Granada to Motril
These patterns in the pavement were on the doorstep of the hostel I stayed at in Granada. It took an old fellah just a day to do this one, with the help of his young apprentice. He doesn't work from any design sheet or use any kind of measuring instruments but carries all the designs in his head. A true artist if ever I knew one!
The blog gets more difficult to write the more I have to sort out what subjectively interests me and what is appropriate or expected for a cyclists travel blog. I've had some challenging personal experiences to do with loss and self esteem during the last few days and I'm not sure how much soul baring is healthy. I've had a brief chat with Scott from the CW Farm, who is becoming something like a mentor for me on this trip, about some of my experiences, and I don't think he'll mind me sharing here that one of the comments he made was that I'm not doing the Tour de France ! So with that in mind I'll attempt to convey some of the realities of the last few days on the basis that reality is what we are all concerned with.
Another thing that makes this difficult is that the events also concern people who I met along the way who may be reading this blog, or friends of theirs who may be, and there's a good deal of stuff which would in the ordinary course of étiquette remain confidential.
I'll take a risk with this one though.The dormitory in the hostel I stayed in was mixed, male and female, and there was a young couple staying there from another part of Spain. They had been looking for work in Granada and were still looking for a longer term place to live. They both worked late and I'm not sure but they probably came back after everyone else had already gone to sleep, certainly after I had. On my first night I woke up as I nearly always do, in the small hours, and I could hear them whispering to each other. Amongst my first thoughts I began to blame them for waking me up, and a feeling of being annoyed about this briefly passed through me. But I didn't want to entertain this feeling and I knew if I said something to them it would create even more tension. So I remembered the yoga technique I had used in the early morning when the cars woke me and started to use it again. Just trying to extend my awareness of sounds to take in as many different sounds as I could hear. The effect was almost immediate. Suddenly I was hearing their voices as what they were, the tender and delicate whisperings of two people in love, trying not to let their passion overspill and affect the rest of us. Because they were speaking in Spanish I couldn't understand their words but their voices were filled with tenderness and affection. All my annoyance vanished and suddenly I was realising what a privilege it was to be a fly on the wall to the reality of their wonderful situation.
On the second night in the dormitory the same thing happened, but the guy who was in the bed above me, (and I'm ashamed to say a fellow cyclist !!!) quite understandably rolled over with a disgruntled and noisy SsHH sound. The silence that followed, to me, was a lot noisier and more uncomfortable than the couple's whispering. It was followed by a range of unsettled movements around the room, people going to the toilet, getting in and out of their beds, but nobody breathed a word until after about five or ten minutes and it all went quiet again. And then the couple started whispering to each other again! More quietly even than before, but it did make me feel glad, and evidently the relief was shared around the room as nothing more was said and we all, I imagine, went back to sleep.
On the third night they both had a day off from work and didn't come back at all, in fact I only saw them briefly the following day around lunchtime as they were leaving to go out somewhere, but they remembered my name and gave me a greeting with a pair of the most handsome smiles you could ever ask to see. As if we knew that we shared something very special.
And this was true, this was the reality of living in that room. I had the impression that Granada itself was full of this feeling of goodwill and mutual accommodation.
On the second morning I woke just after dawn, as is my custom, and went out onto the roof terrace with my overnight bag to change clothes and clean up.
View looking out from the rooftop terrace at the hostel.
There was a woman sitting with her eyes closed so I tried my best to avoid disturbing her. As I was leaving to go down for breakfast she opened her eyes and it occurred to me that although she was fully dressed she might be cold. The November nights in Granada are very chilly, almost freezing, and I offered her my blanket which I was no longer using. This began an extraordinary conversation and indeed a chain of events that has occupied my attention for a lot of the time since. I'm reconciled to the fact that it's only my own sense of self importance that makes these events seem out of the ordinary, but part of the reality of this whole journey is about understanding what is and is not important and whereabouts in the infinitely sprawling field of human consciousness that such distinctions are made.
To respect their privacy I'm not going to go into the details of their situation but broadly she had adopted a traveling partner, a few months ago, who was at deaths door and had no interest in living. He was also staying in the hostel and I soon met him. I think anyone who spent any time in conversation with him would say he was a little crazy, but he was also very caring and perhaps misguidedly always looking for the high or happy characteristic of any moment. He was able to make people laugh with simply an expression or a gesture, almost a Charlie Chaplain kind of figure. In no way would I ever have considered that he was a depressed person. To me this was a testament of her effort and dedication in giving up her own time to protect and nourish him. But it had not come without a personal cost to her which I think is perhaps why I was able to notice that she looked cold and in need of some comfort. She had already called for help and had an old friend downstairs who had come from Barcelona to try and help with her predicament. Because now it was time for her to acknowledge her own needs and move on, but she was having difficulty finding circumstances in which she could trust, for her traveling partner to fend for himself. Her friend from Barcelona had brought a new and sympathetic energy, but no hope of longer standing support. All this took me back to a period in my life when I was living in a community run by the Philadelphia association for people in mental distress, where an attempt was made to provide a healing environment where folks could work through their difficulties without recourse to chemical treatments.
What I found in Granada was that a lot of people were actually giving themselves quite a lot of chemical treatment with Marijuana which is available more or less openly, and I even saw growing in the hotel lobby. Despite this there is no paranoia in Granada, and I guess that this is because the distribution is tightly controlled with the consent and endorsement of the police. It makes for a friendly and healthy atmosphere at one level, and it means there is less doctored weed on the streets. While I was there, admittedly only for four days, I saw very little evidence of any crime.
My experience with Buddhism has taught me that although self medicating with these or any other kind of drugs, like caffeine, only moves the problem of distress and addiction further along the line, it is always necessary to cultivate compassion both for ones own weaknesses, and for those of others.
Leaving these people, knowing their predicament was incredibly difficult. I had become attached to their compassion for one another, their humour and their trust in and love of life. But I had my own resolve to attend to and the interest was conflicting. I couldn't stay more than two weeks longer in Spain because of the new restrictions consequent to Brexit, and in any case the hostel was fully booked from Friday. Of course I didn't have to make any excuses, such was the understanding that we shared, but that didn't make leaving any easier, and when it came time for me to get back on the bike I spent a long long time puzzling over how it is I manage to get so emotionally involved with certain people so quickly. And why it is that the welfare of every soul is significant and should not be ignored. And how I could be so brutal as to get back on my journey as if nothing had happened.
Well that's one reason I'm writing this, to prove to you all that it has happened and that there are people out there who appear to be quite fucked up but who are in reality attending to the demands of their own compassion. This is the exquisite mystery that is slowly revealed in this adventure called travel.
And that was not the end of it.
Cycling from Granada to Motril on the southern coast of Spain was the latest "best section" of the journey so far. It leads through a deep valley at the southern and western edge of Spain's highest mountain range, the Sierra Nevada. The old main road intertwines with the new motorway and ancient mule trails through alpine villages and towns.
Extraordinary terraced gardens and farms dress practically every slope, the south facing ones anyway, and thankfully for the cyclist the ascents and descents, although stupendous are never laborious or interminable. It is probably the best cycling experience I've had so far. So that helped me a lot to reflect on the reality of my own situation and to forget about my concerns of the last few days.
In Motril there was a campsite but when they told me it was £18 for one night I thought I would take a look around before accepting. There was a beautiful wide long beach planted out with trees even where the villas and hotels petered out at the edge of town. As I hadn't yet slept on a beach I thought it was high time to give it a try. The cyclable path lead to a grassy area surrounded by palm trees and well out of the way. As I was just about to make myself comfortable I caught sight of another rough sleeper, no tent, but surrounded by bags and covered in a blanket. I thought I had better check out the situation. When I could see they were awake I approached and it turned out she was a woman, probably a little younger than me. She spoke no English, only Spanish so our conversation was very limited as my Spanish is pretty poor. But I felt that she was telling me that it was fine to stay on the beach and that she had been living here for weeks. I hadn't eaten and explained that I needed to get food but that if she didn't mind I'd like to sleep nearby. So we ate together and exchanged stories. It seems like she had been homeless for a long time. There was no hard luck story, instead she spoke at great length about her parents and how her mother was from Murcia and her father from Andalusia and the differences in their accents and how they spoke. She also talked at great length about a lot of things that I didn't understand at all and left me feeling that she was probably suffering from some sort of mental distress or disorder. She was also taking tablets and slept like a baby right through the night. It was a full moon and I found it less easy to settle, but as before I took the opportunity to observe some extra meditation practice. There was a lot to think about.
In the morning we had breakfast together in a bar and she began showing me papers that indicated her social security claim had been suspended. I tried to find out if she new people in the town who could help her and it seemed that there was a process underway but that things were not going very swiftly. I encouraged her to make as many allies as she could find and to keep pestering the authorities to remind them about her situation. The time came for me to catch my boat and suddenly I could see that she was fighting back the tears. Using Google translate I asked her to have faith that things will work out from one day to the next, and she immediately objected that that was the trouble, she doesn't have faith in anyone or anything anymore.
It was very hard to leave her on that note, but I had a boat to catch and all I could hope for was that having identified this as a problem for her, she might find the internal strength to have faith in herself or failing that to continue to reach out to others and have faith that they will help her. There's no reason behind faith but sometimes the penny drops.
It seemed like the universe was throwing every possible challenge at me to prevent me getting on that boat. My brother Pete, God rest his soul, had been a solicitor and an ally to many women in similar situations, and I felt quite ashamed of myself and my new bike on which I was going off to live the dream and fulfill myself in balmy Africa. But I knew there was not much I could do to help in a foreign country apart from play a few tunes on the ukulele, and not very well at that. So I set off for the ferry terminal and while I was waiting in the departure lounge I messaged Scott at the CW Farm, who lucky for me happened to be online at the time and replied immediately. It is really a mystery that life provides us with guides and helpers, many of whom we don't recognise, and some of whom we never even meet. And I am more and more convinced that the things we talk about and do all day are secondary to the movement of energy that really affects us, consciously and unconsciously. We should be very careful about criticising one another for being different or behaving in ways that seem unreasonable when they are not also unsociable. And sometimes even what is socially acceptable can be a thin veil disguising something we would prefer not to see.
Meher Baba, the Persian mystic, described some people he called "Masts" like radio masts, who don't appear to conform to normal values and who are sometimes entirely unintelligible. Their role he said, if I understand him correctly, is to process some of the darker and less well known areas in the evolution of human consciousness in which we all play a part. And who am I to argue with a well known Persian mystic?
Leaving Motril on the ferry
