping. Concrete is very strong in compression but relatively weak in tension so the vertical members have to stay straight or it’s “all over red rover”.  The bridge was a manifestation of “less is more” in concrete.

Its not that Engogirl thought it was a bad design, it was just different and showed a desire to make a bridge that was more than just functional. Although the construction of the bridge looked quite rough because it had been made with formwork on site, suggesting that it was just a fairly cheap bridge of no real importance, it had lots of character. In fact it was quite beautiful in its own way.

Just before we left Valencia to head southwest into Andalusia, Engogirl was looking up old train routes that have been converted into bicycle and walking trails known as “via verde”. One review mentioned that the via verde in Andalusia passed through endless olive trees.

 We thought that it would be better to head to Burunchel which is close to a few national parks to do some hiking instead cycling.

 The person who said that there were endless olive tree in Andalusia wasn’t kidding. About an hour before we reached our destination we started to see scenes like the one below.

 There are hills after hills planted with nothing else but olive trees. It’s almost hypnotic passing kilometre after kilometre of evenly spaced trees. As the afternoon rakes through the trees it’s like driving past a stroboscope.

Our hotel in Burunchel has been fantastic with great food and excellent staff. On our first night I asked the waitress (a really lovely person) to suggest a local wine to go with the venison we were having for dinner. Our waitress looked at me with the sort of compassionate countenance that seemed to convey, you poor clueless thing, you don’t have any idea do you? Then she said to me, “we don’t grow grapes around here, only olives”, and then she went on to suggest, what turned out to be, an excellent wine from another region.

Yep they only grow olives around Burunchel, and as a matter of fact when we went up into the nearby mountains in the national parks, it looks like there is nothing but olive trees as far as the eye can see.

The sight of such mass plantings right up to the park boundaries reinforced in my mind the theory that I have, that national parks, just about anywhere, only exist in areas that can’t be farmed.

Even when we drove about 100 kms (about 62 miles) north up to Segura de La Sierra there was nothing being farmed but olive trees. 

Interestingly many of the little villages we passed were on hill tops and nearly all of them have some kind of defensive fortifications, be it a little tower or a full blown castle. This brings to mind how turbulent Spanish history has been.

Back home in Australia towns tend to be built on some economic nexus point, like the availability of fresh water, a resource and a harbour for instance. In Spain the need for security seems have come first and then people have tried to make a living where they could more easily defend themselves, even though to do so would’ve made life very difficult. Just walking up the hills in these little towns unencumbered is bad enough, never mind having to lug produce around and do manual work in such terrain.

A difficult life is way better than death or enslavement.

Back in the early 1980s I spent three months in Morocco and a large part of that time was spent in a small village in the south. Each day I had to go to the well and stand in line with crowds of women and wait my turn to haul some water out of the deep well. It was such hard work and a real drag.

A huge amount of time is used pulling water up from wells and when I looked at all those hill top towns here in Andalusia I was reminded how life would’ve been for the inhabitants back in the old days. A hill top is not a good place to get water and I bet their wells would’ve been so deep.

In our modern lives we take so much for granted.

Spain has been an amazing place so far and Andalusia seems to be the icing on the cake.

By the way, the olives and the olive oil I’ve had over the last couple of days have been the best I’ve ever eaten. The locals are so proud of what they produce and seem genuinely pleased to be sharing something special when I’ve commented on how delicious their olives are. I had some green olives stuffed with anchovies the other night as tapas that were to die for.

We visted the castle at Segura de La Sierra, which was interesting in its own right but to be honest I thought that the lenticular clouds stole the show.

Nature wins again.