the cheese from santos lugares

i have just left seville and taken a walk through the santos lugares of the mountains before descending to algeciras on the coast.   now i am soon to cross to morocco and am having to keep an eye on my rucksack in this port city internet station.  i am straining my ears to make any sense of the arabic voices i hear - unrecognisible from the careful recitation of my teach-yourself-arabic notes while following a mountain path

i love that place in the mountains.

one night i decided to sleep on a meadow higher up, where there were no trees and the starscape was wider.

soon after waking the next day i met two mushroom-pickers and told them about my star gazing.
the older one said:   ahh you can almost touch the stars from up here

first of all i thought that he was referring to elevation of that meadow - a few hundred metres closer to the stars i suppose.
then i thought that he might have also been referring to the sensation of elation of being in such a place.

it was quite a remote place.  maybe only a 45 minute run from the village of Benaocaz , but when it was raining you had to run down a slippery muddy path
it was the muddy path that made it feel cut off.

for a few days it rained quite a lot
there were also gusty winds and i thought:  winter is also coming to andalusia.
sometimes i feel wary of the advances of modernity
but those nights all i could do was marvel at the plastic sheet which was tied up over the moorish ruins
flapping frenetically, occassionally flecking my warm abode with cold droplets of rain
but generally as warm and as comfortable as larry by the fire,
reading books by torchlight, marvelling.
i grew to love those plastic sheets

(personal comfort over and above concerns about the vast and offensive hydrocarbon industry, i note)


i marvelled at the battery-operated torchlight too.
one night the fog was very thick.  the torch batteries were running very low.
i thought:  by now i should know these parts well enough to find my way. 
it was not so.  i crouched down to bring the torch closer in order to see if the smudges in the mud were cattles hoofs or genuine human shoe prints.  there was a lot of crouching and shuffling along dead end stone walls, feeling quite lost.
very glad that night to stumble across the water fountain and know exactly the route back to my home in the stones among the trees.

andrea came up from seville almost every weekend with his flatmate maribel. also bringing wine and one time his guitar and always bringing me back to his flat in seville for a jolly good scrub (essential when one is in the city, more specifically among the people of the city) and for to change library books. mil gracias andrea

one night we left the nazari bar in benaocaz when the barman called after me..
and held out a thick polar fleece to me


what a good thing to do
- to give warmth to someone who is cold
or to give food to someone who is hungry.



first i thought: i don't need such a garment - every item's worth must be weighed carefully before accepting it in a rucksack.

but the barman insisted and i accepted thinking: what will i do with such a polar fleece?

in time it has proven its usefullness,
especially the night i arrived back at the encampment after a few days in seville and found my sleeping bag very wet, an almighty cold had descended that night and i became very appreciative of the friendly polar fleece gesture.


one day i descended from the mountain and met shephard Cristoban- actaully an estate worker who was herding sheep at that moment.  he seemed surprised by my wandering in such a way (without even a mobile phone) and when i said: each person chooses their own path to follow through life, he replied that many people have work commitments and family responsibilities.  i wanted to respond and underline the importance of every person's free and resplendent will in the decisions they make, but i saw that he was partly right.
i said: i would love to taste the cheese that comes from the goats around santos lugares and he invited me to pass by his house one day for a tasting.